To Be a Historical Subject in the Age of Illusions: "Organize!"

Dear comrades, hello.

Standing shoulder to shoulder today in the square of Marmaris—packaged in capital’s glossy holiday brochures as an "earthly paradise"—we did not merely follow a rally; we saw in one another’s eyes the same anger, the same anxiety, and above all the same hope. Every sentence Comrade Sera Kadıgil voiced in that square struck us once more in the face with the naked truth the bourgeois media tries to cover in pink veils—the deep destitution into which the country has been driven, and the slaughter of nature.

While it was possible to spend a hot Saturday at home, in front of a screen, or in the zone of individual comfort, the mass that filled that square tore up and threw away the passive stupor imposed on us by the mass media, by social-media illusions, and by the isolating feeling of burnout. To feel another’s pain in one’s own breast, to take the bleeding wounds of society to heart, and to come together in order to say no to this course of things is the first sincere spark of a dialectical leap.

The picture we witnessed in Marmaris and across the Aegean is not a passing administrative error or an isolated lovelessness toward nature. It is the concrete, materialist proof of how the Aegean and the beautiful geography of Muğla are being turned, step by step, in the age of late capitalism, into a zone of dispossession and plunder.

From the Destruction of Tobacco to the Slaughter of the Olive: The Dispossession of the Aegean Peasant

To grasp the social catastrophe lived in Muğla and in every corner of the Aegean, we must take the process up with its historical roots. The Aegean geography has been sacrificed to policies of de-agrarianization applied in a planned way for decades:

• The Liquidation of Tobacco: Turkish capitalism, articulated to the imperialist center after the Second World War, deliberately destroyed tobacco production—the historical security of the Aegean peasant—through IMF and World Bank directives, with quotas, collapsed floor prices, and the privatization of TEKEL.

• Dispossession: The Aegean peasant who could not get the return on their tobacco, cotton, and olives lost the quality of being a free producer on their own land. Those who yesterday produced on their own land have today either joined the city’s army of cheap labor-power or been made into the precarious, seasonal slaves of the tourism sector.

• Olive Groves Placed in the Crosshairs: In the Aegean the olive is not only a tree; it is the backbone of food security and of ecological balance. The opening of olive groves to mining and coal companies through regulatory changes under the name of "public interest" is a direct extension of the lust to tear the peasant from their land.

From Akbelen to Sinpaş: Accumulation by Dispossession

The heaviest class and ecological crime file that comes to mind when Muğla is named is the privatization of the Yatağan, Yeniköy, and Kemerköy thermal power plants and the slaughter of nature carried out in order to feed those plants.

These plants, built with public resources in the old Republican period, were all but handed over as a gift to the capital groups known as the Gang of Five (Limak, IC İçtaş, and so on). In the hands of private capital these facilities turned into machines of profit and death.

The historical resistance waged by the women of İkizköy in the Akbelen Forest is a scalpel struck precisely at the heart of this order of plunder. Akbelen is the nakedest form of the mechanism of accumulation by dispossession that Karl Marx defined in Capital—that is, of the transfer of the people’s common property to capital by leaning on the state. The bourgeois state has shown plainly whose representative it is by placing the security forces and the judiciary at the command not of the peasant, but of the energy monopolies that poison nature.

The construction arrogance of Sinpaş rising in Kızılbük is also a link in this chain. This project, carried out within the boundaries of a national park, is, as Henri Lefebvre set out in his thesis of "the production of space," the document of capital’s commodifying space in order to overcome its crises, of making it something that must be paid for, and of subjecting the people to a spatial exile in the city in which they themselves live.

The Tourism Precariat and the Dialectical Chasm Between Two Pensioners

One of the most wounding points Comrade Sera underlined in her speech is also the contradiction between exploitation in the tourism sector and the destitution into which the people have been driven.

Young tourism laborers, worked 12–14 hours a day in the kitchens and laundries of glittering hotels, seasonal, uninsured, and condemned to the minimum wage, consume their own lives while producing other people’s holidays.

The other reality standing directly opposite this is the seizure of our own citizens’ right to a holiday:

While a Western pensioner paid in euros or dollars takes their ease in the Aegean’s most luxurious coves, the Turkish pensioner who gave their life to this country’s production queues for cheap food in front of markets and cannot take a step outside their home. This is the most ruthless point reached by the imperialist hierarchy and the cheap-labor policy.

Bourgeois / Idealist Discourse	Dialectical-Materialist Class Reality
"Aegean Tourism Brings the Country Foreign Currency"	Flexible, uninsured, seasonal slavery; and the foreign currency obtained flowing to capital monopolies.
"Thermal Plants Are for Energy Need"	The conversion of public resources, through privatization, into a profit transfer for gangsterized capital.
"Sustainable and Green Tourism"	As in the Sinpaş example, the opening of national parks and protected areas to concreting.
"Tourism Paradise Turkey"	Native laborers who cannot take even a single day’s holiday in their own country, and the exploited tourism precariat.

We Will Not Be Passive Spectators; We Will Be the Subjects of History: ORGANIZE!

Young comrades,

The most sincere, most heartfelt, and most historical message Comrade Sera Kadıgil gave in Marmaris was this: We reject pessimism and hopelessness; because alone we are helpless, organized we are strong!

Today’s capitalism wants to lock us in our homes, isolate us in front of screens, and make us believe the lie that "The system is too strong; there is nothing you can do." This is a narcotic the ruling class uses to paralyze us.

Yet the will that filled that square showed that we are not alone. The medicine for loneliness and helplessness is to stand side by side and to struggle shoulder to shoulder.

Comrade Sera’s call is extremely open, embracing, and clear:

Whether its name is the Workers’ Party of Turkey (TİP), the Labour Party (EMEP), a revolutionary student movement, a workers’ union, or an ecology platform… Wherever it may be; go wherever you will feel at ease, productive, and inside the struggle, and ORGANIZE AT ONCE!

Why?

• Individual Reaction Is Not Enough: Alone we can neither stop Sinpaş’s bulldozers, nor put our arms around the trees in Akbelen, nor prevent the exploitation in the hotels and the factories. Individual anger evaporates so long as it is not transformed into an organized structure.

• Historical Subjectivity: To take part in life as active human beings is to cease being a passive spectator, an object narcotized by the mass media, and to become the subject of history. History is written by organized masses who take their own fate into their hands.

• Solidarity Keeps Us Alive: Against this system that fragments us, sets us competing, and isolates us, our greatest shelter and our weapon is class solidarity.

It Is Time to Put Our Shoulder to the Wheel!

From Marmaris’s plundered coves to Akbelen’s resisting olive groves, from Aegean villages whose tobacco has been taken from their hands to the young tourism workers exploited in the hotels, this country awaits a task from us.

Let us no longer remain spectators while the capitalist order turns the country into a zone of plunder. Hope will not descend from the sky on a rope; hope is in our joined hands, in our organized will.

Let us leave passivity, postponement, and pessimism behind us. Let us move with our faith in ourselves, in our comradeship, and in our class.

Let us take a step into the nearest revolutionary position, the nearest organized structure.

Come, let us ORGANIZE together and change life!

Long Live Our Organized Struggle, Long Live Socialism!