Sosyal bilimlerde yeni bir kavram üretmek kolaydır. Yeterince karmaşık görünen bir sorun alınır, ona özgün bir isim verilir, birkaç akademik metin yazılır ve kavram literatüre yerleşir. Sorun şudur: kavramın gerçekten yeni bir şeyi tanımlayıp tanımlamadığı çoğu zaman sorgulanmaz.

Prekarya tam böyle bir kavramdır. Guy Standing başta olmak üzere bir dizi çağdaş sosyal teorisyen, güvencesiz, parçalı, süreksiz işlerde çalışan kesimi “yeni bir sınıf” olarak tanımlamak için bu terimi önerdi. Kulağa cazip geliyor. Ama yakından bakıldığında prekaryanın tanımladığı her özellik —güvencesizlik, parçalı istihdam, taşeronluk, sosyal haklardan yoksunluk— klasik Marksist proletarya kavramının zaten içindedir. Ortada yeni bir sınıf yoktur; yalnızca yeni bir etiket vardır.

Bu makale, prekarya kavramını ve benzerlerini bu açıdan ele almaktadır. Argüman üç düzlemde ilerleyecektir: teorik, mantıksal ve politik. Teorik olarak bu kavramların Marksist sınıf analizine hiçbir şey eklemediğini, mantıksal olarak bu yaklaşımın kendi absürdlüğüne mahkûm olduğunu ve politik olarak sınıf bilincini dağıtmanın nesnel bir işlevi gördüğünü öne süreceğiz.

II. PREKARYA NEDİR VE MARX’TA NE KARŞILIĞI VAR?

Guy Standing, 2011 tarihli The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class adlı kitabında prekarya kavramını sistematik biçimde ortaya koydu. Standing’e göre prekarya, geleneksel işçi sınıfından farklı, yeni ve özgün bir toplumsal katmandır. Bu katmanın ayırt edici özellikleri olarak şunlar sıralanır: İstihdam güvencesinin yokluğu, sosyal haklardan yoksunluk, platform çalışması, gig ekonomisi parçalı ve süreksiz çalışma biçimleri, mesleki kimliğin çözülmesi, ücret dışı gelire bağımlılık ve geleceğe dair kronik belirsizlik… (Gig ekonomisi: Özgün anlamıyla müzik endüstrisinde tek seferlik konser ya da performans; buradan genişleyerek iş bulduğunda, proje bazlı, sözleşmesiz ve güvencesiz biçimde çalışmayı ifade eden bir terim haline gelmiştir. Türkçede tam karşılığı olmamakla birlikte “iş buldukça çalışma” ya da “parça iş” olarak aktarılabilir.)

Bu özelliklerin listesini okuyan Marksist teoriye aşina biri şu soruyu sormak zorundadır: Bunların hangisi proletarya tanımının dışındadır?

Marx için sınıf, öznel bir kimlik meselesi değil, nesnel bir üretim ilişkisidir. Proletarya, üretim araçlarından yoksun olduğu için emek gücünü satmak zorunda kalan sınıftır. Bu tanımın içinde güvencesizlik zaten mevcuttur, zira işçinin emek gücünden başka satacak bir şeyi yoktur ve bu emek gücünün alınıp alınmaması sermayenin kararına bağlıdır. Parçalı istihdam, taşeronluk, süreksiz çalışma biçimleri Marx’ın Kapital‘inde ayrıntılı biçimde incelenir. Sosyal haklardan yoksunluk, mesleki kimliğin çözülmesi, geleceğe dair belirsizlik: Bunların tamamı sermaye ile emek arasındaki temel ilişkinin sonuçlarıdır; bu ilişkinin dışında bağımsız bir sınıf oluşturacak özellikler değildir.

Kısacası Standing’in prekarya için öne sürdüğü her kriter, proletaryanın belirli tarihsel koşullardaki görünümünü tanımlar. Ortaya çıkan tablo yeni bir sınıf değil, sınıfın yeni bir halidir. Kavramın teorik katkısı sıfırdır. Ancak yarattığı analitik hasar sıfırın çok üzerindedir.

III. MANTIĞI SONUNA GÖTÜRELIM: UYDURMA KATEGORİLER

Bir kavramın geçerliliğini test etmenin en güvenilir yollarından biri, onun mantığını tutarlı biçimde uygulamak ve nereye vardığına bakmaktır. Prekarya kavramının arkasındaki mantık şudur: Proletaryanın içindeki bir kesim, kendine özgü koşullar yaşıyorsa ayrı bir kategori oluşturmayı hak eder.

Bu mantığı kabul edelim ve uygulayalım.

Eşcinsel işçiler işyerinde ayrımcılığa uğruyor, ek güvencesizlik yaşıyor. O halde chomoletarya”. Çocuk işçiler hem sömürülüyor hem de eğitim haklarından yoksun bırakılıyor. O halde “pedoletarya”. Yaşlı işçiler emekliliğe zorlanıyor, iş piyasasından dışlanıyor. O halde “gerioletarya”. Mevsimlik tarım ve turizm işçileri yılın yalnızca bir bölümünde çalışabiliyor. O halde “sezonoletarya”. Uyuşturucu satıcıları kayıt dışı, güvencesiz, tehlikeli koşullarda çalışıyor. O halde “narkoletarya”. Kiralık katiller iş güvencesinden yoksun, sosyal haklara erişemeyen, kronik belirsizlik içinde yaşıyor. O halde “sidoletarya”. Haraç toplayanlar örgütlü ama gayri resmi bir ekonomik ilişki içinde. O halde “ekstortoletarya”. Umudunu piyangoya bağlamış işçiler geleceği belirsiz, kurtuluşu şansa emanet etmiş. O halde “lototerlaterya”. Dahası,yakın gelecekte Mars’a gönderilecek koloniciler, en ağır koşullarda, en uzak cephede çalışacak. O halde “spatiolaterya”.

Liste burada bitmiyor. Bitmesi için hiçbir neden yok.

Şunu açıkça belirtelim: Yukarıdaki örneklerin büyük bölümü bu makalenin yazım sürecinde, birkaç dakika içinde üretilmiştir. Bu bir övünç değil, bir uyarıdır: söz konusu mantık o kadar basit ve o kadar gevşektir ki herhangi biri herhangi bir özelliği alıp ona bir etiket yapıştırabilir. Listeyi uzatmak için özel bir uzmanlığa gerek yoktur. Okuyucu dilerse kendi eklemelerini yapabilir.

Her birinin ne anlama geldiğini açıklayalım:

Homoletarya: Eşcinsel işçiler. İşçi olmalarının yanı sıra cinsel yönelimleri nedeniyle baskı ve ayrımcılığa uğruyorlar. Bu gerçek bir baskıdır — ama onları proletaryanın dışına çıkarmaz. Proletarya içinde ayrımcılığa uğrayan bir kesimi ayrı bir sınıf ilan etmek, baskıyı ortadan kaldırmaz; yalnızca etiketler.

Pedoletarya: Çocuk işçiler. Hem sömürülüyor hem eğitim haklarından yoksun bırakılıyorlar. Marksist analizin en eski ve en net örneklerinden biridir. Marx ve Engels bunu zaten yazdı. Yeni bir kategori gerektirmez, yeni bir etiket hiçbir şey eklemez.

Gerioletarya: Yaşlı işçiler. Emekliliğe zorlanıyor, iş piyasasından dışlanıyorlar. Sermayenin işgücünü kullanıp attığı klasik örnek — yedek işçi ordusunun en görünür hali. Marx’ta zaten var.

LGBTİQ++letarya: Geniş LGBTİQ++kesim. Homoletaryanın genişletilmiş versiyonu. Artı işaretinin sayısı arttıkça kategorinin sınırları belirsizleşir — ama mantık aynıdır.

Sezonoletarya: Mevsimlik işçiler. Tarımda, turizmde, inşaatta yılın yalnızca bir bölümünde çalışabiliyorlar. Süreksiz istihdam, Marx’ın kapsamlı biçimde incelediği bir olgudur. Yeni bir isim, yeni bir analiz getirmez.

Narkoletarya: Uyuşturucu satıcıları. Kayıt dışı, güvencesiz, tehlikeli koşullarda çalışıyorlar. Ama hangi sermaye ilişkisi, hangi artı değer? Soru yanıtsız kalır, çünkü analiz çerçevesi zaten uygulanamaz.

Sidoletarya: Kiralık katiller. Latince caedere —öldürmek— kökünden. Homicide, fratricide, genocide ile aynı aileden. İş güvencesinden yoksun, sosyal haklara erişemeyen, kronik belirsizlik içinde. Mantık tutarlı biçimde uygulandığında varılan nokta budur.

Ekstortoletarya: Haraç toplayanlar. Gayri resmi bir ekonomik ilişki içindeler. Latince kökü kavrama sahte bir bilimsellik havası verir ama içi boştur.

Migralaterya: Göçmen kaçakçıları ve mağdurları. Burada liste çöküşünün en derin noktasına ulaşır: fail ile mağdur aynı kategoriye giriyor. Sömüren ile sömürülen aynı etiketi taşıyor.

Loterlaterya: Umudunu piyangoya bağlamış işçiler. Artık ekonomik faaliyeti değil, umudu kategorize ediyoruz. Marksist analizin yabancılaşma kavramı bunu çoktan açıklamıştır. Yeni bir etikete gerek yoktur.

Pornolaterya: Porno endüstrisi çalışanları. Sermaye ilişkisi burada daha görünürdür; stüdyolar, yapımcılar, platformlar mevcuttur. Ama bedenin üretim aracı sayılması sorusu yanıtsız kalır.

Spatiolaterya: Uzay kolonicileri. Listenin zirvesi ve mantığının doğal sonu. Henüz var olmayan, belki hiç var olmayacak bir işçi sınıfı. Ama söz konusu mantığa göre neden olmasın?

Bu örneklerin tamamını biz ürettik, birkaç dakika içinde… Ama yöntem satirik bir icada gerek bırakmıyor, zira kendi kendini üretiyor.

