Mass or Class? A Dossier on the Workers' Party of Turkey

Dear Young Comrades,

Let us begin this dossier with one sentence. On the evening of 2 October 2026, speaking for two hours on İlke TV, Erkan Baş opened not with Parliament but with the mine:

"Yesterday five worker comrades of ours lost their lives at İMBAT Mining."

He then spoke of Can Atalay, the fund robbery, the municipalities, peace, the world, and hope. At one point he also said this: "We look at life a little along a class axis. This is the bosses' power."

This dossier follows that sentence. We will ask three questions:

1. Where did the Workers' Party of Turkey come from? Erkan Baş's political path, the split of 2014, and the link drawn with the TİP of 1961.
2. What has TİP given Turkey, and where can it grow stronger? Its value and its fields of development, taken together.
3. Is the "class axis" a discourse, or a model of organisation? Why the difference between a mass party and a class party matters so much.

Before we begin: our stance

This dossier is a comradely critique. Our aim is to think and argue together with TİP. We know that hundreds of thousands of young people in Turkey met the word socialism for the first time through TİP. We also know the value of the voice that, from the parliamentary rostrum, spoke against NATO, trade with Israel, and the mine bosses. We have stood, and we will stand, side by side with the comrades who give their labour in TİP: in the same strike tent, in front of the same courthouse, at the same funeral.

But comradeship is not silence. Comradeship is saying to someone's face what you hold to be true. In this dossier we make an invitation to the comrades in TİP: to a revolutionary class line. A line on which anger against theft, the longing for peace, and the energy of youth have to be bound to the organised working class, so that they do not scatter and drain away.

Method

• A source under every claim. There is a thematic source list at the end; we also give links in the text.
• We do not hide contradictions. When sources give different dates or figures, we show it in the text.
• Give what is due, then complete it. Before every criticism we write what TİP has done right in that field.
• The party's own documents come first. Programme, statute, congress and conference documents, Court of Cassation membership figures.
• The word of those who left, and the party's reply. We set the two side by side.

The dossier has twelve parts:

Part	Subject
I	The latest interview: 2 October 2026, İlke TV
II	A chronology of Erkan Baş
III	Before TİP: from the SİP to the TKP, the split of 2014
IV	Two TİPs: 1961–1980 and after 2017
V	What TİP has given Turkey
VI	Where it needs to grow stronger: a deeper class analysis
VII	Unity inside the left: on the charges of sectarianism
VIII	Different tendencies in today's TİP
IX	The criticisms of those who left, and our assessment
X	Its place in the world and in the class: international relations, the European model, ideological position, the unions
XI	Mass party or class party?
XII	Steps for the comrades in TİP to think through

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PART I — THE LATEST INTERVIEW: 2 OCTOBER 2026, İLKE TV

Programme: Time to Talk, İlke TV, the evening of 2 October 2026, about two hours. The questioners: Dilek Odabaş, Şirin Payzın, Ercüment Akdeniz. Recording: YouTube, İlke TV · İlke TV news summary

The interview took place in the shadow of two events from the day before. On 1 October Can Atalay had begun a 24-hour hunger strike, and TİP, instead of attending the opening of Parliament, had gone to the Constitutional Court. The same day, at Soma, the roof collapsed at İMBAT Mining and five workers lost their lives. We told that story in A Class Seven Layers Underground.

Below we summarise the interview heading by heading. We leave the assessment to Part VI.

1. The parliamentary boycott: "We did not want to pretend"

• Baş said that Parliament had been "rendered functionless" under the one-man regime, and that the opposition's duty was to represent the people's will.
• He described Can Atalay as the symbol of this: an open violation of the constitution, the refusal to recognise the Constitutional Court's rulings, the Court of Cassation's letter being read out in the General Assembly.
• He remembered the retired citizen who ended his life in front of the Constitutional Court saying "not for money, for my honour," and said he would not accept that this be forgotten.
• To Şirin Payzın's question, "instead of abandoning the field, would it not have been more effective to make a noise there?", he answered by listing kinds of action: actions to defend a right, to win a new right, to stop an attack, and actions taken so that "our place in history is clear."
• He described how Erdoğan does not come to the budget debates or to the 23 April sittings, and does not "put himself on a level" with the deputies.

2. The municipalities and the election calendar

• He said he thought the Mersin operation was in fact aimed at the Union of Municipalities of Turkey.
• He spoke of the bargain "either join the AKP or be thrown into prison." He described how the balances in the Üsküdar and Adalar councils were being "designed" by court rulings.
• His thesis: "One-party rule has come to dominate the whole of the state."
• His forecast for the election: the AKP will not go to an election without taking the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and without changing the election law.
• He recalled the record of the "strategic vote": the deputy elected in Antalya in 2023 in place of the tourism worker Yunus Başaran is today, in the AKP, chair of the Constitution Commission. He gave a similar example from Eskişehir.
• He described their objections to Lütfü Savaş in Hatay, and the withdrawal of support for Gökhan Zan's candidacy. "Politics is a matter of the cause," he said.
• His stance on a new constitution: "You cannot make a constitution with those who do not abide by the constitution."

3. The fund crisis: "the greatest theft in the history of the Republic"

• He said that in a one-man regime the responsibility sits at the very top: "Since you have built a one-man regime, you are responsible for everything."
• He rejected the defence that these were "isolated cases." He named the deputy chair responsible for social policy (Fatma Betül Sayan Kaya) and the son of the deputy chair responsible for law: "Wealth, poverty, the economy, and the law. At the point where these intersect, three deputy chairs appear."
• He called for the resignation of the Minister of Justice, the members of the Capital Markets Board, and the management of Borsa Istanbul and Takasbank.
• He proposed a civil, independent commission of inquiry in which all the opposition parties, the unions, and the specialists would take part. As an example he pointed to the Duvar report they had prepared on Sedat Peker's allegations.
• He relayed a claim by TİP's Science Board: the breaking date of the fund rip-off coincides with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality operation of 19 March 2025.
• He proposed that the assets of every deputy and minister of the last 25 years be disclosed.

4. "Why does a worker enter the stock market?"

The most class-based part of the interview was the answer given to Ercüment Akdeniz's question, which referred to Lenin's The Development of Capitalism in Russia:

• Poor young people who work 12 to 14 hours a day for 20 to 30 thousand lira a month being pushed into gangs and drug networks.
• The wage-earner who has saved for twenty years and still cannot buy a house putting their money into a fund as a "last hope."
• A country in which "illicit gain has been normalised," and "a stage of decay in capitalism."
• He said that on his tours of Central Anatolia (Kayseri, Konya, Yozgat, Çorum, Sivas) he had seen a break from the AKP and the MHP, and that an important part of those who lost money in the funds were AKP voters.
• His concluding sentence: "It has to find a channel to flow out through."

5. The Kurdish question and the process

• "We look at life along a class axis. This is the bosses' power. This is the power of the rich."
• He described the "no" vote on the commission report and the "yes" vote on the framework law. His reason: both sides say "if this law passes, people will not die."
• He also confessed his own limit: "When you look from the east of Turkey we look Turkish; when you look from the west we look Kurdish."
• Let us note that he said the struggle for democracy would have to grow stronger once the war ended, and that on this "I take responsibility for our shortcoming."
• He said the AKP's aim was to detach Kurdish labourers from the opposition.

6. Unity: alliance heading by heading

• He stated TİP's aim plainly: "The struggle for independence, democracy, and socialism must be waged. The power of labour must be established."
• He said that against theft one could work with everyone, including the İYİ Party; that on freedoms one could stand side by side with the YENİ Party, the DEM Party, and the socialists; and that even agreeing with the CHP on an economic programme was hard.
• He recalled that on opposition to NATO the socialists were left alone.
• His formula: "A line that is ready, when necessary, to stand alone, but that always seeks the struggle together."
• He said the experience of the Labour and Freedom Alliance could be developed. He announced that he had asked Özgür Özel for an appointment.
• He repeated his objection to the YENİ Party's shift to the right: "There is no need to do right-wing politics for this."

7. The world: "an international counter-revolution"

• He recalled the finding of the last congress period: an international counter-revolution at whose centre stand Trump, Musk, and Netanyahu, and of which Erdoğan is also a part.
• He described the antifascist conference in Porto Alegre, and the decision to organise similar meetings on every continent.
• He also spoke of their own failures: that they had not been able to carry the "naked truth" of the Trump–Erdoğan friendship and of the trade with Israel to wide sections of society.

8. Hope and the subject

• He said that half of Turkish society had not surrendered to this government for 25 years, and that resistance had changed hands like a "relay race": Kurds, women, young people, the working class.
• He said he had left Deniz Göktaş's hearing with hope. We had taken this up in The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor.
• He said "there is no salvation by a short cut," and gave Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as an example.
• He announced his decisions: to go door to door, to knock on the door of everyone who votes for TİP until the next election.
• He called for "a new style of politics that will make the people the subject." He called on the unions to raise their voice against this theft.

The programme closed with the news that the philosopher Ioanna Kuçuradi had left us. We remembered her in Telling Young Comrades about Ioanna Kuçuradi.

A first impression: the diagnosis is from class, the prescription is largely from law

The interview itself carries the thesis of this dossier. Baş sets up the class frame openly: he opens with the mine, he says "the bosses' power," he explains why the worker is pushed onto the stock market. But when it comes to concrete proposals the language changes: resignation, a commission, transparency, a declaration of assets, compliance with the constitution.

There is also a question left unanswered. Akdeniz asked plainly: how, how much, and at what value will those who lost money in the funds get their money back? No concrete class demand was proposed for this question, which concerns the savings of more than half a million households. We discussed it in detail in Control for Capital, the Blast for Us and Circuit Breaker: The Bourgeoisie's Exchange Does Not Even Trust Itself.

This gap is not an accident. To understand where it comes from, we have to go back to the beginning of the journey.

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PART II — A CHRONOLOGY OF ERKAN BAŞ

Erkan Baş's story begins in Berlin. This detail is not ornament. Part of the class experience he tells comes from his own family's story of migration.

Roots

• 14 July 1979, West Berlin. The child of a Bosniak family that had migrated from Yugoslavia. His father a "guest worker" in Germany, his mother a housewife and a former textile worker. Sources: tip.org.tr/genel-baskan, English Wikipedia, Cumhuriyet.
• Istanbul, Alibeyköy. His childhood and youth were spent here, in a workers' neighbourhood.
• Education. Istanbul University, Faculty of Letters, Department of the History of Science. He began a master's degree but did not finish it. Halk TV writes that in 2008 he received a disciplinary penalty for taking part in workers' actions against the privatisation of the canteen. TİP's page gives the reason as "political pressures."
• Occupation. Editor-in-chief of the journal Studies in the History of Science, and a visiting lecturer at Istanbul Technical University.

In 2023 the chair of the Great Unity Party, Mustafa Destici, accused Baş of "being raised in left organisations under the control of German intelligence" and of being "a leftover of Tito." Baş's reply was like the common voice of the children of migrant workers: "What is being insulted is the millions of migrants from Yugoslavia in our country. What is being called an agent is the millions of workers' children born in Germany." (Yetkin Report) Let us give this reply its due. He defended, in a class language and against a racist attack, the double exclusion that the migrant working class lives through.

