As the state of emergency regime of Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP steps up its persecution of working class and Kurdish opposition, two prominent leaders of the younger generation of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party (DIP) have been submitted to persecution. Levent Dölek, Deputy Chairperson of DIP and a lecturer at the Faculty of Economics of Istanbul University, was among a group of social fighters at the university who were expelled from their posts by a government decree. Mert Kükrer, on the other hand, a leader of the Ankara branch of the party and research assistant and doctoral candidate at the Middle East Technical University of Ankara, was, for a second time, threatened by the administration of his university with expulsion in an act that blatantly makes opportunistic use of the state of emergency reigning in the country since the failed coup of 15 July this year.
Tayyip Erdogan signs Law Decree that expels Levent and colleagues from their posts
Levent Dölek and his colleagues were sacked through a Decree Law passed by none other than the council of ministers meeting under the chairmanship of Tayyip Erdogan. They were charged with the laughable crime of their supposed link to a terrorist organisation The true reason for the sacking of Levent and his colleagues is clear to all who know the situation at Istanbul University. Levent was one of the most prominent leaders of a very militant movement back in 2008-2009 fighting for the job security of research assistants at the university. At a certain stage of the struggle, the movement went so far as to occupy overnight a lecture hall in the Faculty of Science building, as well as doing the same with the office of the president of the university on another day.
They won their cause on the basis of the strength of the mass movement. Many of the members of the so-called “Committee of Representatives”, the body that the movement generated democratically from within its bosom with each representative acting as the spokesperson of the research assistants of the various units of the university, have now, belatedly, been sacked!
Of course, Levent’s fight was not confined to this particular incident nor to the specific struggle of his own category within the work force. Apart from his regular day-to-day work at the party, Levent has been a very active member of his union, the “university branch” of the Education Workers’ Union, the only progressive public employee union organised in educational institutions across the country. He was the shop steward for the union for the central campus of the university. He was and still is also ceaselessly involved with workers’ struggles not only in Istanbul, where he works and lives, but all around the country. He was always on the picket line when the sub-contracted workers of his own university, doing regular jobs but employed on the basis of extremely precarious and low-paying labour contracts, waged struggles for their rights. He was also constantly moving to and fro between the many industrial basins of the country, from Bursa to Manisa and from Kocaeli to Düzce, to help industrial workers organise and fight. He was present in all the major recent episodes of class struggle in Turkey, playing a significant part in the formidable wildcat strike movement of metalworkers in which tens of thousands of workers of the major car factories and other metallurgical workplaces participated in spring and summer 2015.
Nor was his militant activity confined to class struggle in the strict sense of the term. He was constantly on the side of the students when they staged an action under the very repressive regime of the university and tried to protect them from the ferocious attacks waged on them by the private security guard of the university and by riot police. Only recently, he was on the front line, together with two of his colleagues (who, predictably, have now also been sacked!), trying to avert police violence against the students of Istanbul University, who were trying to stage a protest action on the anniversary of the 10 October 2015 suicide bombing incident at a union demonstration in Ankara last year that killed more than a hundred people, organised by ISIL under the benevolent gaze of the AKP government.
All this of course did not escape the attention of the university administration nor of the government.
The government uses its practically unlimited powers to enact Decree Laws through which the purported adepts of the Gulen fraternity, held responsible for the failed coup of 15 July, have been expelled in their thousands and tens of thousands from public office. It has lately become the norm to extend this to those public employees that are suspected of affinity to the Kurdish movement, if only because they participated in some strike action by public employee unions to protest the blatant violations of human rights in the Kurdish region. More recently, the names of left-wing militants or plain social fighters started to be hidden within the thick web of the thousands of names of Gulen followers. Levent and his colleagues fell prey to this abominable tactic of the government, creating a ridiculous amalgam between its former allies the conservative religious Gulen fraternity and atheist Marxists who have always fought the Gulen current as well as the reactionary AKP. In Levent’s case, the comic element was further heightened by the fact that the president of the university and his entourage, who in all probability drew up the list of leftists to be expelled, are suspected Gulenists!
