Bedahet Tosun — How Is a Life to Be Lived?
Remembering Bedahet Tosun on the Second Anniversary of His Death
Comrade, Why Is Life Lived?
After Bedahet Tosun, on the second anniversary of his death
Young comrade, you have probably never heard this name.
Bedahet Tosun died two years ago today, on 23 August 2024, in Ankara. A few lines appeared in the papers. He was the founder of a foundation, among the founders of a platform, had served eight years in prison. His funeral was held two days later from Istanbul.
This piece is not a eulogy. Still less a hagiography. We will use a life to discuss a question — because that life carries the answer in a way that cannot otherwise be told.
The question is this: By what is a lifetime built?
First the facts
1955, Ceyhan. His father was a teacher trained at a Village Institute — that is, a product of the institution the republic founded to carry literacy into the countryside and closed fifteen years later.
1973, METU. He became one of the prominent names of the student movement in Ankara. The generation we call the ’78 generation: resisting neighbourhood by neighbourhood against fascist attacks, trying to hold the university and the street at once, and crushed collectively on 12 September.
Eight years in prison after 12 September 1980. In the texts written after his comrades’ deaths the sentence most often repeated was this: under the junta’s heaviest tortures not a single word could be taken from his mouth.
Do not read that sentence quickly. Read it knowing what it means. Torture under 12 September in Turkey was a system designed to make a person speak, and it often worked. Not speaking is not a character trait; it is a decision remade every day, and the person who makes that decision that day also saves other people’s lives.
After release. He worked as a journalist, wrote for Evrensel. He was among those who founded the Social Research Foundation (SAV) and for many years served as its chair. He was among the founders of Unity for Democracy; he was a key figure of the 2020 Democracy Conference. He contributed an essay to İletişim Publishing’s İsmail Beşikçi collection.
He was married and had a child.
In the movement they called him "Bedo."
And the part the memorial texts did not write
Comrade, pay attention now. Because the real issue is here.
None of the texts written after his death touched one part of his life. All of them wrote the prison, the foundation, the conference. But they did not write this:
Bedahet Tosun worked for many years at Bilkom. And there he was a deeply liked person.
The man described by those who knew him at work is the same as the man described by his comrades: kind, patient, speaking to everyone with respect, never losing his smile. As he was in the meeting, so he was on the shift. As he was at the podium, so he was in the corridor.
This is not a small detail, comrade. This is the thesis of the piece.
On the Turkish left, when a cadre is recounted, the moments of heroism in his life are recounted: detention, resistance, podium, funeral. The man who boards the morning shuttle, returns home in the evening, waits for his wage, drinks tea with a workmate is not recounted.
Yet the great majority of a lifetime is that part. Torture lasts three days; prison eight years. But there are forty years of work.
And this too is true: that the man who kept silent under torture and the man who treats his workmate well on the shift are the same man is no accident. Both are the product of the same thing — a person’s consistency with himself. Without the one, the other does not last long.
(We found this information in no public source; those who knew him told it to us. And the gap itself is evidence of what the piece wants to say.)
Now to the question: why is life lived?
Young comrade, think for a moment of the answers you are given to this question today.
"Realise yourself." Discover your talents, unlock your potential, become your best version. It sounds fine. But a premise is hidden inside it: the meaning of life is something that can be found inside the individual. As if the human being arrived in the world as a closed box and it were enough to open it and look inside.
"Be happy." Take care of yourself, stay away from what tires you, find peace. This too is an answer, and it is a class’s answer: the answer of those who can buy peace. For the person whose rent is unpaid, whose shift never ends, whose child’s school instalment has come due, “take care of yourself” is not advice; it is mockery.
"Leave a mark." Be an entrepreneur, be a brand, gather followers. Here meaning is reduced to a measurable output. How many saw it, how many liked it.
What the three share is this: they imprison the meaning of life inside the individual’s own story. And that is no accident. A culture that imprisons the individual in their own story also blocks any collective demand from them.
The Marxist answer begins somewhere else
At seventeen, in his secondary-school leaving exam, Marx wrote a composition: Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession, 1835. The closing paragraph is this:
"If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people."
The child who wrote this was not yet a Marxist; Marxism had not even been founded. But the question he asked was right, and the direction of the answer was right: the meaning of a life exists to the extent that it is joined to something larger than itself.
Marxism later turned this intuition into a science. Like this:
CONCEPT: Individual and historical subject
As Marx wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach, the essence of man is not “an abstraction inherent in each single individual” but "the ensemble of the social relations."
The practical meaning of this is: you cannot produce a “meaning” on your own, because you are not a being on your own. Who you are is determined by the relations in which you stand. And these relations are not given — they can be changed.
Therefore the Marxist answer to “why is life lived?” is not a feeling but a declaration of position: life is lived because the human being takes part in the struggle to change the relations that constitute them.
This is not “make a sacrifice.” It is the opposite: wherever you begin to determine the conditions of your own life yourself, from that point on the life is yours.
And Nâzım said this in a poem
I do not ask you to memorise On Living; I ask you to understand it.
The poem begins like this:
Living is no laughing matter: you must live with great seriousness like a squirrel, for example— I mean without looking for something beyond and above living, I mean living must be your whole occupation.
That is: first love life. Not for the next world, not for an ideal, not even for the future — for life itself.
