Truth Seeping Through the Smoke: The Class, Sociological, and Political Anatomy of the Sivas Massacre

The date of 2 July 1993 is etched into Turkey's collective memory as an unextinguished fire and an undying pain. The burning to death of 33 poets, writers, artists, and young people along with 2 hotel workers at the Madımak Hotel in Sivas by a reactionary mob is one of the darkest turns in Turkey's recent history.

1990s Turkey: The Material Basis of the Road to Massacre (Sociological Background)

To examine a social tragedy in isolation from the historical and economic conditions that produced it is an epistemological deficiency. The smoke that engulfed the Madımak Hotel was the outcome of Turkey's overturned economic structure in the 1990s, a blocked model of capital accumulation, and the hegemony crisis into which the ruling classes had fallen.

According to the fundamental law of historical materialism, tremors in the base (the economy) produce violent ruptures in the superstructure (politics, law, religion). We can deepen the material foundations of the road to Sivas 1993 under four main headings:

Neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programs and Precarization

The 1980s were the period when capitalism was brutally grafted onto a neoliberal phase in Turkey through the 24 January Decisions and the force of the 12 September military coup. By the 1990s, the destructive consequences of these policies had collapsed onto the masses:

• Liquidation of Public Investment: Agricultural supports were withdrawn; State Economic Enterprises (SEEs) were placed in the grip of privatization. This led to a massive employment crisis in the provinces (especially in cities dependent on agriculture and public investment, such as Sivas).
• Lumpenization and Insecure Labor: A broad stratum emerged that was deindustrialized, uprooted from the land, or condemned to insecure work. Deprived of class consciousness and rendered futureless, this provincial youth and unemployed population (lumpen proletariat) formed the most open "mass base" for manipulation by reactionary and chauvinist ideologies.

The Rise of Anatolian Capital and Provincial Conservatism

The 1990s were the years when, opposite the traditional Istanbul bourgeoisie (TÜSİAD), a new Islamic capital fraction sprouting from the provinces stood up—called the "Anatolian Tigers."

• This new bourgeois fraction used religious communities and tarikat networks as organic ties to suppress the working class's pursuit of rights and expand its own market share.
• Sivas was one of the centers where this new conservative capital accumulation and provincial notables flourished. Holding a cultural and artistic festival (the Pir Sultan Abdal Festivals) in the city center was perceived by this rising conservative provincial bourgeoisie and its ideological projections as a threat to their "regional domination"—a class challenge.

Collapse of the Political Superstructure and Coalition Hypocrisy

In 1993, the DYP (True Path Party) and SHP (Social Democratic Populist Party) coalition was in power. The SHP's presence as a coalition partner while defining itself as "left," "progressive," and "social democratic" makes the sociological dimension of the massacre all the more tragic.

• The Left's Integration into the System: The SHP had dampened the real class demands of the working class and the oppressed by supporting neoliberal policies. Paralyzing opposition within the system in this way prevented the masses' accumulating anger against the order from flowing into a left channel.
• Turning a Blind Eye to the Reactionary Encirclement: The order-bound left remained blind and deaf to the reactionary staffing of the state apparatus and tarikat organizations in the provinces. In the end, while intellectuals were being slaughtered in Sivas, the "social democrats" sitting in the state's executive branch merely watched the destruction of their own base and progressive dynamics.

Global Conjuncture: The Collapse of the Soviet Union and Identity Politics

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, imperialism spread "End of History" theses worldwide and declared class politics finished.

• From Class Politics to Identity Politics: The universal struggle of the working class was replaced by ethnic, religious, and sectarian identity conflicts. Turkey's ruling class adapted to this global trend.
• The danger of workers uniting for trade union rights, humane wages, and an exploitation-free order was neutralized by dividing society into "Alevi-Sunni" and "Secular-Antisecular" compartments. The Sivas Massacre is the most concrete historical example of class consciousness being smothered by identity-axis reactionary frenzy.

Sociological Summary: The crowd of 15,000 that piled up in front of the Madımak Hotel in Sivas did not descend by parachute. They were a structural whole produced by neoliberalism's impoverishment, provincial capital's funding, tarikat networks' opiating, and the bourgeois state's feeding and releasing onto the streets of reaction as a barricade against the left. The massacre is material proof of how reaction can be turned into a weapon of mass annihilation for capitalism's survival.

