ISTANBUL, June 5 — The working class is rising in Turkey, involving 3,000,000 across 60 cities. Mass demonstrations with as many as 250,000 people have occurred on a daily basis since May 29, centered in Istanbul’s Taksim Square, a place where workers traditionally voice their grievances and show their strength. They are outraged at the Islamist government of Prime Minster Erdogan. On June 4, 240,000 government workers in the Confederation of Public Sector Trade Unions walked out as part of a general strike. They are protesting the arrest and trial of 72 members on phony terrorism charges. They are also striking against the current wave of police repression of massive anti-government protests that started last Friday.
On May Day, the trade unions staged their annual march, with tens of thousands of workers carrying red flags despite warnings not to enter Taksim Square. Workers responded to police attacks by hurling rocks, paving stones and bottles, and destroying police vehicles.
Since then, the government announced plans to erect a shopping mall, bulldozing hundreds of trees that form a park in the Square. This plan further enraged the masses. Huge protests began as hundreds blocked the bulldozers. The government responded with water cannons, tear gas and police batons, wounding over 1,000. Police have shot gas cannisters at people’s heads, killing one and blinding 12.
Protests have spread to the capital city of Ankara, Izmir, and the port of Bodrum on the Mediterranean Sea. The protesters are demanding the resignation of the Erdogan government.
Over the past six years Turkey has experienced rapid economic growth, but the working class has seen little benefit. As a result, the unions led a strike wave this past year. The Erdogan government responded by arresting hundreds of trade union leaders and rank-and-file militants, charging them with serious felonies in order to smash the power of the unions.
Turkey has been crucial to U.S. imperialism’s influence in Iraq, its aim to undermine the Assad regime in Syria, and U.S. conflict with Iran. Instability in Turkey could weaken U.S. influence in the region and strengthen Russian and Chinese imperialist influence.
The parallel to Egypt is quite evident. Like Egypt, there is a succession struggle between the rival political parties, neither of which has the worker’s interests at heart. By trying to change the constitution, Erdogan is attempting to pave the way for him to circumvent the term limits on being Prime Minister by becoming President. So, the crackdown on the sit-ins in front of bulldozers and its subsequent uprising, are now being co-opted by opposition political parties.
For courageous workers in Turkey, the essential lesson from this struggle is that a mass communist party is necessary to up the ante to a fight for workers’ power and an egalitarian communist society. PLP embraces this struggle against tyranny and looks to aid the working class in building that international party in Turkey. We ask all workers to organize rallies at Turkish embassies, consulates and Turkish Air Lines protesting the fascist Erdogan regime.

As communists, we are often asked how a communist society would function under the leadership of the Progressive Labor Party. One way to envision a communist society is by studying historical examples, such as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (CR) that occurred in China between 1966 and 1976. An excellent source of first-hand knowledge and documented facts is Dongping Han’s book, “The Unknown Cultural Revolution: Life and Change in a Chinese Village.”
The book is largely based on research done for Han’s PhD thesis. He traveled from the U.S. to his native village in China to interview villagers who lived there during the CR, and to examine records of crop production and village expenditures. As part of his thesis, he wanted to provide evidence that the educational and political reforms that took place during the CR greatly improved the lives of the average villager.
However, by 1969 Mao retreated from the CR and had the Red Guards dismantled or placed under army control. Many of the educational and political reforms that the CR initiated were reversed. Consequently, the children of many rural villagers were, and continue to be, denied an education because the schools are no longer free. With the abolishment of communal farming (and thus eliminating the societal security it created) many farmers are forced to work well beyond retirement age.
The CR empowered villagers because, for the first time, they were encouraged to criticize their leaders. Students were encouraged to criticize their teachers and principals; women were encouraged to work and get educated. Corrupt village officials were denounced and forced to reform or be removed from office. Big character posters, newspapers, and mass organizations flourished during the CR.
Before the CR, there were only two high schools in Jimo county (where the author grew up); as a result of the CR the number increased to eighty-four. The high schools were all constructed and financed by communes. Before the Cultural Revolution, a standardized test determined who would be admitted to college. In 1966, the national entrance exams were suspended, and all students had to work in rural areas or a factory for at least two years before going to college. “Students had to prove themselves as good farmers or workers before going to college.”
On communes, team leaders were no longer appointed, but chosen. Production plans were decided on by meetings of mass leaders of various mass organizations. These meetings involved as many as ten thousand, from county leaders to production team leaders. The democratic nature of the CR resulted in significant increases in yields of corn and wheat, as well as mechanization of farming techniques.
Han concludes that “economic development in the countryside was facilitated by political and cultural changes brought about by the CR.” Among the changes was a cultural shift that allowed villagers to challenge party leaders, advance a collective work ethic, including leadership participation in manual labor and democratic decision-making. These changes also resulted in giving rural children an opportunity for an education and development of skills that helped rural economic development.
Even though capitalism was restored in China and the USSR, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution serves as an example of what we in PLP are fighting for under a communist society.

