İHD's Forty-Year Praxis and the Class Epistemology of Human Rights

Young comrades: when examining the transformation line of social formations and the institutional structures along that line, it is a philosophical necessity to go beyond sensory perceptions and emotional reflexes. The forty-year span of activity of the Human Rights Association (İHD)—from its founding in 1986 to 2026—offers an objective inventory of Turkey's political and legal superstructure mechanisms. We must grasp this process not with the romanticism of an abstract "human rights" that liberalism claims to be transcendent, ahistorical, and above classes, but by passing it through the rational filter of historical materialism and epistemology.

In his early work On the Jewish Question, Marx subjected the abstract rights categories of bourgeois law to a radical deconstruction. He showed that legal forms are determined by the underlying relations of production and forms of property, and that bourgeois declarations of "human rights" essentially secure the atomized individual torn from their social essence.

Yet this theoretical critique must not drag us into a nihilism or agnosticism that severs us from the field of practice. As Lenin insists in his philosophical texts, "the concrete analysis of the concrete situation" is the most essential principle of the dialectical method. In that repressive climate after the September 12 military intervention, when rational reason and law were suspended, the founding of İHD in 1986 took shape not as an abstract legal debate, but as a necessary objective extension of the need of the oppressed and the laboring classes to protect their physical, mental, and legal existence. In this period, the search for rights gained meaning as the practice of building an institutional, legitimate, and rational line of protection against the ruling class's mechanisms of repression.

Thanks to Institutional Memory and the Production of Objective Knowledge

To analyze İHD's 40th year of activity requires acknowledging, with scientific objectivity, the labor of all the subjects who laid the mortar of this institutional structure and historical memory. In this context we owe thanks for the theoretical and practical contributions offered to Turkey's history of social progress:

To Those Who Broke the Illusion of Official Discourse: To the founding jurists, physicians, and intellectuals who—by tearing the curtain of "appearance" produced by the state's official ideological apparatuses—meticulously reported, documented, and archived objective rights violations in prisons, seizures of rights in detention, and unsolved cases, and who thus reached the "essence" behind the facts;
To Those Who Organized the Data of Truth: To the unnamed rights defenders and relatives of prisoners who, by shaking the ruling class's monopoly on knowledge, turned rights violations into statistical and scientific data and thus offered social opposition a ground of rational argumentation;
To Those Who Preserved the Internationalist and Class Line: To all the pioneers who, even in periods when mechanisms of repression and chauvinist ideology encircled rationality, defended human rights with a universal, indivisible, and internationalist principled stance and never stepped back from rational reason…

"This accumulation of objective knowledge and archival memory they produced constitutes today the legitimate foundation of the scientific data we use when analyzing the social structure and state mechanisms."

As we see in the clear humanism of the classical philosophical legacy and of the founding realism of Soviet literature—for example Maxim Gorky, who positions the human not as a passive victim of historical processes but as a constructive subject—bringing the human to a consciousness that recognizes their own truth is a philosophical duty. İHD's forty-year search for truth must be read as a structural production of counter-knowledge against the epistemological encirclement of ruling culture.

Young comrades: the task that falls to us today is to grow the rational consciousness that will carry this objective practical legacy—without abandoning it to liberalism's conceptual colony or to the logic of funded NGOs—through the filter of historical materialism into the free social forms of the future.

The Truth Behind Appearance: İHD as a Center of Counter-Hegemony and Knowledge Production

Young comrades: the deepest and most shattering distinction that the dialectical method has given to the history of philosophy is the contradiction between Appearance and Essence. This epistemological filter, inherited from Hegel and perfected by Marx in the critique of political economy, is the sole path to grasping objective reality. In capitalist social formations the ruling class never presents its own domination and structural violence in naked form. On the contrary, the bourgeois state apparatus, through the legal and political superstructure, projects onto society a rational, neutral, and democratic "appearance." What makes the Human Rights Association's (İHD) forty-year institutional activity philosophically meaningful is precisely its capacity to deconstruct this curtain of illusion.

The State's Monopoly on Knowledge and Ideological Illusion

The capitalist state, as Louis Althusser conceptualized it, produces consent not only through repressive apparatuses but also through Ideological State Apparatuses (law, education, media). The most refined form of this production of consent is the monopoly the state establishes over "truth and knowledge."