Of course, it is never easy to gag a militant Marxist who believes in his or her cause. The government’s move has backfired in the immediate aftermath of the expulsion decree. With only three or four days behind since the expulsion, Levent and some of his colleagues have been brought under the limelight, with TV and newspaper interviews, millions of entries in their social media accounts, all resulting in an immense interest in Levent’s unrepentant insistence on the necessity to fight this government and its regime of state of emergency. On 3 November, several days after the Decree Law in question was published in the Official Gazette, a big demonstration, called by many mass organisations and the student body, was held on the public square in front of the main campus of the university, where Levent and a woman student from DIP were two of the three speakers. (See video of Levent’s talk at youtube or below, with subtitles translated into English.)
Levent, with the support of the whole party, is fighting to explain to the working class, in its majority supporters of Tayyip Erdogan for reasons we have explained elsewhere, that the state of emergency regime is more and more turning into a regime of onslaught against the working class. If cases like the expulsion of Levent and his colleagues were not sufficient grounds to make this claim, the undeniable evidence comes from the same Decree Law in question. The government has been sounding for some months, dating from before the failed coup, the possibility of privatising the coal pits of Zonguldak. Never mind the scandalous nature of such an initiative in a country that went through the Soma tragedy, where 303 miners of a private coal producing firm, a majority on sub-contract labour, died in a work-related “accident”, more aptly called a profit-seeking massacre, only two years ago! This, in fact, was what the miners of Zonguldak reminded the government on 14 July, one day only before the failed coup, when they marched in a powerful demonstration against privatisation. The Decree Law that expelled Levent has also expelled the fighting workers end engineers, i.e the vanguard of the class, in the Zonguldak pits! If there is any terrorism in this act, it is certainly the violence of the capitalist government against the working class!
State of emergency opportunism and Mert’s fightback
The case of Mert Kükrer, the other DIP leader currently being persecuted, is somewhat more complex, but again typical in embodying a different aspect of the present period of struggles, what we at DIP call “state of emergency opportunism”. Here again, as in Levent’s case, the story goes back in time.
For several years now, Mert has been the organising secretary of the Ankara “university branch” of the above-mentioned Education Union (the reason this union is not called a Teachers’ Union is that it is not one, i.e. it is not a professional union, but throws its net wide to organise all employees in the education sector). In that capacity, he was the main organiser of a very powerful strike movement at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in December 2014. This strike brought together workers of different categories, from university teachers to cafeteria workers and from administrative staff to toilet cleaners. For three days, more than one thousand workers joined a strike on economic matters that bound all these categories together. This was probably the best-organised strike with the highest participation seen at universities since the fateful military junta of 1980.
The university administration did not linger long to strike back. In spring 2015, disciplinary action was taken against Mert, along with another colleague, a lab technician. The punishment requested was expulsion from public office. This is precisely the executive (i.e. non-judicial) punishment given to Levent. It is a very aggravated punishment for the simple reason that the person cannot apply for any other jobs in the public sector, even as a janitor, for instance. There are further consequences, e.g. one cannot exercise the profession of lawyer because that has been accorded the status of a public function. Mert and his colleague decided to fight back by picketing the office of the president of the university. They set up a tent right in front of the office, spending 17 days and nights picketing. There were many support actions staged by university teachers, administrative staff, manual workers, students etc. throughout this period.
METU happens to be the symbol among Turkish universities of glorious days of struggle in the past. So the going was hard for the administration, which tried to posture as the successor to all the struggles of the 1960s and the 1970s. The peak of the movement came during the commencement (i.e. graduation) exercises. The students carried many placards reading “Hands off my teacher!” and opened a gigantic banner expressing solidarity with Mert and his fellow picketer. And a full half of the entire student body turned its back on the president of the university as he was making his address to the crowd gathered!
No wonder the university administration (and the Higher Education Board, a very reactionary supra-university body created by the military junta of the 1980s and charged with this type of disciplinary matter) went into reverse gear! The dossier was silently shelved. Apparently, though, only to be rehashed when circumstances were more conducive to repressive measures. Mert was again referred for disciplinary action some 20 days ago with the same demand for expulsion from public office.