Prekarya İçinde Kadın Olmanın Akışkanlığı

Femmekarya adlı eser —bir doktora tezinden doğan, prekarya içindeki kadını tanımlayan ve yayıncısının ifadesiyle ‘ülke sınırlarını aşmaya aday’ olan— zaten raflarda yerini almış durumda. (Müjgan Şahin, Prekarya İçinde Kadın Olmanın Akışkanlığı: Femmekarya, Siyasal Kitabevi, 2026.) Femmekarya (femmecariat) listeye ekleniyor.

Ancak atomizasyon burada da durmaz. Femmekarya yalnızca bir ara istasyon. Önce proletaryayı böldüler, prekarya çıkardılar. Şimdi prekaryanın içini de bölüyorlar, femmekarya çıkardılar. Süreç aynı mantıkla ilerlemeye devam eder: prekarya içindeki kadın, prekarya içindeki yaşlı kadın, prekarya içindeki yaşlı göçmen kadın, prekarya içindeki yaşlı eşcinsel göçmen kadın… Her kesişim noktası yeni bir kategori, yeni bir araştırma programı, yeni bir kariyer üretir. Süreç mantıksal olarak sonsuzdur ve tek kişilik gruplara, yani her bireyin kendi sınıfını oluşturduğu noktaya kadar ilerleyebilir. O noktada sınıf kavramı fiilen ortadan kalkmış olur, sermayenin karşısında atomize, izole, örgütsüz bireyler kalır. Bu, kavram enflasyonunun teorik sonu değil, siyasi hedefidir.

Tüm bu kategorilerin ortak noktası nedir? Hepsi üretim araçlarından yoksundur. Hepsi emek gücünü satmak zorundadır. Hepsi sermaye ile aynı temel ilişki içindedir. Yani hepsi proletaryadır. Kavramlar çoğaldıkça açıkladıkları değil, örttükleri büyür.

IV. PROLETARYA KAVRAMIN DIŞINA TAŞMAK: SAHTE “İŞÇİ” KATEGORİLERİ

Önceki bölümde ele aldığımız uydurma kategoriler en azından gerçek işçileri konu alıyordu. Proletaryanın içindeki kesimleri yapay biçimde parçalıyor, her gruba ayrı bir etiket yapıştırıyorlardı. Yanlış ve zararlıydı ama en azından zorlamayla bile olsa Marksist analiz alanı içinde kalıyordu.

Şimdi ele alacağımız kategori daha ileri gidiyor. Bu kez Marksist sınıf kavramının hiç uygulanamadığı faaliyetler “işçilik” olarak tanımlanıyor. Üretim ilişkisi yok, artı değer yok, sermaye ilişkisi yok, sadece “işçi” etiketi var. Bu etiketin arkasında, ilk bakışta insancıl görünen ama yakından incelendiğinde tam tersine işleyen bir ideolojik hareket yatıyor.

“Seks İşçisi” Kavramı

“Seks işçisi” terimi, fuhuşu bir meslek olarak tanımlamak ve meşrulaştırmak amacıyla belirli çevreler tarafından sistematik biçimde kullanılmaktadır. Terimin kendisi zaten bir siyasi pozisyondur; tarafsız bir tanım değil, bir savunuculuk pratiğinin dil düzeyindeki yansımasıdır.

Marksist çerçevede bu terimi sınamak için üç temel soruyu sormak yeterlidir.

Birinci soru: Üretim aracı nedir?

Klasik Marksist analizde işçi, üretim araçlarından yoksundur — bu yüzden emek gücünü satmak zorundadır. Eğer bedenin kendisi üretim aracı sayılacaksa o zaman her manuel işçi kendi üretim aracına sahip demektir. Bu kabul edilirse proletarya tanımının temeli çöker. Kavram ya herkese uygulanır ya da hiç kimseye.

İkinci soru: Artı değer nerede üretiliyor ve kim el koyuyor?

Marksist analizde artı değer, işçinin ürettiği değerin ücret olarak ödenen kısmının üzerinde kalan bölümdür ve sermaye buna el koyar. Fuhuşta bu ilişki tanımlanamaz. Müşteri kapitalist midir? Ödediği para artı değer mi, yoksa değişim değeri mi? Bir organizasyon devreye girdiğinde ilişki değişiyor mu? Sorular cevaplanamaz çünkü analiz çerçevesi uygulanamaz durumdadır.

Üçüncü soru: Sınıf bilinci nasıl oluşacak?

Marksist analizde sınıf bilinci, ortak üretim ilişkisinden doğar. İşçiler aynı sermayeye karşı, aynı sömürü ilişkisi içinde ortak çıkarlarını fark ederler. “Seks işçileri”nin hangi ortak üretim ilişkisi içinde sınıf bilinci oluşturacağı sorusu yanıtsız kalır.

Sahte Merhamet Mekanizması

Bu noktada itirazlar yükselir: “Ama bu insanlar sömürülüyor.” “Ama hakları korunmalı.” “Ama güvencesizler.”

Bu itirazların hiçbiri yanlış değildir. Fuhuşa sürüklenmiş kadınlar — büyük çoğunluğu yoksulluk, şiddet, insan ticareti mağduru olan kadınlar — gerçekten sömürülmektedir ve hakları korunmalıdır. Ama bu, onları “seks işçisi” olarak tanımlamayı gerektirmez. Tam tersine: bu tanım onları korumaz, onları orada tutan sistemi meşrulaştırır.

“Seks işçisi” kavramını Marksist sınıf analizine sokmak, mağduriyeti özgür seçim olarak yeniden çerçeveler. Fuhuşu bir emek ilişkisi olarak tanımlamak, onu normalleştirmek ve sürdürmek için ideolojik zemin hazırlar. Sahte merhametin gerçek işlevi budur.

Porno endüstrisi de aynı çerçevede ele alınır. Burada sermaye ilişkisi daha görünürdür — stüdyolar, yapımcılar, dağıtım platformları mevcuttur. Ama bedenin üretim aracı olması sorusu burada da yanıtsız kalır. Pornolaterya (pornolateriat), kavramın absürdlüğünü bir adım daha ileri taşır.

Linç Mekanizması

Bu eleştiriyi dile getirenlerin karşılaştığı tepki bellidir: “Fuhuşu savunuyorsun.” “Kadın düşmanısın.” “Mağdurları suçluyorsun.”

Bu suçlamalar, iki tamamen farklı pozisyonu kasıtlı olarak birbirine karıştırır. Fuhuşu Marksist kategoriye sokmayı reddetmek, fuhuşu savunmak değildir. Tam tersine, fuhuşa sürüklenmiş kadınların gerçek mağduriyetini görünür kılmak için “işçi” etiketinin kaldırılması gerektiğini savunmaktır.

Ama bu ayrım yapılmaz. Yapılmaması tesadüf değildir. Tartışmayı kapatmanın, eleştiriyi susturmanın ve karşı çıkanı ahlaki olarak itibarsızlaştırmanın en hızlı yoludur. Entelektüel dürüstlüğün değil, ideolojik tahakkümün silahıdır.

Göçmen Kaçakçılığı ve Migralaterya

Benzer bir çöküş göçmen kaçakçılığı meselesinde de yaşanır. Migralaterya kavramı buradaki absürdlüğü açıkça ortaya koyar: göçmen kaçakçılığı yapanlar mı işçidir, yoksa kaçakçılığa maruz kalan mağdurlar mı? İkisi birden mi? Fail ile mağdur aynı kategoriye sokuşturulduğunda kavram yalnızca anlamsızlaşmaz, ahlaki olarak da çöker.

Bu da tesadüf değildir. Fail ile mağduru aynı çatı altında toplamak, failin sorumluluğunu bulanıklaştırır. “İşçi” etiketi, sömüreni de sömürüleni de aynı üretim ilişkisinin parçası haline getirir ve böylece ikisi arasındaki ahlaki ve hukuki mesafeyi ortadan kaldırır.

V. DÖRDÜNCÜ, BEŞİNCİ VE ALTINCI DÜNYA

Bu kavram enflasyonu yalnızca sınıf analiziyle sınırlı değildir. Benzer bir şişme uluslararası ilişkiler literatüründe de yaşanmıştır.

Mao Zedong’un üç dünya tasnifi tutarlı bir jeopolitik ve anti-emperyalist analiz çerçevesine dayanır. Birinci Dünya, iki süper güçten — ABD ve SSCB’den — oluşur; her ikisi de kendi alanlarında emperyalist bir politika izlemektedir. İkinci Dünya, bu iki bloktan birine bağımlı olmakla birlikte bağımsızlık arayışındaki orta güçleri —Japonya ve Avrupa ülkelerini— kapsar. Üçüncü Dünya ise sömürge, yarı sömürge ve yeni sömürgecilik kurbanı olan, iki süper güç kampının dışında kalan ülkeleri ifade eder.

(Bu tasnif tartışmalıdır — SSCB’yi “sosyal emperyalist” olarak nitelendirmesi, ABD ile yakınlaşmayı ve bazı kurtuluş hareketlerinde tartışmalı ittifakları beraberinde getirmiştir. Ama bu ayrı bir tartışmadır.)

Üç Dünya Teorisi doğru ya da yanlış bulunabilir, ama bir sistematiǧi vardır. Bir tahlile dayanır, kendi içinde tutarlı bir çerçeve sunar, politik sonuçları olan bir kavramsallaştırmadır.

Dördüncü Dünya bundan da yoksundur. Birinci Dünya içindeki yerli halkları, kronik yoksulları, sistem dışına itilmiş toplulukları tanımlamak için kullanılır. Gerçek bir mağduriyeti işaret etmektedir. Bunu teslim edelim. Ama Mao’nun tasnifinin devamıymış izlenimi verse de o mantıkla hiçbir ilişkisi yoktur. Neden dördüncüdür? Hangi sistematik tahlilden türemiştir? Sorular yanıtsız kalır. Kavram havada asılı durmaktadır. Antik Yunan’da “metoikos” diye etiketlenen yabancılar da benzer mantıkla, kendi toplumunun dışına itilenleri tanımlamak için kullanılırdı. Numara yapıştırmak kolaydır; sistematik tahlil zordur.

