Left Movements and the Army in Turkey (1961–71): The Case of the Yön-Devrim Movement

Turkey’s long sixties started with a military coup (May 27, 1960) and ended with another military coup (March 12, 1971). During this period, there was an explosion in the number of radical left and socialist movements in Turkey. One of the leading left movements of the period was the Yön-Devrim movement. The most distinctive feature of this movement was the special role it placed on the military in the transition to socialism. In this article, we will focus on the relationship between the military and left/socialist politics during this period. To this end, we will examine the Yön-Devrim movement, specifically their approach to the military. In particular, we will examine why this movement imposed a “progressive” mission on the military, what kind of a transition a possible military coup would provide for socialism, and what role they envisioned for the army, and the bureaucracy in general, in the class struggle.

The Prospects for Socialist Politics in South Africa

Our article endeavours to critically examine the prospects for socialist parties and socialist policy reform in South Africa. Firstly, we seek to provide an appraisal of modern socialist politics and policies globally. Secondly, we attempt to diagnose why South Africa has been as yet unable to fashion a suitable socialist workers’ party during the democratic epoch. In this, the article discusses the prospects of socialist parties and policy reform in South Africa after examining the failure of the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP) to make an impact at the 2019 polls. Using a combination of comparative methodology and critical inquiry, our study presents not only that socialist politics and policies are valuable to democratic systems, but also that socialist politics should have a more viable vehicle in South Africa. The prospects for deepened ideological development, particularly the formation of a successful socialist or workers’ party, remains quite weak in South Africa but there is considerable evidence to suggest that civil society both requires and desires a more vibrant relationship with modern socialism.

China Miéville

China Miéville is a British author and a significant writer of Fantastika fiction in the 21st century, his work showcasing a desire to write across a variety of different forms and genres. Miéville is associated with the writing of the New Weird movement, although he does not describe his work in this manner anymore. Born on 6 September 1972 in Norwich, UK, Miéville was brought up and has lived in London for much of his life. Miéville taught English in Egypt for a year before attending university. Here Miéville developed an interest in politics, especially Marxism and socialism, which continues to influence his academic life and creative work. After studying social anthropology at Cambridge, Miéville gained a master’s in 1995 and a PhD in international relations from the London School for Economics in 2001. Miéville found his own political viewpoint being drawn firmly toward Marxism due to feeling dissatisfied with the postmodern theories he was exposed to during his studies. Miéville’s first novel, King Rat, was published in 1998, but it was the following Bas-Lag trilogy (Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council) that cemented his reputation as a writer. Miéville wrote Perdido Street Station alongside his PhD studies. His work has won many awards, including the Hugo Award for The City & The City, the Arthur C. Clarke Award an unprecedented three times, the British Fantasy Award twice, and Locus Awards four times across different categories. Miéville has been the guest of honor at multiple conventions and conferences, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2018, and has held positions in both politics and creative writing in UK and US higher education institutions. Socialist politics is a constant theme throughout Miéville’s biography and creative work. Miéville was previously a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United Kingdom, leaving the party in 2013 in disgust at the leadership’s attempted suppression and refusal to deal with rape allegations against a party member. He stood for election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 general election for the constituency of Regent’s Park and Kensington North. Alive with creative world-building and experimental representations of monstrous bodies, Miéville’s work challenges the borders between categorization and presents genres as literary spaces that can be both politically engaging and socially relevant.

Review of The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles by David Harvey (Pluto Press)

The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles is a collection of accessible, loosely connected essays by influential Marxist geographer David Harvey. Based on episodes of Harvey's podcast of the same name, the book tackles topics related to the contemporary and historical crises of global capitalism. In nineteen brief, topical chapters, Harvey appropriates and reimagines Marxian categories and anti-capitalist frameworks of various kinds in order to report on the changing shape of global capitalism considered as a historically distinct social formation, the internal logics and contradictions which govern capital's movements in the world, and the obstacles to be overcome by socialist politics.

H. G. Wells

This chapter shifts attention from reference in space to reference in time, in order to extend the argument about realism and metaphysics to a consideration of genres as ideological formations which must both engage with recognizable circumstances and possess an innate desire to defamiliarize, even contravene, the givens of the cultural symbolic world. The social problem novel highlights this paradox, because it can only imagine possible futures through extrapolation from present conditions. The future acts as another boundless context against which realist representation must be pivoted. Chapter 4 explores this temporal paradox in the novels of H. G. Wells, whose background in evolutionary biology and investment in performative socialist politics means he depicts contemporary society as already, in a sense, prescient. The conclusions drawn about the operation of temporality in Wells’s fiction—particularly his use of tenses and the odd, recurrent topos of metanarrative intrusion—are used to think through some of the implications for ‘condition of England’ writing as an oracular and dialectical tradition within realism.

Minority Nationalism and Socialism

What has been the relationship between nationalism and socialism in the history of the Finnish social democratic labour movement? This article explores this question by focusing on the Swedish-speaking socialist politician Karl H. Wiik (1883–1946), who was a central figure both in the Swedish-speaking and in the national Finnish labour movement. By examining Wiik’s role as a political and ideological foreground figure of the Swedish-speaking labour movement in Finland, the article discusses the relationship between national issues, class and socialism in the history of the Finnish social democratic labour movement. The article asks how language was connected to ethnic identity. Also, the article examines how both nationalism and ethnic identity was connected to social democracy as well as to socialist politics. On a more general level, the article contributes to the study of nationalism and especially to the study of the engagement of ethnic or linguistic minorities in the history of the labour movement. By focusing on the minorities in the labour movement, it is possible to problematise the historical narratives of the majority. The article links the multinational history of the Finnish labour movement to that of the international labour movement, where the questions about socialism and nationalism have been high on the political agenda.

‘I am of Them’: Tom O'Flaherty's Socialist Fictions and the Irish Free State

Tom O'Flaherty's unpublished novel Red Crom's Island is a distinctly political potboiler that envisions the Gaeltacht as a potential centre for leftist revolutionary activity. By comparison, O'Flaherty's two Anglophone short stories collections, Aranmen All and Cliffmen of the West, seem to eschew socialist politics in favour of ethnographic depictions of the Aran Islands. When read in conjunction, however, the novel appears to be a source for the short fiction, which prompts a reevaluation of the politics at work in both collections. In this article, I argue that reading the unpublished and published work in tandem with archival correspondences involving officials from the Irish Free State reveals the ways in which O'Flaherty sought to articulate the necessity of socialist values for the survival of the Aran Islands at a time in the 1930s when anti-Communist sentiment and distaste for socialism was on the rise in Ireland.

Is it ‘the economy, stupid’? Economic relations and cultural studies: Some reflections on Jim McGuigan’s Cultural Populism

This article argues that in the development of media studies and cultural studies, a gap opened between textual analysis and political economy that became a damaging schism. The roots of the schism between the economic and the cultural lie in the growing influence of French structuralism, and post-structuralism from the late 1960s onwards. Jim McGuigan’s book, Cultural Populism, appeared at a time when socialist politics, political analysis and cultural theory were, both together and separately, in a degree of flux, self-reflection and loss of direction. This article outlines the nature of the split between emphasis on the cultural and the economic, the ways in which it continues to mark the field and the importance of continuing to try and hold the two together in the analytic frame. Methodologically, this article involves analysis of Cultural Populism and utilises document and archive searching, interviews, syllabus analysis and personal communication.