This is precisely what we call “state of emergency opportunism”, when public administration bodies other than the government itself use the political atmosphere born of the existence of this state of exception for repressive ends in matters that have no relation whatsoever to the prosecution and punishing of the perpetrators of the failed coup. (We distinguish this from the government’s use of the same state of emergency powers to attack the Kurdish movement or the workers’ movement because in that case the two are inextricably welded in the same strategy of eliminating Erdogan’s opponents.) The METU administration waited a full one and a half years in total inaction before bringing Mert’s expulsion on the agenda once again now, simply because the state of emergency, not in any legal sense, but in a politico-psychological manner, has created a more repressive atmosphere. And these respectable professors profess to be opponents of Erdogan’s “dictatorial” ambitions and the destruction of secularism! When it comes to crushing the struggles of the working masses, they willingly extend a hand of cooperation to him.
Mert and the Ankara comrades decided to raise the stakes by once more picketing the office of the university president. This action has now won the cause after a fortnight of struggle.
The disciplinary committee (in actual fact the steering committee) of the university, in what turned out to be a tense and conflict-ridden discussion, has refused to endorse the administration’s demand of Mert’s expulsion from public office. Victory!
There is no doubt that this victory is, first and foremost, the fruit of Mert’s resistance, with a tent set up in front of the university president’s office for a total of 33 days in two different stages of the struggle in the summer of 2015 and recently. However, international support from many prominent academics and public intellectuals of many different countries of the world in the form of petitions has also had its impact on the METU administration, traditionally very conscious of its international standing. Here the contribution of our Greek and Italian comrades also played a significant part. We reproduce the two international petitions signed during the two stages of the struggle as an appendix hereto.
Of course, Mert, no less than Levent, has always been inside and usually at the forefront of countless workers’ struggles in the past. He participated in most of the picket lines or the occasional workplace occupations organised in Ankara in protest against this or that attack by bosses on the working class. Most importantly, he was feverishly active during the 72-day “Sakarya Commune”, an appellation that we at DIP use for the tent city set up in the heart of Ankara late 2009 and early 2010 by the workers of Tekel (the state enterprise that used to produce tobacco products and alcoholic drinks until it was privatised). Mert was in constant touch with the tents of the different regions, coordinated the work of DIP militants that were provisionally sent from other cities to Ankara in order to assist the workers’ struggle, many spending the nights in tents together with the workers, and regularly put out party leaflets (some twenty in all) that assessed the evolving situation and tried to show the way forward to the workers in very discreet language, which were then widely distributed throughout the tents.
It is embedded in the political traditions of the Turkish bourgeois state to punish severely such intellectuals, since the bourgeoisie knows full well that the unity forged between Marxism and the working class is incendiary stuff. Levent and Mert are now receiving their share of this punishment, whereas we of the older generation were submitted to similar persecution during the military junta of the early 1980s and its reactionary sequel that was for a long time a repressive regime under civil parliamentary disguise. However, for a very long time, for decades now, it was the leaders, the cadres, even the rank and file of the Kurdish movement that suffered the worst repression, crossing over into naked massacres. A new generation of Marxist fighters have now compelled the bourgeoisie to turn once again to persecuting revolutionary working-class activists.
Spasmodic development
So the government is now at war with everyone! Not only is it ferociously attacking the Gulen fraternity, but it is trying to gag all opposition to itself. The paper Cumhuriyet, one that could be very broadly described as the counterpart of Le Monde or The Guardian or Il Corriere della Sera in the local context, is now being harassed with raids and the arrest of a dozen journalists. Overall 130 media outlets have been shut down. And things are deteriorating by the day. The government is also at war with the Middle East, raising the stakes by the day in both Syria and Iraq.
After the coup, Erdogan found himself almost isolated internationally and without the firm support of any of the repressive organs of the Turkish state domestically. But once again, as back in 2013, when Erdogan was shaken by the twin earthquakes of the Gezi popular rebellion and the corruption scandals, or in 2015, when he lost the elections in June and faced the terrible prospect of prosecution for corruption, his former enemies from within the ranks of the bourgeoisie have come to his help. The so-called “National Consensus” of parties, supposedly established to defend democracy in the face of the coup attempt (!), brought together the AKP not only with the fascist MHP, but with the party of Ataturk, the CHP as well, gave him a new lease of life. Three months later, having consolidated his power once again after a shaky beginning in the wake of the coup, Erdogan is now more and more prepared to abandon the CHP, whereas he has established a very close anti-Kurdish chauvinistic alliance with the fascist leader of the MHP. His star once again seems to be rising. This new alliance may give him the executive presidency he has so long yearned for and practised de facto since taking over the largely ceremonial office of the president of the republic in 2014. Rabiism, the Sunni sectarian project of the AKP of dominating the Arab world and beyond, is feverishly working to open up spaces for the “Rais” (the Leader) in the Middle East.
