"This Social Order Must Change Platform," formed to run independent electoral candidates after the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) was banned to run for upcoming general elections on June 24, organised a grand meeting in Turkey’s capital city Ankara on June 8.
Following the performance of the Turkish folk singer Ufuk Karakoç, the independent candidate of the Platform in the 1st electoral district in Ankara, Ali Rıza Aydın, took the floor.
"We live in the world of inequality," Aydın said, "and injustice, racism, religious fundamentalism, reactionism, occupational murders, femicide, child abuse, rape, plunder, the threat of war, unlawfulness, marketism, and exploitation." Aydın maintained his words by underlining that the political parties in Turkey, which are integrated into the capitalist/imperialist system, do not seek to create a change of this social order but to sustain it as long as possible. “This is all they do in the name of politics,” Aydın stated, “repairing.”
Explaining that the TKP, the only party that claimed the right and will to change the capitalist order, was unlawfully pushed out of the elections, Aydın said: “It was thought that the TKP would keep silent, that the struggle would be broken … This social order, the core of which is exploitation, must change. This social order will change. Socialism will prevail.”
After Aydın, the candidate in the 3rd electoral district in Ankara, Özge Aydemir Güney delivered a speech. Güney said: “I am here before you as a communist independent electoral candidate of ‘This Social Order Must Change Platform; as a working woman in the industrial zone; as a mother who is concerned about the future of her children and other women.”
Güney also expressed the awareness that capitalism cannot promise anything good for the people of the world, and maintained: “We have to work unceasingly in order to live in the houses we build, and buy the household goods we manufacture. There are no safe kindergartens we can leave our children mind at peace, and the schools we send them so that they can have a so-called 'secular' education, so that they are not confined to religious vocational schools lead us to unending debts. On top of that, they force our children to enter shady exams in order to get a chance to have the training of a job – not a job that they want, but one that they can find an opportunity to work.”
Stating that it is now an undeniable necessity to change the capitalist order, Güney finalised her words with a call to people: “It is possible to live in an enlightened, equalitarian, and free country only if we organise, my friends. For this, let us first vote for the system change! This social order will be changed by the enlightened people, challenging women, the future-seeking youth of our country – by the working class. We are the ones who produces, the ones who create life itself. We will change this social order!”
The Communist Party of Greece (KKE) also saluted the meeting with a solidarity message. Wishing success to the TKP, the KKE said: “The workers of Greece are with the working people of Turkey. Long live, socialism! This social order must change!”
After the KKE’s message was read, Kemal Okuyan, the General Secretary of the TKP, took to the stage. Stating that they had never met during the electoral works a single person who said that this social order should not change, Okuyan emphasised the fact that the only social order where no one exploits anyone is called communism. “We haven’t seen anyone who objected that, neither has we seen anyone who accepted this social order,” Okuyan said.
Kemal Okuyan maintained: “… if people were asked that whether this social order must change, with an additional question of if the current social order must be changed with what we propose, a large majority answers that the current order must be changed with an equalitarian one. Why should those who want this order to change vote for the order not to change? … The leftists [in Turkey] stopped telling people that this order must change. The leftists in Turkey have come between the system change and the people.”
Underlining that, as long as this situation persists, the left-wing will always have the higher ground, Okuyan stated that it is not possible to be a leftist by delaying the demand of system change, and that it is indispensable to be against imperialism, reactionism, and capitalism to be a leftist.
Finally, Okuyan said: “Our two friends who have just delivered their speech, and the willpower behind them and the effort we put into this is so important that without it, there would not be even a bit of the left-wing and socialism in the elections that is said to be so crucially important. Our duty is to louden the voice that says this social order must change, and increase the number of those who say so. It is not so hard to change the order as thought. We will do whatever we can.”