The Strategy of Masking: The ruling system renders invisible seizures of rights, rights violations, illegal practices in detention, and structural violence through paper legislation and the rhetoric of the "rule of law." Facts are distorted or entirely ignored in official reports, creating the image that the system operates smoothly.
Epistemological Violence: The manipulation of knowledge by the rulers prevents the working class and oppressed layers from grasping the exploitation and repression to which they themselves are subjected. Rights violations that occur are torn from the structural character of the system and presented as "isolated cases."

The Practice of Reporting: The Counter-Hegemonic Organization of Data

Through forty years of uninterrupted reporting, documentation, and archiving of rights violations, İHD has radically shaken this monopoly of the bourgeois state on knowledge. Examined in the context of Antonio Gramsci's theory of counter-hegemony, İHD has functioned as an organic center of knowledge production that sets the organized data of objective truth against the false flow of knowledge produced by official ideology.

From the Isolated to the Structural: The annual balances, reports, and statistical studies prepared by İHD bring together pains and seizures of rights that appear singular and establish the dialectical bond among them. Thus they scientifically prove that violations are not accidental, but a structural result of a state mechanism programmed to protect the ruling class's survival.
Archival Memory and Truth: Knowledge is social opposition's greatest intellectual arsenal. This forty-year archive that İHD has meticulously woven has been the fortress of objective reality against the rulers' attempts to rewrite history according to their own interests (amnesia / memory rupture).

"Philosophically, İHD's balances are documents of truth that strip away the ruling class's false makeup and expose the naked violence (the essence) of the order of exploitation."

The Mirror of Truth in the Light of Soviet Realism

The founding vein of Soviet literature and aesthetic theory sees art and writing not as an escape from the world, but as part of the act of grasping and transforming objective reality in all its nakedness. Leo Tolstoy's great deconstructive style that decodes the hypocrisy of Tsarist bureaucracy, or Maxim Gorky's realism that exhibits social decay with philosophical honesty, carries a methodological kinship with İHD's logic of reporting.

İHD's reports are like literary and scientific mirrors that anatomize the social formation. When one looks into that mirror, behind the glittering shop window of bourgeois democracy one sees workers whose rights have been seized, intellectuals left as unsolved cases, and identities rendered invisible.

Young comrades: among the philosophical approaches of the modern world, let us recall Michel Foucault's analyses of the "power/knowledge" spiral: power produces its own knowledge and thereby domesticates subjects. İHD, against this power's regime of knowledge that renders subjects docile, has produced a rational counter-knowledge filtered from the concrete experiences of the oppressed. Therefore we must read and grasp İHD not merely as a rights-advocacy organization, but as a scientific barricade that methodologically organizes objective truth against the rulers' mechanism of lies.

Class Struggle and Democratic Positions: The Class Value of Rights Advocacy

Young comrades: a mechanical and crude interpretation of Marxist theory can drag us into a fatal epistemological error: "Human rights and law are elements of the bourgeois superstructure; therefore they carry no value for the proletariat." This dogmatic approach is a reductionism that misses the essence of the dialectical method. Marx's deconstructive critique of bourgeois law is not for belittling the struggle for rights, but for determining its limits and seating it on a historical-materialist ground. The Human Rights Association's (İHD) forty-year practice is the concrete counterpart of this philosophical balance: a rational line of protection within the limits of bourgeois law, yet expanding those limits in favor of the oppressed classes.

The Dialectical Necessity of Democratic Positions and the Leninist Line

The line Lenin theorized in Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution offers us an invaluable philosophical guide on this matter. Political freedoms and democratic rights cannot themselves be the ideal of a final society without exploitation; yet they are dialectical moments that enable the working class's mental and institutional development on the road to that ideal.

Widening the Ground: Universal principles such as freedom of expression, the right to organize, freedom of the press, and the right of assembly prevent the ruling class from making its hegemony absolute. These rights are legitimate democratic positions in which the working class can build its own class consciousness, grow its union structures, and bring its theoretical production into contact with the masses.
Minimum Guarantee: These fundamental rights that İHD has defended for forty years are a rational barrier of the social structure against capitalism's savage, ruleless, and lumpenized phase of exploitation. Rights advocacy functions to optimize, on behalf of the oppressed, the objective conditions in which class struggle will be waged.

From the Abstract Individual to the Concrete Laborer: İHD's Class Scope

Liberal human-rights theory constructs the human as an abstract "citizen" torn from their economic relations. Yet when İHD's historical practice is examined, this institutional structure is seen to have transcended liberalism's shallow frame and centered concrete social relations. İHD has been a refuge not only for intellectuals subjected to rights violations because of their political thoughts, but also for those crushed directly at the heart of relations of production.