What Happened on 2 July 1993? (Chronology and the Anatomy of Provocation)

The Sivas Massacre is not the sudden explosion of homogeneous mass hatred; it is an ideological and logistical operation organized step by step according to a common plan by cliques within the state, provincial bourgeoisie, and reactionary centers. From a Marxist philosophical standpoint, provocation is the art of manipulating masses with false consciousness (illusion) to set them against fake enemies instead of their real class enemies.

That is exactly the play staged in Sivas. Let us lay on the table the anatomy of that dark process and its hour-by-hour chronology through a historical materialist lens.

Ideological Preparation: Manufacturing "Consent" and Targeting (Late June – 1 July)

The logistical and psychological infrastructure of the massacre had been prepared weeks in advance. The state's ideological apparatuses (local press, leaflets, café and mosque networks) that Louis Althusser pointed to were run flawlessly.

• Leaflets and Newspapers: Days before the festivals, unsigned leaflets titled "To the Muslim Public" were distributed in Sivas. These leaflets distorted Aziz Nesin's views and spread the lie that "Islam and the Prophet had been insulted." Local newspapers Yeni Sivas and Bizim Sivas ran incendiary headlines.
• Material Preparation (War Fortifications by the Municipality): Just before the massacre, the Refah Party Sivas Municipality began pavement work on the street where the Madımak Hotel stood. The street was filled with huge piles of stones and paving blocks that the angry crowd would later use as weapons. Leaving those stones there is proof of logistical authorization.
• Attack on Cultural Symbols: On 1 July, the "Monument to the Bards" erected in front of the Culture Center as part of the festivals was targeted by reactionaries. This was the rehearsal for the physical attack to be carried out the next day.

Massacre Day: Hour-by-Hour Chronology of Barbarism (2 July 1993)

2 July is the chronology of how provincial lumpen proletarians, tradesmen, and tarikat followers were turned into a force of annihilation under the pretext of Friday prayers:

Time	Events and Their Class/Political Counterpart
13:30	Exit from Friday Prayers and First Mobilization: A crowd of thousands leaving Paşa Mosque marched toward the Culture Center where the festivals were held. The slogans are clear: "We want Sharia," "Sivas will be Aziz's grave."
14:00	Siege of the Culture Center: The mob tried to block events at the Culture Center and destroyed the Monument to the Bards there. The statue was dragged through the streets before the eyes of the state's security forces. The ruling ideology wanted to destroy everything progressive about art.
16:00	In Front of the Governorship and Political Slogans: The crowd piled up in front of the Sivas Governorship. The number kept growing. Slogans targeted not only Aziz Nesin but directly secularism and the republic: "Governor resign," "The republic was founded here, it will be destroyed here." State power was entirely passive at this stage.
18:00	Siege of the Madımak Hotel: The crowd gathered in front of the Madımak Hotel where intellectuals and young people had taken refuge. There was only a weak police barricade around the hotel. The mob's number reached 15,000. Intellectuals inside the hotel (Metin Altıok, Behçet Aysan, Uğur Kaynar) called Ankara, ministers, and Deputy Prime Minister Erdal İnönü by phone to convey the gravity of the situation. The answer was always the same: "The center has it under control, stay calm."
19:00	Withdrawal of the Military: A small military unit brought to the front of the hotel, instead of intervening against the angry crowd, withdrew from the area to the crowd's applause and "soldier-civilian alliance" slogans. This moment is the epistemological peak of the tacit alliance and authorization the bourgeois state apparatus established with the reactionary crowd.
19:50	Starting the Fire: With stones piled on the street by the municipality, the hotel's windows were broken. Then cars in front of the hotel were overturned and set on fire. Flames leaping from the cars reached the hotel's curtains and wooden parts. Barbarism, with cries of "Hellfire" and "Allahu Akbar," spread into the hotel.
21:00	The Massacre's Toll: When the fire was extinguished, the lifeless bodies of 33 intellectuals and artists and 2 hotel workers emerged from the smoke. They had died by suffocation from smoke or by burning.

Epistemological Analysis of Provocation: The Illusion of "Spontaneity"

Bourgeois historiography presents this chronology as a "popular uprising" (spontaneous reaction). Yet Marxist epistemology teaches us that no social action is entirely spontaneous.