Crowds of anti-capitalist protesters on June 1 blocked streets leading to the European Central Bank in Germany's to protest its role in pushing for austerity cutbacks as a way to fight the continent's debt crisis.

The following article advances some possible answers to questions raised in the thoughtful letter, “Can Class Struggle Use the Bosses’ Court?” (CHALLENGE, 4/26/13), especially about the history posed by the law professor whose lecture on the racist history of the U.S. Supreme Court inspired the letter.
There is historical evidence that the U.S. War of Independence was fought mostly to preserve slavery. By the late 1700s, the British rulers were gradually moving away from chattel slavery toward wage slavery due to the rise of industrial capitalism in Great Britain. The leaders of the War of Independence, including southern plantation slave owners and northern shipping and banking interests, all profited from the continuation of chattel slavery.
The new U.S. government wasted no time in using its power to support slave owners. The Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision (1857) was a logical manifestation of the intent of the “Founding Fathers.” It stated categorically “that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not” were included within the term “citizen” in the U.S. Constitution nor within the term “people” in the Declaration of Independence.
It’s important to understand the dialectics of the capitalist legal system, in its appearance and essence. The bosses wish to promote the appearance that the courts are the final resort for those seeking relief from the more oppressive aspects of capitalist rule. Dred Scott, for example, was a runaway slave represented by Abolitionists in a lawsuit arguing that since he lived in a free state he should be a free man. They turned to the Supreme Court for relief. But the latter returned him to slavery.
One of the most famous cases used to support this appearance of “relief” from oppression is the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision which ended legal segregation in public schools. The case was mounted by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund as part of a 60-year campaign of legal challenges to segregation.
A closer look at the essence of the courts, however, reveals that they are a tool of the capitalist bosses to maintain power. Thus, the Brown decision was primarily a response to the Cold War gains of the communist movement in Asia and Africa, in the wake of the Chinese Revolution and the massive anti-imperialist struggles of the 1940s and 1950s. The U.S. bosses were attacked, correctly, worldwide for the hypocrisy of their system of racial segregation.
In a “friend of the Court” brief filed in the Brown case, the U.S. Justice Department argued that legal segregation had “an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries. Racial discrimination furnishes grist for the communist propaganda mills, and it raises doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.” Interestingly, though, through various legal maneuvers as well as the result of capitalism’s overall racism in broader spheres (segregated housing, rent and income disparities), school segregation exists in the vast majority of U.S. cities.
As communists we need to separate our possible tactical use of the courts — as part of a larger mass campaign — from our understanding of how the court system itself serves strategic ruling-class interests. The Court’s function is to legally interpret the Constitution.  However, this Constitution is enshrined chattel bondage, whose main purpose is the protection of capitalist property rights. Its most “progressive” part, the Thirteenth Amendment, while abolishing slavery, permits a modern form of slavery — the mass incarceration of mainly black and Latino youth and workers.
In practice, this means that “legal interpretation” of the Constitution is solely a function of the needs of the ruling class in any historical period. At times the Court is used to mediate issues among competing factions of the ruling class, such as President Roosevelt’s efforts in the 1930s to add additional justices when the Court refused to endorse his New Deal programs, or the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000 which settled a disputed election.
The appearance of liberal v. conservative justices is largely a smokescreen. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who led the Court to the Brown decision, was a conservative Republican appointed by Eisenhower. Yet he went on to become the liberal bosses’ darling in a string of cases after the Brown decision was used to expand the “rights of the accused” even as more and more workers were incarcerated.
Similarly the arch-conservative Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal justices in upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare because today’s capitalist class needs to control healthcare costs to fund mounting imperialist wars. The gay marriage cases, though still undecided, are getting extensive coverage because the bosses’ agenda for the military includes limiting overt discrimination in order to win more recruits willing to die for their interests.
Thus, we oppose organizing appeals to the “legal reasoning” or “humanity” of a court system established to crush the working class and maintain ruling-class power. However, just as communists involve themselves in the daily battles of reform struggles, we also involve ourselves in the bosses’ court system. It is one more arena of struggle, although by far not the most important. There are reasons for communists to take tactical advantage of the legal system and to recruit and train legal workers.

(Part II will discuss the political use of the courts as one tool within a mass communist-led campaign, as well as maintaining the necessity to recruit lawyers and legal workers into the Party.)