Workplace Deaths and Precarity: Defending the right to life of workers who die for capital's greed for profit—from Soma to Ermenek, from shipyards to construction sites—is one of the most dynamic headings of İHD's institutional reporting.
Dispossession and the Plunder of Nature: Defending the rights of peasants whose living spaces, waters, and lands are taken from them in line with capitalism's processes of capital accumulation, and registering processes of ecocide as human-rights violations, is an indicator of the class contribution the association has offered to social progress.

"Legal rights are not abstract articles of law; they are social indices showing the balance of power relations among classes at that moment. İHD's existence is an institutional weight that holds this balance in favor of the oppressed."

The Concept of Rights from Classical Aesthetics and Contemporary Philosophy

Among the philosophical approaches of the modern world, we can apply here Giorgio Agamben's conceptualizations of "bare life" and "homo sacer." Agamben shows how sovereign power, by stripping the human of legal guarantees, reduces them to a mere object of biological survival. İHD's forty-year struggle is precisely a rational barricade drawn against the reduction of Turkish society and laborers to this "bare life." It raises the human from being a biological object to the position of a historical subject who seeks their own rights.

The human conception of classical literature and Soviet realism also sits exactly here. That search for justice rising against the transformation of law into the hypocrisy of those who hold power in Shakespeare's plays, or Pavel Korchagin's defense of human dignity and will amid every impossibility in Nikolai Ostrovsky's novel How the Steel Was Tempered, overlaps with the philosophy of resistance that İHD represents.

Therefore, young comrades: abandoning the human-rights struggle to liberalism's proprietary horizon is a great theoretical ignorance. For us this struggle is an inseparable part of the perspective of social totality that Georg Lukács emphasized. Defending and expanding democratic positions is the act of protecting from today the free and rational consciousness that will build the exploitation-free world of the future.

İHD's Contributions to Turkish Society: Memory, Justice, and an Internationalist Stance Against Chauvinism

Young comrades: when measuring a social structure's level of progress, the rational bond that structure establishes with its own past and the immunity it develops against the ruling ideology's divisive apparatuses are critical parameters. The Human Rights Association's (İHD) forty-year institutional existence has offered Turkey's socio-political topography two deep contributions—not only at the legal level, but essentially at the mental and cultural level: the protection of social memory and the stubborn defense of an internationalist, rational consciousness against chauvinism.

Resistance Against Memory Rupture: An Epistemological Barricade Against Social Amnesia

One of the ruling class's hegemony strategies is also the act of "making the past forgotten" that Walter Benjamin, among the philosophical approaches of the modern world, diagnoses with magnificent clarity in his Theses on the Philosophy of History. When Benjamin says, "Even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins," he was referring to the dominant structure's tendency to rewrite history according to its own interest and create a social memory rupture (amnesia).

The Politics of Forgetting: In Turkey the September 12 military regime and the neoliberal processes that followed aimed to build a shallow, memoryless, and selfish "dead culture" by making the past of social opposition, prison massacres, disappearances in detention, and unsolved murders forgotten.
The Archiving of Truth: Through forty years of uninterrupted activity, İHD has built a strong epistemological barricade against this amnesia move. This practice—stretching from the steadfast insistence of the Saturday Mothers to the legal pursuit of unsolved murders—has taken pain out of being an object of melancholy and turned it into documents of historical truth. Keeping memory alive is an indispensable theoretical precondition for grasping the origins of today's mechanisms of exploitation.

An Internationalist Stance Against Chauvinism and Rational Reason

There is a basic maxim Marx and Engels established in their analyses of the National Question: "A nation that oppresses another nation can never itself be free." The ruling class anesthetizes the masses with the apparatuses of nationalism, chauvinism, and racism in order to prevent the working class and oppressed layers from uniting around common class interests. This is one of the most insidious states of false consciousness that cripple social rationality.

The Leninist Line and the National Question: Lenin's philosophical and political analyses of the national question show that chauvinism is the greatest bourgeois ideology that poisons working-class consciousness. Lenin emphasizes that defending the democratic rights of oppressed peoples is a necessary bridge for the internationalist unity of the proletariat.
Principled Consistency: Even in Turkey's most difficult and repressive periods, İHD broke through the chauvinist encirclement by defending a peaceful, democratic, and human-rights-based solution to the Kurdish question. The association's stance has functioned as a rational insurance—beyond liberal identity politics—that rises on the basis of the brotherhood of peoples and internationalist solidarity, and that protects society from lumpenization and eclipse of reason.

