Great humanity is a deck passenger on a ship / third class on a train / on foot on the highway / great humanity.
Great humanity goes to work at eight / gets married at twenty / dies at forty / great humanity.
Bread is enough for everyone except great humanity / so is rice / so is sugar / so is cloth
/ so is the book / enough for everyone but great humanity.
There is no shadow on the soil of great humanity / lantern in the street / glass in the window
/ but great humanity has hope / one cannot live without hope.
The revolutionary poet Nazım Hikmet, in his poem ‘Great Humanity’, emphasizes that the working class, to whom he gives examples from his life, should only have hope despite everything and that one cannot live without hope.
Due to the end of the year, the economic crisis in the country in general and the multifaceted policy of intimidation in particular, there is great despair about the future in all segments of society, especially among public laborers.
In these bad conditions, those who are optimistic, who look at life with a smile, who always see the glass half full, who continue their struggle for democracy and socialism like an ant, who look to the future with hope, and who continue on their way after every defeat without taking a step back from their determination to struggle, can either not be understood by the frustrated-hopeless masses or can be accused of ‘Pollyannism’.
We believe that the cause of frustration and despair is not looking at the world as a whole, not interpreting the historical process sufficiently and not understanding the achievements of ‘Great Humanity'.
At this point, we would like to emphasize two points;
First, it is the philosophical, economic, historical and sociological interpretation of the world, and the formulation of coherent explanations based on this interpretation.
In this sense, we can say that Marxism offers a coherent set of explanations. Marxism was able to combine the accumulated knowledge in many disciplines, from science to philosophy, from history to political economy, until the 19th century.
The emergence of Marxism in the 19th century was not a coincidence, but the result of the developments of those years. The enlightenment thought that emerged with the end of medieval darkness, developments in technology, the capitalist system that began to form with the liquidation of feudalism, and finally the disappearance of the aristocracy, which was the product of feudalism, and the formation of new social classes on the periphery of the capitalist class and the working class, triggered the emergence of new ideas.
Marxism critically analyzed the previous understandings of political economy, philosophy and socialism into a coherent explanation.
Political economy sought to reveal the source, dynamics and basic components of capitalist production. Philosophy sought to answer the question of the progress of history, the relationship between people's material living conditions and thought, and what kind of future awaits humanity, based on the radical transformations that Europe underwent at the time.
The understanding of socialism, on the other hand, has sought to remedy the inequality and impoverishment created by capitalism and has tried to develop models that propose an end to these phenomena.
Marxism, through a critical synthesis of these three currents of thought, has put forward an analysis of social formation. Accordingly, productive forces and means of production give rise to capitalist relations of production. Capitalist relations of production are organized around capital and the working class and a mode of production is formed. This mode of production triggers and conditions structures and super-structural institutionalizations. After the emergence of the capitalist mode of production, feudal structures and superstructural institutions do not suddenly disappear. It not only creates its own superstructural institutions but also articulates and transforms some of the old-style superstructural institutions.
In Marxism, the source of class struggle is the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production. This contradiction is the source of the conflict between the working class and capital. Class struggle is the driving force of history.
The Marxist analysis of social formation reveals a unity of structure and superstructure. What is at stake in this unity is not that the structure determines the superstructure one-to-one, but that it points to the conditions under which the elements of the superstructure will take shape and in which direction they will develop and change. There is no doubt that superstructural institutions such as the state, politics and law can sometimes trigger important processes and open various channels for these processes. However, it is still the structure that is ultimately decisive.
According to Marxism, the historical process takes the form of economically based social formations producing their opposites over time, and as the opposites gradually turn into conflict, the new formation eliminates the old one.
The gains achieved as a result of class struggles since its emergence, although set back by the collapse of the real socialist system in the 1990s, are not gains to be underestimated. Rights such as the right to work, the right to organize, wages, social insurance, severance pay, notice pay, the right to look for work, annual paid leave, overtime pay, weekends, rest breaks, public holidays and holidays, compensation for material and moral damages, the right to reinstatement. These gains have demonstrated the importance of the determined continuation of the class struggle in winning the future of the working class and those at the bottom.