Belli bir sistematik tahlile dayalı kavramsallaştırmanın dışında kalan, havada asılı kavram üretmek hiç de zor değildir. İşte birkaç örnek:

Beşinci Dünya: Dijital yoksullar. İnternete erişimi olmayanlar, algoritmalar tarafından görünmez kılınanlar, platform ekonomisinin dışında kalanlar. Ekranı olmayanlar. Şifresi olmayanlar. Bağlantısı olmayanlar. Beşinci Dünya bekliyor — ve akademik kariyerler de.

Altıncı Dünya: Uzay kolonicileri. Henüz Mars’a gönderilmemiş, belki hiç gönderilmeyecek, ama teorik olarak en ağır koşullarda, en uzak cephede, en derin güvencesizlik içinde çalışacak olan insanlar. Spatiolaterya sınıf listesinde kendine yer bulmuşsa Altıncı Dünya da coğrafi listede yerini alabilir.

Yedinci Dünya için gerekçe bulmak güç olmaz. Sekizinci için de. Liste açıktır, kalem elimizdedir. Tek gereken, bir mağduriyet bulmak ve ona bir numara yapıştırmaktır.

VI. BU NEDEN YAPILIYOR?

Buraya kadar ele aldığımız kavramların ortak bir özelliği var: hepsi yanlış. Teorik olarak temelsiz, mantıksal olarak tutarsız, analitik olarak işlevsiz. Peki bu kadar açık hatalar nasıl oluyor da akademik literatüre giriyor, tartışma gündemine oturuyor ve eleştirenleri susturmayı başarıyor?

İki ayrı ama birbirini tamamlayan açıklama var. Birincisi yapısal, ikincisi siyasi.

Birinci Açıklama: Akademik Üretim Baskısı

Modern akademi, bilgi üretmekten çok kavram üretmek üzerine kurulu bir sistemdir. Yayın sayısı, atıf endeksleri, özgünlük Sömürgecilik vb. Bunların tamamı akademisyeni sürekli yeni bir şey söylemeye zorlar. Ama söylenecek gerçekten yeni bir şey her zaman yoktur.

Bu baskı altında en kolay çıkış yolu, var olan kavramları parçalayıp yeniden adlandırmaktır. Proletarya zaten tanımlanmıştır, onu olduğu gibi kullanmak özgün bir katkı sayılmaz. Ama proletaryanın bir kesimini alıp ona yeni bir isim vermek, bir makale, bir kitap, bir araştırma programı, bir akademik kariyer anlamına gelir. Prekarya tam da böyle doğmuştur. Guy Standing’in kitabı on dile çevrilmiş, onlarca üniversitede okutulmuştur. Ortaya koyduğu şey Marx’ın zaten söylediğidir, ama yeni bir kelimeyle söylenmiştir.

Bu mekanizma iyi niyetle de işleyebilir. Pek çok akademisyen gerçekten yeni bir şey söylediğini sanır. Ama iyi niyet, analitik hatayı ortadan kaldırmaz. Sonuç aynıdır: kavram enflasyonu, parçalanmış analiz, zayıflamış sınıf bilinci.

İkinci Açıklama: Sınıf Bilincini Dağıtmanın Nesnel İşlevi

İkinci açıklama daha rahatsız edicidir — ama görmezden gelinmesi daha da rahatsız edicidir.

Sınıf bilinci, sermaye için tehlikelidir. İşçilerin kendilerini ortak bir sınıfın üyesi olarak tanımaları, ortak çıkarlarını görmeleri ve ortak hareket etmeleri… Bu, tarihin en büyük toplumsal dönüşümlerinin motorudur. Sermaye bu bilinci dağıtmak ister. Bunu her zaman doğrudan yapmaz. Çoğu zaman dolaylı yollar daha etkilidir.

Proletaryayı onlarca alt kategoriye bölmek, bu dağıtma işleminin en zarif biçimidir. Homoletarya kendi sorunlarıyla ilgilenir, gerioletarya kendisininkiyle, sezonoletarya kendisininkiyle. Her grup kendi özel baskısını görür, ama hepsinin kaynağı olan ortak üretim ilişkisi görünmez hale gelir. Birleşik sınıf hareketi yerine birbirinden kopuk kimlik siyasetleri ortaya çıkar. Sermaye için daha rahat, daha yönetilebilir bir düzen.

Bu işlevi gören kavramları üretenlerin hepsinin bu niyetle hareket ettiğini söylemek gerekmez ve söylenmemelidir. Ama bir fikrin nesnel işlevi, o fikri savunanın öznel niyetiyle ölçülmez. Kapitalist sistemi sürdüren pek çok mekanizma, onu sürdürmeyi hedeflemeyen insanlar tarafından işletilir. Kavram enflasyonunun yarattığı analitik kargaşa, niyet ne olursa olsun, sermayenin işine yarar.

Üçüncü Açıklama: Yüzeysel Marksizm

Bu tabloya bir de şunu eklemek gerekir: söz konusu kavramları üretenlerin ve savunanların önemli bir bölümü Marksizmi yeterince özümsememiştir. Akademisyenler dahil pek çok kişi, Marksist teoriye kulaktan dolma, yüzeysel bir aşinalıkla yaklaşmakta; kavramların tarihsel ve teorik derinliğini kavramadan yeni etiketler üretmekte ya da üretilenleri benimsemektedir.

Daha ilginç olan ise bu kişilerin eleştiriye verdikleri yanıttır. Klasik Marksist kavramları doğru kullanmayı savunanlar, “200 yıllık kavramlarla düşünen köhne kafalar” olarak nitelendiriliyor. Bu suçlama kulağa radikal geliyor ama içi boştur. Marksizmi aşan, onun sınırlarını zorlayan, yeni bir teorik çerçeve öneren hiçbir şey ortada yoktur. Yalnızca sulandırma ve bulandırma vardır. Kavramları parçalamak, teorik ilerleme değildir, teorik gerilemenin örtbas edilmesidir.

Üçü Birden

Bu üç açıklama çelişmez, birbirini tamamlar. Akademik üretim baskısı zemini hazırlar: sürekli yeni kavram üretme zorunluluğu, analitik disiplini aşındırır. Siyasi işlev bu zeminde büyür: parçalanmış analiz, dağılmış sınıf bilinci, işlevsiz bir sol. Yüzeysel Marksizm ise bu iki mekanizmanın içinden kolayca geçtiği, en az direnci sunan zemindir.

Sonuç, kasıtlı bir komplo değildir ama kasıtlı bir komplo kadar etkilidir. Belki daha da etkilidir: çünkü içten gelir, iyi niyetle üretilir ve eleştirilmesi güçtür. “Güvencesiz işçileri savunmak istemiyorsun” demek, “sınıf analizini sulandırıyorsun” demekten çok daha kolaydır.

Femmekarya bitiş çizgisi değil, yol ayrımı. Proletaryayı önce prekarya diye yardılar. Şimdi prekaryayı da kadın diye yarıyorlar. Yarın yaşlı diye, göçmen diye, eşcinsel diye yardıkça yardacaklar. Her bıçak darbesi yeni bir kavram doğur. Kavramlar çoğaldıkça proletarya buharlaşıyor. Buharlaşan sınıfın yerini alan tek neferlerin bedelini işçiler ödüyor.

VII. KLASİK KAVRAMLAR NEDEN HÂLÂ YETERLİ?

Marksist sınıf analizinin en büyük gücü, soyutlama düzeyidir. Proletarya, belirli bir mesleği, belirli bir çalışma biçimini ya da belirli bir kültürel kimliği tanımlamaz. Üretim araçlarından yoksunluk ve emek gücünü satmak zorunda olmak — bu iki kriter, tarihsel olarak son derece farklı koşullardaki işçileri aynı analitik çerçeve içinde ele almayı mümkün kılar.

On dokuzuncu yüzyılın tekstil işçisi, yirminci yüzyılın montaj hattı işçisi ve yirmi birinci yüzyılın platform çalışanı — üçü de farklı koşullarda, farklı biçimlerde çalışır. Ama üçü de üretim araçlarından yoksundur, üçü de emek gücünü satmak zorundadır, üçü de sermayeyle aynı temel ilişki içindedir. Bu ortaklık, aralarındaki farklılıklardan daha belirleyicidir.

Prekarya teorisyenleri bunu görmezden gelir. Platform çalışmasını, gig ekonomisini, taşeron sistemleri “yeni” olgular olarak sunar ve bu yeniliğin yeni kavramlar gerektirdiğini öne sürerler. Ama üretim biçimlerinin değişmesi, üretim ilişkilerinin değiştiği anlamına gelmez. Sermaye hâlâ sermayedir, emek hâlâ emektir. Araçlar değişmiş, ilişki değişmemiştir.

Marksist sınıf analizi, kendi zamanında bile son derece farklı işçi kesimlerini kapsıyordu. Marx, Kapital’de fabrika işçisini, tarım işçisini, ev ekmeği işçisini, gezgin satıcıyı aynı çerçevede ele aldı. Engels, İngiltere’de Emekçi Sınıfın Durumu‘nda güvencesiz, parçalı, süreksiz çalışan işçileri, yani bugünün prekarya teorisyenlerinin “yeni” bulduğu her şeyi on dokuzuncu yüzyılda zaten tanımlamıştı.

Güvencesizlik yeni değildir. Parçalı istihdam yeni değildir. Taşeronluk yeni değildir. Bunlar kapitalizmin kronik özellikleridir — kâh öne çıkar, kâh geri çekilir, ama hiç kaybolmaz. Marx bunu biliyordu. Yedek işçi ordusu kavramı tam da bu kronik güvencesizliği açıklar: sermaye, işçiyi disiplin altında tutmak için daima bir yedek işgücü kitlesi bulundurur. Bugünün platform çalışanı, Marx’ın yedek ordusunun dijital çağdaki görünümüdür — başka bir şey değil.

Klasik kavramların yeterliliği yalnızca teorik bir mesele değildir — politik bir meseledir. Proletarya kavramı, işçileri ortak bir kimlik etrafında bir araya getirir. Bu kimlik, farklılıkları yok saymaz — fabrika işçisi ile tarım işçisinin koşulları farklıdır, bunu herkes bilir. Ama bu farklılıkların altında yatan ortak ilişkiyi görünür kılar. Ortak düşman kimdir, ortak çıkar nedir, ortak hareket nasıl mümkündür — bu soruları yanıtlamayı sağlar.