The Lumpen Crowd from a Leninist Perspective: Lenin argued that lumpen masses deprived of class consciousness (the unemployed, poor tradesmen, tarikat marginals) can at any moment be turned into a strike force (blackshirts) in the hands of the ruling classes against the left and progressive movements. The 15,000 in Sivas clung to the fake target the system offered them—the myth that "religion is slipping away"—instead of holding account for their own exploitation.

One symbolic moment of the massacre is this: As Aziz Nesin was being lowered injured from the hotel on a fire ladder, he was pushed down the ladder by the municipal council member of the period and firefighters and an attempt was made to lynch him with iron bars. This scene is a truth showing the organized and institutional character of the massacre from the lowest-ranking state official to the minister at the top.

What happened in Sivas was a planned annihilation operation staged by ruling bourgeois cliques using counter-guerrilla tactics to blind rising class consciousness among the masses and crush Alevi and left dynamics. Even 33 years later, meticulously examining this chronology is our greatest task to expose the complicity of the bourgeois state and reaction.

The Bourgeois State's Stance: Weakness or Authorization?

Bourgeois historiography and liberal analyses usually try to explain the state's role in the Sivas Massacre with technical terms like "intelligence failure," "lack of coordination among security forces," or "bureaucratic sluggishness." Yet Marxist philosophy and epistemology show us that in the political field, no great inaction is accidental. Epistemologically, "conscious inaction" is the ruling class disabling or directing the state apparatus to serve a specific purpose.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Friedrich Engels states that the state is not a supra-class arbiter but "the state of the most powerful, economically dominant class," and that this class creates an armed body of men (army, police) through the state to suppress the oppressed class. Lenin deepens this thesis in The State and Revolution, emphasizing that the state is a product of class antagonism.

We can decode the state's stance at Madımak on this theoretical ground in four fundamental dimensions:

Class Selectivity of the Monopoly of Violence

Weberian bourgeois sociology defines the state as the apparatus holding the legitimate monopoly of violence. Marxist analysis, however, looks at against whom that monopoly of violence is used.

• The State Against Workers: In the same period, when workers, public employees, students, or Kurdish villagers took to the streets seeking their rights, the bourgeois state's monopoly of violence (tanks, batons, tear gas, detentions) was deployed mercilessly and within seconds.
• The State Against Reactionaries: On 2 July in Sivas, against a reactionary mob of 15,000 shouting "We want Sharia" and "The republic will be destroyed here" for 8 hours, throwing stones at the governor and state buildings, this monopoly of violence virtually evaporated. Tear gas in police hands was not used; no serious physical intervention was made to disperse the crowd. This is not "weakness" but a class and ideological ceasefire the state's repressive apparatus established with reactionary elements.

Withdrawal of the Military: Counter-Guerrilla Authorization

The most critical breaking point in the massacre chronology is the withdrawal from the area, after confronting the angry crowd, of the small military unit of roughly 30–40 soldiers sent to the front of the hotel in the afternoon.

• The soldiers' backward steps were applauded by the lumpen masses besieging the hotel with "soldier-civilian alliance" and "the greatest soldier is our soldier" slogans.
• This scene is tacit "Your path is open, continue your action" authorization given by the state's armed force to the reactionary crowd. Counter-guerrilla cliques within the state planned the burning of that hotel and the liquidation of the left-progressive intellectuals inside as the greatest deterrent against social opposition—and opened the way for that plan through military withdrawal.

THE BOURGEOIS STATE'S DUAL REFLEX MECHANISM

Class Movement / Left Opposition → Revolutionary Threat → REPRESSION (Worker strikes, student boycotts, progressive festivals) (Full Violence)

Reactionary / Fascist Mob → System-Internal Apparatus → AUTHORIZATION (15,000 besieging Madımak) (Barricade Against the Left) (Inaction)

Discourse Analysis of Ruling Cliques and Complicity in Crime

The voices rising from the summit of the state after the massacre epistemologically expose the class character and hypocrisy of bourgeois state reason:

Tansu Çiller (Prime Minister of the Period): "Thank God, nothing happened to our citizens outside the hotel."

• Class Analysis: This sentence is the bourgeois state's definition of the "acceptable citizen." In Çiller's eyes, the state's real base is the reactionary bourgeois/tradesmen and lumpen crowd that burned the hotel and demanded sharia. The intellectuals, artists, and Alevis who burned to death inside are "others" outside the state's protective umbrella.