Chronology

Date	Event	Note
14.07.1979	Born in West Berlin	Bosniak migrant worker family
~1995–96	Joined the Socialist Power Party (SİP)	soL wrote in 2009 that he had been a member "since the age of 16"
2001	The SİP took the name Communist Party of Turkey (TKP); Baş was among the founders	Istanbul provincial secretary and Central Committee member (the years could not be confirmed)
2008	Active in the 1 May Taksim actions; a disciplinary penalty after the canteen action
February 2009	At the TKP's 9th Extraordinary Congress he took over from Aydemir Güler	Aged 29. The date (1 or 8 February) and the title (chair or general secretary) are contradictory in the sources
13.07.2014	The TKP split: two congresses on the same day	Baş's side held the "12th Congress" at the Golden Horn
July 2014	People's Communist Party of Turkey (HTKP)	Baş general secretary (Cumhuriyet, Halk TV) or spokesperson (English Wikipedia); the sources contradict each other
2017	The dispute over the name "TKP" and the emblem was taken to court
07.11.2017	The HTKP was dissolved and the Workers' Party of Turkey was founded	146 founding signatures (T24 says "December 2017")
21.06.2018	The Constitutional Court unanimously rejected the objection to the use of the name TİP	E.2018/1, K.2018/9
24.06.2018	Elected a deputy for Istanbul's 1st region on the HDP list	Barış Atay was also elected from Hatay
06.10.2018	Baş and Atay moved from the HDP to TİP	TİP in Parliament after 53 years
2021	Ahmet Şık (April) and Sera Kadıgil (June) joined TİP	November: the Duvar report on Sedat Peker's allegations
February 2022	The Intervention Congress (Golden Horn)
25.08.2022	The Labour and Freedom Alliance was founded
07.03.2023	Support for Kılıçdaroğlu: "Let us finish this in the first round"
03.04.2023	TİP decided to enter the election with its own lists in 41 provinces	Debate inside the alliance
14.05.2023	General election: 956,057 votes (1.76%), 4 deputies	Baş elected from Istanbul's 3rd region
30.01.2024	Can Atalay's deputyship was stripped	The Constitutional Court later said it was "null and void"
21.02.2024	In Kadıköy, while the TKP's candidate was Maçoğlu, it announced its own candidate	See Part VII
18.03.2024	Support was withdrawn from Gökhan Zan's candidacy in Hatay
31.03.2024	Samandağ was won (Emrah Karaçay, 47%)
July–August 2024	2nd Congress; resignation of the Amasya, Samsun, and Ordu provincial leaderships; departure of 8 provincial organisations (Kılavuz)
12.04.2025	Those who left founded the Red Party
August 2025	"TİP crisis" in DİSK Basın-İş: resignation of four officials
1–2.11.2025	3rd Ordinary Conference of Turkey: the finding of an "international counter-revolution"
February 2026	"No" to the process commission's report
April 2026	Hunger strike with the Doruk Mining workers
12.06.2026	The "candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" remarks, and the correction
21.06.2026	Party Council: the "door to door" decision, and the stress that the crisis cannot be solved by elections alone
04.07.2026	International Anti-Imperialist Peace Summit in Istanbul	Five foreign guests were deported
08–09.08.2026	Party Council: "yes, together with our reservations" to the framework law
10.08.2026	The framework law passed with 467 votes; TİP said "yes"	The "not enough, but yes" criticism (see Part VI)
20–23.08.2026	Leadership and young-cadre camps in Balıkesir
24.08.2026	"TİP is becoming a great Movement of the Nameless"
September–October 2026	District congresses began
1–2.10.2026	Atalay's hunger strike, the boycott of Parliament's opening, the İlke TV interview

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PART III — BEFORE TİP: FROM THE SİP TO THE TKP, THE SPLIT OF 2014

A family tree: one chain, five links

The family tree of today's TİP does not come from the TİP of 1961. It comes from another branch. Without knowing this, the argument about "inheritance" cannot be understood.

Year	Link	Explanation
1978	Yalçın Küçük is expelled from TİP	The circle of the journal Socialist Power forms (some sources give 1979 as the year of expulsion)
1992	Socialist Turkey Party (STP)
1993	Socialist Power Party (SİP)	After the STP was closed
2001	The SİP takes the name Communist Party of Turkey
2014	The TKP splits in two	On one side today's TKP, on the other the HTKP
2017	The Workers' Party of Turkey, as the continuation of the HTKP

Source: Serbestiyet, 2023; English Wikipedia, HTKP.

This is what it means: Erkan Baş's political school is the SİP–TKP tradition. In the 1990s and 2000s this tradition was known for a strong stress on national independence and a republican-secular emphasis, a tight cadre discipline, and a stance kept at a distance from the Kurdish movement. Some of today's TİP reflexes, for example the stress on "the progressive gains of the Republic," or the breaks that occur from time to time on the Kurdish question, also carry traces of this school. But TİP was at the same time born of a revolt against this school.

2014: two congresses on the same day

On 13 July 2014 the TKP gathered two separate congresses on the same day:

	"Leap Congress"	"12th Congress"
Place	Bostancı Show Centre	Golden Horn Congress Centre
Prominent names	Kemal Okuyan, Aydemir Güler	Erkan Baş, Metin Çulhaoğlu, Kurtuluş Kılçer
Afterwards	Communist Party (KP), the TKP again in 2017	HTKP, TİP in 2017

Source: Aydınlık, 14 July 2014, Diken. By a protocol of separation the name "TKP" and the emblem were placed under protection (soL, 18 July 2014). In the division of property the journal and portal sol stayed with the other side; the newspaper and the party's debts fell to the HTKP (Sözcü, 25 July 2014).

The content of the split

That day the sides said the following to each other:

• Erkan Baş: "The tendency on the left in general to be content with what exists has not been accepted by the TKP's revolutionary cadres." (BirGün, 29 July 2014)
• Erkan Baş: "Our age was not enough, we could not be the founding will, but we are shaping the revolutionary will." (Aydınlık)
• Aydemir Güler: He said the opposing circle branded the TKP's recent past a failure, and held "the half of the Central Committee other than themselves" responsible for it. (BirGün)
• Kemal Okuyan: "Because of this group we have become unable to produce politics in Turkey's present conditions." (Aydınlık)

Three axes of argument come out of the sources:

1. The assessment of Gezi. According to Baş's side, in June 2013 the party had closed in on itself, broken from the street, and missed the chance to meet the masses. According to the other side, the TKP had been the "signal flare" of the resistance.
2. The model of the party. "Not being content with what exists" meant passing from a closed cadre organisation to a party that opens onto society. The younger cadres were of this mind.
3. The Kurdish question. From the other side, Aysan Şener wrote in 2017 that Baş's side approached Kurdish politics in a "liberal" way, and saw it as a field of manoeuvre detached from class analysis. She also criticised taking "social-movementism," and Syriza and Podemos, for a radical alternative (Gelenek, issue 133).

We found no source showing that nationalism, or democracy inside the party, was openly debated in the split. We do not claim that it was.

A class reading: the legacy of 2014 runs two ways

To see the split of 2014 as only an organisational disagreement falls short. The hundred-year question of the Turkish left was asked here again: how does the party meet the masses?

There was a rightful core in the objection of Baş's side. A party that closes in on itself, that belittles every social movement as "spontaneism," that cannot bind itself to the anger in the street, cannot be a class party. Gezi was a revolt in which millions came into the street, but in which the organised working class was not on the stage as a determining force. It was right to see this gap.

But the direction of the objection was open to argument. The antidote to closure could have been to settle inside the working class: a lasting organisation in the factory, the warehouse, the hospital, the school. The path chosen was to address society in general: the media, elections, well-known names, a broad category of "the people." The first path is slow, invisible, and asks for patience. The second is fast, visible, and exciting. The next nine years of TİP carry both the fruit and the cost of this choice.

There is also something that must not be forgotten. In the name dispute of 2017, two "communist" parties complained of each other to the prosecution of the bourgeois state, a scuffle broke out in İzmir, and claims of attacks on buildings were made (Diken, Cumhuriyet). Baş was right that day to criticise one communist party for denouncing another to the state. But this scene also showed how fragile relations inside the left can be. The Kadıköy rivalry we will see in Part VII is the 2024 form of the same problem.

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PART IV — TWO TİPs: 1961–1980 AND AFTER 2017

The strongest symbolic capital of today's TİP is its name. To say "Workers' Party of Turkey" is to say the party that in 1965 put 15 socialist deputies into Parliament, that wrote the existence of the Kurdish people into a congress resolution for the first time, the party of Behice Boran. We have to speak honestly about the legacy this name carries, and about how it is claimed today.

1961: the party of twelve trade unionists

TİP was founded in Istanbul on 13 February 1961 by twelve trade unionists. In the list Aziz Çelik gives in BirGün the names are these: Kemal Türkler (Maden-İş), Avni Erakalın, Şaban Yıldız, İbrahim Güzelce, Ahmet Muşlu, Rıza Kuas (Lastik-İş), Kemal Nebioğlu, Hüseyin Uslubaş, Saffet Göksüzoğlu, Salih Özkarabay, İbrahim Denizcier, and Adnan Arkın (BirGün). There are differences of a few names among the sources: Kemal Sülker and other names appear in the Milliyet list (Milliyet). But one thing is common to all of them: the party was born by the decision of trade unionists, not of intellectuals.

Grasp the importance of this detail. The Türk-İş statute forbade union officials from taking a party post. Despite this ban, the founders chose to found the working class's own party (Tek Gıda-İş). Six years later, on 13 February 1967, that is, on the anniversary of TİP's founding, DİSK was founded. Four of DİSK's founders (Türkler, Kuas, Güzelce, Nebioğlu) were also founders of TİP (Cumhuriyet). We draw this match by comparing the sources. But the picture is clear: the party and class trade unionism came out of the same root.

The arrival of the intellectuals, and the first tension

In February 1962 Mehmet Ali Aybar became chair. With him, intellectuals such as Behice Boran, Sadun Aren, Cemal Hakkı Selek, and Fethi Naci entered the party. The programme was adopted at the 1st Grand Congress in İzmir in 1964 (T24).

The intellectuals added a great intellectual strength to the party. But the first tension was also born here: was the party the workers', or the intellectuals'? The statute adopted at the 1966 Malatya Congress made it a condition that half of the party organs be manual workers (İnan, UPAD 2023). This rule was a class guarantee against the weight of the intellectuals. In his memoirs Nihat Sargın still complains that "there were no worker members in the offices" (TÜSTAV, introduction to The TİP Years).

1965: socialists in Parliament

In the election of 10 October 1965 TİP took 276,101 votes (2.97%). Thanks to the national remainder system it entered Parliament with 14 deputies, and with Çetin Altan the group became 15. Some of the sources say 14, some say 15. Tarık Ziya Ekinci's explanation resolves this contradiction (bianet; Kiriş & Gül).

Only three of these 15 were of worker or trade-union origin (BirGün). But the parliamentary rostrum was used for the class: Aybar exposed the US bases and the bilateral agreements, and Boran exposed NATO as "the military face of dependence on the imperialist powers" (sol.org.tr). The government abolished the national remainder, and in 1969 TİP fell to two deputies.

The great debates

At the end of the 1960s TİP was shaken by three debates:

1. National Democratic Revolution, or socialist revolution? Mihri Belli and the circle of Yön (T24, Mehmet Altan) argued that Turkey was semi-dependent, and that before socialism a national democratic revolution with officers and intellectuals was needed. TİP opposed this.
2. Aybar's "socialism with a smiling face." Aybar defended a socialism particular to Turkey that rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat. In 1968 he openly condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia.
3. The line of Behice Boran and Sadun Aren. In 1968 Boran, Aren, Sargın, and their friends tabled a motion saying that Aybar had placed his personal ideology above the party line. Aybar resigned the chair in 1969. Boran was elected chair in 1970 (Gelenek; Aksakal).

Turkey and the Problems of Socialism, which Boran wrote in 1968, is the most comprehensive text of this debate. According to the book, in Turkey the struggle for socialism and the struggle for national independence are one and the same struggle. The staged conception of revolution is rejected. The working class, becoming conscious through its organised party, is the vanguard (Textum).

1970: the Kurdish people in a congress resolution

The 4th Grand Congress, gathered on 29–31 October 1970, took a historic decision. The resolutions wrote plainly that "the Kurdish people live in the East." The oppression, terror, and assimilation that the ruling classes applied to this people were established. It was said that to see the question as a matter of "regional development" was chauvinism. A call was made to integrate the democratic demands of the Kurdish people with the socialist struggle of the working class (TÜSTAV, congress resolutions).

The cost was heavy. After the 12 March memorandum the Constitutional Court closed the party in July 1971 on the grounds of "separatism" (the sources give 20 or 21 July). A martial-law court gave Boran 15 years in prison. The leaders came out with the 1974 amnesty (Tr724; bianet).

1975–1988: the second TİP, and liquidation

On 1 May 1975 Boran and Nihat Sargın refounded TİP. This second TİP, in Tanıl Bora's phrase, was on a line of Soviet-oriented "Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy" (Birikim). But it could not find the influence of the 1960s. In the 1977 election it took only 20,565 votes (0.14%) (English Wikipedia). In 1978 seven TİP students were massacred in Bahçelievler.

On 12 September 1980 the party was closed again. Boran went abroad and died in Brussels on 10 October 1987. The same week the decision to unite TİP and the TKP was announced. The United Communist Party of Turkey (TBKP) that emerged moved away from a revolutionary programme with the wind of "restructuring" in the Soviet Union. It was founded as a legal party in 1990, closed in 1991, and called on its members to join a social-democratic party (English Wikipedia, TBKP).

Do not skip this last link. The legacy the name TİP carries is not only the victory of 1965 and the courage of 1970. The lesson of how a revolutionary programme was dissolved by revisionism and liquidationism is also part of this legacy. Our tradition has always criticised the surrender, under the name of "new thinking," of the working class's independent revolutionary party to bourgeois democracy. This criticism is still valid today.

