The state cannot defend itself by committing murder!

Vijay Prashad is an Indian Marxist intellectual, historian, and author. In his wonderful book titled Red Star Over the Third World, published by Yordam Kitap, there is a passage that reads as follows:

“According to the Germans, Lenin was saddened that the 1918-19 German uprising could not create a social revolution. In October, a million German workers went on strike and established the Rate (councils), the German equivalent of the Soviets. The sailors of the main German fleet in Wilhelmshaven refused to weigh anchor. This mutiny of the sailors chilled the imperial German monarchy to the bone. Their slogan, again inspired by the Soviets, was Frieden und Brot (Peace/Freedom and Bread). The spread of this revolution led to the abdication of the minor German monarchs and finally the emperor himself. The social democrats declared a republic but prevented the progress of the revolution using trickery and violence. The founding of the Communist Party of Germany in late 1918 was the result of this revolutionary move and the betrayal of the social democrats. A mass demonstration held on January 5, 1919, brought hundreds of thousands of people together in Berlin to declare a revolutionary government. Unlike in Russia, the soldiers in Germany did not march on the masses; they remained loyal to Friedrich Ebert’s social democratic government. The two leaders of the Communist Party, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered ten days later. The revolution failed.” (pp. 16-17)

The relentless struggle and conflict between social democrats and Marxists in Germany, which ended bloodily in favor of the former, did not go down in history as a victory for the people. The first lesson we learn from this historical story is that social democracy is used as a shield against socialism and people's power. The concept and phenomenon of people's power do not abstractly contain a state-like quality. This is because the nature of the state does not stem from its own essence, but from the class character of the economic system it is responsible for protecting, and it is defined in that context. The second lesson to be drawn from this narrative is that while it is certain that the power that murdered the leaders of the German Communist Party, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were state agents, the undeniable reality in the background of this image is the existence of capital, the true owner of the system. Thus, while capital protects and maintains its own interests through the state, this brutality committed against the people is legitimized under the rhetoric of maintaining the system, while at the same time, it absolves itself of the crime.

Although such murders are recorded in official documents as “unsolved,” the whole world knows who committed the murder and who instigated it, and despite the powerful flow of time that dissolves everything and erases memories, it never forgets and never lets it be forgotten. Because such murders are committed against the people, while their perpetrators are cursed, their victims are etched into memories as folk heroes. Interestingly, states, even at the risk of going down in history with the stain of this crime, continue their function of protecting and shielding the exploitative capital and imperialism that have actually settled over the people, all in the name of the fraud of “protecting the system and social order,” with a great sense of loyalty. Bourgeois states, equipped with the function of acting as the watchmen of national capital in the nation-state era and international capital today, continue to maintain this sacred function by mobilizing all ideological and repressive state apparatuses. How long will this sacred duty continue? Until the dawn breaks, heralding the awakening of the people who have become aware of the capital-politics cooperation against them!

March 3 is the anniversary of the adoption of three important laws of the Republic. One of these laws is the law that transferred the caliphate to the authority of the parliament, allowing power to pass to the representatives of the people; the second is the Law on the Abolition of the Ministry of Sharia and Foundations; and the third is the Law on Unification of Education. All three of these laws mandated that the Republic be based on the principle of secularism and that a uniform education system be established nationwide through secular education. In addition, the social state quality added to our constitution is a document of the fundamental identity of the constitution and the state. Although the fundamental identity of the state is defined within the framework of the social state principle, the fact that economic moves could not be made at the required level has disrupted social policies. The source of this deficiency is also capital, because the state must carry out social policy applications not with its own will, but with what remains from the resources that capital draws from value-added into accumulation. It was unimaginable for a state that acts in line with the interests of capital even in allocating sufficient resources to social democratic policies to turn toward people's power.

Twenty years ago, on another March 3, an unsolved murder similar to the one in Germany was committed in Turkey. Önder Babat, a law student, was shot in the back of the head and killed in a manner similar to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, as if a copy were being played out. The struggle for justice, which was dragged out and kept in limbo for twenty years, thank goodness (!) reached the statute of limitations, and capital and all its supporters breathed a sigh of relief. The handle of the axe is made of wood; if the liver is handed over to the cat, no different result will emerge!

If murder is a crime, regardless of by whom or in whose name it is committed—and this definition is included in the relevant penal code adopted by the parliament itself—finding those responsible is a very fundamental public duty. Turning a blind eye to the statute of limitations on a crime raises questions about who a public power that does not fulfill this duty receives votes from and whom it protects, either covertly or overtly. No state, no state that has dedicated itself to service by standing with the people and has received votes from the people with this rhetoric, can be exempted from the public duty of finding the criminal and delivering them to justice for any reason.