Turkey: workers' centres nourish new culture

Submitted by Matthew on 8 May, 2013 - 5:56 Author: Michael Elms
Red flag

In mid-April 2013, I visited Istanbul to meet a group of socialist activists involved in building a workers’ support group, Uluslararası Işçi Dayanışması Derneği (Association of International Workers’ Solidarity, UID DER).

My visit co-incided with feverish campaigns to prepare for May Day celebrations.

UID DER runs six community centres in rented-out shopfronts in different working-class neighbourhoods of Istanbul and Ankara; they want to open offices in other places. On the morning of my arrival we went to see the office in Sarigazi, a diverse neighbourhood, where Turks and Alawites live together. The district has a lively political life: the walls are covered with posters and graffiti from an array of different socialist tendencies. As we arrive at the centre workers of all ages are preparing for an afternoon May Day event. Newly-made wall displays about the history of May Day have been tacked up.

Half a dozen activists clear a space among the ruckus and assemble a trestle table and chairs: one organiser, Devrim, explains that the comrades had planned to set a few minutes aside to talk to me. The combination of a relaxed atmosphere, apparent chaos and a deceptively high degree of co-ordination, discipline and precision is a trademark of UID DER.

Devrim explains the centre’s work. Contacts of UID DER are invited to get involved — those who want to support the work of the association are asked to join one of the work groups which carry out all the functions of the local branch. Contact with workers is forged through workplace interventions. The centre has split Sarigazi up into two areas and has assigned a working group to each, to monitor struggles and the work of UID DER in factories in either area. The aim is to set up a working group for each large workplace.

Factories are visited and the UID DER bulletin, Işçi Dayanışması (Workers’ Solidarity), is distributed. The work groups also visit workers’ homes to hold small meetings and discuss problems of daily life, politics and local struggles. Devrim outlines other activities: “We have a football group, a library group and a press group. Our football group tries to promote collectivism in sport instead of individualistic bourgeois football culture. We organise matches between teams from the local factories. Before every game we make speeches, to underline that our game isn’t just about football, but friendship, solidarity, unity and helping each other.

“Our press group reports for the national bulletin from our local factories, on problems in daily life. We do interviews with workers about different issues and we encourage our readers to write in to our letters page. The press group also organises training for workers in how to write. The library group promotes reading books among workers. We’ve amassed the best collection we can. We mainly use novels about working-class life, we read them and discuss them in groups.

“We also have videos, films and documentaries which we show in workers’ homes."

Adalet, sitting next to Devrim and rocking a pram back and forth as she speaks, explains how she brought workers in her factory into contact with UID DER: “I work in a car components factory with about 1,000 workers. They announced plans to close our plant down, saying that labour costs in Turkey were twice as high as labour costs in Romania, and they were moving production there.

“We tried to organise a workers’ committee to oppose the closure. But the recognised union in our plant, Türk Metal, is run by sympathisers of the fascist Grey Wolves. They collude with management to get you sacked if you’re seen as a militant. We had to go to UID DER to ask for advice.

“We put forward demands for a severance bonus equivalent to two years’ salary on top of the usual redundancy deal. The company told us it was illegal and unprecedented — but our friends at UID DER helped us do research to find a precedent and to find legal advice.

“We made links with other employees of the same company in Romania and the Czech Republic... They’ve now backtracked and offered us a severance bonus of to eight months’ wages, but we’re not accepting it. Workers have got confidence in UID DER because the advice we gave has been proved right in the struggle.”

Alaraiye, a shop steward in a school, picks up where Adalet leaves off: “We are observing the difficult situation for trade unions and looking at ways of organising workers in spite of it. We have created a pole of attraction for workers — our centre is somewhere where they want to come, to discuss problems in daily life.”

The comrades are keen to emphasise how, as much as formal political positions, the tone, feel and style of their work is what is unique about UID DER’s approach. This means a tremendous attention to detail and a high level of organisation to make sure that as well as offering correct advice, the tone and pace of UID DER’s work is calculated to maximise the participation and a feeling of closeness and familiarity with those who join the activities.

UID DER was launched in June 2006, at a 1,000 strong public meeting to commemorate the famous workers’ uprising of 15-16 June 1970. But the work of building up the association had been going on for ten years before then. After the 1980 military-fascist coup Turkish socialists were scattered and demoralised. 650,000 people were arrested, most were tortured, and hundreds died. When the regime thawed in the mid-1990s, a group of socialist activists started re-examining their methods of work and political ideas. They harshly criticised their old, Stalinist politics, and chose a course of action — setting up workers’ self-education groups.

The first group was set up in about 1997. As Turkey experienced a long upswing of development the tamed and broken trade unions stagnated under the influence of a doctrine of social partnership called “Modern Unionism”. But there was an upsurge of wildcat strikes. These socialists, learning from a small group of cadres from the communist movement of the 1980s, made contact with wildcat-striking workers.

