“Turkey Will Be a Second France, Unless Our Demands Are Satisfied”: The Turkish Student Movement in the Long 1960s

The transnational phenomenon that was “1968” was felt keenly around the globe with direct and virtually immediate impact. Turkey stands as a clear example, wherein the development and dynamism of the “Western” student movement had an immediate impact and shaped developments unfolding in Turkey at the time. As elsewhere in the world, “1968” did not hit Turkey out of thin air. The “1968 generation,” and the student movement in general, was mainly Kemalist, one of the significant characteristics that differentiated it from others. It first emerged as a student movement focused on reform within the university system, but toward the end of the 1960s, it evolved into a revolutionary movement, eventually deploying revolutionary violence from 1971–72.

The Ideology and Agency of Kosovar Albanian Marxist Groups in the Demonstrations of 1981

The author explores the ideological underpinning and political goals of Kosovar Marxist-Leninist groups and examines their role in the 1981 demonstrations in Kosovo. She contextualizes these events against the backdrop of theories of revolutionary violence that were prevalent in Kosovar Albanian Marxist groups. Describing the position of Albanians within socialist Yugoslavia, she traces the formation of these groups of dissidents and their support of Hoxhaism—following the political views of the Albanian leader Enver Hoxha. Hoxhaist propaganda shaped anti-Yugoslav dissidence to a certain extent, and the author throws light on the nationalist incentive to support Hoxhaism. She contextualizes Yugoslavia’s response to the demonstrations as an act of coercive violence aimed at stemming events that the Yugoslav officials perceived to be both counter-revolutionary and to presage the rise of nationalism.

Leftturn of the peronism in the «long» 60's.

The Argentinian 60s of the ХХ century were a time of growing political tension and the emergence of new ideological and political movements that constituted the era of revolutionary activism and ideological search. The key actor in this process was left-wing Peronism, which experienced a sharp evolution in the direction of Marxism, new left ideological currents, and the anti-imperialist unity of the «Third world» countries during these years. The rapprochement of the Peronist left with Marxism in its classical (Soviet), Maoist, Gramscian and even Trotskyist versions gave rise to the emergence of a fruitful current of the «new left», which had a decisive influence on Argentine social thought and political agenda. The 60s were key for the further history of Argentina, both politically, ideologically and socially. Left-wing Peronism brought a lot of new things to Argentine politics, both revolutionary violence and the desire to perceive ideas from other left-wing currents, not only Marxism, but also social Catholicism, «liberation theology» and terсermundism. Ideological and political processes within left-wing Peronism in the 60s, its interaction with the «new left», communists and socialists, castrism and Maoism, the development of its own concept of the national liberation revolution and national socialism is devoted to this work.

Was Stalin’s Revolution from Above a Rational Strategy of Modernization?

Strategies of modernization are legion within the social science literature. Stalin’s Revolution from Above—but not the Great Terror—is set within this literature as a revolutionary, as opposed to a reformist, strategy. Features of the revolutionary strategy may have been considered necessary to urgently create the capacity to defend the country in a hostile world. But the extent of revolutionary violence against the peasantry cannot be justified in those terms.

Building Socialism

After Stalin won the power struggle, he adopted a strategy for building socialism that entailed a frenzied pace of industrialization, city-building, collectivization of agriculture, state-building, and social transformation, accompanied by the vast use of revolutionary violence against the peasantry in particular, causing the deaths of over six million people. The rhetorical basis for both the scope and the pace of change was the claim that the national security of the Soviet state required the earliest possible construction of a communist state with the capacity to mobilize its population for war and defend itself militarily.

World War II and the Creation of Asian Communist States

Mao’s formula for coming to power differed from the Bolshevik pathway. It entailed a peasant-based guerrilla war that helped to defeat Japanese occupation and that went on to defeat the Nationalist forces, led by Chiang Kai-shek, in conventional warfare after World War II was over. There were many differences between the Maoist and Soviet models of revolution, but there were also many similarities in the willingness to attempt a “socialist” revolution in a peasant society, in the glorification of revolutionary violence, in the determination to ensure that the communist party monopolizes power and politics after winning the civil war, in the determination to build socialism thereafter, and in the commitment to anti-imperialist struggle within a world communist movement led by Moscow.

Was Stalinism a Logical Continuation of Marxism, Leninism, or Neither?

For political activists as well as scholars, the relationship between Stalinism and the Marxist-Leninist (or Bolshevik) heritage is a fraught one. If Stalinism grew organically out of the Marxist apocalyptic vision or the Leninist commitment to revolutionary violence, then the discrediting of Stalinism would call into question the entire intellectual and organizational heritage of Bolshevik rule. This chapter presents the arguments for and against continuity and concludes that the Leninist heritage facilitated, but did not determine, the Stalinist Revolution from Above or the Great Terror.

The Rise and Demise of World Communism

Sixteen states came to be ruled by communist parties during the twentieth century. Only five of them remain in power today. This book explores the nature of communist regimes—what they share in common, how they differ from each other, and how they differentially evolved over time. The book finds that these regimes all came to power in the context of warfare or its aftermath, followed by the consolidation of power by a revolutionary elite that came to value “revolutionary violence” as the preferred means to an end, based upon Marx’s vision of apocalyptic revolution and Lenin’s conception of party organization. All these regimes went on to “build socialism” according to a Stalinist template, and were initially dedicated to “anti-imperialist struggle” as members of a “world communist movement.” But their common features gave way to diversity, difference, and defiance after the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. For many reasons, and in many ways, those differences soon blew apart the world communist movement. They eventually led to the collapse of European communism. The remains of communism in China, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cuba were made possible by the first three transforming their economic systems, opening to the capitalist international order, and abandoning “anti-imperialist struggle.” North Korea and Cuba have hung on due to the elites avoiding splits visible to the public. Analytically, the book explores, throughout, the interaction among the internal features of communist regimes (ideology and organization), the interactions among them within the world communist movement, and the interaction of communist states with the broader international order of capitalist powers.