Special Editors: Remzi Altunpolat, Mustafa Kemal Coşkun, Mustafa Bayram Mısır, Tolga Tören, Sinan Yıldırmaz
Chronology by Praksis
On October Revolution
Masis Kürkçügil, Metin Çulhaoğlu, Sungur Savran, S. Mahir Sayın, Yusuf Zamir
The Art of Revolution: Transcending the Past, Democratizing the Art
Emre Tansu Keten
The Russian Revolution in the Context of Legitimacy and Democracy Debate
Mustafa Bayram Mısır
This article focuses on the legitimacy of Russian Revolution and debates on democracy. Bolsheviks, who took power through the October Insurrection, committed to establish the workers’ and peasants’ democracy from below to top. They were backed by Soviets, the governing bodies. The fact that they could not achieve their objectives would not annihilate the historical legitimacy of October Insurrection. October Insurrection is not a coup. Lenin assumed that state would “wither away” or would quickly start to wither away as a result of political revolution. As it did not happen, Bolsheviks took their place in the state mechanism. Through that way, Russian Revolution could not develop the socialist democracy as an alternative to the
capitalist democracy. As a result, the emergent Soviet political form could not be universalized. Autocratic one-party regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe articulated to the capitalist mode of production as an experience of non-Western rapid modernization. In this paper, the dual power strategy is presented as the reason of these developments. The strategy of dual power arises from the state theory dealing with the state as a tool for ruling classes. However, modern state is the union of political power and public service. The ideal of socialist democracy, which will not give up its strategy of state’s withering, must consider this unity. Socialist democracy can only be a form of realization of self-government. Self-governance can be developed in a constitutional democracy that releases federative and communal powers in their own dialectical unity. Two basic principles of this constitutional democracy are individual property against private property and self-governance against political domination. In this paper, the tactics – that is to say, dissolution of Constituent Assembly, transformation of Soviets to the peripheral organizations of BolshevikParty, disappearance of the workers’ control, the right of the nations to
self-determination and new internationalism connected with the politics of socialism in a single country- followed by Bolsheviks, who took political power after October Insurrection, is treated with a critical perspective that arises from this theoretical framework.
Abstract: The Russian Revolution, socialist democracy, the October Revolution, dual power, State.
Samizdats and Tamizdats as a Phenomenon of the Public Opposition in the Soviet Union
Emek Yıldırım
The underground publishing, which had intensively used by the Russian opponents before the October Revolution, also preserved its feature as a significant factor of the Russian political culture, in spite of the change of its content after the revolution. Because the ground, upon which the main structure of the Russian political culture established, consists of the conjunction of; on the one hand paternalist and authoritarian political power, which owns highly solid traditional roots, while on the other hand resistance culture, which could be germinated somehow in every condition. I this sense, one of the most important instances of the underground publishing activity fact, which was used by the Soviet era social opposition to manifest its existence and transmit its voice to the masses, is the samizdats and tamizdats medium. Therefore, with this work, it is aimed to examine the existence circumstances of the public opposition in the Soviet Union through samizdats and tamizdats, which were one of the Soviet times appearances of the Russian underground literature became a substantial course of the political and public opposition for the Russian geography.
Keywords: Samizdat, Tamizdat, October Revolution, Tsarist Era, USSR, Soviet Union, public opposition, underground publishing, Russian intelligentsia.
The Country of the Women Walking towards Freedom: Soviet Society in the Aftermath of October Revolution
Armağan Tulunay
The Soviet experience in terms of social evolution program of working class had became an examination regarding emancipation of the women. The workers’ state established after the October Revolution took various important decisions and put them into practice in different fields from education to marriage, divorce, abortion, participation to labour power, and the efforts to political organization. The Zhenotdel experience and the developments in the lands on which the Muslim women live occupy particular place. There is a close relationship between the inability of sustaining the steps taken in the first years of the young worker state and the bureaucratic degeneration in the Soviet Union. In terms of the emancipation of women, the failures of the Soviet experience does not arise from Marxism but from the bureaucracy’s socialism in one country program.
Keywords: The October Revolution, the Soviet Union, Zhenotdel, women rights, gender.
The October Revolution and the Armenians
Candan Badem
In its congress in August 1914, Armenian nationalist party Tashnaksutyun decided to remain neutral in case of a war between Russia and Ottoman Empire. However, when war broke out Russian Armenians started to organize volunteer battalions in the Russian army. When Bolsheviks came to power after the October Revolution in 1917, they met a powerful opposition in the periphery of the Russian Empire, including the Caucasus. Bolsheviks had come to power with demands of immediate peace and accordingly they started peace negotiations with Germany, Austria and the Ottomans. Armenian nationalists in Anatolia however, did not want the Russian army to retreat because Armenians were numerically insufficient to hold the region against the Ottoman army. This situation made them oppose the Bolsheviks. Armenian nationalists did not act realistically, they hoped to establish a Great Armenia with the help of USA, UK, and France. In the end Armenian forces were defeated by the army of Turkish nationalists and Armenians again faced danger of being annihilated. Soviet power and Red Army saved little Armenia from annihilation.
Keywords: 1917 October Revolution, Armenian nationalism, East Anatolia, West
Armenia, Armenia.
The Theory of Immaterial Labor of Hardt and Negri: A Critical Approach
M. Arif Koşar
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argued that new hegemonic power of today’s global
capitalism is immaterial labor that created powerful influence on the other forms of labor. The concept of immaterial labor, emphasizes the production of ‘product’ or services such as information, ideas, symbols, codes, communication, relationship or emotional expression, creating the impression that we live in an immaterial world. It is assumed that the works have become knowledge-based, creative, communicative and laborers have also acquired these qualities with technological developments, these laborers form a socio-economic basis of the multitude as a new collective subject. Yet, in modern capitalism, the claim that the general mass of workers and works have
become creative and intellectual has not been empirically confirmed. It is a serious methodological error to ignored the fact that capital relations created hegemony over the entire production and exchange processare, and dividing laborers over the quality of the product they produce or defining a hegemonic socio-technical labor type with a Western-centric approach.
Keywords: Immaterial labour, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Marxism, labour.