Soviet Literature's Conception of Memory and İHD's Practice

In Chingiz Aitmatov's novel The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years, the type of the Mankurt—who loses memory, roots, and identity through torture and becomes an enemy of their own people—is precisely the human model that ruling systems wish to create. The system wants an army of selfish mankurts stripped of memory, torn from their past and social bonds.

The work İHD has carried out for forty years is a literary and philosophical prescription of resistance that reminds society of its historical responsibility and dignity against this mankurtization operation. By keeping alive the memory of intellectuals left as unsolved cases, murdered journalists, and the oppressed whose rights were taken from them, İHD has protected the roots of social progress.

Young comrades: this contribution İHD has offered Turkish society is too great to be confined to the corridors of courthouses. Against the chauvinism and amnesia that the rulers inject into society to conceal their order of exploitation, İHD has for forty years been an institutional torch defending rational reason, historical consciousness, and human dignity. To claim this legacy means to build the memory of the future from today.

Deconstruction of the Liberal Rights Illusion and the Rights Understanding of the "Human of the Future"

Young comrades: examining how the concept of human rights is put into circulation in today's intellectual market brings us to the most slippery ground of contemporary ideology critique. Today global capitalism instrumentalizes human rights for its own hegemonic purposes by turning them into abstract, classless, and ahistorical dogmas. Decoding this process of instrumentalization and then philosophically constructing the free human of the future's conception of rights is one of the most critical stages of our struggle for epistemological hygiene.

Neoliberal Encirclement: Critique of the "NGOization" of Rights Discourse

Philosophical approaches of the modern world—especially structural analyses showing how late capitalism absorbs oppositional foci into itself—draw attention to the phenomenon of "NGOization." After the collapse of the bipolar world, imperialism transformed human-rights discourse into apparatuses of geopolitical intervention and into neoliberal adaptation processes operating through funding mechanisms.

The Strategy of Depoliticization: Western-centered liberal rights advocacy renders structural relations of exploitation invisible. It tears rights violations from systemic contradictions and reduces them to technical and bureaucratic "project" items. It imprisons the masses' radical and class anger within domesticated legal limits bound by funding rules.
İHD's Organic Exception: The fundamental philosophical quality that separates the Human Rights Association's (İHD) forty-year tradition from this liberal wave of liquidation is its organic and independent character. İHD has succeeded in remaining not an apparatus producing funding projects in sterile plaza offices, but a historical focus of resistance whose roots are in the street, in social cases, at prison gates, and in the naked struggle of laborers. This organic structure is a rational response given within Turkey's social formation against global capitalism's move to domesticate rights discourse.

Deconstruction of Bourgeois Law: The Limits of the Proprietary Individual

The philosophical ground Marx established in On the Jewish Question draws the ontological limits of the liberal understanding of rights. Bourgeois rights declarations tear the human from their social and collective essence and secure the atomized, proprietary individual—withdrawn into their own boundaries, seeing other humans as the limit (or threat) of their own freedom.

Isolated Freedom: In liberalism, a right is a shield by which a person, isolated from other people, protects their private property and selfish interests. This understanding of rights serves no purpose other than to give legal guarantee to exploitation itself.
Dialectical Sublation: The rights İHD has defended for forty years, by contrast, have a character that presses against these selfish limits and carries the collective voice and will of the oppressed into the public sphere. Therefore the search for rights within the limits of the bourgeois legal form takes on a genuinely progressive character only when it is united with a class and social perspective of totality.

The Human of the Future and the Aesthetic Guarantee of Communist Humanism

So, beyond this selfish "dead culture" that surrounds us, what philosophical meaning will the concept of rights attain in the socialist society of the future? What will take the place of bourgeois law's defensive, selfish, and negative understanding of rights?

The founding humanism of Soviet literature—especially that immortal cry of the character Satin in Maxim Gorky's play The Lower Depths—guides us on this matter:

"Everything is in the human, everything is for the human! Only the human exists; everything else is the work of their hands and mind! Human! That sounds magnificent! Human! One must take pride in the human!"