2017: how is the legacy claimed?

The name of today's TİP was legally secured in 2018 by a unanimous decision of the Constitutional Court (the Court's ruling). The party counts its founding anniversary from 13 February 1961. In its statement on the 60th anniversary it remembers Kemal Türkler, Behice Boran, Aybar, Yaşar Kemal, and Çetin Altan (tip.org.tr). In 2020 Erkan Baş says this: "TİP is a party that has argued, ever since the 1960s, that Turkish and Kurdish labourers must struggle together." (Cumhuriyet)

There is an interesting detail. The party programme begins its legacy not from 1961 but from the Communist Party of Turkey founded on 10 September 1920 (tip.org.tr/parti-programi). In the programme we could not find a direct reference to the TİP of 1961 or to Behice Boran. That is: the name comes from 1961, the programme's family tree from 1920, and the organisational root from the SİP–TKP line.

There are also those who object to the inheritance:

• A group referred to as "TİP (1961–1988)" commemorated the 60th anniversary separately, and defined itself as the historical party that joined the TBKP in 1988 (bianet).
• Some former members of TİP criticised the use of the name because there was no historical continuity (Serbestiyet).
• After the "candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" debate of June 2026, Şeyhmus Diken wrote that the name which Behice Boran's comrades had entrusted to history had to be carried in a way worthy of this legacy (Güneydoğu Ekspres).
• On the other side, İrfan Aktan in 2018 read the passage of Baş and Atay from the HDP to TİP in continuity with the Kurdish resolution of 1970 (Gazete Duvar).

A class reading: taking the name is easy, taking the root is hard

Taking a party's name is possible with a ruling of the Constitutional Court. But what made the TİP of 1961 into TİP was not its name. It was three things:

The TİP of 1961–1971	TİP after 2017	The question
Founded by the decision of trade unionists	Born of the split of a left party	Where are the organised workers in the party?
Half the organs were to be manual workers (1966)	No worker quota or workplace-unit requirement in the statute	What is the guarantee against the weight of intellectuals and well-known names?
Came out of the same root as DİSK	Its relation with the unions is disputed (the DİSK Basın-İş crisis)	How should the party and class trade unionism relate?
In 1970 it wrote the existence of the Kurdish people into a congress resolution	The right of self-determination is in the programme, but there are breaks in the discourse	How far does the programme pass into practice?
Boran: "only the power of the worker and labouring classes and of their socialist party"	"The power of labour" is a goal, but the organisational model is a "mass party"	Which organisation leads to the goal?

Truly to claim the legacy is not to hang Boran's photograph in the congress hall. It is to do what the twelve founding trade unionists did: to found the party with the hands of the organised section of the working class, to secure the worker's voice in the party organs, to defend the right of the Kurdish people whatever the cost. In the parts that follow we will discuss how close today's TİP comes to these three measures.

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PART V — WHAT TİP HAS GIVEN TURKEY

Before passing to criticism, let us give what is due. What TİP has given Turkey in the last nine years is not something to be belittled.

1. It carried the word socialism back into the mainstream

After 1980 the word "socialism" had been driven out of the television studios, out of the parliamentary rostrum, out of the everyday language of the young. TİP brought this word back. Erkan Baş's reply in 2022, "it is not socialists who are seizing people's homes, it is capitalists" (Diken), was a sentence that reached a wide public against the right's scare about socialism. According to the Court of Cassation records, TİP's membership rose from 7,624 at the beginning of 2022 to 43,206 at the beginning of 2024. This was more than the total of the socialist parties in the same period (Gazete Duvar). Most of these young people met socialism for the first time through TİP.

2. It used the parliamentary rostrum for the class

• Since 2019 it has defended taking the minimum wage out of tax (Karar).
• In 2023 it asked "what did 272 ships carry from Turkey to Israel?" (İstiklal).
• It defended its stance against NATO consistently, outside the government and the main opposition (BirGün).
• In 2024 it said that with the taxes not taken from capital, every child in the schools could be fed (Cumhuriyet).

3. Persistence against lawlessness

The Can Atalay case became the clearest document of the collapse of the constitutional order in Turkey. TİP has kept this case on the agenda for years. Atalay's election from Hatay was the will of a people that had come out of the earthquake to choose its own representative. We told this in The Liquidation of a Legal Regime and the People's Intellectual: Can Atalay.

4. A practice of exposure

The Duvar report prepared on Sedat Peker's allegations, and then, in the fund robbery, Ahmet Şık's parliamentary questions, the address for denunciations, and the work of the Science Board, are a practice of systematic documentation, different from the opposition's scattered statements. We took this up in Who Got Out Before the Door Closed?.

5. Physical participation in workers' actions

Entering a hunger strike in Ankara with the Doruk Mining workers in April 2026, and the call "we will be at the holding's door" (Cumhuriyet), showed that a deputy can put their body into a workers' resistance. The 1st Workers' Assembly, gathered in November 2024, was also a step in this direction.

6. A door in local government: Samandağ

Winning Samandağ in 2024 with Emrah Karaçay (47.06%) (Habertürk) was socialists taking the responsibility of government in a district of earthquake survivors. Moreover the TKP did not stand a candidate there, and supported TİP's candidate (Cumhuriyet). This is proof that cooperation inside the left is possible.

7. Responsibility on the Kurdish question

The stance of "no" to the report and "yes" to the law is a consistent stance. The insistence on transparency, the demand for the minutes of the İmralı meetings, and the objection to a report that does not allow a dissenting opinion were right. We had discussed the framework law in Class Analysis of the Framework Law and Socialist Strategy and A Dialectical Assessment of Can Atalay’s Statement on the "Framework Law".

In short: TİP is the name of a period in which socialist politics in Turkey came out of invisibility. To ignore this would be an injustice. To turn visibility into a lasting organisation is the common task ahead of us. Let us now look together at the distance between the two.

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PART VI — WHERE IT NEEDS TO GROW STRONGER: A DEEPER CLASS ANALYSIS

Comrade, keep this in mind while you read this part. What we criticise is not persons. It is a model of politics. This model is not peculiar to TİP either. From Podemos to Syriza, from the Corbyn movement to the Sanders campaigns, it is the common model of twenty years of "new left" experiences in the world. All of them created a great hope, and all of them met similar limits. There is still time for the comrades in TİP to draw the lesson from these experiences.

1. "Class" is in the discourse, not in the model of organisation

TİP's programme aims at socialism, at the working class taking power, and at an end to the private ownership of the means of production. Baş too says "the only force that can save Turkey from this government is the working class of Turkey" (T24, November 2024).

What does the model of organisation say? The Framework Document of the 2nd Congress defines the party as a structure with "tens of thousands of members, volunteers reaching a hundred thousand, and supporters running into the millions" (tip.org.tr). In the statute the party's basic unit is founded "in a social field." A workplace unit is not obligatory, and there is no quota or priority for a worker member (tip.org.tr/tuzuk).

The TİP of 1966 had set aside half of its organs for manual workers. How many workers are there in the organs of today's TİP? We could not find a figure from the party that states this. The absence of the figure is also a figure. A class party has to know and to state its own class composition.

This is also connected with the growth and the decline we see in the table below:

Date	Membership (Court of Cassation)
March 2022	7,624
January 2023	11,122
January 2024	43,206
July 2025	36,044
January 2026	35,547
July 2026	35,130

Sources: Gazete Duvar, Rudaw, Diken.

With the election wave of 2023 the membership quadrupled in a year, then in two and a half years it fell by about a fifth. This is the picture of a mass that arrived with excitement and could not be held by organisation. Elections, the media, and well-known names take people in through the door. What keeps them inside is an everyday practice of organisation in the workplace, the neighbourhood, and the school, and a systematic education. Those who left in August 2024 complained of exactly this: socialist education was not being done, on the grounds that "a mass party is not like that" (bianet).

2. "The people," "the citizen," "the nameless": who is the subject?

Go back to the İlke TV interview and look at which words are used how many times. "Citizen," "the people," "half of society" come very often. "The working class" comes less, and mostly as one section among others: like the Kurds, the women, the young people whose turn comes in the "relay race."

The stress on the "Movement of the Nameless" in August 2026 is the best example of this tension. On 24 August, after the four-day leadership and young-cadre camps in Balıkesir, Baş wrote this (ANKA; İlke TV):

"The Workers' Party of Turkey, created by tens of thousands whose names and faces you do not know... is becoming a great 'Movement of the Nameless.'"

In counting the nameless he mentions drivers, motorcycle couriers, health workers, teachers, miners, office and factory workers. He says "the nameless heroes of this movement are the touchstone of our party, the founders of our future." And he ends with this sentence: "We need more of the nameless... in order to turn the enormous force of their class into a political will."

Let us give this stress its due. The chair of a party that grew through well-known names is saying that the party's real strength is the labourers whose names are not known. In the last sentence the aim of "turning the force of the class into a political will" is plainly there. This is the direction we defend too.

Our contribution is to bind the category of "the nameless" to the category of class. "The nameless" is a concept built on visibility: its opposite is "the famous," not capital. A driver or a nurse is the subject of this movement not because their name is unknown, but because they live by selling their labour and because the value they produce is seized. For the "movement of the nameless" to turn into a lasting class movement, these nameless people have to take their place in the party's organs as an organised force in the workplaces, the branches of industry, and the unions. Then the nameless become a class that speaks in its own name.

The concept Tanıl Bora used for TİP in 2022 comes out of this: left populism (Birikim). The basic move of populism is to divide society in two, into "the people" and "the elites." Left populism builds this duality from the left: "the people" and "the palace," "the honourable" and "the thieves," "the nameless" and "the government that is never full." This language is effective in agitation, and it gathers a crowd. But it pushes three things into the background:

1. Capital. When "the palace" or "the government that is never full" is set up as the enemy, the sections of capital that do no business with the palace but carry on the same exploitation become invisible. The structure behind the fund robbery, the break of fictitious capital from production, and the Capital Markets Board's decisions protecting the large leveraged player are lost under the word "theft."
2. The conflict of interests inside the class. When "the people" is seen as a whole, the subcontracting and de-unionisation policies applied against the worker in opposition municipalities, for example, dissolve inside the discourse of "the people's municipality."
3. The need for organisation. Populism assumes that the people are already ready, and are only waiting for the right representative. Class politics knows that the worker arrives at the consciousness of their own interest inside the organised struggle.

Baş's own words carry this tension. In 2023 he said "we are a party that can take votes not only from the left or from socialists, but from every view" (Medyascope). On İlke TV, though, he rightly said this to the YENİ Party: "There is no need to do right-wing politics. Let us put forward our own values." This second sentence is correct. Our proposal is to carry the logic of this sentence one step further: to address workers of every view is not the same thing as to address voters of every view.

3. The language of morality, and "decay"

In the fund crisis Baş's dominant words are "theft," "robbery," "a criminal organisation," "honourable people," "clean people." The finding of "a stage of decay in capitalism" is a correct intuition. But when its mechanism is not opened, decay looks like a moral problem: bad people have spoiled a good order, and if they are cleaned out the order will be put right.

Yet, as we showed in "Who Got Out Before the Door Closed?" and "Control for Capital, the Blast for Us," the fund crisis is not an illegal deviation. It is, to a great extent, the working of a legal mechanism: privileged shares, the free fund, related-party transactions, leverage. This mechanism pushes small savings onto the market in an economy where the wage is suppressed, and at the moment of crisis it presents the bill to the wage-earner.

The resignations and the commission of inquiry that Baş proposes are valuable for exposure. But none of them touches this mechanism. This is also why the question about those who lost money in the funds was left unanswered. A class demand could have been built like this:

• In the liquidation, priority to small savings, and payment last to large and leveraged positions.
• The personal liability, with their own assets, of the fund founders and the related companies.
• The reversal of the Capital Markets Board's reduction of collateral for margin trading.
• The placing of the banks and the intermediary institutions under public supervision.
• The indexation of the wage to inflation, so that small savings are not pushed onto the stock market as a "last hope."

These say something different from "catch the thieves": "This order is a pump that transfers the wage-earner's savings to capital. Shut the pump down."

4. The axis of the regime and the axis of class

In TİP's Political Report of the 3rd Conference it is written that the counter-revolutionary attack in the world has taken, in Turkey, the form of a war opened on "the progressive gains inside the hundred-year history of the Republic" (tip.org.tr). The title of the 2nd Congress document is also "In the 2nd Century of the Republic, the Labourers Will Win."