Süleyman Demirel (President of the Period): "The incident is isolated. There is severe provocation. Do not pit the people against the security forces."

• Class Analysis: Demirel shifted blame from the killers to the victims' "provocation" (Aziz Nesin's views), triggering the protective reflex of bourgeois law. By "the people" he meant the reactionary mob. The state did not want to offend this reactionary crowd for its own survival.

Erdal İnönü (Deputy Prime Minister and SHP Chair of the Period): "What can I do, I gave orders to the governor by phone, they said be patient."

• Class Analysis: The confession of the order-bound left's (social democracy's) helplessness and complicity within the bourgeois state mechanism. A left detached from class politics becomes merely a figurehead before the state's reactionary cliques.

"Controlled Chaos" and Neoliberalism's Need

In conclusion, in the Sivas Massacre the state did not "arrive late"—it acted on time and as planned. The sole force that could resist the 1990s' savage waves of privatization and de-unionization drives—the left and progressive potential—was meant to be dampened by reaction's fire in Sivas.

The bourgeois state fed the anger that would burn the Madımak Hotel through tarikats and local media; on 2 July it withdrew security forces and granted that anger spatial and temporal freedom. Thus there is no state weakness; there is planned class authorization that the bourgeois state gave reaction to protect its own domination and the capitalist property order.

Social Hypocrisy and Systematic Discrimination Against Alevis

The Sivas Massacre was neither the first nor the last explosion of the structural discrimination and ideological hypocrisy on which Turkish society and the state structure are built. From the standpoint of Marxist philosophy and especially Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory, ruling classes sustain their power not only through crude force (army, police) but through ideological mechanisms that produce the consent of the oppressed.

After the 12 September military coup, the Turkish bourgeoisie built an official state ideology it called the "Turkish-Islamic Synthesis" to produce that consent and fracture working-class unity. The natural consequence of this ideology was the state's uniform imposition of Sunni-Hanafi faith and Alevism's placement in a systematic spiral of "othering," "denial of recognition," and assimilation.

On this sociological and historical ground, we can examine social hypocrisy and institutionalized discrimination in Turkey in four main planes:

Ideological Illusion: The "Anatolian Mosaic" Tale vs. Material Reality

The favorite rhetoric of bourgeois humanism and ruling politics is that Turkey is a "cultural mosaic," a "land of tolerance," and "the land of Mevlana and Hacı Bektaş." Yet this discourse produces collective false consciousness that conceals material reality.

• Discourse: "We are all brothers, like flesh and nail."
• Material Reality: The Maraş (1978), Çorum (1980), Sivas (1993), and Gazi neighborhood (1995) massacres showed how this "tolerance" tale can turn into bloody throat-cutting whenever the ruling class needs it in every crisis period when class contradictions deepen.
• Instead of confronting these massacres, society's silence or attempt to escape blame by attributing it to "provocateurs" is institutional hypocrisy spread to the social base. Poor Sunni workers' anger is redirected toward Alevis as artificial targets so it does not turn toward capitalist exploitation mechanisms (banks, factories, the ruling class).

Economic Exploitation and Ideological Monopoly: the Presidency of Religious Affairs

The most concrete, measurable, and material proof of discrimination against Alevis lies hidden in the state's fiscal budget and institutional structure. Karl Marx deciphers state budget expenditures as the way the ruling class feeds its ideological apparatuses.

Appropriation of Surplus Value: Millions of Alevi citizens in Turkey pay their taxes to the general budget without fail. Alevi workers thus deliver part of the surplus value they produce to the bourgeois state as tax. Yet the state funds the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), which has a massive budget, with these taxes. Diyanet serves only one sect (Sunni-Hanafi), builds mosques, and pays imams' salaries.

This is not simple "budget injustice" but economic and confessional appropriation. With Alevis' taxes, a religious monopoly aimed at assimilating Alevis is financed. The refusal to grant cemevis legal status as "places of worship" is the legal cover for protecting this budget monopoly and ruling confessional hegemony.

Compulsory Religious Instruction: Epistemological Violence and the Colonization of Consciousness

Discrimination is not only physical or economic; it is also epistemological. The education system, which Louis Althusser places at the head of his analysis of "Ideological State Apparatuses," is used in Turkey as an instrument to colonize Alevi children's consciousness.