Prekarya ve benzeri kavramlar bu birliği parçalar. Her grup kendi özel etiketiyle kendi özel sorununa odaklanır. Ortak hareket giderek güçleşir. Tarih boyunca en büyük işçi hareketleri — sendikalar, genel grevler, devrimci dönüşümler — bu ortak sınıf kimliğinden beslenmiştir. Kimliği parçaladığınızda hareketi de parçalarsınız.

VIII. SONUÇ: KAVRAM ENFLASYONUN POLİTİK BEDELİ

Bu makale boyunca tek bir argüman izlendi: Prekarya ve benzeri türev kavramlar, Marksist sınıf analizine hiçbir şey eklemez. Proletaryanın zaten içerdiği özellikleri izole edip yeniden etiketler, kavramın sınırlarını zorlar ve sonunda onu işlevsiz kılar. Bu bir entelektüel moda değildir — analitik bir çöküştür ve politik bir bedeldir.

Guy Standing’in prekarya için öne sürdüğü her kriter — güvencesizlik, parçalı istihdam, sosyal haklardan yoksunluk, geleceğe dair belirsizlik — Marx’ın proletarya kavramının içinde zaten mevcuttur. Yeni olan koşullar değil, etikettir.

Bu mantığı tutarlı biçimde uyguladığımızda varılan yer absürdlüktür: homoletarya, pedoletarya, gerioletarya, sezonoletarya, loterlaterya, femmekarya ve nihayetinde spatiolaterya. Her biri gerçek bir baskıyı, gerçek bir güvencesizliği tanımlıyor olabilir. Ama hiçbiri yeni bir sınıf değildir. Proletaryanın farklı yüzleridir — ve bu yüzleri ayrı sınıflarmış gibi sunmak, asıl ilişkiyi görünmez kılar. Üstelik süreç burada durmaz: Prekarya içindeki kadın da bölünebilir, onun içindeki yaşlı kadın da, onun içindeki göçmen kadın da. Atomizasyon tek kişilik gruplara ulaşana kadar ilerleyebilir ve o noktada sınıf kavramı fiilen yok olmuş olur. Bu kavram enflasyonunun teorik sonu değil, siyasi hedefidir.

Daha da ileri gidildiğinde, Marksist kavramın hiç uygulanamayacağı faaliyetler “işçilik” olarak tanımlanır. Seks işçisi, narkoletarya, cidoletarya, ekstortoletarya, migralaterya, pornolaterya. Burada artık proletaryayı parçalamak bile söz konusu değildir, üretim ilişkisi yoktur, artı değer yoktur, sermaye ilişkisi yoktur. Yalnızca etiket vardır. Bu etiket ise mağdurları korumak bir yana, onları orada tutan sistemi meşrulaştırır.

Peki bu kavramlar kimin işine yarıyor?

Prekarya ve benzeri kavramlar, güvencesiz işçilerin işine yaramamıştır. Onları bir araya getirmemiş, ortak çıkarlarını görmelerini sağlamamış, sermayeye karşı ortak bir cephe oluşturmalarına zemin hazırlamıştır. Akademik kariyerlerin, araştırma programlarının ve ideolojik tahakkümün işine yaramıştır.

Klasik kavramlara dönmek gericilik değildir. Analitik dürüstlüktür. Proletarya kavramı, güvencesiz işçiyi de mevsimlik işçiyi de platform çalışanını da kapsar; onları parçalamadan, aralarına duvar örmeden, her birine ayrı bir etiket yapıştırmadan… Bu kapsayıcılık bir zayıflık değil, bir güçtür.

Kavram enflasyonunun bedeli teorik bir hatadan ibaret değildir. Politik bir kayıptır. Bu kaybın faturasını da akademisyenler değil, işçiler öder.【●】

• Mark Fisher died in 2017. His ideas didn’t — they became a product line.

• The vampire escaped the page and took up residence in the seminar room. On the factory floor, the actual vampirism continues.

COMING SOON●○●COMING SOON

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

In the social sciences, inventing a new concept is remarkably easy. Take a sufficiently complex problem, give it an original name, produce a handful of academic texts, and watch the concept settle into the literature. The question of whether it actually describes anything new is rarely asked.

The precariat is precisely such a concept. Guy Standing and a constellation of contemporary social theorists proposed this term to designate workers in insecure, fragmented, discontinuous employment as a “new class.” It sounds compelling. But on closer inspection, every defining characteristic of the precariat — insecurity, fragmented employment, subcontracting, absence of social rights — is already fully contained within the classical Marxist definition of the proletariat. There is no new class here. There is only a new label.

This article examines the precariat and its conceptual siblings from that standpoint. The argument unfolds on three levels: theoretical, logical, and political. Theoretically, these concepts add nothing to Marxist class analysis. Logically, the methodology that produces them is condemned to its own absurdity. Politically, they serve the objective function of dissolving class consciousness — regardless of the intentions of those who deploy them.

II. WHAT IS THE PRECARIAT — AND WHAT DOES MARX ALREADY TELL US?

In his 2011 book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Guy Standing laid out the concept with systematic ambition. The precariat, he argued, constitutes a fundamentally new and distinct social layer, divorced from the traditional working class. Its defining characteristics include the absence of job security, the total lack of social rights, platform work and the gig economy (a term borrowed from the music industry, where a “gig” originally meant a single, one-off performance — it has since migrated into economic vocabulary to describe project-based, contractless, discontinuous labor, roughly translatable as “working whenever you can find work”), fragmented and discontinuous employment, the dissolution of occupational identity, dependence on non-wage income, and chronic uncertainty about the future.

To anyone familiar with Marxist theory, this list raises an immediate and unavoidable question: which of these characteristics falls outside the classical definition of the proletariat?

For Marx, class is not a matter of subjective experience or cultural identity. It is an objective relation of production. The proletariat is the class that, owning no means of production, has no option but to sell its labor power to survive. Built into that definition is insecurity — because the worker has nothing to sell but labor, and whether that labor is purchased depends entirely on the calculations of capital. Fragmented employment, subcontracting, discontinuous work: all of this is examined in exhaustive detail in Capital. The absence of social rights, the dissolution of occupational identity, chronic uncertainty about the future — these are consequences of the fundamental relation between labor and capital, not characteristics that could possibly constitute an independent class standing outside it.

Every criterion Standing advances for the precariat describes the proletariat in its particular historical manifestation. What emerges is not a new class but a new face of the same class. The theoretical contribution of the concept is zero. The analytical damage it inflicts is considerably higher.

III. TAKING THE LOGIC TO ITS CONCLUSION: INVENTED CATEGORIES

The most reliable way to test a concept’s validity is to apply its logic consistently and see where it leads. The logic behind the precariat is straightforward: if a subset of the proletariat experiences conditions specific to its situation, it qualifies as a distinct class category.

Let us accept this logic and apply it.

Gay workers face discrimination in the workplace, compounding their insecurity.

Therefore: the homoletariat.

Child laborers are exploited and simultaneously denied education. Therefore: the pedoletariat.

Elderly workers are forced into retirement or pushed out of the labor market. Therefore: the gerioletarijat.

Seasonal workers in agriculture and tourism are employed for only a fraction of the year. Therefore: the seasonoletariat. Drug dealers operate in the informal economy, without security, without legal protection, in conditions of constant physical danger. Therefore: the narcoletariat.

Contract killers — from the Latin caedere, to kill, the same root as homicide, fratricide, genocide — lack job security, have no access to social rights, and live with chronic uncertainty. Therefore: the cidoletariat.

Extortionists operate within informal economic structures. Therefore: the extortoletariat.

Workers whose only economic horizon is a lottery win — people for whom systemic mobility is so thoroughly foreclosed that chance becomes the sole imaginable exit — therefore: the lotoletariat.

And the colonists who will one day be dispatched to Mars to labor in the most extreme conditions, at the furthest remove from any social protection: therefore: the spatiolateriat.

The list does not end here. There is no reason it should.

Let us be explicit about something. The majority of the examples above were generated in the course of writing this article, in a matter of minutes. This is not a boast. It is a warning. The logic is so simple and so loose that anyone can take any characteristic and attach a label to it. No specialized expertise is required. The reader is invited to try.

Here is what each of these invented categories actually describes:

Homoletariat: Gay workers. Their experience of workplace discrimination is real. But discrimination does not place them outside the proletariat. Declaring a subset of workers who face discrimination a distinct class does not dismantle the discrimination. It merely relabels it.

Pedoletariat: Child laborers. Exploited, denied education, subjected to physical and psychological damage. This is among the oldest and most clearly documented features of capitalist production. Marx and Engels wrote about it extensively. It requires no new category. A new label adds nothing.

Gerioletariat: Elderly workers, forced into retirement or trapped in grueling physical labor into old age. The classic operation of the reserve army of labor — capital uses up the workforce and discards it. Already in Marx.

LGBTİQ++letariat: The expanded LGBTİQ+ category. An extension of the homoletariat with an expanding acronym. As the plus signs multiply, the boundaries of the category dissolve — but the logic remains identical.

Seasonoletariat: Seasonal workers. Discontinuous employment is among the most thoroughly analyzed phenomena in Marxist political economy. A new name generates no new analysis.

Narcoletariat: Drug dealers. Informal, insecure, dangerous. But which capital relation? Which surplus value? The question goes unanswered — because the analytical framework does not apply.

Cidoletariat: Contract killers. From Latin caedere — the same root as homicide, fratricide, genocide. No job security, no social rights, chronic instability. This is where the logic consistently applied arrives.

Extortoletariat: Extortionists. Informal economic actors. The Latin root lends the category a spurious air of scholarly precision. It is otherwise empty.

Migralateriat: Migrant smugglers and their victims. Here the list reaches its deepest point of collapse: perpetrator and victim enter the same category. Exploiter and exploited share the same label.

Lotoletariat: Workers whose only economic hope is the lottery. We are no longer categorizing economic activity. We are categorizing a psychological response to dispossession. Marxist analysis already has a name for this. It is called alienation. Under the new rules of concept inflation, alienation gets repackaged as a demographic class.