This frame has a rightful side. Gains such as secularism, women's rights, science, and education really are under attack. But the frame carries two dangers:

1. The Republic was a class state. Since 1923 this state for years did not give its own worker the right to strike, denied the existence of the Kurdish people, and after 1946 bound itself to NATO. "Defending the progressive gains" and "defending the republic" are not the same thing. Class politics defends the gains, but it also reminds us of the struggle that won them: most of those gains were not the favour of the state, but were taken by the struggle of the working class, of women, and of the oppressed peoples.
2. The axis of the regime pulls onto the same ground as the bourgeois opposition. The axis of "the Republic against the palace regime" is a ground on which everyone, from the CHP to the YENİ Party and the İYİ Party, can unite. On this ground the socialist party becomes the most radical republican, but it does not become the independent party of the class.

The "candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" remark of June 2026 also has to be read inside this frame. Baş corrected his words at once, and this has to be appreciated. Even so, we think there may have been an electoral anxiety behind this expression: the anxiety of keeping the bond with the republican-secular voter. The criticism by those who left in August 2024, of "a hierarchy of sensitivities in which Turkish identity comes first" (T24), touched exactly this point.

5. Electoralism and parliamentarism

According to the 2nd Congress document, elections are loaded with functions such as developing "institutionality, politics as a whole, and address to the wide masses." There is nothing wrong in this. The Bolsheviks too used the Duma as a rostrum.

The problem is the function of the election turning into the aim. The main line of TİP's last three years was shaped by the election calendar:

• In 2023 it was among the most ardent defenders of the line "a single candidate, let us finish it in the first round" (haberler.com). In 2026, while criticising the YENİ Party for opening to the right, it directed the same criticism retrospectively at the Kılıçdaroğlu period too (Yeni Ankara). Where, then, is the self-criticism of the support given in 2023?
• In 2023, taking Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu as an example, it said that waiting was unacceptable. In 2026, again taking İhsanoğlu as an example, it said "there is no salvation by a short cut." Both sentences are correct. But between the two there is the "full support" given to Kılıçdaroğlu.
• Entering Parliament came about, to a great extent, by the transfer of highly visible names: two deputies elected on the HDP list, Ahmet Şık from the HDP, Sera Kadıgil from the CHP. These names are valuable. But the party's presence in Parliament began as the product of transfer, not of its own electoral base.

Class politics does not reject the election. But it uses the election according to the measure of the organisation, and does not build the organisation according to the measure of the election. How many factory committees, how many union members, how many lasting neighbourhood organisations did an election campaign leave behind? The real question of the balance sheet is this, not the share of the vote.

6. The unions: between two extremes

The relation between a class party and the union is tested by two difficulties:

1. Making the union an extension of the party. In August 2025 four officials resigned from DİSK Basın-İş, saying that the union was being organised "like a party commission, through TİP cadres" (Diken). We do not know how true these claims are. We also could not reach a detailed reply from TİP. But even the appearance of this argument is a warning: the union is the organisation of unity of workers from different political views. The party's duty is to be the most determined, the most self-sacrificing, the most democratic member in the union, not to seize the union through its leadership ranks.
2. Calling on the union from outside. On İlke TV, Baş called on the unions to raise their voice against the fund robbery. A correct call. But a class party does not address the unions from outside. It tries to have that decision taken through its members organised inside the unions, in the workplace.

Participation in the Doruk Mining resistance is valuable. But if the party has no lasting organisation among the workers, participations of this kind remain event-based. The strike ends, the camera leaves, and the party leaves too. What lasts is the party unit founded in that workplace, and the union organisation.

7. Leader-centrism and democracy inside the party

As a party that grew fast, this is one of the fields in which TİP has to give the most labour. The facts:

• In July 2024 the provincial leaderships of Amasya, Samsun, and Ordu resigned, saying that at the 2nd Congress the Party Council list had been imposed as "Erkan Baş's recommended list." TİP said that most of these resigners had previously been expelled or had left, that there was no organisation in Amasya, and that the list was "fake" (Cumhuriyet). We report both sides.
• In August 2024 eight provincial organisations, and many district officials from Istanbul and İzmir, left, saying that debate was being suppressed by the charge of "faction" (T24).
• We could not find a record of an alternative list, a platform, or a motion at the congresses. This shows either a complete unanimity, or that different views could not find a channel in which to organise. In a party that grew fast and then shrank, the chance of the first is low.

When the party's chair is at the same time the party's only media face, the party comes to be measured by his performance on television. Lenin's principle of "democratic centralism" was a guarantee precisely against this: full freedom in debate, full unity in action. In parties that grow fast this balance becomes harder to strike; that is why it asks for a conscious effort.

8. The world: "counter-revolution," or imperialism?

TİP's concept of an "international counter-revolution" (Political Report) is an effective concept for describing the present picture. That Trump, Musk, Netanyahu, and Erdoğan stand in the same photograph is real.

But the concept has a lack. "Counter-revolution" against what? There is no revolution on the scene. The concept describes the attack as an ideological wave of reaction. Yet under this wave there is the crisis of redivision of imperialist capitalism: the profitability crisis of the monopolies, armament, trade wars, the competition over energy and artificial intelligence. Those who carry out this attack are not only Trump's circle; liberal European governments too are increasing military spending and bringing back conscription. We told this in The Rich Want War, Students Want a Future and Dossier: A History of the European Working Class Is Out.

The frame of "an antifascist front against the counter-revolution" carries the risk of presenting the liberal imperialist blocs as a lesser evil. The concept of imperialism, by contrast, binds all the blocs to the same relation of property. Baş's opposition to NATO is consistent, and it is right that he does not exalt China and Russia. These correct intuitions grow stronger when they are bound to an analysis of imperialism.

9. The framework-law vote, and the "not enough, but yes" criticism

On 10 August 2026 the framework law was adopted in Parliament by the votes of 467 of 592 deputies. TİP's deputies also voted "yes." The Party Council, at its meeting of 8–9 August, had defined this decision as "yes, together with our reservations" (tip.org.tr). Erkan Baş's reason was plain: "Despite so much injustice, so much that is wrong, so much that is shameful, we will say yes to this bill. Because peace is too important to be left to the mercy of the Palace." In the same statement he said "the chief enemy of peace is the Palace" (haberler.com).

This stance was assessed from different directions.

The "not enough, but yes" criticism. On 12 August the Cumhuriyet writer Zülal Kalkandelen wrote this: "TİP too joined the yes-sayers; while criticising everything, all of them fell into the impotence of approving" (Cumhuriyet). The core of the criticism is this: an opposition that says a constitution cannot be made with a government that does not abide by the constitution approved, in the name of "peace," a law it found flawed. This is likened to the stance of the liberal and left circles that said "not enough, but yes" to the AKP's constitutional package in the 2010 referendum.

The defence of the yes vote. On 20 August Şenol Karakaş and Volkan Akyıldırım argued that the law was a gain of the Kurds' fifty-year struggle, and that the charge of "not enough, but yes" was a nationalist reflex (marksist.org).

Our assessment. In this debate two separate questions have to be distinguished:

Question	Our answer
Was it right to say "yes" to a law aimed at ending the war?	Yes. The bill for the war is paid by the workers, the poor youth, and the mothers of both peoples. If both sides of the conflict say that with this law the armed period will close, class politics stands on the side of peace.
Is it the same thing as the "not enough, but yes" of 2010?	No, but it carries a warning. The package of 2010 increased the executive's supervision over the judiciary. The mistake of those who supported it was to open a "democratisation" credit to the government, and not to build an independent line of struggle. The framework law, by contrast, is about the ending of a conflict. But there is a common danger: peace can turn into the cover for a constitutional change that will consolidate the one-man regime.

TİP itself sees this danger. The same Party Council communiqué opposes every kind of constitutional change that would prolong the one-man regime under the name of peace. That is, the "yes" is not unconditional.

The real question is here: where will the reservations live? The lesson of 2010 is that if the "not enough" placed beside a "yes" remains only in a text of explanation, it is written into the government's account. For the reservations to gain weight they have to turn into organised demands in the street, in the workplace, and in the union: the implementation of the rulings of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, the lifting of the trustees, the release of imprisoned politicians and of Can Atalay, education in the mother tongue, the right to strike and to organise. When TİP's "yes" is joined with the organisation of an independent peace and democracy movement around these demands, it will have answered the "not enough, but yes" criticism in practice.

One more note. In this process TİP took criticism from two directions: from nationalist circles because it said "yes," and from circles close to the Kurdish movement and from those who left the party because of the "candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" remark of June and because of its stance in the 2023 election. Taking criticism from two directions can also be the natural result of a principled position. What will make this position firm is to explain and to organise, consistently, the class reason behind the stance of "no" to the report and "yes" to the law.

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PART VII — UNITY INSIDE THE LEFT: ON THE CHARGES OF SECTARIANISM

One of the criticisms directed at TİP is that it behaves in a sectarian way in relations inside the left. At first glance this criticism can look strange, because TİP is at the same time criticised as "too flexible," "too close to the CHP." These two criticisms do not contradict each other. They are two faces of the same stance: competitive towards the left, conciliatory towards the centre.

Kadıköy 2024: the balance sheet of a rivalry

The TKP stood Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu, who had been mayor in Ovacık and Tunceli, as its candidate for Kadıköy in the 2024 local election. On 23 January 2024 Kemal Okuyan addressed TİP openly: "Our call is that they support Mr Maçoğlu and the TKP." (soL)

On 21 February 2024 TİP announced its own candidate for Kadıköy, the deputy chair Doğan Ergün. Erkan Baş justified the decision by the confidence he felt that TİP could govern Kadıköy (Cumhuriyet). According to what Atilla Özsever reports, TİP was relying on having taken about 10 per cent of the vote in Kadıköy in the previous election (Gazete Duvar).

The result (Habertürk election results):

Candidate	Party	Votes	Share
Mesut Kösedağı	CHP	212,961	68.78%
Veli Arslan	AKP	40,461	13.07%
Fatih Mehmet Maçoğlu	TKP	31,038	10.02%
Doğan Ergün	TİP	3,858	1.25%

The sources contradict each other here too. Gazete Oksijen's report of 1 April gives the CHP as 73.78% and Maçoğlu as 6.12% (Oksijen). This most probably belongs to an early stage of the count. Whichever figure is taken, the picture does not change: the total of the two socialist candidates would not have been enough to beat the CHP. But the point was not to win the ballot box.

The lessons that come out of this table:

1. The socialist voter looked at the candidate's class identity and record. Maçoğlu's cooperative experience in Ovacık, the identity of the "communist mayor," was a concrete practice. The general-election vote that TİP relied on had, to a great extent, been given to the party brand and to the atmosphere of the general election. In the local election this vote scattered.
2. TİP weighed its own strength not by the measure of the ballot box, but by the vote it hoped for. The claim "we can govern" was justified not by the organisation and the practice in Kadıköy, but by the vote share of the previous election.
3. Refusing the call for a joint candidate against the left destroyed the chance for socialists to test a common experience. Kadıköy was one of the rare places where two socialist parties could have run a campaign together in a district and tried a common local programme.

Let us be fair. The TKP is not flawless on this either. In Okuyan's own words, the assumption that the left parties will grow stronger by uniting is "problematic." In the 2023 general election the TKP called for a socialist electoral alliance, but it built this call as adhesion to its own line (TKP). According to Özsever's piece, the TKP also refused to bargain with TİP. That is, Kadıköy is the example of a rivalry in which both parties understood "the call for unity" as support for their own candidate.

But the same two parties acted together in Samandağ: the TKP did not stand a candidate, it supported TİP's candidate, and the socialists won a municipality. When Kadıköy and Samandağ are set side by side, the lesson is clear: unity was possible, and it was not chosen.

The other examples

Event	What happened?	Assessment by the class measure
2023 general election, the Labour and Freedom Alliance	TİP entered with its own lists in 41 provinces instead of a joint list. Gültan Kışanak: "If there is no joint list, this alliance is no longer an electoral alliance." (Kısa Dalga)	Competition against an alliance partner. TİP argued that no deputy was lost (Serbestiyet). This is disputed, but it is clear that the relation of trust with the alliance partner was damaged
2023, the TKP's call for a socialist alliance	TİP chose to stay in the Labour and Freedom Alliance	An understandable choice. But the possibility of a common socialist platform was never put on the table
2024, Hatay	There was an objection to the CHP candidate Lütfü Savaş, and TİP made Gökhan Zan, a well-known footballer with no connection to the party, its candidate. Support was then withdrawn amid claims of bargaining (Medyascope)	The preference for a "well-known name" instead of its own cadre
2025, DİSK Basın-İş	Union officials resigned on the claim of organisation "like a party commission" (Diken)	The claim that the party's interest was put before unity in the union field
2023, support for Kılıçdaroğlu	"Full support," "let us finish it in the first round"	Flexibility towards the centre

A class reading: two tendencies, one measure

Competition inside the left and closeness to the bourgeois opposition look like opposite tendencies. One puts separation forward, the other puts harmony forward. As Lenin warned in "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder, the solution of both is in the same place: to trust the independent organisation of the working class.