This communist humanism that Gorky points to does not see the human as capitalism does—as an object, a commodity, or an abstract legal subject. For the human of the future, a right is not a barricade that protects property and separates the human from their comrade.

Affirmative Parameters: In the society of the future, a right is the aesthetic and social guarantee of the individual's freest and fullest realization of their potential, creativity, and artistic and mental capacity within collective totality.
Emancipation of Species-Being: A right will be a rational principle of social organization that operates not to protect human against human, but so that the human may attain their own "species-being" and close the gap between mental and manual labor.

Young comrades: to defend İHD's forty-year accumulation today means to tear the human-rights struggle from the hands of Western-centered liberalism. For us the struggle for rights is the act of leaving those selfish, isolated rooms in which the rulers imprison us, and of protecting and growing from today the rational consciousness that will build human dignity and that bright, exploitation-free world of the future.

Historical Optimism and the Germs of the New Human

Young comrades: bourgeois ideology's most insidious success at the level of the superstructure is to rationalize the historical juncture we are in as "the end of history" and the selfish culture produced by capitalist relations of production as "unchanging human nature." That mental paralysis which Mark Fisher, among contemporary philosophical approaches, conceptualizes as capitalist realism imposes on humanity the illusion that a social formation beyond capitalism is impossible. If we limit our epistemological horizon to today's institutional rot and ruling discourses, where we arrive will inevitably be nihilism or a surrenderist cynicism. Yet dialectical materialism whispers to us an objective truth: Rot is not absolute; on the contrary, it harbors in its bosom radical contradictions that carry its own negation and the germs of a new human typology.

When we look from that free, exploitation-free, and socialist culture of the future back to today—to this phase of neoliberal and authoritarian encirclement in 2026—what we see is not a historical end, but a painful transition process in which the old world is pregnant with a new social formation. The Human Rights Association's (İHD) forty-year institutional history of resistance is a rational and empirical proof of this historical optimism, far from bombast.

The Scientific Foundations of Historical Optimism

The theoretical line that will carry the struggle for rights and social progress into the future can be summarized with these philosophical parameters:

Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will: This balance that Antonio Gramsci formulated in fascism's dungeons is the touchstone of rational consciousness. Reason must be objective and "pessimistic" enough to map in all its nakedness the petty-bourgeois egoism, institutional repressions, and structural exploitation that surround us. Yet the will must remain unshakable and "optimistic" enough to know that the motor of history is not the absolute power of the rulers, but social practice (praxis). That İHD has preserved its institutional continuity for forty years despite structural repression is the practical success of this dialectical balance.
The Germs of the New Human (Novy Chelovek): The "New Human" Che Guevara emphasizes in his theoretical text Socialism and Man in Cuba is not a ready-made object to be purchased from a future revolutionary market. Its ethical and intellectual germs are already sprouting today, in the middle of this selfish market culture, in the practices of subjects who resist with rational consciousness against the current. Every rights defender who, despite the ruling class's chauvinist and lumpenizing encirclement, defends rational reason, keeps comradeship bonds organic without fetishizing them, and mobilizes their knowledge for the legitimate rights of the oppressed, is today's concrete kernel of the human of the future.

Looking at Today from the Perspective of the Future

When one looks back from that rational social order of the future—in which the deep gap between mental and manual labor has closed, and law has ceased to be a shackle protecting property and become a principle of organization affirming the human's species-being—the struggles for rights waged in this first quarter of the twenty-first century will be understood far more clearly. This structural blockage that today appears dark and insurmountable to us will be registered for the human of the future only as historical moments that had to be overcome.

"History is written not by the rulers' temporary victory scenarios, but by the silent and deep-flowing river of those who organize human dignity, objective truth, and the will to collective life."

Young comrades: to salute this historical legacy on the occasion of İHD's 40th founding anniversary is not to take refuge in a nostalgia belonging to the past, but to arm ourselves from today with a perspective belonging to the future. We will not abandon the human-rights struggle to liberalism's abstract, isolated, and disabled conceptual world. We will reproduce it with our perspective of social totality and turn it into a rational trench against class exploitation.

Let us turn our faces to the naked reality of the street, to the concrete contradictions of production, to the theoretical clarity of science, and to humanity's unshakable line of progress. That free human of the future awaits us not in sterile ivory towers, but in those concrete social positions where we document the truth and defend justice with rational insistence.

Salute to the forty-year institutional memory of remaining human and of making the human a historical subject!