• "Religious Culture and Ethics" classes taught in schools are not, as claimed, objective or scientific history of religion. They are an empirical assimilation program imposing Sunni Islamic practices directly (prayer suras, ablution rules, etc.).
• Alevi children are forced to reject—or at least hide—their own faith and philosophical roots (human-centered understanding, woman as founding element, distance from dogma) and enter the molds of the dominant. This is institutional epistemological violence applied against the child's own existential reality.

Spatial Exclusion, Ghettoization, and "Marked Doors"

Capitalist urbanization policies also reproduce this discrimination spatially. Alevi populations migrating from the provinces to big cities have been forced to concentrate in certain neighborhoods (ghettos) by both security concerns and class exclusion.

• Bureaucratic Caste System: Throughout republican history, Alevis have undergone systematic liquidation in state bureaucracy, the judiciary, police, and military cadres. Under the mask of "merit," Alevi identity has been positioned as an invisible barrier to advancement in the public sphere.
• Continuity of the Regime of Fear: In Turkey, cases frequently occur in suburbs or provincial cities where Alevi families' doors are marked with red paint "X" and threat messages. State and judicial mechanisms usually pass these off as "children's pranks" or "isolated public order incidents." This impunity practice is hypocrisy's way of legitimizing violence. Fear is kept alive as a governing apparatus to pacify Alevi society and keep it within system-internal bounds.

Comparative Table of Class and Sociological Contradictions

The hypocrisy of the Turkish bourgeoisie's Alevi policy becomes clear in the following radical contradiction between discourse and action:

Ruling Bourgeois Discourse (Superstructural Illusion)	Concrete Material Practice (Base Reality)	Class Aim
"Cemevis are our cultural richness; we respect them."	Cemevis are not granted legal status; electricity/water bills are charged at commercial rates.	Erasing faith from the public sphere; not recognizing it as an institutional right.
"Islam is a religion of peace; those who died in Sivas are also our flesh and blood."	For years a kebab restaurant was allowed to open under the Madımak Hotel; killers are protected.	Erasing memory; hiding the massacre's class and political responsible parties.
"We are a secular social state of law."	Billions are transferred to Diyanet while compulsory Hanafi instruction is imposed in schools.	Producing uniform acceptable citizens through the state; dividing the working class sectarianly.

In conclusion, systematic discrimination against Alevis and social hypocrisy in Turkey cannot be explained by moral weakness or the existence of "bad people." This situation is directly umbilically tied to the survival of the capitalist state and hegemony strategy. The ruling class must keep Alevi faith and oppositional potential constantly under pressure, marginal and at the edge of illegality so that the class consciousness awakening it fears among the exploited masses does not cohere. Thus the Alevi struggle for equal rights is not merely a demand for "freedom of belief"; at its core it is an inseparable part of the common class struggle to be waged against this hypocritical bourgeois state apparatus and the capitalist order of exploitation.

Closing and Marxist Stance: Memory Never Expires

The legal saga of the Sivas Massacre case—the failure to capture the killers, turning a blind eye to their flight abroad, and finally the case's dismissal on grounds of "statute of limitations"—is a cautionary document showing the class character and hypocrisy of the bourgeois legal system. Letting cases against fugitive defendants in the massacre expire and pardoning some elderly defendants through presidential decrees on "health grounds" are concrete proofs of the ruling class's reflex to protect its own reactionary apparatuses.

As Marxists we must lay this "statute of limitations" concept and bourgeois justice on the table in their barest form.

Class Critique of Bourgeois Law: Pashukanis and the Illusion of "Statute of Limitations"

Soviet legal theorist Evgeny Pashukanis, in The General Theory of Law and Marxism, proves that bourgeois law is essentially a reflection of capitalist commodity exchange. Under capitalism, law objectifies human relations and crimes, reducing them to abstract forms measurable by money or time.

Legal Commodification: For bourgeois law, a murder or massacre is an abstract "criminal norm," and every crime has a "maturity date" (statute of limitations) like in the capitalist market. Applying statute of limitations to fascist and reactionary massacres protected by the state is to amortize crimes against humanity through market logic. The account of 33 intellectuals, young people, and artists burned in a reactionary uprising cannot be closed by aging calendar pages.