• A stance that puts competition inside the left forward carries the risk of putting the party's growth before the unity of the class. Supporting another socialist party's candidate looks like weakening one's own "brand."
• A stance that puts closeness to the centre forward stays close to the bourgeois opposition in order to reach its voter. Supporting Kılıçdaroğlu looks like "not losing," and making a well-known footballer a candidate looks like "winning."

The common point of the two is the measure of the ballot box and visibility. The class measure is different: does this decision strengthen the independent organisation of the working class, or weaken it? By this measure:

• Supporting Maçoğlu in Kadıköy would have opened the door to an experience of a common local programme by two socialist parties. That was the right thing.
• In Hatay, standing a candidate from the local organisations of workers and earthquake survivors, instead of a well-known name, would have left a lasting organisation even if it lost.
• Supporting Kılıçdaroğlu against Erdoğan in the second round was a defensible tactic. But giving "full support" from the first round made the socialists' own programme invisible.

The formula is this: socialists seek the widest unity among themselves, and against the bourgeois opposition they protect their independence. In TİP's practice this balance could not always be struck; it is possible to strike it together.

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PART VIII — DIFFERENT TENDENCIES IN TODAY'S TİP

We could not find a record showing an official platform in TİP, or an alternative list competing at a congress. For that reason the distinction below is our reading. It rests on the party documents, the resignation texts, and the statements open to the public. A tendency means not persons, but orientations that exist together inside the party. The same person can carry more than one tendency.

Tendency	What does it defend?	Where does it appear?
The central line: a mass party	Elections, the media, address to a wide mass of "the people," growth with well-known names, being the most radical voice inside the opposition to the regime	The congress documents, the chair's line on television, "votes from every view"
The worker-union tendency	Shifting the party's weight to the workplace and to the union struggle	The 1st Workers' Assembly (November 2024), the Doruk Mining resistance, TİP cadres in the unions
Those who want a more advanced stance on the Kurdish question	That solidarity with the Kurdish people not be sacrificed to electoral calculation, that the Labour and Freedom Alliance be deepened	The resignations that came in 2023 over Ahmet Şık's words (Murat Uyurkulak and others), the criticisms of the Kılavuz group that left in August 2024, the debate of June 2026
The republican-secular tendency	The defence of "the progressive gains of the Republic," the bond with the secular voter	The frame of "the 2nd Century of the Republic," the "we are respectful" answer given to the question of Atatürk
The libertarian field of identity	Struggle in fields such as LGBT+, women, ecology, animal rights	The LGBT+ Bureau, the women's organisation
The tendency of exposure and documentation	The exposure of corruption through journalism, documents, parliamentary questions, and inquiry	Ahmet Şık's work, the Duvar report, the Science Board

These tendencies do not exclude one another. In a healthy party they can exist together. The problem is this: which measure regulates the relation among the tendencies? In a class party this measure is the organised interest of the working class. Identity, secularism, exposure, the Kurdish question, all of them are bound to one another through that interest. In a mass party the measure is, most of the time, the voter's reaction. Then the tendencies, instead of balancing one another, begin to cut one another: an advanced step on the Kurdish question startles the secular voter, an advanced step in the field of identity startles the conservative worker, a union step cuts into visibility in the media.

The great split of 2024 was exactly the explosion of this tension. There is also the withdrawal of the famous. Barış Atay did not resign from the party, but in 2024 he left his post on the Central Executive Committee and announced that he was returning to acting (Hatay Mahalli Haber). This is a personal choice, not something to criticise. But it also brings with it the question of how far a party that grew through well-known names will stay on its feet when those names withdraw.

What was discussed at the latest meetings? (May–October 2026)

The party's meetings of the last months show that the tension we are discussing is also being spoken of inside TİP, and that some steps look in the same direction as our proposals.

Date	Meeting	What stood out
3 May 2026	Extended Meeting of Provincial and District Officials, Istanbul	Actions against the NATO summit in July, preparation of the Peace Summit, targets of organisational growth and of winning members (tip.org.tr)
21 June 2026	Party Council	That the crisis cannot be solved by elections alone, the central importance of the organisation of the labourers, the decision to work neighbourhood by neighbourhood and door to door (tip.org.tr)
4 July 2026	International Anti-Imperialist Peace Summit, Istanbul	A call for a common front against NATO, imperialism, and war; it was held even though five foreign guests were deported (tip.org.tr)
8–9 August 2026	Party Council	"Yes, together with our reservations" to the framework law, the continuation of the "There Is a Way" people's meetings (Party Council communiqué), door-to-door work in every province and district, the decision for a leadership camp (tip.org.tr)
20–23 August 2026	Summer Leadership and Young Cadre Camps, Balıkesir	Members of the Central Executive, the Party Council, the bureaux and commissions, provincial and district officials, representatives of unions and mass organisations; the aim of "a determined, strong, organised party" on the way to the 10th anniversary of its founding (tip.org.tr)
24 August 2026	The chair's message after the camp	"TİP is becoming a great Movement of the Nameless" (ANKA)
September–October 2026	District congresses	For example the Sakarya district congresses on 2–4 October (tip.org.tr)
1–2 October 2026	The boycott of Parliament's opening, and the statement in front of the Constitutional Court	Support for Can Atalay's 24-hour hunger strike

The hopeful direction that comes out of these meetings. Two stresses in the Party Council statement of 21 June are especially important:

• That resistance cannot be reduced to electoral politics, and that the struggle will go forward not by bargains behind closed doors but by organising together with the people.
• That the organisation of the labourers, and the uniting of their forces, is the central task. In the statement's own words, the party aims to be "the most diligent subject of a struggle that will be organised with the people, stitch by stitch."

These sentences point to a meaningful change of direction from the "let us finish it in the first round" line of 2023. Door-to-door work, the participation of union representatives in the leadership camps, and the aim of "turning the force of their class into a political will" also support this direction. Our comradely proposal is that this direction be bound to measurable targets: how many workplace units, how many union organisations, how many officials of worker origin. The congress process ahead is a good opportunity for these targets to be reflected in the statute and in the organs.

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PART IX — THE CRITICISMS OF THOSE WHO LEFT, AND OUR ASSESSMENT

Who left, and when?

Date	Who left	The reason
April 2023	Murat Uyurkulak and the candidate Mert Şahin Özsoy	Words Ahmet Şık said about the HDP. Şık and TİP apologised (Rudaw)
January 2024	İsmail Göksu, former provincial chair of Kocaeli	"That our differences of view and approach remained without a solution" (Nokta)
20.07.2024	The provincial leaderships of Amasya, Samsun, and Ordu	The imposition of the Party Council list by a "recommended list," a "narrow group and status-quo understanding" (Cumhuriyet)
12.08.2024	The provincial organisations of Ağrı, Diyarbakır, Batman, Dersim, Mardin, Muş, Siirt, and Van, and many district officials from Istanbul and İzmir (more than 70 signatures, the "Kılavuz" group)	Electoralism and parliamentarism, the suppression of debate by the charge of "faction," the neglect of cadre education, compromise with Kemalism, a "hierarchy of sensitivities" on the Kurdish question, the reduction of the women's struggle to a quota (T24; BirGün; Medyascope)
12.04.2025	The Kılavuz group founded the Red Party	Co-spokespersons Candan Polat Köksal and Gün Çağ Aydın (Kısa Dalga)
August 2025	Four officials from DİSK Basın-İş	The wish to organise the union "like a party commission, through TİP cadres" (Diken)

Criticisms that came from outside

• The TKP (Kemal Okuyan, September 2023): "We find the vote TİP took important, but we do not think that the way has been opened for a left outside the order." (Rudaw)
• Gazete Nisan (May 2023): The support for Kılıçdaroğlu, the parliamentary path of reform instead of a constituent assembly, and the view of parliament (Gazete Nisan).
• sep.org.tr (March 2024): The passage from a Leninist cadre-party model to a model focused on elections and the media, a deliberate ambiguity on the Kurdish question, the turn towards the CHP voter (sep.org.tr).
• WSWS (November 2024): It describes TİP as the left wing of the bourgeois opposition (WSWS).
• Marksist.org (June 2026): It criticises the "candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" remarks as a Kemalist prejudice (marksist.org).
• Tanıl Bora (Birikim, March 2022): He discusses TİP with the concept of "left populism once again" (Birikim).

Our assessment: what is right, and what falls short?

Criticism	What is right in it	What is missing, or disputed
Electoralism and parliamentarism	The party's main line was shaped by the election calendar, and the organisation was built to the measure of the election	Rejecting the election altogether is not a solution either. The point is to make the election an instrument of the class organisation
Democracy inside the party, the charge of "faction"	It is clear that in a fast-growing, leader-centred party the channels of debate are narrow, and that an alternative voice is not seen at the congresses	Part of those who left chose an organised departure instead of continuing the debate inside. This too has a cost: a new small party increased the fragmentation inside the left
A "hierarchy of sensitivities" on the Kurdish question	The remark of June 2026 confirmed this criticism. There is a gap between the programme and the discourse	TİP's stance of "no" to the report and "yes" to the law, and its claiming of the 1970 resolution, partly answers this criticism
Compromise with Kemalism	The frame of "the progressive gains of the Republic" carries the risk of putting the axis of the regime in place of the axis of class	Defending gains such as secularism and scientific education is also the duty of class politics. The problem is not the defence, it is the frame
The neglect of cadre education	The loss of members (about 19%) supports this. Growth without education does not last	We do not know the party's own assessment on this. In the report of the 3rd Conference there is a self-criticism that "the practice of struggle is in a visible decline" (tip.org.tr)
"The left wing of the bourgeois opposition"	The support for Kılıçdaroğlu and the axis of the regime prepare the ground for this criticism	Too harsh. TİP's opposition to NATO, its proposals to tax capital, and its participation in workers' resistances do not meet this definition

The common picture that comes out of all these criticisms is this: TİP is living a tension between a socialist programme and the organisational model of a mass party. The programme points one way, the organisational model another. Those who left listened to the voice of the programme; the centre listened to the organisational model. What both sides can think about together is the link that binds the programme to the organisation: lasting organisation inside the working class.

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PART X — ITS PLACE IN THE WORLD AND IN THE CLASS: THE PARLIAMENTARY LEFT OF EUROPE, OR A CLASS PARTY?

In this part we take up four questions together. How are TİP's international relations, and with whom does it stand side by side in the world? How far is the criticism of an "intellectuals' party" and of elitism in place? How far is it present inside the working class? And, most important: is TİP on the path of the parliament-weighted left parties of Europe, or does it aim to be a real class party?

1. International relations: side by side with whom?

TİP's international activity has grown markedly in the last two years.

Date	Event	Those it stood beside
26–29 March 2026	Porto Alegre, 1st International Antifascist Conference	The organisers: PSOL, PT, PCdoB, MST, and CADTM from Brazil. In the TİP delegation, Erkan Baş, Doğan Ergün, and Firuze Taner (tip.org.tr; the Porto Alegre Declaration)
4 July 2026	Istanbul, the International Anti-Imperialist Peace Summit (against NATO's Ankara summit)	From Turkey, TİP and the Workers' Democracy Party; from Germany, Die Linke and SOL; from Belgium, the PTB; from Italy, Fronte Popolare; peace and socialist organisations from Greece, Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Austria, Serbia, Palestine, Brazil, Britain, and the United States (tip.org.tr)
4 July 2026	Five foreign guests who were to come to the summit were deported	Among them representatives of Die Linke, SOL, and Fronte Popolare (Cumhuriyet)
Ongoing	Organisation among migrants from Turkey in Europe	The diaspora organisations Baş described on İlke TV

Let us give what is due. To hold an international summit against NATO in Istanbul in the days when the NATO summit was gathering in Ankara was a brave and valuable step against the common "NATO-ist" line of the government and the main opposition. That the summit was held even though the guests were deported also matters. Organisation among migrant workers in Europe is a field in which the Turkish left has fallen short.

The point that has to be discussed: which internationalism? The host of the Porto Alegre conference was the PT, Brazil's party of government. This was the common point of the criticisms that came from the left: when a broad front against fascism is bound to the frame of a governing party and of state interests, class independence weakens. In the journal Solidarity, Ivan Drury Zarin wrote that there was a "class compromise" at the foundation of the conference, and that the declaration stayed silent on Russia's invasion of Ukraine (Solidarity).

