From 1940s America to Turkey in 2009: A Stalinist political tradition

In my article entitled A political lesson from America in the 1940s, published on 9 September 2026, I compared the positions taken by the Stalinist Communist Party USA and the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in response to state repression during the 1940s.

Let us briefly recall what happened. In the early 1940s, the Stalinist Communist Party welcomed the Roosevelt administration’s attack on the SWP under the Smith Act and gave it its open and vociferous support. Rather than answering the Trotskyists through political struggle, it relied on the FBI, prosecutors and the courts. Yet when the same law was used against the Communist Party itself a few years later, the SWP -despite what the Stalinists had previously done to it- unconditionally defended them against state repression.

SWP members targeted by the FBI, tried and convicted, on their way to prison to begin serving their sentences, 31 December 1943.

At first sight, this episode may appear to offer a political lesson from the distant past of a distant country. Yet we need not look as far back as 1940s America to encounter a similar attitude. An episode from our own recent history, which took place in Turkey in 2009, offers -albeit on a far more modest scale- another example of the same Stalinist political tradition operating under different circumstances.

Answering political criticism through the courts

In February 2009, Sungur Savran published an article on the website Mavi Defter entitled Yalçın Küçük and Veli Küçük, or Who Are the Zionists’ True Friends? (Yalçın Küçük ve Veli Küçük ya da Siyonistlerin gerçek dostları kimlerdir?) [In Turkish]. In it, Savran sharply criticised the Stalinist writer Yalçın Küçük for his defence of Ergenekon and advocacy of military coups, as well as for praising figures such as Veli Küçük and Hurşit Tolon, whose names had been linked to unsolved murders and preparations for military coups.

Yalçın Küçük does not answer Savran’s allegations in a political article or attempt to refute them with evidence. Instead, claiming that the article violated his personal rights and insulted him, he brings a lawsuit against Savran seeking 10,000 lira in non-pecuniary damages.

Sungur Savran

The court ultimately rules in Yalçın Küçük’s favour. Thus, a debate that should have been conducted within Marxism on the political and theoretical plane is not merely taken before the courts of the bourgeois order; through its judgment, the court also imposes a legal limit on political criticism.

As Savran noted in his written submission to the court, fierce polemics within the socialist movement were nothing new. It was for Küçük to refute the accusations against him through counter-arguments, evidence and political analysis. Instead, he turned a question that should have been settled through political and intellectual debate into a legal matter, choosing to use a claim for damages based on alleged insult as a weapon against his political opponent.

Two forms of the same political reflex

Of course, the position taken by the Communist Party USA in 1941 and Yalçın Küçük’s actions in 2009 were not exactly the same. The American Stalinists applauded a criminal prosecution initiated by the state that resulted in the imprisonment of Trotskyists. Yalçın Küçük, by contrast, himself turned to a bourgeois court over a political dispute within Marxism. In the first case, the Stalinists supported an attack initiated by the state; in the second, a Stalinist himself set the bourgeois court in motion.

Yet this important difference does not negate the fundamental continuity between the two positions. In both cases, rather than answering a political disagreement through political struggle, assistance was sought from the bourgeois state’s repressive and judicial apparatus. The state was turned into the arbiter of a dispute within the workers’ movement and the socialist left, with the aim of silencing or punishing a political opponent through prosecutors and courts rather than political argument.

Yalçın Küçük

The issue here, of course, is not whether Yalçın Küçük had the right under bourgeois law to bring such a case. The question that really needs to be asked is a political one: how should a writer who describes himself as a Marxist and a revolutionary respond to criticism from another Marxist that, however harsh, is entirely political in character? By presenting counter-evidence and engaging in open political struggle, or by obtaining a ruling from the bourgeois courts?

Küçük chose the latter. This choice was the counterpart, in the realm of method, to the increasingly pronounced social-chauvinist, militarist and statist orientation he was developing at the time. Rather than responding on the political plane to Savran’s criticisms of Ergenekon, the advocacy of military coups and the state, Küçük avoided engaging with the substance of the criticism and instead used a bourgeois court to have his critic ordered to pay damages.

An unchanging tradition

Nearly seventy years separate 1940s America from Turkey in 2009. The countries, the historical circumstances and the legal instruments employed are different. Yet the political reflex evident in both cases is strikingly similar: whenever Stalinist politics finds itself unable to confront Trotskyism on the intellectual and political plane, it turns to the bourgeois state and its courts.

The attempt to “resolve” political disagreements within the workers’ movement with the assistance of the state is not an accidental aberration from the Stalinist political tradition, but one of its defining features. It is precisely here that the historical continuity lies between the Communist Party USA’s applause for the state’s attack on the SWP and Yalçın Küçük’s decision to take Sungur Savran to court.