“We proposed to the more advanced workers, the organisers of the strikes, that leading workers from the different disputes meet up and exchange experiences. We held informal meetings to talk through what was happening in the different struggles and draw lessons from them. We wanted our self-education groups, first and foremost, to be a source of good advice for workers in struggle. We described our work under the slogan, ‘Education for organisation’. We proposed that the meetings take place every week.

“Another term that we used then was ‘sharing life’. Sharing the lives of the workers you are organising with is vital to creating a real link. When you share in workers’ problems and celebrations, that is when you know you are beginning to make an organisation which is really rooted in the workers’ movement. When advanced workers invite you to their houses, that is a crucial step forward in making a relationship with them and developing their confidence in your whole organisation. We were invited to weddings and funerals, we helped organise childcare.

“Most of this work was done without any printed materials. Partially that was a security concern. And the direct human contact was more important than literature distribution at that stage. We also organised concrete solidarity work. For example, many striking workers had little or no health insurance, so we got a van, and had sympathetic doctors and nurses come and do free health check-ups.

“I think the ‘style’ and the approach that we have employed throughout is the same — but as the self-education groups grew, we expanded the remit of the education we carried out.”

Devrim signals that the time set aside for discussion is running out and we move on, driving out of town to another office in Gebze, where the May day meeting will shortly start. The Gebze office is on a busy street, in an office space above a shop, with more rooms than the Sarigazi office. Trestle tables have been set out in the hall and piled high with salads and cakes. A crowd of mostly young men is filing in — most of them workers at factories in the nearby Organised Industrial Zone. I later learn that about half the crowd is Kurdish. Many of the organising cadres leading the event are women: a conscious effort is being made to promote women leaders.

The stage is set up with red UID DER posters on the back wall, and a projection screen, across which are sailing images of past May Day demonstrations. A five-piece acoustic string band, with guitars and bağlamas, sits at the back, all in red polo shirts, and two compères, in red shirts and caps with microphone headpieces, stand on the stage. All are members of UID DER.

The compère explains that May Day is a unifying event for workers all over the world. A film is projected on the wall behind her, with footage of demonstrations around the world that took place since last May Day, from China and Bulgaria to the UK and Portugal. UID DER has run a campaign in the run-up to May Day for the last few years: last year’s was a petition campaign against projected government reforms to take away the right to redundancy money. The campaign got around 100,000 signatures and featured on TV and radio.

This year, the campaign will be about workplace accidents. The cases of particular workers, such as a horribly-burned Azerbaijani sailor, are picked out to highlight the inhumanity of the situation with workplace safety. Turkey has the highest number of workplace accidents in Europe and the third highest in the world. As well as poor industrial practices, low wages are to blame, which oblige workers to take overtime work: twelve-hour days are the norm in much of industry.
The meeting is concluded with speeches about the Kurdish question, songs and poems, and closing remarks about the global capitalist crisis, for which images of starving children are projected alongside pictures of astronauts.

I go to eat some of the food with a group of young workers, who tell me about their union organising efforts. The right to form unions in Turkey exists only on paper — there is a very high threshold of density that workers have to achieve in order to get recognition, and most bosses will sack workers if they are seen to be recruiting to a union. Moreover, unions themselves are complacent and slow-moving.

The 1980 coup regime permitted the tame, mainstream federation Türk-Iş to organise and in some workplaces union membership was encouraged or required by the employer. The more radical union, DISK (Turkish Confederation of Revolutionary Unions) broke from Türk-Iş in 1967. DISK survived a series of confrontations with alarmed Turkish bourgeoisie and incubated a broad layer of revolutionary-minded socialist workplace militants. In 1970, the Türk-Metal union was set up by the government, with CIA advice, to compete with DISK. The symbol of this union was the fascist Grey Wolf, and its leaders were members of the fascist MHP party. Türk-Metal got nowhere with workers until the coup of 1980, when the founder of DISK, Kemal Türkler, was killed in his home by MHP militants and the military regime dissolved the union. All of its assets — and its membership — were transferred to Türk-Metal.

DISK re-emerged with the opening-up of the regime in 1992 but it wasn’t the same. The revolutionary workplace activists had disappeared. The leadership of the union, once aligned with the now-defunct Turkish Workers’ Party (a multi-tendency leftwing labour party), was now dominated by the left-ish wing of the Kemalist CHP, or Republican People’s Party. It has assimilated the doctrine of social-partnership to a lesser extent than Türk-Iş or the openly fascist union, but it is a sad, broken shadow of its pre-1980 self.

“So by and large the unions never organise. Joining a union is a declaration of war, an invitation for the boss to attack”, the comrade continues. “Before you can have a union, you need to build up a strong, fighting organisation in your plant. That’s where UID-DER comes in to help.”