This criticism joins the question we discussed in Part VI, of "counter-revolution" or "imperialism." Inside the frame of an "antifascist front," liberal governing parties and states can appear as allies. Inside the frame of imperialism, it is seen that all the blocs rest on the same relation of property. Class internationalism rests, beside conferences between parties, on the bond between workers across countries: the common organisation of the workers of the same monopoly in factories in different countries, of the dockers working in the same port, of the couriers working on the same platform. Organising the docker who stops, in the port, the ship carrying arms and cargo to Israel is internationalism as much as speaking against NATO in Ankara.

2. The criticism of an "intellectuals' party" and of elitism

This criticism is not new. The TİP of the 1960s was also criticised for being "the party of the intellectuals." The party answered this in 1966 with a statute rule that set aside half the organs for manual workers (Part IV).

Today the criticism rests on three observations:

1. The party's public faces. The chair is a historian of science and an academic. The party's best-known names are a journalist (Ahmet Şık), lawyers (Sera Kadıgil, Can Atalay), actors (Barış Atay, Mehmet Aslantuğ). All of them are valuable people, and they have paid a price in their struggles. But the face the party shows to society is weighted towards educated professionals and well-known names.
2. The electoral base. According to Erol Taymaz's 2023 analysis, about 42% of TİP's votes in Istanbul came from voters who had voted for the CHP in 2018, and about 51% in Ankara from new (young) voters (Birikim). While TİP took 1.76% across Turkey in 2023, it took 9.60% in Kadıköy (Habertürk). This is a picture that points to the weight of urban, educated, young middle layers. This inference is ours; we could not find a detailed survey of the party's voter profile. In Hatay the picture is different: almost half the votes came from voters who had voted for the HDP in 2018.
3. The style of politics. Television studios, social media, press conferences. These instruments are necessary, but politics done with these instruments naturally brings forward those who use words well, those who have time and visibility. It is hard for a warehouse worker who works 12 hours a day to take a place in this politics.

Our assessment. The problem is not the presence of intellectuals. The history of the socialist movement is full of intellectuals, and, in Gramsci's phrase, the "organic intellectual" bound to the class is the need of every class party. Behice Boran too, and Sadun Aren too, were intellectuals. The problem is proportion and direction: how great is the weight of workers in the party's organs, among its candidates, and among its spokespersons? Does the intellectual bind themselves to the class, or does the class become the spectator of the intellectual's campaign?

Erkan Baş's stress on the "Movement of the Nameless" shows that he too feels this criticism. This is a good beginning. The next step is that the nameless take their place, by name, in the party's organs, among its candidates, and on the television screen.

3. How far is it present inside the working class?

This is the hardest question of the dossier, because there is very little data open to the public.

The presence that is visible:

• In November 2024 the 1st Workers' Assembly, and afterwards the TİP Workers' School.
• In 2026 a joint hunger strike with the Doruk Mining workers, and the call for an action in front of Yıldızlar Holding.
• The participation of representatives of unions and mass organisations in the leadership camps.
• The experience of the Samandağ municipality.
• The weight of TİP cadres in DİSK Basın-İş (the resignations of 2025 showed the disputed form of this weight).

What is not visible, or not known:

• How many of the party's members are workers, and how many are union members.
• How many workplace units there are.
• An organised presence in Turkey's great industrial basins (such as Gebze, Kocaeli, Bursa, Manisa, Çerkezköy, Gaziantep, Kayseri). We could not find a public record pointing to a lasting workplace organisation of TİP in these basins.
• A visible presence in the union leaderships, or in the workplace representations, of large branches such as metal, textiles, food, and logistics.

Let us be careful here: not finding a record does not mean that the presence does not exist at all. Union organisation is generally carried on invisibly under repression. But a class party's presence inside the working class, even if it is not seen on television, is visible in the strikes, in the union elections, in the workplace committees. In this field TİP's presence is not in proportion to its political visibility.

Those who founded TİP in 1961 were the trade unionists who later founded DİSK. The story of today's TİP began from the other end: first political visibility, then the effort to reach the class. It is not impossible to reverse this order, but it asks for a conscious orientation, a budget, cadres, and time.

4. The parliamentary left of Europe, or a class party?

Among the parties TİP stood beside at the Peace Summit are two important left parties of Europe: Die Linke from Germany, and the PTB from Belgium. These two parties in fact represent the two paths in front of TİP. A short table from the last twenty years of the European left:

Party	Model	What does it teach?
Die Linke (Germany)	A broad left party weighted towards parliament and the state governments	In the period when its predecessor, the PDS, was in coalition with the SPD in the Berlin government, the city's public housing company GSW was sold in 2005 to a consortium in which the Cerberus and Goldman Sachs funds took part. Coalition in government showed the risk of becoming a partner in administering the order of capital. Elif Eralp's experience in Berlin today is living this test again (What Awaits Elif Eralp?)
Syriza (Greece)	Power by way of elections	In 2015 it won a "no" in the referendum against austerity, but on 13 July the government accepted a new austerity agreement on heavier terms. It showed the limit of an electoral victory that does not rest on an organised class force
Podemos (Spain)	Left populism in the language of "those below and those above," a rise weighted towards the media	It entered a coalition government in 2020, then declined fast. It showed that populist language and leader-centred growth do not leave a lasting organisation
La France Insoumise (France)	A leader-centred movement around the concept of "the people"	Great electoral successes, but the debates on internal democracy and on the relation between movement and party continue
PTB/PVDA (Belgium)	A party of Marxist origin that has entered parliament but has taken root in the workplace and the neighbourhood	The "Médecine pour le Peuple" centres that give free primary health care in workers' neighbourhoods, strong cadres in the unions, the limiting of the pay of elected representatives and of full-time workers to a skilled worker's wage, with the surplus donated to the party. An example of using parliament as the rostrum of the class organisation. It also has its own debates on reformism
The KKE and PAME (Greece)	A strong union front, workplace organisation	It shows the strength of taking root inside the class; on the other hand its stance, closed to common struggle with other left forces, is debated separately from the point of view of unity inside the left

This table tells us this: a presence in parliament is not a model by itself. The same parliament became, for Die Linke and Syriza, the instrument of partnership in government, and for the PTB the instrument of carrying the voice of the class organisation. The difference is in where the party's root is: if it is in parliament, parliament changes the party; if it is in the workplace, the party uses parliament.

Which path is TİP on? Our honest answer is this: TİP's practice of the last nine years resembles, to a great extent, the Die Linke and Podemos type: the weight of parliament and the media, well-known names, leader-centrism, being the most radical voice inside a broad opposition, the language of "the people." But the party's programme, Baş's aim of "the power of labour," the Party Council statement of 21 June, the door-to-door work, the Workers' Assembly, and the miners' resistances also carry the signs of a PTB-type orientation.

These two orientations stand side by side inside the party at the moment. Which of them will weigh more depends on the decisions to be taken in the congress process ahead. Our call is plain: see parliament as an instrument, and the class party as an aim. Walk not towards the parliamentary left of Europe, but towards a class party that founds a health centre in the workers' neighbourhood, that has a representative elected in the factory, that limits the deputy's pay to a worker's wage.

We had greeted Elif Eralp's victory in Berlin with joy in Elif Eralp: "We Wrote History, Comrades". With the same joy we also said this: when an electoral victory does not rest on an organised class force, it strikes the limits of the order of capital. This lesson holds for TİP too.

5. Ideological position: the Soviet experience, Stalin, China, Russia, Cuba

A class party's view of the world is understood not only from its current statements of foreign policy, but also from how it looks at the hundred-year experience of socialism. In this section we set side by side what we could find, and what we could not find, in TİP's own documents and statements.

How does it define itself? The programme is plain: TİP is a party that "takes Marxism-Leninism as its guide," and its slogan is "Workers of all countries, unite!" (tip.org.tr/parti-programi). The name of its theoretical organ is Komünist. In May 2026 the party republished the Communist Manifesto. This shows that a party which presents itself as a "socialist mass party" still sees its ideological root in the communist tradition.

The October Revolution and the Soviet experience. The programme says that the existence of the socialist countries, "above all the experience of the October Revolution of 1917 and of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics," created "incomparable gains" for the labourers. At the same time it states that it claims the history of the socialist movement "with a critical point of view," and that it takes on the task of "drawing lessons" from these experiences. Erkan Baş's book Socialism in Order to Live, published in 2021, also uses the expression "the Great Socialist October Revolution," and tells 1991 as "a heavy defeat on a world scale."

Stalin. We could not find an open, written assessment by the party or by the chair of the Stalin period. In the split of 2014 this subject does not appear as an axis of debate either (T24). The formula of "critical appropriation" is valuable, but its content stays indeterminate: what does it appropriate, and what does it criticise?

This question matters, because how you explain the defeat of socialism determines what kind of party you build today. Our tradition takes an open stance on this: it defends the socialist construction carried on under the power of the working class in the period of Lenin and Stalin, the industrialisation, the collectivisation, and the victory against fascism, and it also discusses the errors and the deviations openly. It binds the defeat of socialism to the revisionism that grew stronger in the Soviet leadership from the middle of the 1950s, that is, to the formation of a new bourgeoisie inside the party and the state, and to the step-by-step return of capitalism. The TBKP experience of the 1980s was the reflection of this dissolution in Turkey (Part IV). That a class party have a clear written assessment on this question is also the guarantee of protecting its own organisation against new bureaucratic and revisionist deviations.

China. We could not find a written assessment by the party of whether China is socialist or capitalist. In June 2026 TİP visited China in an eight-party delegation from the Grand National Assembly (Friends of Socialist China). In August 2026 Erkan Baş met an official of the Chinese Embassy in Parliament (Yeni Ankara). These contacts are ordinary for a parliamentary party. But the programme itself lays down a correct principle: "an anti-imperialism that does not contain anti-capitalism is condemned to failure," and the imperialist powers can confront one another "inside differentiating relations of alliance and of bloc." Moving from this principle, our assessment is plain: today's China is a capitalist and imperialist power, administered by the hand of the state but built on profit and the accumulation of capital, exporting capital and spreading its own monopolies across the world. We told this in BRICS Behind the Curtain: the question is not "which bloc," but "which class."

Russia. At the beginning of the Ukraine war TİP criticised both NATO and Russia. On 22 February 2022 Baş described NATO as "a terrorist organisation," and asked that Russia stay away from approaches that escalate the conflict (Serbestiyet). On 1 March 2022 he said in Parliament that "the operation of the Russian army must end at once" (BirGün). This is a correct line, one that does not fall into the campism of "we are against NATO, therefore Russia is right." The point under debate, as the writer Atilla Aytemur also pointed out, was the choice of the word "operation" instead of "invasion" (Serbestiyet). For us the Ukraine war is a war of division, running between two imperialist blocs, on the land of the Ukrainian people and at the cost of their lives. Calling an invasion an invasion and exposing the expansion of NATO do not exclude each other.

Venezuela and Iran. In January 2026 it sharply condemned the United States' attack on Venezuela, and held an action in front of the US Embassy (ANKA). In February 2026 it described the attack directed at Iran as imperialist aggression. These stances are consistent and valuable.

Cuba. We could not find a statement TİP made in its own name about the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro, or the US pressure of 2026. The only open expression we could find is this sentence in the joint Porto Alegre Declaration, which TİP also published on its site: solidarity with Cuba in the face of the "criminal blockade" imposed by the United States (the Porto Alegre Declaration). At the Cuba solidarity events in Turkey, by contrast, other left organisations and unions appear (soL; Cumhuriyet). Cuba is the symbol of a people that, despite a blockade of more than sixty years, has not bowed to imperialism. The present class character of its economy can be debated; but unconditional solidarity with the Cuban people in the face of the blockade is the open and visible duty of every socialist party.

The attitude to the traditions in the world. There is a marked tendency in TİP's international relations: we could not find a record of its taking part in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties (IMCWP) (SolidNet). It does not appear in the Party of the European Left either. Instead it relates to a broad left network: the PT, PSOL, and MST from Brazil; Die Linke and the PTB from Europe; and, at the Peace Summit, different communist and Trotskyist groups beside these. According to a critical source, a candidate from TİP's organisation in Germany stood on the Die Linke list in the Berlin election of September 2026 (WSWS).

