By International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International
24 June 2024. One year after his death, IDP (Workers’ Democracy Party), the Turkish section of the IWU-FI held an act of remembrance (photo) for comrade and leader, Muhittin Karkın.
He died on 24 June 2023 at 73. He was born in 1950, had two sons and a granddaughter. The founder of Trotskyism in Turkey, he was a member of the Central Committee of the Workers’ Democracy Party (IDP).
We once again recall his revolutionary and internationalist militancy. He was a trade union leader in the 1970s. In 1972, he became a Trotskyist and until 1979 he was a member of the Fourth International (Unified Secretariat-SU), headed by Ernest Mandel. He broke with the Mandelist current at the 1979 congress held in Paris. On the eve of that congress, the current headed by Nahuel Moreno, which was also in the IV-SU with the Bolshevik Fraction (FB), broke with the IV (SU). Its leadership, in the hands of Mandelism and the SWP of the United States, supported the expulsion from Nicaragua of the Simon Bolivar Brigade. The bourgeois government of class conciliation of the Sandinista Daniel Ortega and Violeta Chamorro carried this expulsion out in August 1979. Mandelism supported this measure and defined this government as “a worker and a peasant one.”
From then on, Muhittin Karkin joined Morenoism, though he could never meet Nahuel Moreno. That same year, Muhittin headed the foundation of a Trotskyist organisation in Turkey, the Workers’ Front. In 1980, he was imprisoned by the then ruling dictatorship for being a trade union leader and a Trotskyist. He was sentenced to death twice, but his sentence was suspended, and he was in jail for 4 years.
After his release, he reorganised the Trotskyist movement in Turkey. In 1992, he founded, together with other comrades, a Morenoist group that edited the magazine “International Bulletin” in a tough situation because of the repression.
For his internationalism, he continued his revolutionary militancy in the Spanish State for almost 20 years, from the second half of the 1990s until 2017. First in the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (PRT) and then in Internationalist Struggle (LI), today a section of the IWU-FI.
In 2010, Internationalist Struggle and IDP contacted IWU-FI and eventually both integrated with it in 2014. In 2017, Muhittin Karkin returned to Turkey and re-joined the IDP and its Central Committee.
Muhittin Karkin dedicated his life to the reconstruction of the Fourth International, confronting the opportunist and sectarian currents, in the last years from the IWU-FI. Passionate about the labour movement and its struggles, he also took part in the political elaboration of the IDP and the IWU-FI with various written works in his long career. He has contributed articles like “The Ukrainian question and the revolutionary Marxist attitude” (IC N°49, March 2022) and “Turkey: a historic election” (IC N°52, April 2023).
His trajectory and his legacy as a consistent revolutionary socialist will remain an example for the present and future militancy of the IDP and the IWU-FI.
Comrade Muhittin Karkin, Hasta el socialismo siempre! (Rest in Power)
International Workers’ Unity – Fourth International
24 June 2024