A worker called Umut explains: he works in a local metal plant, where sudden and inhumane changes to the shift pattern (two night shifts followed by two day shifts) roused workers to organise. The workers formed a secret committee with representatives across two plants. They co-opted management’s hand-picked ‘labour representative’ onto the committee.

“That way, we could get to speak to him before management did, and he felt confident in disobeying management instructions when they told him to shut down protests or spread their line.”

The workers’ committee began organising lunchtime protests. The committee was, of necessity, a secret to workers. “Committee members would go to their workmates and tell them what time the next protest would be; some of their number knew more than others — but they didn’t know about the committee. Management also knew something was up, but they couldn’t see who was organising it or how!”

Throughout the dispute, active workers had been coming to the UID DER office at all hours to sit and discuss the dispute collectively.

The next day, we head over to the Işçi Dayanışması editorial offices, which is also the headquarters of the Işçi Tiyatrosu (Workers’ Theatre) company. The walls are decorated with pictures of Brecht, Hikmet, and past workers’ theatre performances. The editorial team break off work to explain the bulletin to me. The editor, a retired leatherworker, explains how it is the collective work of all the different UID DER branches. “We have a network of voluntary worker-reporters who report, follow the press, write interviews, and tell us about struggles and workplace accidents.

“The frontpage article is always about a general political issue. We want to create a rounded world view for workers. On page three there is normally a piece about trade union politics... We have short snippet-reports of goings on in industry around Turkey, and internationally too — we want to use the international news to demonstrate to workers that we are part of a global class. We also have three pages of letters — and our friends and reporters encourage workers to write full articles about issues that are on their minds — so for example, here is a piece one worker wrote in about widespread anti-depressant use."

Another editor, with big hair and leather elbow patches, speaks about the organisation of the bulletin: “We teach activists about how to be reporters. The training is not only about how to report an event technically — but also stylistically, in a way which is plainspoken and appealing.

“Reporting is not just about choice of words but also about attitude — we must avoid an arrogant tone and always aim to encourage. Constantly educating our activists in how to approach and win workers in an open-minded way is very important. For example, UID DER participates in an anti-NATO front. Another participating organisation is a group of anti-capitalist Muslims, who are religious, but quite genuine. Other petit-bourgeois left groups are reluctant to organise with them, regarding them as a lost cause. But we turn out for joint actions with them, and succeed in having a positive effect.

“The small acts of resistance that our bulletin helps engender can intimidate bosses — sometimes into giving concessions and pay increases to stave off further unrest. Our readers call these ‘UID DER bonuses’.”

The bulletin is used to make contacts with trade union organisations.

Esra tells me about the work of the women’s committee, which has recently made a collection of written and video-recorded interviews with working-class women. The women’s committee has chosen the following slogans: “A crèche in every workplace”, “No to harassment and violence”, “Equal pay for equal work” and “Longer maternity leave”. Recorded interviews underscore the importance of these demands, as women describe the conditions of life for working-class women: one makes a heartfelt speech about how her children don’t recognise her because of the lack of childcare in the workplace and the punishing shift rotas.

Bosses in Turkey are not afraid to lean on backward, traditional attitudes on gender to break strikes. Esra tells me of how they will send agents from house to house during strike meetings, to intimidate women and rouse them against their husbands’ union activities. “Getting wives and family members organised in support of mostly-male disputes is crucial to their success.”

Esra says, “we are not ‘feminists’ — we believe that women need their own organisation, but as part of the broader class struggle, where men and women march together”.

In Workers’ Liberty we would counter that what is needed is a synthesis of socialist and feminist ideas — what we call socialist-feminism — and while I didn’t discuss the issue for long with the comrades, my feeling is that our differences are much smaller than a disagreement over the use of the word “feminist” might suggest.

Later we visit the UID DER audio-visual suite, where recording and graphic design hardware and software is used to put together videos and recordings of UID DER events. The video technician calls up the films they have mixed together to project at public meetings. He shows the dubbed and edited footage of the 1995 Liverpool Dock Strike, which was used in an educational film for the strikers at the Mersin docks, where a struggle has just been won against casualisation. The UID DER played a prominent role in the strike and the trade union opposed the more militant tactics which UID DER helped foster, such as a 53-hour crane occupation.

“The trade union branch tried to counsel individual vanguard workers, to tell them to go slow, to take a softer line with the management, to forget about reinstatements and concentrate on signing a collective contract. It was on our proposal that the committee was set up, not the union’s.”

In a film of one of UID DER’s meetings with the Mersin dockers a room full of young men wearing red clap along to the music while a slide-show plays. The unofficial workers’ committee chair gets up to say “The port belongs to us because we are united. We are united as workers — whatever other identities we might have come second: Kurd, Alawite, Turk — we are all workers first. Capital knows no nation, race, colour, gender, and neither should our solidarity.”