This openness has a value: a relation with different traditions that is not dogmatic. But it also has a question: on which programme does a party that writes "Marxism-Leninism" in its programme build its international relations? Across a spectrum running from Trotskyism to Eurocommunism, from Brazil's party of government to the parliamentary left of Europe, the common denominator is most of the time "antifascism" or "opposition to NATO." These are correct and important headings. But class internationalism asks, as much as a common enemy, for a common revolutionary perspective. A party that defines its ideological position in a written and open way also builds its relation with different traditions on firmer ground.

6. The stance in the unions

The steps TİP has taken in this field in the last two years are among the most hopeful developments from the point of view of a class line.

The steps taken:

• The Labour Committee. The party has a unit that carries on its union and worker work (tip.org.tr).
• The 1st Workers' Assembly (3 November 2024). At the assembly, in which representatives from 35 sectors took part, decisions were taken to found the TİP Workers' School, to strengthen the sector coordinations, and on "union democracy." Baş's word at the assembly: "Whoever fights is the vanguard, and we must stand beside them." (tip.org.tr) The Workers' School began in December 2024 (tip.org.tr).
• "DİSK should have 1 million members" (15 February 2026). TİP's 65th-anniversary panel was held in İzmir. Here Baş made a very important comparison: TİP took about 1 million votes in 2023, while DİSK has around 140 thousand members. According to him this proportion has to be reversed (Cumhuriyet). This is an expression, from the chair's mouth, of the main thesis of our dossier: the vote must turn into organisation.
• Participation in resistances. The resistance of the Polonez workers (September 2024, Sera Kadıgil), the struggle of the Yemeksepeti couriers (November 2025, tip.org.tr), and the Doruk Mining resistance (April 2026).

What has to be discussed:

• The DİSK Basın-İş experience. The four officials who resigned in August 2025 gave as their reason that some members were organising the union "like a party commission, through TİP cadres" (T24). The union leadership rejected these claims, and said "the interests of DİSK Basın-İş and of the working class must be held above everything" (DİSK Basın-İş). We report both sides. The lesson of this debate is this: unionists who are party members have to win, in the union, the trust not of the party but of all the members.
• The stance towards yellow unions. During the 2024 local-election campaign, Baş's visit to the Gebze branch of Türk Metal was criticised in a critical source as "an orientation towards the union bureaucracy" (WSWS). It is right to meet the workers in every union of which workers are members. But class trade unionism binds itself not to the union leaderships that compromise with the employer, but to the workers at the base of those unions, and it supports the democratic opposition from the base.
• The absence of a criticism of bureaucracy in the programme. The programme defends the right of union organisation and of collective bargaining, but we could not find an open finding on the union bureaucracy. In Turkey, as much as the low rate of unionised workers, it is also a problem that an important part of the existing unions has moved away from the workers' control.

Our assessment. The aim that "DİSK should have 1 million members" is the name of the most important step TİP can take towards a class party. For this aim to be realised, the party's members have to be the vanguard of unionisation in the workplaces, to found workplace committees, to defend union democracy in every union, and to protect with care the boundary between the union and the party. In 1961 the trade unionists founded the party. Today the party can take on the responsibility of growing the unions.

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PART XI — MASS PARTY OR CLASS PARTY?

These concepts are often confused. Let us first correct a misunderstanding: a class party does not mean a party that is not a mass party. The Bolshevik Party reached hundreds of thousands of members in 1917. The TİP of the 1960s was a mass party, and at the same time a class party founded by trade unionists. The distinction is not in size. It is in what the organisation rests on, under whose control it is, and what it aims at.

	Mass party (electoral party)	Class party
Basic unit	A geographical unit, or a unit of a "social field"; membership loose	The workplace unit (factory, warehouse, hospital, school, office) and the neighbourhood
Membership	Easy entry, volunteers, supporters. The difference between member and voter is blurred	Candidate membership, education, a task, dues. The member is a person who works in an organ of the organisation
Subject	"The people," "the citizen," "half of society," "the nameless"	The working class, and the labourers and oppressed peoples organised around it
The measure of growth	Share of the vote, number of members, visibility in the media	Lasting workplace organisation, union strength, strikes won, the accumulation of cadres
The election	The main field of activity	A rostrum and an instrument. The balance sheet of the campaign is measured by organisation
Leadership	A media face, a single voice	Collective leadership, the weight in the organs of cadres of worker origin
Democracy inside the party	Either a silence without debate, or factionalism	Full freedom in debate, full unity in the decision
Attitude to the bourgeois opposition	An electoral alliance, a joint candidate, "first let the regime go"	Common action is possible, but programmatic and organisational independence is protected
Relations inside the left	Competition, protection of the brand	The united front: the unity of the worker comes before the party's interest
Durability in a crisis	It scatters when the election is lost, or when the famous leave	When repression comes, it lives in the workplace, the union, the neighbourhood

Behice Boran's formula of 1968 is still valid: power can be "only the power of the worker and labouring classes and of their socialist party" (Gelenek). In this sentence there are two separate subjects: the classes, and their party. The party does not take the place of the class; it is the organised consciousness of the class. The power of a party elected by the people's vote is not the power of the class.

Why does this matter so much?

Because the period ahead of Turkey may be not an election period but a period of repression. Erkan Baş himself says it: the election law will change, the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality will be taken, the municipalities will change hands. If the government sets the election calendar, a party built according to the election is left with nothing to do but wait for the calendar.

A party organised in the workplace, by contrast, can create the calendar itself. The strongest form of raising a voice against the fund robbery is not a television statement; it is a stoppage of work in a branch of industry. The strongest pressure for Can Atalay is not a press statement; it is the organised march, in Hatay, of the earthquake-survivor workers and of the unions. We said this too in Why Do Workers Vote for the Right?: a vote for the right is the expression of being unorganised. Its antidote is not a better performance on television; it is a deeper organisation.

A class politics at a distance from populism

One of the most important sentences Baş said on İlke TV was this: "It has to find a channel to flow out through." Correct. Anger is accumulating in Turkey, from the AKP voter who lost their money in the fund to the peasant in Central Anatolia. But the channel this anger finds does not flow to the left of itself. Right-wing populism is also looking for a channel for the same anger, and it has stronger instruments in its hand.

Left populism cannot win this race on right-wing populism's own ground. A left that speaks in the language of "the people and the palace," "the honourable and the thieves," can be left behind a right that speaks the same language more loudly. We saw this in Europe: the left-populist parties that tried to represent the anger of the working class shone for one election period, and then either shifted to the centre or scattered. We discussed this in detail in our dossier Dossier: A History of the European Working Class Is Out.

Class politics says something else: "The source of the anger is not the thieves; it is the property relation that makes theft legal. And the force that will change this relation is not at the ballot box; it is in production." This language is slower, and it gets less applause. But it is the only language that stays on its feet in a crisis.

For a real struggle together

There is a correct core in Baş's approach of "alliance heading by heading": to come side by side with different forces on different questions. But the struggle together has two layers, and the two must not be confused:

1. Common action with the bourgeois opposition. It is possible and necessary to stand in the same square, against lawlessness, theft, and censorship, with people from the CHP, the YENİ Party, and the İYİ Party. But here the socialists protect their programmatic independence, and do not make their own programme invisible behind a joint candidate.
2. The united front of the labourers and the oppressed. The real unity is here. The socialist parties, the unions, the political representatives of the Kurdish people, the organisations of women and of youth, the pensioners' associations, the workers' resistances. The foundation of this unity is not an electoral bargain; it is a common programme of struggle: the wage, job security, the right to strike, peace, the equality of the peoples, democratic rights.

The united front, since the period of Lenin and of Dimitrov's 1935 report, works by one principle: unity from below. That is, not the bargain between party centres, but the common struggle, in the workplaces, the neighbourhoods, and the unions, of workers from different parties and of workers without a party. Unity is established not when party leaders give each other an appointment, but when workers from two different parties work on the same strike committee.

Against theft, one unites with everyone. But against the order that makes theft possible, only the class unites.

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PART XII — STEPS FOR THE COMRADES IN TİP TO THINK THROUGH

Dear comrades in TİP,

We wrote this dossier not to judge you, but to argue with you. The proposals below are not ready-made prescriptions. They are questions that can be debated inside your party, at your congress. You may already be debating some of them. All of them look at the same aim: that the hope TİP has created turn into a lasting organisation on a revolutionary class line.

Organisation

1. Make the workplace unit the party's basic unit. Instead of a "social field," wherever possible, units of the factory, the warehouse, the hospital, the school, the call centre, the cargo office, and the software office. Let the neighbourhood organisation be the complement of this.
2. Know and state the party's class composition. How many members are workers, how many are union members, how many are in which branch? Without this figure it cannot be claimed that one is a class party.
3. Bring back the spirit of the 1966 statute. Debate a rule that secures the weight, in the party organs, of members of worker origin. Put this rule not for the media faces, but for the organs.
4. Candidate membership and education. Let being a member be not the filling in of a form, but passing through a process of education and taking on a task. The firmest way to keep members in the party is an educated membership that has a task.
5. Carry the "door to door" campaign to the workers' doors too. The door of the factory, the warehouse, and the building site, as much as the door of the voter's house. Let the aim of every door visit be not a vote, but an organisation: membership of a union, a workplace committee, a network of solidarity.

Programme and language

6. Set beside the language of "against theft" the language of "against the pump." In events such as the fund crisis, beside the moral exposure, a line that explains the mechanism and proposes a concrete class demand: priority to small savings in the liquidation, the personal liability of the founders, public supervision of finance, the indexation of the wage to inflation.
7. Name the class by its name, instead of "the people" and "the nameless." Tell the worker not as one section, but as the subject of change. Kurds, women, and young people are inside that class, not beside it.
8. Put the axis of class in place of the axis of the regime. Defend the gains, but tell the struggle that won them. Instead of "the second century of the Republic," you can say "the first century of labour."
9. Stand behind your programme on the Kurdish question. Your programme accepts the right of the Kurdish people to determine their own future and their own fate (tip.org.tr). Defend this by principle, not by electoral calculation. The duty of the worker of the oppressor nation is to defend, before anyone else, the right of the oppressed nation. Do not leave the reservations placed on the framework law in a text of explanation either: turn them into an organised campaign for the implementation of the rulings of the Constitutional Court and the European Court of Human Rights, the lifting of the trustees, education in the mother tongue, and the release of the prisoners. This is the strongest answer to the "not enough, but yes" criticism.
10. Bind the analysis of "counter-revolution" to the analysis of imperialism. A frame that does not stay limited to Trump's circle, and that also covers the armament of the liberal blocs.

Election and alliance

11. Draw the balance sheet of election campaigns by organisation, not by the vote. After every campaign, ask: how many workplace units were founded, how many workers joined a union, how many volunteers turned into lasting cadres?
12. Protect programmatic independence against the bourgeois opposition. Voting against Erdoğan in the second round is a tactic. Giving "full support" from the first round makes the programme invisible. Make the self-criticism of 2023 openly.
13. Your own cadre, instead of a well-known name. The Gökhan Zan experience became a warning. Let the candidate be a person who comes from their own workplace, their own neighbourhood, their own struggle.

Relations inside the left

14. Partnership instead of competition among socialists. Set Kadıköy and Samandağ side by side. At the next local election, let the joint candidates of the socialist parties, and a common local programme, be debated.
15. Unity in the unions, not turning them into a party. The union is the organisation of workers of different views. Let the TİP cadres be the most determined and the most democratic members there, and let the anxiety of turning the union into a party commission never arise.
16. Keep the bridges with those who left. Look at the Red Party, at the provincial organisations that left, at the socialists who criticise, not as enemies, but as different lines of the same side. Carry the debate not by the charge of "faction," but by an open and written polemic.

Internal democracy

17. Let alternative motions, platforms, and lists be possible at the congresses. Full freedom in debate, full unity in the decision.
18. Collective leadership. The party's having a single media face binds the party to one person's performance. Spokespersons from different branches of industry and from different regions.
19. A culture of self-criticism. The sentence in the report of the 3rd Conference, that "the practice of struggle is in a visible decline," is a valuable beginning. Debate its reasons openly.