However, there are also immense difficulties. Erdogan is playing with fire in Iraq and Syria. In effect he is playing the game of the Saudi rentier state by fanning the flames of a war with Iran, which can only take the form of Islamic fratricide between the Sunni and the Shia. Domestically, the failed coup of the summer still remains shrouded in mystery. Many indicators suggest that the top brass, the intelligence agency (MIT) and even a part of the AKP organisation may have initially supported the coup initiative but desisted at the last moment. This implies that there is profound unease with the way Erdogan handles both domestic matters and international relations. One reason for the support a majority of the working class extends to Erdogan is the rather steady growth of the economy up until the recent period. But now crisis looms large in the horizon. Layoffs may fan the repressed anger of the working class in the face of a systematic policy of the destruction of workers’ previous gains and rights and, most importantly, their job security, a policy that has continued under the AKP, owes its origins to the military junta.
So the decisive battles are ahead. We must be ready for a succession of rapidly changing circumstances, of the kind Trotsky spoke about in The Third International After Lenin regarding the world situation in the transitional age when a rapid succession of contrasting political conjunctures was, to his mind, the rule rather than the exception. This pattern of events is what Trotsky termed “spasmodic”. Here are some passages that give a taste of Trotsky’s thinking on this question:
The explosive character of this new epoch, with its abrupt changes of the political flows and ebbs, with its constant spasmodic class struggle between Fascism and communism, is lodged in the fact that the international capitalist system has already spent itself and is no longer capable of progress as a whole.
(...)
The revolutionary character of the epoch does not lie in that it permits of the accomplishment of the revolution, that is, the seizure of power at every given moment. Its revolutionary character consists in profound and sharp fluctuations and abrupt and frequent transitions from an immediately revolutionary situation; in other words, such as enables the communist party to strive for power, to a victory of the Fascist or semi-Fascist counter-revolution, and from the latter to a provisional regime of the golden mean (the “Left bloc,” the inclusion of the social democracy into the coalition, the passage of power to the party of MacDonald, and so forth), immediately thereafter to force the antagonisms to a head again and acutely raise the question of power.
Turkey is now very concretely experiencing this “spasmodic” pattern of development. The Gezi people’s rebellion and the corruption scandal of late 2013 was followed by the electoral victory of the AKP in the local elections of March 2014 and the presidential elections of August the same year. But the serhildan (revolt in Kurdish) over Kobani (Kobanê) in October of that year changed the situation yet again. This was followed by the wildcat strike of the metalworkers and Erdogan’s defeat at the polls in June 2015. However, as a result of the political mistakes committed by the Kurdish movement and the left, the situation once again was turned upside down in the snap elections of November, when the AKP took the majority once again. The failed coup of July was a near miss and brought Erdogan once more to the edge of the precipice. Now he and the AKP are rising from their ashes once more!
In the light of this roller-coaster style development, DIP is preparing for all kinds of modalities of struggle, very repressive ones as well as possibly a more progressive one, where there is ascendancy in workers’ struggles. We are prepared politically and psychologically for further persecution. We do not succumb to despair as a majority of left-wing currents, constantly moaning and whining about repression and dictatorship, but fight back. We fight back not only within secular petty-bourgeois environments where almost everyone is already gained to an anti-Erdogan stance. No, we do what is the most difficult job: we do our best to go to the working masses, infatuated with the pride Erdogan and his cohorts have falsely filled them with, the pride of rediscovering their long-repressed “native and national” traditions and of their leader defying the great powers of the world for the first time in decades. Whereas Erdogan and the rest hark back to the Ottomans and the tradition of the caliphs, we claim the tradition of social struggle and rebellion rampant in Anatolia and the Thrace under the Ottomans and divide culture not between nations but between classes. Whereas the ideologues of the AKP speak the ventriloquist’s idiom in criticising US and EU imperialism, we call a spade a spade and demand loud and clear that Turkey exit NATO, that the Incirlik base is shut down and the US be dispossessed of the nuclear warheads stored there, and that the so-called “missile shield” set up against Iran in eastern Turkey be dismantled. But above all, we tirelessly show them that the AKP is fighting for the interests of the bourgeoisie and against the working class.