And then, in the same poem:
you must be able to die for people, even for people whose faces you’ve never seen, even when no one forces you, even when you know that the most beautiful and the most real thing is to live.
Do you see the last two lines? The value of sacrifice does not come from belittling life. It comes from the opposite: even when you know that the most beautiful thing is to live.
The sacrifice of someone who does not love life is cheap. The sacrifice of someone who loves life means they want that life to be possible for everyone.
So how is it lived? Five sentences from Bedahet Tosun’s life
Now let us return to the first part and look at that life with this eye.
1. Measure not the peak moment but continuity
Keeping silent under torture is a great thing. But what truly measures a person is the forty years after those three days.
Because the moment of heroism is fleeting and sometimes becomes part of identity — a person can spend a lifetime on that moment and do nothing more. Bedahet Tosun did not do that. He came out, became a journalist, founded a foundation, organised meetings, went to work, worked another thirty-five years.
Comrade, the measure of a life is not its peak but its average.
2. Consistency is real only to the extent that it can be carried from the podium to the corridor
Have you known someone who says “working class” at the podium but shouts at subordinates at work? I have known many.
The man described by those who knew Bedahet Tosun was the same man in both places. This is a political matter. Because socialism is not only a programme; it is a claim about a form of relation. A movement that cannot build that relation cannot build it when it takes power either — the whole of our dossier The Real Russia is the history of that.
3. Wage labour is not outside politics
In this country most cadres are not professional revolutionaries; they are wage-earners. They rise in the morning, go to work, come to the meeting in the evening.
And this is not a deficiency. On the contrary: it is the most concrete form of standing inside the class. Bedahet Tosun worked in a workplace and was liked there too. Comradeship is built there as well — on the shift, in the queue, in the staff shuttle, in the hospital corridor.
Organisation does not begin in the meeting hall. The meeting hall is where trust built elsewhere is gathered.
4. Build institutions
Look at what he did in the second half of his life: he founded a foundation and kept it standing for thirty years. He founded a platform. He organised a conference.
These are not glittering deeds. Running a foundation, paying rent, putting out a journal, keeping an archive, setting a meeting date — none of it brings you applause. But the movement’s memory is held by this work.
And this connects to the central thesis of our dossier The Real Russia:
The Soviet Union raised people who would defend it, but did not build the institutions that would defend it.
In 1941 those people stopped the Nazi army. In 1991 their children learned from television of a decision taken in a hunting lodge, and there was nothing they could do.
The difference is not courage; it is institutions.
Bedahet Tosun’s generation was defeated. 12 September crushed them. And after defeat some of that generation scattered, some withdrew to a corner, some changed sides. He built institutions. That is the hardest and most necessary thing that can be done after a defeat.
5. A smile is a political stance
The last and most easily belittled point.
The words that appeared most often in the memorial texts were these: smiling, modest, patient, kind. And this sentence: "Does a person always smile."
Comrade, the socialist movement is a hard place. People are tired, resources are gone, debate is harsh, defeat is heavy. In such a place courtesy is not a dispensable ornament; it is a condition of endurance. In an organisation where people do not treat one another well, no one stays long — and with people who do not stay long, institutions are not built.
Our whole book Criticizing as Comrades was written for this: if criticism can be made without wearing one another down, the movement advances; if it cannot, the movement suppresses criticism. And where criticism is suppressed, everything ends.
A warning: remembrance is not sanctification
Young comrade, we said at the start that this piece is not a hagiography. Let us keep our word.
The generation to which Bedahet Tosun belonged was defeated. They did not foresee 12 September, could not unite against it, were crushed. In the following forty years the socialist movement in Turkey could not become a mass force. This is a matter of balance sheet, and that generation too has a share in that balance sheet.
To remember a person is not to give up criticising their generation’s politics. On the contrary: comradely criticism is done to the dead as well — because it is work that prepares the living, not that protects the dead.
But this too is true, and it is what this piece says: that a politics turned out wrong does not render worthless the life of the person who built that politics. Bedahet Tosun’s life, independent of its outcome, was a life built according to the right questions. And what remains for us is to answer those questions better.
So what is asked of you?
Nothing. And everything.
No one is asking you to keep silent under torture — I hope you never find yourself in that situation. No one is asking you to sacrifice your life either; as Nâzım said, the most beautiful and most real thing is to live.
What is asked of you is far more ordinary and far harder:
To be able to bind a lifetime to something larger than yourself. And then to sustain that bond for forty years, even when no one is looking.
Because when someone is looking, everyone is good. The real question is who you are on the mornings when no one is looking.
Last word
Bedahet Tosun was born in Ceyhan in 1955 and died in Ankara in 2024. In between there were eight years of prison, a foundation, a platform, a conference, countless meetings, a spouse, a child, and many years of work.
Today, on the second anniversary of his death, we speak his name to young comrades. We do this not to pay a debt, but to show a method.
Because if you enter this movement, most of the stories you are told will be stories of heroism. Those too are real. But you cannot build your everyday life on them.
What you can build is this: to be a good person, to remain consistent, to build institutions, and to endure for forty years.
Comrade,
Life is lived because the human being takes part in the struggle to change the relations that constitute them.
And the proof of a life well lived is not how many came to the funeral — it is how many institutions, how many relations, how many people remain standing afterwards.
We remember Bedo with respect.