The following evening, we go to the local office in the working-class suburb of Tuzla. A working group of about 20 young activists is preparing placards for the UID DER contingent at the coming May Day rally. The working group breaks off its preparations to sit down and speak to the English visitor. I ask how people decided to join UID DER and get more involved.

Bariş says, “I first came to know UID DER through a wildcat strike demanding union recognition. UID DER came and visited us. Back then, in 2010, we knew nothing about how to conduct the struggle. Then we started to see who our real friends were. UID DER was always there for us.”

I ask: didn’t he find UID DER strange?

“Yes, with their aprons and caps, I found them... very striking”, he says diplomatically, and others laugh. “What was really strange was the word ‘international’. We’re here, in Turkey, not anywhere else. They explained that our class and our fight are international.”

Meryem speaks up: “The first thing which is important about UID DER is its discipline and humane relations. People value each other and teach you to value yourself. UID DER has clear class politics and they make you think about your place in class society, how you can be useful for the working class. They educate you properly. I see people my age sitting around doing nothing all day, but I feel like I’m realising my potential here.”

Safiye speaks: “Some of our friends have had to wage a hard struggle with their families to get involved. My family hated it. Some of us have been beaten — I was beaten. But I stuck it out, so they had to put up with me coming here. You walk through that door and suddenly gender relations are equal for a change. You see men doing the washing and cooking. This is Turkey. To see something like that made me want to make a commitment.”

Ceyda from the women’s committee: “I work in a metal factory with more than 300 people who’ve mostly come from the Black Sea region. They’re very conservative people. They’re religious women who wear headscarves and vote fascist. In our work at the factory, we shared daily life with them. I am known as an irreligious woman, but I helped them prepare their Iftar meal at Ramadan, which surprised them, and shook some of their prejudices.

“So when I started inviting some of them to visit this centre, they were hesitant at first but they came to see that we are their real friends, supporting them in their difficulties. When some were sacked, we supported their struggle for re-instatement, offered legal support. In the end they won.

“Then I was fired for my part in the campaign —and I started doing a picket, on my own, outside the factory. These Black Sea women workers would come and bring me food, and join my protest, on their breaks. They were hard nationalists. They generally viewed any leftwing activity as ‘terrorism’. And when the women came to help me, other backward workers started calling them ‘terrorists’ too, which taught them a lesson.”

I think that what the comrades in UID DER have created is inspiring, and unique in my experience of the anti-Stalinist socialist left in Europe and North Africa. It is like a resurrection on a small scale of some of the best aspects of the west European Marxist movement of the early 20th century. That movement, which now lies submerged under a sea of failure and Stalinist and capitalist distortion, created a network of social, cultural, artistic and sporting organisations which bound together and carried the ideas of the mass socialist workers’ movement —Clarion cycling clubs, workers’ athletic societies, colliery bands, women’s newspapers, the Labour Colleges movement. The patient, well-planned, purposeful work of UID DER shows the way that genuine Marxists might begin to rebuild this city in the 21st Century. It is an example, I think, of something we talk about in terms of Gramsci’s ideas — activities to be undertaken by Marxists in “the quiet times”. And let’s remember that Turkey is not a backward country, Istanbul least of all. UID DER is not successful because Turkish workers are short of alternative forms of cheap entertainment!

The social and cultural work of UID DER is not, however, undertaken as an alternative to the class struggle, in the way that some demoralised activists or certain sorts of anarchist in the West pose semi-philanthropic food distribution, individual artistic endeavour or cultivation of community gardens and so on as superior avenues of activity to direct class struggle. UID DER’s activities are organised around a single goal — coalescing, educating and expanding a socialist proletarian leadership, and rooting it in a broader milieu of conscious workers.

I don’t think that there is a simple and direct way of summarising and applying the lessons of UID DER in Britain. But there are certain slogans and approaches that we might usefully take up and consider. The first and most obvious is the necessity of creating a framework which offers a variety of low-intensity, easily-accessible political activities for contacts and sympathisers which falls short of the relatively high requirements of AWL membership.

Another is the value of creating a social and cultural milieu around advanced workers and communists, and which serves as another means of tying together advanced workers and communists. The various slogans which socialists in UID DER use to describe their “style” — “sharing life” and “any advance which is not prepared will be lost” — are important and valuable, although they need to be interpreted to fit British realities and the culture and nature of the British labour movement.

I think above all, the concern for “style” is the thing which we should take away from the UID DER method — and we should look at the serious, meticulous, open and humane culture that the comrades are working to develop, and measure ourselves against those criteria.

Comments

Submitted by AWL on Mon, 13/05/2013 - 15:15

A report of May Day activities by the UID DER rank-and-file workers' organisation, on the Marxist Revival website.

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