Pornolateriat: Workers in the pornography industry. The capital relation here is more visible — studios, producers, distribution platforms exist. But the question of whether the body can serve as a means of production remains unanswered.

Spatiolateriat: Space colonists. The apex of the list and the natural terminus of its logic. A working class that does not yet exist, that may never exist. But given the rules of this game, why not?

Most of these examples were invented in the course of writing this article, in a matter of minutes. But the methodology requires no satirical invention — it is already producing itself.

The Fluidity of Being a Woman Within the Precariat

Born from a doctoral thesis, designating women within the precariat, and already, in its publisher’s words, ‘poised to cross national borders’ — is already on the shelves. (Müjgan Şahin, Siyasal Kitabevi, 2026.) The femmecariat takes its place on the list.

But the atomization does not stop here. The femmecariat is merely an intermediate station. First they divided the proletariat and produced the precariat. Now they are dividing the precariat itself and producing the femmecariat. The logic continues indefinitely: women within the precariat, elderly women within the precariat, elderly migrant women within the precariat, elderly gay migrant women within the precariat — every intersection generates a new category, a new research program, a new academic career. The process is logically infinite and can advance until only single-person groups remain: the point at which every individual constitutes their own class. At that point, the concept of class has effectively ceased to exist — what remains, facing capital, is a mass of atomized, isolated, unorganizable individuals. This is not the theoretical endpoint of concept inflation. It is its political objective.

What do all these categories share? None of them owns the means of production. All of them must sell their labor power. All of them stand in the same fundamental relation to capital. They are all, in other words, the proletariat. As the concepts multiply, what they illuminate shrinks and what they conceal grows.

IV. BEYOND THE PROLETARIAT: FAKE WORKER CATEGORIES

The invented categories examined above at least concerned real workers. They artificially fragmented the proletariat, attaching a separate label to each subset. This was wrong and harmful — but it at least remained within the terrain of Marxist analysis.

The category we turn to now goes further. Here, activities that bear no relationship to Marxist class analysis are designated as labor. There is no production relation, no surplus value, no capital relation — only the label “worker.” And behind that label, beneath what appears at first glance to be a gesture of solidarity, lies an ideological operation that functions in precisely the opposite direction.

The Concept of “Sex Work”

The term “sex worker” is deployed systematically by certain currents to define and legitimize prostitution as an occupation. The term itself is already a political position — not a neutral description but the linguistic expression of an advocacy practice.

Testing it against the Marxist framework requires only three questions.

First question: what is the means of production?

In classical Marxist analysis, the worker is separated from the means of production — this is precisely why labor power must be sold. If the human body is to be counted as a means of production, then every manual worker already owns their means. If that is accepted, the foundational definition of the proletariat collapses. The concept either applies to everyone or to no one.

Second question: where is surplus value produced, and who appropriates it?

In Marxist analysis, surplus value is the portion of the value created by the worker that exceeds the wage paid, and capital appropriates it. In prostitution, this relation cannot be defined. Is the client a capitalist? Is the payment surplus value or exchange value? Does the involvement of a third party change the relation? The questions cannot be answered — because the analytical framework does not apply.

Third question: how is class consciousness formed?

In Marxist analysis, class consciousness emerges from a shared relation to production. Workers facing the same capitalist within the same structure of exploitation come to recognize their common interests. The question of how “sex workers” might form class consciousness within a shared production relation has no answer.

The False Compassion Mechanism

The objections arrive on cue: “But these people are exploited.” “Their rights must be protected.” “They are vulnerable.”

None of these objections is false. Women driven into prostitution — the great majority of them victims of poverty, violence, and trafficking — are genuinely exploited and their rights genuinely require protection. But none of this requires defining them as “sex workers.” On the contrary: that definition does not protect them. It legitimizes the system that keeps them there.

Inserting the concept of “sex work” into Marxist class analysis reframes systematic victimization as a free choice within a labor market. Defining prostitution as a labor relation prepares the ideological ground for normalizing and sustaining the industry. This is the real function of false compassion.

The pornography industry is treated within the same framework. The capital relation there is more visible — studios, producers, platforms. But the question of whether the body can function as a means of production remains unanswered. The pornolateriat carries the absurdity one step further.

The Lynching Mechanism

Those who raise these objections know what to expect: “You’re defending prostitution.” “You hate women.” “You’re blaming the victims.”

These accusations deliberately conflate two entirely different positions. Refusing to insert prostitution into Marxist categories is not a defense of prostitution. It is precisely the opposite: it insists that the genuine victimization of women driven into prostitution must be made visible, not obscured by the label of worker.

But the distinction is never drawn. Its not being drawn is not accidental. It is the fastest available method for closing down debate, silencing criticism, and morally discrediting anyone who objects. It is the instrument of ideological domination, not intellectual honesty.

The Migralateriat

A parallel collapse occurs with migrant smuggling. The migralateriat exposes the absurdity with particular force: who, in the smuggling operation, is the worker — the smuggler or the migrant? Both? When perpetrator and victim are placed in the same category, the concept does not merely become meaningless. It becomes morally untenable.

This too is not accidental. Collapsing the distinction between exploiter and exploited obscures the responsibility of the perpetrator. The “worker” label places the smuggler and the trafficked migrant within the same production relation, erasing the moral and legal distance between them. When a concept expands to cover everything, it functionally means nothing — and those who cause harm find protection in that void.

V. THE FOURTH, FIFTH, AND SIXTH WORLDS

This concept inflation is not confined to class analysis. A parallel expansion has infected international relations.

Mao Zedong’s Three Worlds Theory rests on a coherent geopolitical and anti-imperialist analytical framework. The First World consists of the two superpowers — the United States and the USSR — each operating as an imperialist force within its own sphere. The Second World comprises the middle powers — Japan and the countries of Europe — dependent on one of the two blocs but seeking independence. The Third World designates the nations that are colonies, semi-colonies, or victims of neocolonialism, standing outside the camps of both superpowers.

(The theory is fiercely contested — its designation of the USSR as “social imperialist” led Mao toward rapprochement with the United States and toward support for deeply questionable forces within liberation movements. But that is a separate argument.)

It may be right or wrong. But it has an internal logic. It is grounded in analysis, offers a coherent framework, and carries political consequences.

The Fourth World has none of this. It is used to describe indigenous peoples, the chronically poor, communities pushed to the margins within First World societies. It points to real suffering — that much should be conceded. But however much it may appear to continue Mao’s sequence, it has no organic relationship to that logic. Why is it the fourth? From which systematic analysis does it derive? The questions go unanswered. The concept hangs in the air. In Ancient Greece, ‘barbarians’ were labeled the same way—outsider (“metoikos”) pushed beyond the bounds of society. Sticking a number on something is easy; systematic analysis is hard.

Generating concepts that float free of any systematic analytical foundation is not difficult. Here are two demonstrations:

The Fifth World: The digitally dispossessed. Those without internet access, rendered invisible by algorithms, excluded from the platform economy. Those without screens. Those without passwords. Those without connections. The Fifth World is waiting — and so are the academic careers.

The Sixth World: Space colonists. Not yet dispatched to Mars, perhaps never to be dispatched, but theoretically destined to labor in the most extreme conditions, at the furthest frontier, in the deepest insecurity. The spatiolateriat has already claimed its place in the class list. The Sixth World can claim its place in the geopolitical one.

A Seventh World would not be hard to justify. Nor an Eighth. The list is open, the pen is ready. All that is required is a grievance and a number.

VI. WHY IS THIS HAPPENING?

The concepts examined here share a common feature: they are wrong. Theoretically groundless, logically incoherent, analytically useless. Yet they dominate academic literature, anchor public debate, and succeed in silencing their critics. How?

Two explanations, distinct but mutually reinforcing.

First Explanation: The Pressure to Produce

Modern academia has become less a system for generating knowledge than a factory for generating concepts. Publication counts, citation indices, the imperative of originality — these pressures force academics to perpetually produce something new. But there is not always something genuinely new to say.

Under this pressure, the path of least resistance is to take existing concepts apart and reassemble them under new names. The proletariat is already defined — using it as it stands earns no credit for originality. But taking a fraction of the proletariat and giving it a new name yields an article, a book, a research program, an academic career. This is precisely how the precariat was born. Standing’s book has been translated into ten languages and taught in dozens of universities. What it delivers is what Marx already said — in new packaging.

This mechanism can operate in good faith. Many academics genuinely believe they have found something new. But good intentions do not cancel analytical error. The result is the same: concept inflation, fractured analysis, weakened class consciousness.

Second Explanation: The Objective Function of Dispersing Class Consciousness

The second explanation is more disturbing. Ignoring it is more disturbing still.

Class consciousness is dangerous to capital. Workers recognizing themselves as members of a common class, grasping their shared interests, and acting collectively — this is the engine of the greatest social transformations in history. Capital needs to dissolve that consciousness. It does not always do so directly. Indirect methods are often more effective.

Fragmenting the proletariat into dozens of subcategories is the most elegant form this dissolution takes. The homoletariat attends to its own concerns, the gerioletariat to its own, the seasonoletariat to its own. Each group sees its particular oppression, but the shared production relation that is the source of all of it becomes invisible. A united class movement gives way to disconnected identity politics. A more comfortable, more manageable order for capital.

It does not follow that everyone producing these concepts intends this result — and that claim should not be made. But the objective function of an idea is not measured by the subjective intentions of those who advance it. Many of the mechanisms sustaining capitalism are operated by people who have no interest in sustaining it. The analytical chaos generated by concept inflation serves capital regardless of anyone’s intentions. As one formulation puts it: this is divide and conquer executed with sociology degrees rather than strikebreakers.

Third Explanation: Superficial Marxism

There is a third factor that must be named. A significant proportion of those producing and defending these concepts have never genuinely absorbed Marxist theory. Academics included, many approach it with secondhand familiarity, adopting the vocabulary without grasping the historical and theoretical depth of the concepts — generating new labels or endorsing existing ones without the analytical foundations to evaluate them.

