The Turkish state, which has been trying to bolster its imperialist hegemony in the Middle East for quite some time, has increased the number of its imperialist interventions in recent years.
These interventions deepened the civil war in Syria, causing many Syrians to migrate to Turkey, which has also been a frequent destination for Afghan and Pakistani immigrants. Next to this, ever-increasing military expenditures necessitated by these imperialist interventions, soaring costs of living due to the pandemic and high inflation, brought people to the edge during what is undeniably a serious economic bottleneck.
Earlier this year saw numerous wildcat strikes throughout the country, all the while voices of dissatisfaction with the government getting ever louder. This also brought the debate among different camps of the opposition as to who will take the helm of the state to a full boil. Right-wing parties and social democrats to a certain degree, as fresh contenders for control of the state apparatus, blame the crisis on “immigration policies”, when not outright on immigrants themselves. Current political climate is marked by an insistence on addressing this crisis with a tried-and-true, inflammatory nationalist rhetoric. Recent public discourse fueled by social hysteria, almost expertly curated using anecdotal images and videos, portray these immigrants as an “invading force” composed entirely of “sexual offenders”, ushering an atmosphere akin to that which caused last year’s Ankara pogrom on August 11, 2021.
Today, it is clear that a danger of a new pogrom is imminent, seen from such incendiary discourse making its way through social media, all the while parties subject to the right and left wings of capital expressing similar demands.
In a setting where social ties are severed to atoms via the nuclear family form, where everyone is for their own, where fetishization of individual instincts and societal decay occur under futurelessness created by capitalism, and where all this is engendered by the inability of the working class to uphold a revolutionary perspective, irrational and sectarian tendencies of all kinds can make ground. "Locals"’ fear of "foreigners", their xenophobic and racist prejudices, their blind, obsessive and hateful rhetoric assumes a social-hysterical character.
In this context, while the scars left by the pogrom of August 11 in Ankara are all too recent, provocations recently witnessed in social media are heralding a new pogrom. This onslaught of incitement signals the danger of the pogrom mentality becoming commonplace at the very heart of today’s capitalism.
Difficulties faced day-to-day by the working class (endless economic crises, COVID, ecological collapse, war in the heart of Europe capable of triggering a world war that may wipe out all of humanity) undermine the capacity of our class to resist and revive its own revolutionary alternative. In such despair, that is, in the absence of a perspective concerning the true nature of capitalist social relations and their inextricable contradictions, a real danger comes in the form of masses seeking scapegoats to blame for the misery of this world. This reactionary attitude, founded on a mythical “golden age”, back when society was “more harmonious”, sees immigrants, and those most affected by the crisis responsible for all problems and presents them as such.
Xenophobia has, of course, a longstanding history. But what we see in capitalism today is the prolific release of the most despicable, vilest instincts into discourse and action. Bourgeoisie takes advantage of the most nauseating and reactionary ideologies while resorting to all kinds of manipulations to reproduce and validate its hegemony through populist rhetoric. The polemic, usually over Afghan, Pakistani, Middle Eastern immigrants but foreigners in the most general sense, is the contemptible reflection of this historical practice of the bourgeoisie seen from today. The state, by way of fueling hysterical social media campaigns and provoking these reactionary and chauvinistic tendencies in every milieu, lends implicit or otherwise direct support to the acts of the bourgeoisie.
What is before us today is an objective threat of scapegoating, fully capable of destroying its victims both physically and mentally.
Images appearing on social media may indeed be quite unsettling for women, already encircled by incessant attacks of patriarchy on their bodies and minds. However, the ruling class, laying all the blame on immigrants through such images, points the finger to not capital, the state or their patriarchal institutions, but to immigrants, as the primary cause of women's increasingly difficult lives, effectively organizing a hysterical provocation concurrent with its historical mission. These images are not to be attributed to any people in any manner. These images are the expression of a decay that encompasses capitalist society, and therefore humanity as a whole, a form of internalized, dominant social relations. Wage labor transforms people into commodities, sexual objects, images for adverts, and this is the real scandal, masked behind the strikingness of the images. Debate between the left and right of the bourgeois political apparatus, especially among purported advocates of "women's rights", only serves to legitimize and reinforce the confusion in the minds of the workers. For this is where the dilemma regarding all struggles for mere “rights” comes into play. Those whose politics emerge from “rights” as defined by bourgeois law, who seldom discuss capitalism and the imperialist war, private property and family, do not see the state or capitalism as their enemy, but immigrant men. The bourgeois left and bourgeois feminist politics both continue to stoke the fires of this pogromist hysteria, the former portraying the immigrant worker as a threat to the class while the latter portrays the immigrant as a threat to all women.
Bourgeois left, using hollow moral categories such as a “prosperous life”, “a western way of life”, “civilized society”, targets the most precarious, insecure part of society, the biggest victims of the imperialist plunder which they are supposedly against, for ostensibly different reasons than open rightists, albeit with identical methods. The state continues to present itself as a guarantor of democracy and national unity while fanning the flames of hatred. The working class has nothing to gain in this swamp where both sides lie abound with nationalist pitfalls. It is an urgent task today for the communists to keep a sharp distance between themselves and those who add fuel to this hysteria whilst using the adjectives socialist and Marxist disingenuously, and to take steps to organize the internationalist action of the working class.
Long live the international solidarity of the workers!
Class against class, communism against capitalism!