The decay of society is a projection of a decaying fascist order and capitalist state. Habitual sensitivity or total insensitivity appear at any level, creating a state of servitude to those who come and go. In other words: it points to the ineffectiveness of the laboring left movement, its inability to become a subject and the political vacuum it finds itself in. It’s at the bottom of an ever expanding social insensitivity. The decay of the oppressed classes is a result of a rotting order.
The Turkish comprador bourgeoisie, at the head of a financial colony of imperialism, is rotting away. Every day a new example arises, another case of social decay becomes evident. Child abuse in state-affiliated sect dormitories continues; the legal and illegal destruction of property at hands of mafia and counter-guerilla; the fascist regime walking arm in arm with drug barons; drug trade, which not only finances the colonial war on Kurdistan, but also the politics of the ruling class; corruption networks that continue to plunder public property; the high bureaucracy, backed by the power of the state, collecting tribute through gangs and bribery networks; the political Islamists helming the order are accumulating wealth with wild ambition, and the regime is growing and feeding the margin of well-off youth and parasites on nepotism. The fascist Erdoğan regime implements all forms of theft, corruption and property destruction, as well as legal capitalist exploitation and robbery, and strengthens its own capital division by doing so.
The regime is rotten and stenches from all its crevices. The decaying order contaminates the social classes. It begins with capitalist state order. Fascist regimes serve as the most fertile incubators of moral and political decay, from which political corruption and reactionism of the oppressed classes buds.
The political parties of the bourgeois class are at center of this process. They are the active subjects and direct instruments of the decaying order. The rotten state the order finds itself in, is a product of the parties’ efforts.
And of course, the AKP-MHP ruling bloc is the main actor at hand.
Other establishment parties that are part of the bloc are its collaborators and complementary subjects. Take, for example Sinan Oğan, who marketed his politics to Erdoğan and his palace regime in the 2023 elections, strikingly embodies the political dimension of the decay.
It is indisputable that Sinan Oğan, an establishment politician who believes in and worships money, the god of capitalism, sold himself to the regime. Bourgeois politicians, fed by the order, work like a political brokerage network. No matter which bourgeois order party we look at, the same truth emerges. CHP, İYİP, the Victory Party or the Welfare Party are elements of order politics and therefore of its corruption.
The negotiations between former CHP chairman Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Ümit Özdağ, a prolific Turkish racist and bourgeois politician who takes on an important role in fascitizing the oppressed of Turkey, during the 2023 election process are another variant of this refutation policy. The bargains and dirty deals made by these two scoundrel bourgeois politicians on issues such as the colonial occupation war, the continuation of the trustee policy, and the forcible deportation of refugees document the decay of bourgeois politics and its ultimate refinement into fascism. Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu’s attempt to take the labor left parties under his wing while kindling with a counter-guerrilla politician and spokesman like Özdağ is but an effort to keep the decaying and rotting fascist order alive. While the leader of İYİP, Meral Akşener, yet another fascist, supposedly exposes the corruption in the state with the concreteness of police chiefs marketing women’s bodies, his own parties dirty business, goes beyond scope, reaching from from bribery to harassment to siphoning municipal companies. Other bourgeois order parties are the beads of the same fake, hypocritical bourgeois politics and are the political tools of the system’s refutation policies.
All kinds of theft, corruption, fraud, bribery and extortion scandals have now become commonplace, beyond politics as well. From media to law, from unions to universities, nothing is left untouched. Mafia and bribery in the judiciary reveals the stakes of a corrupted system. The Turkish judiciary is linked to gangs; the order imposed its own justice with a helping hand of organized crimes. He who has money blows the whistle and buys the court decision he wants. Fortunes are accumulated in the judiciary with bribe money, one example of this being the “FETO stock market”. The same judiciary is the sword of fascism and imprisons the leaders of the resisting oppressed.
The decay of society is a projection of a decaying fascist order and capitalist state. Habitual sensitivity or total insensitivity appear at any level, creating a state of servitude to those who come and go. In other words: it points to the ineffectiveness of the laboring left movement, its inability to become a subject and the political vacuum it finds itself in. It’s at the bottom of an ever expanding social insensitivity. The decay of the oppressed classes is a result of a rotting order.
A social medium who observes what is happening from the sidelines, approaches all kinds of cases of decay with the usual sensitivity, that is, sees, hears, witnesses, is aware, feels anger but does not take action, talks from an emotional standpoint, refutes their anger, or explodes at those closest to them or even within themselves.
This facilitates spread and deepening of social insensitivity. The oppressed and the poor who cannot line up on the front and side of a political struggle against theft, corruption, injustice and unfreedom become a part of this social decay. The order is caught in the whirlpool of its own diminution. The decay of the order carries on to the social classes.
Mafia, drug cartels and counter-guerrilla organizations are the main instruments of the fascist order’s policies towards the oppressed and the poor. In the context of class struggle, mafia organizations a weapon of capitalist states against the order. In a state where the economic-social living conditions have deteriorated dramatically and the working class and laborers are struggling with the vortex of poverty, laborers and the poor are clinging to the thinning cotton thread of the order, both in order to survive and break out of these difficult conditions. Clinging to the ropes of the order, workers adopt many methods, be it acquiring stocks or gambling, from the mafia to fraud, as a path of individual salvation, with the illusion of moving up the class and this breaking away from the shackles of capitalism. The more one sees the examples of those who break away from this system of exploitation and oppression, the more one is confronted with the rich who live comfortably and parasitically by feeding on the system, the more one becomes inclined towards these paths.
Along with social classes, the laboring left movement, an organic part of the social classes, is also affected by the complications of this decaying process. The actions of the fraud and money laundering network that Seçil Erzan and Fatih Terim focus on, or the Dilan-Engin Polat couple case in the same section, are publicized as another money laundering incident. However, no meaningful political-social reaction develops. The labor left movement cannot channel these scandals into a meaningful political expression, active agitation and struggle against the fascist Erdoğan regime.
It is a state of political cynicism, prepared under the conditions of fascist siege and raging terror. The attitude of political cynicism is one of pretense, habitual sensitivity, spectatorship, one that grumbles about every political event or corruption scandal, while staying inactive and allowing the establishment to humiliate it. Cynicism is organizational obscurity, a disruption of integrity. It is the loss of political integrity, organization and action. It lacks assertiveness and self-confidence. It means walking under the hegemony of bourgeois parties. Ultimately, it means contradicting one’s own purpose of existence and denying oneself.
The laboring left movement, the working class, laborers and the oppressed have always had an opposing stance and political answer to the policies of the fascist order and the decay of society. In the history of the political struggle of the labor left movement, there are successful examples where the corrupting and corrupting policies of the order were frustrated and neutralized by comprehensive revolutionary activities and policies. We must remember the very valuable and profitable activities against corruption, drugs and corruption policies in the working-class districts. Again, in Kurdistan, strong counter-policies, which are an integrity of political action, have been developed against the colonial policies of corruption and decay. Significant political struggles have been carried out against various policies such as prostitution, drugs, spying, regulating, purchasing, collaborating and making them the basis of the fascist regime.
Today, the laboring left movement must rely on all the knowledge of the anti-fascist struggle it has waged in the past, and understand practice against the politics promoting social decay and corruption as its duty. The political reaction, sensitivity and fragmented struggles that persist against drugs and corruption in working-class districts show the waypoints and revolutionary possibilities of where to start and move forward for the working-class left movement.
*Editorial of the 145th issue of ATILIM newspaper, Voice of the Working Class and the Oppressed, dated 08 December.