As a result of the logic of the profit-oriented functioning of the capitalist system, it is a reality that has been tested and revealed in the historical process that it will constantly experience periodic and structural crises, that it is not possible to provide material and moral welfare to the majority of society, and that people will be alienated from the system and themselves.
In this case, it is out of the question for an individual who knows the reality that all living and non-living beings in the world affect and transform each other through a dialectical process in the historical process under the guidance of Marxism, and who is aware that he or she is a part of the working class, to fall into a feeling of despair. Because the historical process has flowed, is flowing and will continue to flow in favor of workers, laborers and oppressed classes.
Secondly, independent of Marxism, if we consider what human civilization has achieved from the past to the present, how it has overcome problems, overcome deadly diseases, and made human life easier, it is necessary to see that humanity has solved and will continue to solve these problems despite the problems such as globalization, wars, nationalism, religious bigotry, climate change, genocide, hunger, and economic exploitation.
On this subject, four world-renowned thinkers, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Alain de Botton and Malcolm Gladwell, present some important data in a discussion entitled ‘Will the future bring better days?.
Steven Pinker, one of these thinkers, has made some observations about life.
These findings are summarized as follows;
-İnsan hayatı gittikçe uzuyor. Bir buçuk asır önce insan ömrü ortalama otuz yıldı. Bugün yetmiş yıl. Bu yükseliş durma belirtileri göstermiş de değil. İnsan sağlığı konusunda devasa gelişmeler sağlandı. Kitlesel ölümlere yol açan çiçek hastalığı ve sığır vebası ortadan kalkmış durumda. Refah seviyesi oldukça yükseldi. İki yüzyıl önce, dünya nüfusunun %85’i aşırı yoksulluk içinde yaşıyordu. Bugün bu oran %10’un altına indi. Birleşmiş Milletlere göre 2030’da sıfırlanabilir. İnsan etkinliklerinin en yıkıcısı savaşlar azalıyor. İç savaşlar devam ediyor ama onlar da devletlerarası savaşlara oranla daha az yıkıcı. Ayrıca sayıları da azaldı. Bütün dünyada şiddet suçları düşüyor. Dünyanın önde gelen suçbilimcilerinin hesaplarına göre otuz yıl içinde cinayet oranları yarı yarıya düşecek.
Tek tük ülkelerdeki irtifa kayıplarına rağmen, küresel demokrasi endeksi hiç olmadığı seviyelerde. Dünya nüfusunun %60’ı artık açık toplumlarda yaşıyor ki bu oran hiç bu kadar yüksek olmamıştı. 1820’de insanların %17’si temel eğitime sahipti. Bugün bu oran %82 ve oran hızla%100 doğru yükseliyor. Devam etmekte olan küresel seferberliklerin hedefleri arasında çocuk işçiliği, idam cezası, kadınlara şiddet, kadın sünneti, eşcinselliğin normal sayılması ve insan ticareti gibi konular var. Her birinde önemli mesafeler kat edildi. Küresel verilerin gösterdiğine göre kadınlar artık daha iyi eğitim alıyor, daha geç evleniyor, daha çok kazanıyor, güçlü ve etkili konumlara daha çok geliyorlar. Dünyanın her yerinde IQ her on yılda üç puan artıyor.
As a result, developments such as the increase in human life expectancy, the progress made in human health, the rise in the level of prosperity, the absence of inter-state wars, the fall in crime rates, the rise in the global democracy index, the increase in the proportion of people with basic education to % 100s, the achievement of gender freedom, the progress achieved in human rights, and the rise in average IQ levels clearly show that the future of humanity is looking up.
These developments, which facilitate human life, increase the possibilities of living humanely, increase the individual rights of human beings and the collective rights of human communities, and the set of explanations that Marxism offers for the past and the future, require us to be hopeful about the future of humanity.
But great humanity has hope / one cannot live without hope...