Although modest in size, DIP has been consciously and systematically preparing itself for the formidable struggles that lie ahead. It has built a cadre that is capable of tactical flexibility under all circumstances. And the younger generation of the leadership is taking over seamlessly. Levent and Mert are only the tip of the iceberg.
Appendix: International support for Mert
Middle East Technical University has opportunistic recourse to Erdoğan’s State of Emergency!
Last summer a notable group of academics, unionists and politicians from around the world powerfully protested against the search for a very heavy disciplinary sanction against some junior academic staff of the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara. This petition questioned the future relations of the international community of progressive academics should the university persist in its persecution of the staff in question. Some of us were signatories to this petition. Fortunately for the future of our relations with METU, the charges were dropped at that time. Even the reactionary Board of Higher Education, set up with the purpose of bringing Turkish academia into line with the reactionary policies of the junta of the early 1980s, did not deem appropriate the extremely heavy measures demanded by the administration of METU.
Now one and a half years later, the dossier has been opened up one more time! It is incredible that a member of the staff is deemed worthy of expulsion from public office and disbarred for life and yet is left alone and can freely conduct activities inside the university for such a long time. Why this total neglect for a year and a half of the question and the sudden rehashing now? There are two explanations for this anomalous situation. First, the university now has a new president, who lost the elections in which his peers voted in another professor, but was nonetheless appointed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in lieu of the winner, in line with the shameful legislation for the selection of university presidents in Turkey. Apparently, the brand new president is paying his respect to the powers that elected him. Secondly, and much more importantly, after the passing of a full year and a half the question is brought back on the agenda because Turkey is now ruled with the State of Emergency declared after the 15 July failed coup attempt. This exceptional regime is used by the AKP government in persecuting in wholesale fashion not only the perpetrators of the coup, but all kinds of opposition that no sane person can link to the coup. So the present METU administration is very obviously making opportunistic use of Turkey’s present-day repressive regime to open closed files and settle old accounts.
We protest strongly against this sinister recourse by the new METU administration to the very anti-democratic regime that exists today in Turkey. METU, with its long progressive history, does not deserve this shameful act to pass into its history. We fully support the earlier petition, signed last year by many of us, which we provide as an appendix hereto.
Noam Chomsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, ABD)
Tariq Ali (New Left Review, Britanya)
Greg Albo (York University, Kanada)
Savas Michael-Matsas (Yunanistan)
Luca Scacchi (Universitàdella Val d’Aosta, İtalya)
Neil Faulkner (University of Bristol, Britanya)
David Gaunt (Uppsala University, İsveç)
Alessandro Arienzo (Professore associato, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italya, vice-chair Higher Education and Research Standing Committee, ETUCE)
Mariagrazia Monaci (Professore ordinario, Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italya)
Maria Grazia Meriggi (Professore ordinario, Università degli studi di Bergamo, Italya)
Massimiliano Tabusi (Professore associato, Università degli studi di Siena, Italya)
Eugenio Parente (Professore ordinario, Università degli Studi della Basilicata, Italya)
Alessio Vieno (Professore associato, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italya)
Silvia Gattino (Ricercatore, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italya)
Francesca Acquistapace (Professore associato, Università degli studi di Pisa, Italya)
Alida Clemente (Ricercatore, Università degli studi di Foggia, Italya)
Luca Guzzetti (Ricercatore, Università degli studi di Genova, Italya)
Renato Miceli (Professore ordinario, Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italya)
Maria Letizia RUELLO (Ricercatore, SIMAU Università Politecnica delle Marche, Italya)
Patrizia Meringolo (Professore Ordinario, Università degli studi di Firenze, Italya)
Antonella Arena (Professore associato, Università degli studi di Messina,Italya)
Maria Letizia Corradini (Professore Ordinario, Università degli studi di Camerino, Italya)
Andrea Reale (Professore associato, Università degli studi Roma Tor Vergata, Italya)
Bruno Catalanotti (Ricercatore, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italya)
Claudia Ortu (Ricercatore, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italya)
Massimo Zanetti (Ricercatore, Università della Valle d’Aosta, Italya)