More revealing is how these people respond to criticism. Those who insist on the correct use of classical Marxist categories are dismissed as antiquarians trapped in 200-year-old vocabulary. The accusation sounds radical. It is hollow. Nothing on offer transcends Marxism, pushes against its limits, or proposes a new theoretical framework. There is only dilution and muddying. Fragmenting concepts is not theoretical progress. It is theoretical regression with a progressive aesthetic.

All Three Together

These explanations do not conflict. They complete each other. Academic production pressure prepares the ground: the compulsion to generate new concepts continuously erodes analytical discipline. The political function takes root in that ground: fractured analysis, dispersed class consciousness, a left rendered ineffective. Superficial Marxism provides the path of least resistance through which both mechanisms operate most freely.

The result is not a deliberate conspiracy — but it is as effective as one. Perhaps more so: because it comes from within, is generated in good faith, and is extraordinarily difficult to criticize. Saying “you don’t want to defend precarious workers” is much easier than saying “you are diluting class analysis.”

The femmecariat is not the finish line—it is a fork in the road. First they split the proletariat and called it precariat. Now they are splitting the precariat and calling it women. Tomorrow they will keep splitting it: by age, by migrant status, by sexuality. Every knife cut births a new concept. As concepts multiply, the proletariat evaporates. The bill for replacing a class with lone individuals is paid by workers.

VII. WHY THE CLASSICAL CONCEPTS STILL SUFFICE

The greatest strength of Marxist class analysis is its level of abstraction. The proletariat does not designate a particular occupation, a particular form of work, or a particular cultural identity. Two criteria — separation from the means of production and the consequent necessity of selling labor power — make it possible to analyze workers in vastly different historical conditions within a single analytical framework.

A nineteenth-century textile worker, a twentieth-century assembly line worker, a twenty-first-century platform worker: all work differently, in different conditions, with different tools. But all are separated from the means of production, all must sell their labor power, all stand in the same fundamental relation to capital. That shared foundation is more determinative than the differences between them.

Precariat theorists ignore this. They present platform work, the gig economy, subcontracting as “new” phenomena requiring new concepts. But a change in the forms of production is not a change in the relations of production. Capital is still capital. Labor is still labor. The instruments have changed. The relation has not.

Marxist class analysis encompassed radically different categories of workers even in its own time. In Capital, Marx analyzed factory workers, agricultural workers, home workers, itinerant traders within the same framework. In The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels documented insecure, fragmented, discontinuous labor — everything that precariat theorists now present as a novel discovery — in the nineteenth century.

Insecurity is not new. Fragmented employment is not new. Subcontracting is not new. These are chronic features of capitalism — more prominent at some moments, less at others, but never absent. Marx understood this. His concept of the reserve army of labor explains this chronic insecurity directly: capital maintains a permanent pool of underemployed workers to discipline the employed workforce. Today’s platform worker is the digital-era manifestation of Marx’s reserve army. Nothing more.

The sufficiency of classical concepts is not only a theoretical question. It is a political one. The concept of the proletariat brings workers together under a shared identity. This identity does not erase differences — the conditions of a factory worker and an agricultural worker are different, and everyone knows it. But it makes the shared relation beneath those differences visible. It enables the questions that matter: who is the common enemy, what is the common interest, how is collective action possible.

The precariat and its conceptual siblings destroy that unity. Each group, furnished with its own specific label, focuses on its own specific grievance. Collective action becomes progressively more difficult. The greatest working-class movements in history — trade unions, general strikes, revolutionary transformations — drew their force from this shared class identity. Fragment the identity and you fragment the movement.

VIII. CONCLUSION: THE PRICE WE PAY: WHEN CONCEPTS DISSOLVE CLASS

A single argument has run through this article: the precariat and its derivative concepts add nothing to Marxist class analysis. They isolate characteristics already contained within the proletariat, re-label them, push against the boundaries of the concept, and ultimately render it inoperable. This is not intellectual fashion. It is analytical collapse with a political price.

Every criterion Standing advances for the precariat — insecurity, fragmented employment, absence of social rights, uncertainty about the future — is already present within Marx’s concept of the proletariat. What is new is not the condition. It is the label.

Applying this logic consistently leads to absurdity: the homoletariat, pedoletariat, gerioletariat, seasonoletariat, lotoletariat, the femmecariat, and ultimately the spatiolateriat. Each may describe a real oppression, a real insecurity. But none constitutes a new class. They are different faces of the proletariat — and presenting those faces as distinct classes renders the underlying relation invisible. The process does not stop here: women within the precariat can be further divided, elderly women within that, migrant women within that. The atomization can advance until only single-person groups remain — at which point the concept of class has effectively ceased to exist. This is not the theoretical endpoint of concept inflation. It is its political objective.

Pushed further, activities that bear no relationship to Marxist analysis are designated as labor: sex work, the narcoletariat, the cidoletariat, the extortoletariat, the migralateriat, the pornolateriat. Here the proletariat is no longer being fragmented — there is no production relation, no surplus value, no capital relation at all. Only the label remains. And that label, far from protecting the victims, legitimizes the systems exploiting them.

The question that remains is the only one that matters: whose interests do these concepts serve?

They have not served the interests of precarious workers. They have not brought them together, enabled them to recognize their common interests, or prepared the ground for collective action against capital. They have served academic careers, research programs, and ideological domination.

Returning to classical concepts is not conservatism. It is analytical honesty. The concept of the proletariat encompasses the precarious worker, the seasonal worker, the platform worker — without fragmenting them, without erecting walls between them, without attaching a separate label to each. That inclusiveness is not a weakness. It is a strength.

The cost of concept inflation is not a theoretical error. It is a political loss. And the bill is paid not by the academics who generate the concepts, but by the workers who needed the solidarity those concepts dissolved.【●】

COMING SOON

In the social sciences, inventing a new concept is remarkably easy.

Take a sufficiently complex problem, give it an original name, produce a handful of academic texts, and watch the concept settle into the literature.

The question of whether it actually describes anything new is rarely asked.

COMING SOON

The answer is obvious: because in English, the words "negro" and "nigger" carry the weight of the Atlantic slave trade, the plantation system, generations of humiliation. Those words are burdened with history. For societies that lived through that history, this sensitivity is understandable, legitimate, even necessary.

But that history is not our history.

The word zenci comes from Zanzibar. That ancient port city in East Africa. The name Zanzibar derives from the Persian zangbār: zangī (the name of a people) and bār (coast). It entered Turkish as a geographic and ethnic descriptor. There is no insult in it, no degradation, no stamp of slavery.

Every language has its word for the color black. In Arabic, aswad. In Persian, siyah. In Turkish, kara. These describe a color, not a person. But zenci stands completely outside this series. It is neither a color word nor derived from one. It is the name of a place, of a people. For centuries, Turkish preserved this distinction.

The word zenci carries Zanzibar with it — in Ottoman Turkish, Zengibar, Zencibar. Zanzibar is not just a city name. Zanzibar represents Africa, represents African-ness, represents African roots, a culture, a history. One of East Africa's most profound centers of civilization. The heart of Swahili culture, where for centuries trade, poetry, and architecture converged. When you say zenci, you are speaking of a person belonging to that civilization. When you say siyahi (the Turkish calque of "black"), you speak only of skin color… That's exactly what the colonizer did: reduced a person to a body, not a bearer of cultural heritage. What is done in the name of "greater sensitivity" unconsciously reproduces the colonizer's gaze.

Saying siyahi is to destroy that distinction, to reduce the person back to their color. The essence of racism is to see the skin; siyahi does precisely that. In the name of being more sensitive, you end up doing exactly what sensitivity is supposed to oppose.

You don't need to look far to understand this. What does it mean to call a Kurd a "Southeasterner" or a "Northern Iraqi"? It erases identity and reduces it to a geographic coordinate. It tears a person from their origin, culture, language, and turns them into a map point. When you say "Kurd," there is a people, its history, language, culture. When you say "Southeasterner," there is only an address. Substituting siyahi for zenci does exactly the same thing. It erases Zanzibar — that people, that culture, that geography — and leaves behind only skin color. Biology replaces identity. Pigment replaces the human.

Yes, the Ottomans had zenci as well. But their condition is structurally incomparable to that of the Atlantic slave. In the Atlantic, people were kidnapped, crammed into ships, used as means of production on plantations. That chain remained unbroken for generations. In the Ottoman Empire, however, there were those who rose in palace service, in the Janissary corps, in the army, in the bureaucracy. Some rose to Grand Vizier. This does not beautify everything those people endured, but the historical reality is different. You cannot tell the same history with the same word.

Now let's turn to Négritude — the real irony.

In 1930s Paris, at the very heart of French colonialism, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas launched a movement. Its name was Négritude. These intellectuals were truly under colonial rule. The word nègre had been hurled at them as an insult, repeatedly, systematically, as a weapon of degradation. And what did they do? They did not abandon the word. They reclaimed it. They transformed that word from shame into honor, from humiliation into resistance.

Césaire, who lived that history, reclaimed that word.

But the Turkish comprador intellectual, who never lived that history, abandoned his own word — which was neutral in color.

We need to dwell on this paradox. The Négritude movement tells us this: the meaning of a word cannot be divorced from its historical context. Nègre had been poisoned within French colonialism; but Césaire turned that poison into an antidote. Zenci, however, had never been poisoned in Turkish. There was no burden to transform. No shame to discard.

And yet it was discarded.

Négritude is not the only example. Conscious Black movements in the U.S., those who resisted imperialism, who reclaimed their African roots and cultures, who rebelled against the system of exploitation — they insisted on using the word "negro." Malcolm X used it. The Black Panthers used it. They also rejected the imposition of "Afro-American," because that word made them neither fully African nor fully American, left them suspended between two identities. A diluted identity, not fully belonging to either.

"Negro" was an authentic identity shaped within that land, that history, that struggle. A word with roots, with history, with struggle.

But the Turkish comprador intellectual, without ever being part of that struggle, without ever living that history, adopted "siyahi" — a word that even those movements never embraced — in the name of sensitivity. Why? Because woke white American liberals started saying "black." And their agent in Turkey needed a corresponding word.