The concept of statute of limitations is a legal ideological apparatus the ruling class produces to make the masses forget its own institutional and class complicity in mass killings, bury files on dusty shelves, and paralyze social memory.

Lenin and the State's Shield of Impunity

In The State and Revolution, Lenin writes that the bourgeois state and its courts are structured to keep the oppressed under pressure and eternalize the domination of the rulers. When the statute of limitations decision was handed down in the Sivas case, the political authorities of the period's "Congratulations" statements confirm exactly this Leninist observation.

• The decision was "congratulatory" to the bourgeois property order and the reaction it uses as ideological mortar.
• The state did not want to punish the leaders and trigger-men of that reactionary, lumpen mass it used as a barricade against the left, the working class, and Alevis, thereby offending its own base.
• Thus statute of limitations decisions from bourgeois courts are not "errors of justice" but conscious class fortifications in which the state apparatus protects its own organic elements.

Walter Benjamin and the Epistemology of Historical Memory

Marxist aesthetic and history philosopher Walter Benjamin, in Theses on the Concept of History, warns us against the historiography of the rulers: "If the enemy wins, not even the dead will be safe. And the enemy continues to win."

Forgetting the Sivas Massacre, allowing a kebab restaurant to open for years under the Madımak Hotel, and closing the case through statute of limitations is the ruling class's effort to rewrite history in its favor and take even the memory of our dead from our hands.

Yet in the collective consciousness of the working class and the oppressed operates a historical materialist memory. This memory cannot be bounded by the official seals of bourgeois courts, time limits, or the cold walls of courtrooms. Our memory possesses a revolutionary continuity that transcends the limits of the property world. Not forgetting Sivas is not merely a moral commemoration; it is the very current ideological struggle against today's mechanisms of exploitation and their reactionary supporters.

Dialectical Conclusion: Ideas Cannot Be Destroyed by Fire

Like the principle of the indestructibility of matter, the ideal essence of social progress, enlightenment, and the ideal of a classless world cannot be destroyed by fire, smoke, or statute of limitations decisions. While the name of Ottoman feudalism that hanged Pir Sultan Abdal is remembered with oppression today, Pir Sultan's words are on the tongues of those resisting exploitation. The mentality that burned Madımak and the bourgeois state that protected them are also condemned to the dustbin of history.

THE DIALECTICAL PATH TO REAL JUSTICE

Bourgeois Courts → Statute of Limitations / Forgetting → OBLIVION

Organized Class Consciousness → Collective Memory → REAL JUSTICE

In today's dark picture where tarikats have become holdings in the modern world, education has been reactionized, and working masses are divided along lines of faith, exposing the Sivas Massacre in all its nakedness is a vital task.

The names of the lives we lost at Madımak, etched into our historical memory, are listed below:

Ahmet Öztürk, Ahmet Özyurt, Asaf Koçak, Asuman Sivri, Baran Sarıkaya, Behçet Süleyman Aysan, Belkıs Çakır, Carina Cuanna Thuijs, Edibe Sulari, Erkan Kılıç, Gülender Akça, Gülsün Karababa, Handan Metin, Hasret Gültekin, Huriye Özkan, İnci Türk, Kenan Yılmaz, Koray Kaya, Menekşe Kaya, Metin Altıok, Muammer Çiçek, Muhibe Akarsu, Muhlis Akarsu, Murat Gündüz, Nesimi Çimen, Nurcan Şahin, Özkan Doğan, Sait Metin, Sehergül Ateş, Serkan Doğan, Serpil Canik, Uğur Kaynar, Yasemin Sivri, Yeşim Özkan.

Let it not be forgotten that these names listed side by side are the concrete expression of a social memory bourgeois law cannot erase and of our uncompromising class hatred against reaction.

The real barricade against reaction, fascism, and chauvinism is not seeking justice in the authorized zones of bourgeois politics by squeezing into religious or ethnic ghettos. The real antidote is the common, rational, and organized class struggle of the working class, the oppressed Alevi people, and all progressive dynamics that will shake the capitalist order of exploitation to its roots by using religion as opium.

Madımak's account will truly be settled only when the material foundations that sustain this world of exploitation are removed—when the capitalist system that makes humans slaves to humans and seizes labor is overthrown. We are reborn from our ashes; our memory is fresh, our consciousness clear, our class hatred alive.