Roberto De Vogli (Professore associato, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italya)
Chiara Volpato (Professore Ordinario, Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca, Italya)
Fabio Sulpizio (Ricercatore, Università degli studi del Salento, Italya)
Simona Sacchi (Professore associato, Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca, Italya)
Giorgio Tassinari (Professore associato, Università degli studi di Bologna, Italya)
John Gilbert (Lettore, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italya)
Antonio Carrano (Professore ordinario, Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Italya)
Michela Lenzi (Ricercatore, Università degli Studi di Padova, Italya)
Margherita Ciervo (Ricercatore, Università degli Studi di Foggia, Italya)
Marco Ballerini (Ricercatore, Università di Trento, Italya)
Alessandra Filabozzi (Ricercatore, Università degli studi Roma Tor Vergata, Italya)
Sebastiano Ghisu (Ricercatore, Università degli studi di Sassari, Italya)
Ivana Fellini (Ricercatore, Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca, Italya)
Stefania Tuzi (Ricercatore, Università degli studi Sapienza Università di Roma, Italya)
Silvia Mari (Ricercatore, Università degli studi di Milano Bicocca, Italya)
Donato Zipeto (Professore Associato, Università degli studi di Verona, Italya)
Stefano Visentin (Ricercatore, Università di Urbino 'Carlo Bo', Italya)
Last year’s petition
Retract the punitive procedure against unionists at METU!
The recent events at the Middle East Technical University (METU) are a serious source of disturbance for the international academic community and concerned scholars around the world. In the past, many of us have attended scientific conferences of high quality at that distinguished institution of higher learning. METU has also been at the forefront of progressive social and political movements since its early days. This half-century long tradition was recently revived and the METU community was heavily involved in the progressive social movement of 2013 in Turkey, more commonly known as the Gezi movement after the park in Istanbul that the government tried to demolish so as to make space for a shopping mall, though the movement was a national one that also had a strong component in the capital city of Ankara, where METU is.
We have been informed that two employees of METU, Mert Kükrer, a research and teaching assistant, and Barış Çelik, a technician, are under attack for their trade union activity. Mert and Barış are both union leaders at the local Ankara branch of the Education Union of public employees (Eğitim-Sen) and were heavily involved in the organising of a very strong strike movement last December, in which more than a thousand employees of the university took part to put forth certain economic demands. Their file has now been sent by the university administration to the Higher Education Board, a body that was established by the military dictatorship of the early 1980s with the explicit purpose of domesticating universities politically and whose legitimacy has never been recognised within the progressive community of academics. What is more, this institution has recently been closely controlled by the AKP government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The demand the university administration has made is the expulsion of Mert and Barış from their jobs and a lifetime ban on public service for both of them.
Mert and Barış have now set up a tent in front of the premises of the university president and are picketing for the retraction of this procedure. Two different petitions have been signed by local academics, one by over 200 professors from other universities and another by professors of METU. The traditionally colourful graduation exercises of METU were replete with protests by the students against this move by the university administration against Mert and Barış.
We the undersigned protest against this attempt at the persecution of two employees for their union work and the extremely punitive measure that has been demanded from a notoriously repressive organ. This move by the METU administration creates an extremely awkward situation for the progressive academic community and concerned scholars all around the world in their future relationship with METU. We therefore demand the university administration to review its procedure and retract any moves for punitive measures against the two unionists.
Noam Chomsky (ABD), David Harvey (USA-Britain), Tariq Ali (Britain), Michael Löwy (France), Aijaz Ahmad (India), Hillel Ticktin (Scotland), John Weeks (Britain), Joel Kovel (USA), Alexander Buzgalin (Russia), Ludmila Bulavka-Buzgalina (Russia), David Epstein (Russia), Anwar Shaikh (USA), Nancy Holmstrom (USA), Christoph Scherrer (Germany), Riccardo Bellofiore (Italy), Raquel Varela (Portugal), Greg Albo (Canada), Guglielmo Carchedi (Netherlands), Savas Michael-Matsas (Greece), Mariagrazia Monaci (Italy), Luca Scacchi (Italy), Tatyana Filimonova (Russia), Iosif Abramson (Russia), Mikhail Konashev (Russia), Thomas Marois (Britain), Vijay Prashad (USA-India), Sheila Delany (Canada), Robert Pollin (USA), August Nimtz (USA), Neil Faulkner (USA)