Let's be clear: Colonialism, slavery, and racism are not shameful but bygone pages of capitalism. They are constitutive and ongoing features of that system. From the vantage point of the Global South — the exploited, plundered world — this reality is visible to the naked eye. Where does the wealth of the North, of the West, come from? Just ask the question. The answer is painful.

Replacing "negro" with "black" is a cover-up operation by Anglo-American liberalism. A Latin color term is swapped for an English one — same content, new packaging. Structural exploitation, the weight of history, the fact that the North's prosperity is built on the blood of the South: none of this disappears by changing the color code. Nor does the fact that a Black person becomes a famous singer or sits as president in the White House change that painful truth. Individual success is not proof of the system's justice; on the contrary, it is the system's tool of legitimation.

When Turkey's wannabe liberal says siyahi instead of zenci, they voluntarily step into that operation. They line up with those who say "black" instead of "negro." They speak the same language, perform the same cover-up. As if they had been part of that history, as if they carried that burden, as if they were a party to that reckoning. They act as if they share a history they do not share, as if they own a guilt they never lived.

What else can you call this but intellectual confusion?

Because the comprador intellectual follows the West's agenda. They adopt the West's sensitivities. They keep pace with the West's intellectual fashions. When the New York Times style guide changes, Turkish journalistic norms change too. America's internal reckoning becomes a universal moral principle. Adopting wokeness, speaking its language, becomes a mark of intellectual maturity, sensitivity, modernity.

But this sensitivity is cheap. It is a performance of sensitivity whose conditions are set by others. It is trying to see yourself in someone else's mirror, without looking at your own history, your own language, your own context.

Moreover, who benefits from this universalization? For the West — especially Anglo-American imperialism — turning its own slave history into a universal issue is a functional operation. Guilt is not specified; it is universalized. If everyone is a little bit guilty, then no one is fully guilty. The historical perpetrators fade, responsibility diffuses.

The Turkish comprador intellectual becomes a willing partner in this operation. They shoulder someone else's shame. They confess someone else's sin. They feel someone else's history as their own.

But that history is not our history. That shame is not our shame.

Why should our faces blush for someone else's disgrace?

Cevap açık: Çünkü İngilizce'de "negro" ve "nigger" kelimeleri Atlantik köle ticaretinin, plantasyon sisteminin, nesiller boyu süren aşağılamanın damgasını taşıyor. O kelimeler bir tarihin yüküyle malul. O tarihin içinde yaşayan toplumlar için bu hassasiyet anlaşılır, meşru, hatta zorunludur.

Ama o tarih bizim tarihimiz değil.

* * *

"Zenci" kelimesi Zanzibar'dan gelir. Doğu Afrika'nın o kadim liman şehrinden. Zanzibar adı Farsça "zangbār"dan türemiştir: "zangī" halk adı, "bār" kıyı demek. Türkçeye coğrafi ve etnik bir tanım olarak girmiştir. İçinde ne hakaret vardır ne aşağılama ne de kölelik damgası.

Her dilin siyah renk için kendi kelimesi vardır. Arapçada esved, Farsçada siyah, Türkçede kara. Bunlar rengi tanımlar, insanı değil. "Zenci" ise bu dizinin tamamen dışındadır. Ne bir renk kelimesidir ne de bir renk kelimesinden türemiştir. Bir coğrafyanın, bir halkın adıdır. Türkçe yüzyıllarca bu ayrımı korudu.

"Zenci" kelimesi Zanzibar'ı —Türkçede Zengibar, Zencibar— taşır. Zencibar yalnızca bir şehir adı değildir. Zencibar Afrika'yı temsil eder, Afrikalılığı temsil eder, Afrika köklerini temsil eder, bir kültürü ve tarihi temsil eder. Doğu Afrika'nın en köklü medeniyet merkezlerinden biridir. Swahili kültürünün kalbi, yüzyıllarca ticaretin, şiirin, mimarinin buluştuğu noktadır. "Zenci" derken o medeniyetin mensubundan söz ediyorsunuzdur. "Siyahi" derken ise sadece tenin renginden… Sömürgecinin yaptığı tam da buydu: Onu kültürel mirasının bir bireyi olarak değil, bir beden olarak görmek… "Daha duyarlı" olmak adına yapılan şey, farkında olmadan sömürgecinin bakışını yeniden üretiyor.

"Siyahi" demek ise o ayrımı yıkmak, insanı yeniden rengine indirgemek demektir. Irk ayrımcılığının özü teni görmektir; "siyahi" tam da bunu yapıyor. Daha duyarlı olmak adına tam da duyarlı olunmak istenen şey yapılıyor.

Bunu anlamak için uzağa gitmeye gerek yok. Kürt'e "Güneydoğulu" demek, Kuzey Iraklı demek ne anlama geliyor? Kimliği silip coğrafi bir koordinata indirgemek anlamına... İnsanı kökeninden, kültüründen, dilinden koparıp bir harita noktasına dönüştürüyor. "Kürt" derken bir halk var, onun tarihi, dili, kültürü var. "Güneydoğulu" derken sadece bir adres var. "Zenci" yerine "siyahi" demek tam aynı şey. Zanzibar'ı, o halkı, o kültürü, o coğrafyayı silip geriye sadece ten rengi bırakıyor. Kimliğin yerine biyoloji geçiyor. İnsanın yerine pigment.

Osmanlı'da da zenciler vardı, evet. Ama onların konumu Atlantik kölesinin konumuyla yapısal olarak karşılaştırılamaz bile. Atlantik'te insan kaçırıldı, gemilere tıkıştırıldı, plantasyonlarda üretim aracı olarak kullanıldı. Nesiller boyu bu zincir kırılmadı. Osmanlı'da ise saray hizmetinde, kapıkulu ocaklarında, orduda, bürokraside yükselebilenler vardı. Sadrazamlığa kadar çıkanlar vardı. Bu, o insanların yaşadığı her şeyi güzelleştirmez, ama tarihsel gerçeklik farklıdır. Aynı kelimeyle aynı tarihi anlatmak mümkün değildir.

* * *

Şimdi “Négritude”e gelelim, asıl ironiye…

1930'larda Paris'te, Fransız sömürgeciliğinin tam kalbinde, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor ve Léon-Gontran Damas bir hareket başlattı. Adı Négritude idi. Bu aydınlar gerçekten sömürge altındaydı. "Nègre" kelimesi onlara hakaret olarak fırlatılmıştı; defalarca, sistematik olarak, bir aşağılama silahı olarak… Buna rağmen ne yaptılar? Kelimeyi terk etmediler. Sahiplendiler. O kelimeyi utançtan onura, aşağılanmadan direnişe dönüştürdüler.

Bizzat o tarihin içinde olan Césaire o kelimeyi sahiplendi.

O tarihin içinde hiç olmayan Türk komprador aydını ise renk olarak nötr olan kendi kelimesini terk etti.

Bu paradoksun üzerinde durmak gerekiyor. Négritude hareketi bize şunu söylüyor: Bir kelimenin anlamı tarihsel bağlamından koparılamaz. "Nègre" Fransız sömürgeciliğinin içinde zehirlenmişti; ama Césaire o zehri panzehire dönüştürdü. "Zenci" ise Türkçede hiç zehirlenmemişti. Dönüştürülecek bir yük yoktu. Terk edilecek bir utanç yoktu.

Ama terk edildi.

* * *

Négritude tek örnek değil. ABD'deki bilinçli zenci hareketleri, emperyalizme karşı duranlar, Afrika kökenlerine ve kültürlerine sahip çıkanlar, sömürü düzenine isyan edenler "negro" kelimesini ısrarla kullandı. Malcolm X kullandı. Black Panthers kullandı. "Afro-American" dayatmasına da karşı çıktılar Çünkü o kelime onları ne tam Afrikalı ne tam Amerikalı yapıyordu, iki kimlik arasında havada asılı bırakıyordu. İkisine de tam ait olmayan, ikisinin arasında eritilmiş bir kimlik.

"Negro" ise o topraklarda, o tarihin içinde, o mücadelede şekillenmiş özgün bir kimlikti. Kökü olan, tarihi olan, mücadelesi olan bir kelime.

Türk komprador aydını ise o mücadelenin içinde hiç olmadan, o tarihi hiç yaşamadan, o hareketlerin bile benimsemediği "siyahi" kelimesini duyarlılık diye benimsedi. Çünkü duyarlılık gösterisi yapan (woke) Beyaz Amerikalı liberaller “black” demeye başladı. Türkiye’deki acentesi de buna uygun bir kelime bulmalıydı.

Bir şeyi açıkça söylemek gerekiyor: Sömürgecilik, kölelik, ırkçılık kapitalizmin utanç verici ama geride kalmış sayfaları değildir. Bunlar o sistemin kurucu ve süregelen özellikleridir. Küresel Güney'den —yani ezilen, sömürülen, yağmalanan dünyadan— emperyalist merkezlere bakıldığında bu gerçek çıplak gözle görünür. Kuzey'in refahı, Batı'nın zenginliği nereden geliyor? O soruyu sormak yeterli. Cevap can yakıcıdır.

"Negro" yerine "black" demek Anglo-Amerikan liberalizminin bir örtbas operasyonudur. Latince renk isminin yerine İngilizce renk ismi konuyor — içerik aynı, ambalaj değişiyor. Yapısal sömürü, tarihin ağırlığı, Kuzey'in refahının Güney'in kanı üstüne kurulmuş olması: Bunların hiçbiri renk kodu değiştirmekle ortadan kalkmıyor. Bir zencinin meşhur şarkıcı olması ya da Beyaz Saray'a başkan diye oturtulması da o acı gerçeği değiştirmiyor. Bireysel başarı sistemin adaletinin kanıtı değildir; tam tersine, sistemin meşruiyet aracıdır.

Türkiye'deki liberal özenti "zenci" yerine "siyahi" deyince tam da o operasyonun içine gönüllü olarak adım atmış oluyor. "Negro" yerine "black" diyenlerle aynı saflara geçiyor. Aynı dili konuşuyor, aynı örtbası yapıyor. Sanki o tarihin içindeymiş gibi, o yükü taşıyormuş gibi, o hesaplaşmanın tarafıymış gibi hissediyor kendini. Paylaşmadığı bir tarihi paylaşıyormuş gibi, yaşamadığı bir suçu sahipleniyormuş gibi davranıyor.