International relations and presence in the class

20. Carry internationalism to the bond between workers. Beside the conferences, build common organisations that bring together the workers of the same monopoly in different countries, the dockers, the platform workers. Strengthen your organisation of migrant workers in Europe in this direction.
21. Take the right lesson from Europe. Look with caution at Die Linke's experience of coalition in government and at Syriza's 2015, and with inspiration at the PTB's root in the workplace and the neighbourhood. Debate concrete steps such as centres of solidarity in health, law, and education in the workers' neighbourhoods, and the limiting of elected representatives' pay to a worker's wage.
22. Turn towards the industrial basins. Make it the party's priority to found a lasting organisation in the great industrial basins, from Gebze to Manisa, from Çerkezköy to Gaziantep. Set aside cadre, budget, and time for this; report the progress at every congress.
23. Write the content of "critical appropriation." Debate, in an open document, how you assess the October Revolution, the Soviet experience, the Stalin period, and the defeat of socialism. Take a clear stance on the class character of China and of Russia. Ideological clarity also becomes the ground of international relations.
24. Make solidarity with Cuba visible. Make solidarity with the Cuban people, in the face of the blockade, into the party's own campaign; work in common with the other organisations in this field.
25. Turn the aim of "DİSK, 1 million members" into an organisational plan. Let every provincial and district organisation set targets of unionisation in its own area. Defend union democracy in every union; bind yourselves not to the leaderships of the yellow unions but to their base; protect with care the boundary between the party and the union.

And the most important

26. Turn this sentence from İlke TV into a principle of organisation: "We look at life along a class axis." Apply this axis not only in analysis, but in the organisation, in the candidate, in the alliance, in the campaign. Let the measure of every decision be this question: does this decision strengthen the independent organisation of the working class?

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CONCRETE TASKS: FOR YOUNG COMRADES

Young comrade reading this dossier, you may be in TİP, or you may not. The tasks hold for both.

1. Watch the interview yourself. Open the video, and count how many times "the working class" is said, and how many times "the people" and "the citizen." Then do the same in your own speeches.
2. Read the party's documents. The programme, the statute, the Framework Document of the 2nd Congress, the Political Report of the 3rd Conference. Measure for yourself the distance between the programme and the model of organisation.
3. Read Behice Boran. Turkey and the Problems of Socialism (1968) is still the best beginning. Then read the 1970 congress resolutions from the TÜSTAV archive.
4. Organise in the workplace. Whatever your party, your first task is to organise where you work or where you study. If you have no union, found one, or join one.
5. Ask for unity. If at the next election your own party stands a candidate against a socialist party, ask why. Ask for a joint candidate and a common programme.
6. Listen to those who left. See the comrade who left a party not as a traitor, but as a partner in debate. Read their reasons, and separate what is right in them.
7. Voice the class demand in the fund crisis. Beside saying "let the thieves be caught," put the demand of "priority to small savings, the personal liability of the founders, public supervision of finance."
8. Do not forget Can Atalay, but remember him together with Hatay. Together with the demands of the earthquake-survivor workers who elected him.
9. Be principled on the Kurdish question. The right of the oppressed people is not a matter of electoral calculation.
10. Copy this dossier and debate it. With your friend in TİP, with your friend in the TKP, with your friend who is in no party. Organisation is not sharing a piece; it is talking about it.

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Dear Comrades,

In 2014 Erkan Baş had objected to the party he was leaving, calling it "being content with what exists." He was right: a left that closes in on itself cannot meet the masses. Twelve years later TİP met the masses. Millions heard it, tens of thousands joined it, a socialist voice rose in Parliament.

Now the same question stands in front of TİP, but from the other end: is meeting the masses enough? Did those who came stay? Did the vote turn into organisation? Is the "class axis" a sentence on television, or a measure that determines every decision of the party?

In 1961 twelve trade unionists founded their own party despite Türk-İş's ban. The value of a socialist party is measured not by whom it takes its name from, but by whether it does today what those twelve trade unionists did.

We stand on the same side as the comrades in TİP. This dossier is a call made from inside that side:

The mass is a beginning; the class is a direction. Anger looks for a channel; unless that channel is dug by the worker themselves, others direct the water.

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Sources

The latest interview

• Time to Talk, İlke TV, 2 October 2026 (YouTube)
• TİP chair Erkan Baş on İlke TV — İlke TV
• TİP did not attend the opening of Parliament — ANKA
• Can Atalay ended his hunger strike — Medyascope, 2 October 2026

Erkan Baş and before TİP

• Erkan Baş — TİP's official page
• Erkan Baş — English Wikipedia
• Who is Erkan Baş? — Cumhuriyet
• Who is Erkan Baş? — Halk TV
• Congress statement from the TKP — soL, February 2009
• Two TKPs, two Central Committees — Aydınlık, 14 July 2014
• The TKP split — Diken
• Why did the TKP split? — BirGün, 29 July 2014
• Was there no ideological content in the TKP split? — Gelenek, issue 133
• The communist quarrel went to court — Diken, June 2017
• People's Communist Party of Turkey — English Wikipedia
• A journey that began under the lead of Yalçın Küçük — Serbestiyet

The historical TİP (1961–1988)

• Sixty years ago the workers had their own party — BirGün, Aziz Çelik
• The first socialist party to enter Parliament — Milliyet
• Türk-İş and relations with political parties — Tek Gıda-İş
• Sections from the history of TİP — Gelenek
• Resolutions of TİP's 4th Grand Congress (1970) — TÜSTAV
• Nihat Sargın, introduction to The TİP Years — TÜSTAV
• The TİP of 1965–68 — bianet
• Kiriş & Gül — Society and Democracy, 2007
• İnan — UPAD, 2023
• Aksakal — SDÜ, 2009
• Behice Boran's intellectual journey — Textum
• What was Behice Boran's crime? — Tr724
• DİSK, founded on this day in 1967 — Cumhuriyet
• The TBKP — English Wikipedia
• Special posts by TİP (1961–1988) — bianet
• TİP's test with the Kurd — Şeyhmus Diken, Güneydoğu Ekspres

TİP's documents

• Party programme
• Statute
• Framework Document of the 2nd Congress
• Political Report of the 3rd Ordinary Conference of Turkey
• TİP is 60 years old
• Constitutional Court ruling, E.2018/1, K.2018/9

The elections, the sectarianism debate

• Kemal Okuyan's assessment of unity on the left — soL, 23 January 2024
• TİP's Kadıköy decision — Cumhuriyet, 21 February 2024
• The socialists' Kadıköy race — Gazete Duvar, Atilla Özsever
• Kadıköy 2024 results — Habertürk
• The CHP won Kadıköy with 73% — Gazete Oksijen
• Our electoral stance and the call we made to the left — TKP
• Support from the TKP for TİP's Samandağ candidate — Cumhuriyet
• Samandağ 2024 results — Habertürk
• Debate in the Labour and Freedom Alliance — Kısa Dalga
• Gökhan Zan will enter the election with the TİP logo — Medyascope
• Membership figures of the political parties — Gazete Duvar
• The parties' membership figures updated — Diken, July 2026

The framework law, the latest meetings, international relations

• Communiqué of the Party Council of 8–9 August — tip.org.tr
• We will organise, we will resist together with the people — Party Council statement, 24 June 2026
• Extended Meeting of Provincial and District Officials — tip.org.tr, 3 May 2026
• Summer Leadership and Young Cadre Camps of 2026 — tip.org.tr
• Erkan Baş's statement on the framework law — haberler.com
• A photograph of the situation — Zülal Kalkandelen, Cumhuriyet, 12 August 2026
• From "not enough, but yes" to the framework law — marksist.org, 20 August 2026
• Erkan Baş: TİP is becoming a great Movement of the Nameless — İlke TV
• We hosted the International Anti-Imperialist Peace Summit — tip.org.tr
• Five foreign guests coming to the Peace Summit were deported — Cumhuriyet
• Erkan Baş attended the International Antifascist Conference — tip.org.tr
• The Porto Alegre Declaration — tip.org.tr
• Ecosocialism or class compromise — Solidarity, April 2026
• Alliance politics 2023 — Erol Taymaz, Birikim
• Kadıköy results, 14 May 2023 — Habertürk

Theoretical and international references

• Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) — marxists.org
• Lenin, "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) — marxists.org
• Dimitrov, report to the 7th Congress of the Comintern (1935) — marxists.org
• Antonio Gramsci and the organic intellectual — Wikipedia
• Behice Boran, Turkey and the Problems of Socialism (1968) — TTK catalogue
• Are you a National Democratic Revolutionary, or a socialist? — T24, Mehmet Altan
• Statement on the Duvar report — Cumhuriyet, 16 November 2021
• The 2010 constitutional referendum — Wikipedia
• The 2015 Greek referendum — Wikipedia
• GSW Immobilien — Wikipedia
• Die Linke — Wikipedia
• Syriza — Wikipedia
• Podemos — Wikipedia
• La France Insoumise — Wikipedia
• PTB/PVDA — Wikipedia
• PAME — Wikipedia

Ideological position and the unions

• Erkan Baş, Socialism in Order to Live (2021) — PDF, tip.org.tr
• Statement on the Ukraine crisis, 22 February 2022 — Serbestiyet
• The stress on peace in the Russia–Ukraine war, 1 March 2022 — BirGün
• How do socialists look at the invasion of Ukraine? — Atilla Aytemur, Serbestiyet
• A multi-party delegation from Turkey visits China — Friends of Socialist China, June 2026
• Erkan Baş met an official of the Chinese Embassy — Yeni Ankara, August 2026
• The United States' attack on Venezuela — ANKA, January 2026
• 23rd International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties — SolidNet
• The friends of Cuba met at a solidarity event — soL, September 2024
• Solidarity with Cuba by workers in front of the US Consulate — Cumhuriyet, March 2026
• WSWS, on TİP and Die Linke, March 2026
• We completed our 1st Workers' Assembly — tip.org.tr, November 2024
• The Workers' School has begun — tip.org.tr
• On TİP's 65th anniversary: DİSK should have 1 million members — Cumhuriyet, February 2026
• Four resignations in the leadership of DİSK Basın-İş — T24, August 2025
• Statement of the DİSK Basın-İş leadership, 8 August 2025
• The Yemeksepeti couriers will win — tip.org.tr, November 2025
• Criticism of TİP and the union bureaucracy — WSWS, March 2024
• BRICS Behind the Curtain — Knowledge Commons

The departures and the criticisms

• Mass resignation in TİP — T24, August 2024
• Those who left TİP and joined Kılavuz tell their story — Medyascope
• Three provincial leaderships of TİP resigned — Cumhuriyet
• Those who left TİP founded the Red Party — Kısa Dalga
• The TİP crisis in DİSK Basın-İş — Diken
• TİP III, and left populism once again — Tanıl Bora, Birikim
• The TİP experience and the debate on the party model — sep.org.tr
• A criticism of the criticisms of TİP — Gazete Nisan
• The question of the candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish — marksist.org

Erkan Baş's earlier interviews and statements

• We are a party that can take votes from every view — Medyascope, April 2023
• Full support for Kılıçdaroğlu — haberler.com, March 2023
• It is capitalists, not socialists, who are seizing people's homes — Diken, December 2022
• The only force that can save Turkey is the working class — T24, November 2024
• Hunger strike with the Doruk Mining workers — Cumhuriyet, April 2026
• Erkan Baş's criticism of the YENİ Party's shift to the right — Yeni Ankara, September 2026
• TİP is becoming a great Movement of the Nameless — ANKA, August 2026
• A correction of the "candidate whose mother tongue is Kurdish" remarks — İlke TV
• Tuncer Bakırhan's reply — T24
• The debate over "agent" and "leftover of Tito" — Yetkin Report

Our linked pieces

Tag page: /en/tag/parliament/

The fund crisis

• Circuit Breaker: The Bourgeoisie's Exchange Does Not Even Trust Itself
• Who Got Out Before the Door Closed?
• Control for Capital, the Blast for Us

Law, Parliament, Can Atalay

• The Liquidation of a Legal Regime and the People's Intellectual: Can Atalay
• A Dialectical Assessment of Can Atalay’s Statement on the "Framework Law"
• Class Analysis of the Framework Law and Socialist Strategy
• Rejecting the Ruling Class’s Playing Field: The Reality of Hegemony, Passive Revolution, and an Independent Class Line
• They Shut Down What They Cannot Buy

Class, the right, and organisation

• Why Do Workers Vote for the Right?
• 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup
• Dossier: A History of the European Working Class Is Out
• Has Neoliberalism Ended?

The European left

• Elif Eralp: "We Wrote History, Comrades"
• What Awaits Elif Eralp?

The other faces of the same week

• A Class Seven Layers Underground
• The Deniz Göktaş Case and the Class of Humor
• The Rich Want War, Students Want a Future
• Telling Young Comrades about Ioanna Kuçuradi

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Knowledge Commons — Knowledge Belongs to Everyone.

This dossier rests on sources open to the public, on the party's own documents, and on the İlke TV interview of 2 October 2026. The section on tendencies inside the party is our reading. Dates and figures on which the sources contradict one another are noted separately in the text. Our pages are open to the replies of the persons and institutions criticised. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Copy it, debate it.