Workplace murder of child and adolescent laborers is a problem that a revolutionary political practice cannot ignore. In the position it hold within class struggle it serves as a reminder, to the subjects of the revolutionary youth movement and the revolutionary pioneers of the working class: persist in the united struggle against capital and the fascist regime!
Our people are gasping for air in the grip of an impoverishment crisis. As it continues to deepen day by day it confronts us with its severe social and tragic consequences. The state of misery, where minimum has become average wage, where millions of people earn below the hunger threshold and have no choice but to feed on dry bread, for which they line up in front of bakeries, portrays the concrete reality of our working people today. Amidst this misery and social destruction, the situation of the working class’s youth stands out as a special socio-political problem. On the one hand, suicides among the proletarian youth, condemned to futurelessness and uncertainty, are rising. On the other hand, the youth of our working people are forced to sell their labor power to murderous bosses at the cheapest price and lose their lives in workplace murders in the midst of wild exploitation. The fascist regime and the capitalist system of exploitation surround millions of young people from both branches. The ongoing murders of young workers show us this fact strikingly.
Murders of young workers are no rarity in Turkey and Northern Kurdistan, where neoliberal capital accumulation is implemented tsing the most brutal forms of exploitation. Almost every week, one or more exploited child worker loses their lives in occupational homicide. In real terms, the serial deaths of children and young workers working to earn a living are increasing significantly and becoming chronic.
Contrary to popular belief, the neoliberal capital accumulation regime does not emerge spontaneously as a natural law of the market. It becomes flesh and blood by way of the direct practice of the economic-political programs of the governments that govern on behalf of the capital class. One of the main areas of economic competition of the integrated world market in the era of imperialist globalization is the cheapest labor market. Collaborative Turkish capital is trying to increase competition in the international labor market by making labor cheaper. Out of this aim, it imposes the most unregulated, insecure and unorganized labor regiments. It invents and uses the most sophisticated and brutal forms of labor exploitation.
The political Islamist fascist regime, always eager to claim that it embraces the Chinese model of capitalist development and growth, meets the desire of the capital class for maximum profit. It does not hesitate to take all kinds of legal and practical steps. The AKP-MHP fascist government implements the neoliberal capital accumulation regime after Chinese model without restrain and makes the conditions for capitalist exploitation more favorable by making new legal regulations at every stage.
Yusuf Tekin, Minister of National Education at the service of the Turkish bourgeoisie, made the following offer to employers in regards to the shortage of intermediate staff in Turkey: “Whatever you need, let’s open that program within the vocational high school there.” He adds: “Let’s form the teaching staff together, let’s select the academic staff, and let’s choose the content of the courses to your desire.”
The fascist palace regime, the government of the capitalist rich, made a significant change in the Professional Law No. 3308 in December 2021. With this change in law, the Ministry of National Education opened Vocational Training Centers (Mesleki Eğitim Merkezi abb. MESEM) and expanded them in a short time. This neoliberal labor regime regulation enabled these centers to be opened as a different type of school within Vocational and Technical Anatolian High Schools. Cheap young labor force was immediately funneled to the market with this combination of school, classes and production, developed to meet the capital’s need for intermediate technical personnel.
In order to shift students in Vocational and Technical Anatolian High Schools towards MESEMs, the requirement of passing classes was re-introduced. For the same purpose, the propaganda of “salary and insurance, job guarantee” was spread to organize the flow of students to the training centers. Under the conditions of the decisive encirclement and coercion of the impoverishment crisis, the children of poor working families began to flow right into the wheels of the wild capitalist exploitation of the Vocational Training Centers. There, 14- to 15-year-old children go to school once a week, while working in workshops and factories four days a week. Students, who are brutally exploited through intense and heavy working hours from eight in the morning to seven in the evening, are essentially excluded from formal education. This brutal and cheap form of exploitation of child labor hinders the physical, mental, educational and social development of children. Child and adolescent workers who are pulled out of school and thrown into the labor market of capitalist exploitation occupy an important place in the social composition map of the working class and constitute a special political field of class struggle.
This phenomenon, which confronts us today with a magnitude of murders of young workers, is a direct object of revolutionary politics. Workplace murder of child and adolescent laborers is a problem that a revolutionary political practice cannot ignore. In the position it hold within class struggle it serves as a reminder, to the subjects of the revolutionary youth movement and the revolutionary pioneers of the working class: persist in the united struggle against capital and the fascist regime!
The pioneers of the revolutionary youth movement should consider it an urgent duty today to intervene in this field of political class struggle alongside child and adolescent workers. Likewise, all left socialist foci of revolutionary class politics within the workers’ movement must be able to develop a comprehensive organized intervention that prioritizes political action in this ongoing series of labor murders and massacres. They must develop a comprehensive organizing strategy that takes into account the ban on organizing and all the adverse conditions that this young segment of the working class finds itself in.
It is evident that all the leading groups of the revolutionary youth movement were unable to make this issue an agenda of the political struggle so far. It is a fact that all political subjects of the revolutionary youth movement, without exception, limit their struggle to the mobilization and problems of higher education youth. This narrow horizon and backward approach must be overcome.
Student suicides and murders in KYK dormitories have the potential to become a movement involving thousands of students. The multifaceted reaction and anger of higher education youth can be actively uncovered at a certain moment. This is possible because the subjects of the revolutionary youth movement manage to make these issues the subject of political action, keeping them in the political spotlight. All subjects of the revolutionary youth movement must be able to do a similar work to the academic-democratic struggle for young workers, as well as student workers who are under the exploitation of internships.
This is not an issue that can only be resolved by the political and organizational intensification of the political subjects of the revolutionary youth movement and by treating the murders of young workers as their special case to be dealt with. The subjects of the revolutionary workers’ movement operating within the working class should also turn to this cause. The total accumulation of the struggle against workplace murders should be revitalized here and evaluated properly in understanding the murders of young workers and following with adequate policies. Following the Leninist procedure of revolutionary politics, every workplace murder must be turned into a political event. With agitation, propaganda and creative political actions that raise hell over the death of every child laborer; each child and young worker murdered can be turned into a lever of the consciousness and organization of the working class. A political and organizational policy must be and acted upon immediately, without hesitation, on this issue, where the revolutionary worker subjects and the leading groups of the revolutionary youth will shoulder and raise the class struggle together.
*Editorial of the 152nd issue of ATILIM newspaper, Voice of the Working Class and the Oppressed, dated January 26.