Contribution of the Communist Party of Turkey

Contribution to ECA Conference on 28th of September 2024
On TKP’s Work within the Youth

When the history of the socialist movement in Turkey is analysed, it is seen that the youth has always carried an important role in that history. For TKP as well, its organisation within the youth has occupied a important place in the party organisation for many years and constituted one of the most important cadre resources of the TKP.

Although the average age of the population of Turkey has relatively increased in recent years, it still draws attention with its young population compared to many European countries.

Some statistics on the population, which TKP also takes into consideration in its work, are as follows:

- Approximately 23 per cent of Turkey's population is composed of young people between the ages of 15 and 30. In other words, 20 million young people live in our country.
- The proportion of university students among the young population is about 40 per cent. However, a significant portion of university students have to work at the same time as studying. Nearly half of the entire young population works in temporary jobs in the service
sector and in jobs that do not require specific qualifications.
- 10 per cent of young people drop out of school. Only 25 per cent of these are due to academic failure. The rest are due to economic reasons or pressure from some Islamist families.
- The proportion of young people who are neither in education nor in employment is around 30 per cent, and suicide rates among these population are on the rise.
- Drug use is increasing not only among university youth but also among high school and secondary school students.

On the one hand, these conditions make it difficult for capitalism to convince young people politically and ideologically. On the other hand, the hopelessness and pessimism about their future led by these conditions cause the youth to become ‘lost’ unless a strong intervention is made.

Our party is structuring its interventions within the youth with the party identity and carrying out under the name of Communist Youth of Turkey in a way to respond to these conditions.

In this context,
- We are raising the demand for state ownership in critical sectors to eliminate the economic difficulties that cause students to drop out of their education, especially due to the housing problem.
- We are organising a long-standing campaign against drug addiction at universities and high schools.
- We expose the political dimensions of the obstacles to the participation of young people in economic life (high unemployment rates and the cadreisation of the government in public institutions).
- We struggle against the imposition of a religious reactionary curriculum in high schools that is completely unscientific and we develop alternatives to compensate for this situation with our own organised power.
- We fight against the exploitation of vocational high school students as a source of cheap labour.

Although the effects of impoverishment, commercialisation in education and reactionism on the youth constitute the main agendas for our organisation within the youth, one of the important tests for youth organisations in our country today, similar to the world, is to
overcome the tendency to compress student movements only to the union/academic field.

In Turkey, due to the conditions listed above, various protests, large and small, are taking place in different regions and universities of the country. However, when these reactions cannot be combined with a common and strong political discourse, then they only deal with
the problems on the surface and do not bring students closer to becoming a strong political subject.

In fact, almost all of these weak reactions, which do not give strength to each other, stem from the confrontation of young people with the macro-level consequences of the capitalist system, such as privatisation, the dominance of monopolies and the religious sects in
economic and social life. Initiatives that lack such a wholistic approach, no matter how much they mobilise young people, lead to apoliticism and make the young people distance themselves from the political parties.

Youth organisations, which are confined to the field of youth policy, are affected by current developments very much and often negatively under the current conditions. Mobilisations within the youth that can be seen from time to time may lead to the emergence of mass youth organisations. And TKP sometimes established such mass affiliated organisations itself, and sometimes it carried out work in interaction with the existing ones. However, when these mobilisations are withdrawn, it is seen that mass youth organisations that have a loose organizational structure cannot maintain their existence.

The difference of the communist youth organisations from the youth organisations that are stuck in a narrow sense in youth agendas is that they do not equate themselves to those spontaneous mobilizations. The youth movement cannot be created by our organisations.
However, our communist youth organisations should have a political character that can creatively direct such mobilisations within the youth by developing various tools and channels for intervention. This is where the importance of the party identity of the youth
organisation of the TKP comes from. It is this identity that protects young communists from only being relied on the path of the students movement and will historically connect them to the struggle in the periods when mobilisation is weaker.

In order for communist youth organisations to continue their struggle effectively and to increase their ability to intervene in possible student movements, they must not lose their claim to speak not only on behalf of the youth but also on behalf of society and the working class. When we look at the periods in the history of Turkey and the world in which the youth have left their mark, we can see how important this claim is. In almost all of the meaningful examples in our history, we see that the youth stood up together with the working class, not as an independent actor on their own. This will continue to be the case in the future.

The objective circumstances of the youth in Turkey further reinforce the conditions for this. The ‘semi-intellectual’ character of the youth in our country has gradually weakened. Starting from high school age, the obligation to work at the same time as studying has gradually
reduced the free time of young people and their relationship with campuses, and the working class character has become more dominant.

TKP updates its political practices and priorities in youth organisation in line with this reality. The preparation of the Communist Youth of Turkey is not only to lead the organisation of current reactions by responding to the questioning within the youth, but also to ensure that these reactions become long-term permanent contributions to the struggle for socialism. At a time when the working class movement is on the rise, it is trying to ensure that organised young communists are equipped with a class character that will enable them to take the lead and add dynamism to it. In doing so, we emphasise that it should be kept in mind that the forms of the student struggle that will energise the total revolutionary struggle runs parallel to the working class struggle.