Buna entelektüel şaşkınlıktan başka ne denir?

* * *

Çünkü komprador aydın Batı'nın gündemini izler. Batı'nın hassasiyetlerini taşır. Batı'nın entelektüel modasına ayak uydurur. New York Times'ın stil kılavuzu değişince Türkçe gazetecilik normları da değişir. ABD'nin iç hesaplaşması evrensel bir ahlak ilkesine dönüşür. O ilkeyi benimsemek, o dili konuşmak, entelektüel olgunluğun, duyarlılığın, çağdaşlığın göstergesi haline gelir.

Oysa bu duyarlılık ucuzdur. Koşulları başkaları tarafından belirlenmiş bir duyarlılık gösterisidir. Kendi tarihine, kendi diline, kendi bağlamına bakmadan, başkasının aynasında kendini görmeye çalışmaktır.

Dahası bu evrenselleştirme kimin işine yarar? Batı'nın, özellikle Anglo-Amerikan emperyalizminin, kendi kölelik tarihini evrensel bir mesele haline getirmesi işlevsel bir operasyondur. Suç özgülleştirilmez, evrenselleştirilir. Herkes biraz suçluysa kimse tam suçlu değildir. Tarihin failleri silikleşir, sorumluluk dağılır.

Türk komprador aydını bu operasyona gönüllü ortak olur. Başkasının utancını sırtlanır. Başkasının günahını itiraf eder. Başkasının tarihini kendi tarihi gibi hisseder.

Oysa o tarih bizim tarihimiz değil. O utanç bizim utancımız değil.

Başkasının ayıbından neden bizim yüzümüz kızarsın?

Batı kaynaklı felsefe tarihleri Sokrates’in sorular sorduğu için ölüme mahkûm edildiğini anlatır. Hikâye, cahil halka dayanan bir demokrasinin, özgür düşünceye tahammül edemeyip susturduğu yalnız bir hakikat arayıcısının şehadeti şekline bürünmüştür. 2 bin 500 yıldır tekrarlana tekrarlana neredeyse kutsal metin hâline gelmiş bir anlatıdır bu.

Acaba gerçekten öyle mi?

Tarihsel kayıtlar bu hurafenin kalıbına uydurulmadan, farklı bir gözle incelenirse bambaşka bir tablo çıkar karşımıza. Sokrates yalnız başına bir düşünür değildi. Aristokratik bir şebekenin merkezinde yer alan, inisiyatik (tekris de denen erginlenme töreniyle girilen) geleneklere yakın, siyasi hedefleri olan kapalı bir çevrenin önderiydi. Çevresindeki en yakın kişiler —Alkibiades, Kritias, Kharmides— örgütlü bir şebekenin mensuplarıydı. Bu şebekenin siyasi profili çok netti: Aristokratik, demokrasi düşmanı ve düzene karşı örgütlü şiddet kullanmaya hazır…

Üstelik tanıdığımız Sokrates, tarihsel Sokrates de değildir. Sokrates'in kendisi hiçbir şey yazmadı. Ona atfedilen her söz, Platon’un süzgecinden geçmişti. Platon ise Otuz Tiranlar’la aile bağları olan ve şeyhinin olumlu bir imajını inşa etmek isteyen bir aristokrattı. “Sokrates felsefesi” adı verilen külliyat aslında Platon'un imalatıydı.

Bu şebekenin kalkıştığı işin siyasi sonuçları yoruma yer bırakmayacak kadar somut ve kanlıydı. Sokrates’in en yakın çevresinden Kritias, MÖ 404’te oligarşik bir darbeye önderlik etti. Otuz Tiranlar rejimi Atina demokrasisini geçici olarak tasfiye etti ve yüzlerce vatandaşı idam ettirerek mallarına el koydu. Alkibiades Sparta karşısında Atina'ya ihanet etti ve buna başkalarını da sürükledi. Sokrates darbeden beş yıl sonra, darbeci şebekeyle ilişkisinin juri tarafından gayet iyi bilindiği bir siyasi konjonktürde yargılandı.

Suçlamalar aslında siyasi bir kovuşturmanın hukuki kılıfıydı. Çünkü darbe sonrasında eski düzenin yeniden tesis edilmesi için belirli bir tarihe kadar işlenen suçlar kovuşturma konusu yapılmıyordu. Onun için “dinsizlik ve gençleri yoldan çıkarmak” suçlamasıyla dava açıldı. Yani iddia edildiği gibi, Sokrates felsefi sorular sorduğu için mahkûm edilmedi. Atina demokrasisini (her ne kadar bugünkü ölçülerle demokrasi sayamasak da) yıkmaya teşebbüs eden bir şebekenin örgütsel merkezinde yer aldığı için mahkûm edildi.

“Gençleri yoldan çıkarmak” suçlaması Helenomani geleneği tarafından sürekli yanlış okunmuş ya da kasıtlı olarak çarpıtılmıştır. MÖ 5. yüzyıl Atina’sında eşcinsel ilişkiler olağan bir toplumsal pratikti; cinsel yoldan baştan çıkarma anlamlı bir suç kategorisi oluşturamazdı. Suçlama, Sokrates’in çağdaşlarının hemen anlayacağı kesin bir siyasi anlam taşıyordu: Genç aristokratları demokratik yükümlülüklerden koparmak, onlara halk yönetimini küçümsemeyi aşılamak ve oligarşik sadakate yönlendirmek.

Kanıtlar soyut değildi. Sokrates’in yakın çevresinden Alkibiades, Atina’yı tümüyle ihanete sürüklemeden önce, işbirliği yaptığı Spartalılara demokrasinin “herkesin kabul ettiği bir aptallık” olduğunu söylemişti. Yine Sokrates’in en yakın müridlerinden Kritias, Otuz Tiranlar’a önderlik ederek demokrat vatandaşları sistematik olarak katletmişti. Sokrates’in “yoldan çıkardığı gençler” ahlaki açıdan sapmış ergenler değildi. Onlar anti-demokratik bir şebekenin önder kadrosuydu. Suçlama, mevcut koşullar altında mümkün olan tek hukuki dille ifade edilmek suretiyle özünde siyasi bir suçu tanımlıyordu: Atina demokratik düzenine karşı şiddet kullanacak insanların örgütsel ve ideolojik olarak darbeye hazırlanması.

Hüküm verildikten sonra Sokrates kaçabilirdi. Her şey hazırdı: İmkânlar mevcuttu, dostları istekliydi, şehrin sürgündeki birinin peşine düşmesi olası değildi. Hatta kaçması için örtülü bir göz yumma vardi. O reddetti. Bu ret, siyasi amaçlı dini hareketler tarihindeki bazı figürlerin davranışıyla çarpıcı bir benzerlik taşır. En yakın örneği Ayetullah Ali Hamaney’dir. İran’ın dini lideri, Şubat 2026’da ABD-İsrail saldırıları Tahran’ı vurduğunda 86 yaşındaydı ve ileri evre prostat kanserinin pençesindeydı. Tahliye edilip güvenli bir yere götürülebilirdi. Kalmayı seçti. Temsil ettiği Şii geleneğinde şehitlik yenilgi değildir; bir lideri efsaneye, bir siyasi fikri hiçbir devletin yok edemeyeceği bir simgeye dönüştüren en yüksek stratejik ve ruhani eylemdir. Sokrates de —ya da çevresindekiler— aynı mantığı kavramıştı. Sürgündeki Sokrates bir dipnottan ibaret olurdu; baldıranı kendi eliyle içen Sokrates ise entelektüel özgürlüğün kurucu efsanesi hâline gelirdi. Ölüm cezasına çarptırılmıştı ve cezayı bizzat kendi infaz etti. Bu eylem Platon tarafından sonraki nesillere dinsel bir liturji titizliğiyle dramatize edilerek aktarıldı.

Bütün bunlardan Avrupamerkezci tarihyazımının çıkardığı sonuç, Helenomani ihtiyacına uygun olarak gerçeğin tersyüz edilişidir. Otuz Tiranlar’la aile bağları bulunan, demokrasiye derinden düşman bir aristokrat olan Platon, Sokrates mitosunu inşa etti. Siyasi amaçlı yoldaşlık örgütünün önderi, özgür akılcı sorgulamanın şehidine dönüştürüldü. Anti-demokrat bir kişi, entelektüel kültürün seçkin bir simgesi hâline getirildi.

Mısır Tapınaklarından Menzil’e: Yapısal Örüntü

Sokrates istisnai bir vaka değildi. Felsefi ya da ruhani bir görünüm arkasına gizlenerek siyasi iktidar peşinde koşan örgütlü inisiyatik yoldaşlık örüntüsünün —siyasi tarihin en kalıcı yapısal örüntülerinden birinin— bir örneğiydi.

Batı entelektüel tarihinin “Yunan felsefesi” adını verdiği şey, aslında örgütsel biçimiyle, başka geleneklerin tarikat, tekke ya da gizli yoldaşlık —veya kardeşlik, biraderlik— diyeceği yapılarla metaforik değil, tam anlamıyla örtüşen kapalı inisiyatik topluluklar dizisiydi. Tekke, ruhani eğitim, ortak yaşam ve inisiyatik hiyerarşiyi bir arada barındıran Sufi kardeşliğidir. Thales ne bir okul ne bir metin ne de açık bir araştırma yöntemi bıraktı; ondan kalan yalnızca çağdaş geleneklerin animist kozmolojilerinden yapısal olarak ayırt edilemeyecek kozmolojik savlardı. Kroton’daki Pisagor cemaati de katı beslenme yasakları, ortak mülkiyet düzenlemesi adı altında mal-mülkün cemaate devredilmesi, inisiyasyon ritüelleri ve yalnızca inisiye olanlara açık hiyerarşik bir bilgi düzeni içinde işliyordu. Bu tanım Bektaşi tekkesine ya da Hurufi çevresine de aynen uygulanabilir. Epikürcüler ise Bahçe’ye çekildiler: Sadakat yükümlülükleri ve bütünüyle korunması gereken bir üstat öğretisiyle sınırlandırılmış bir topluluktu bu. Stoacılar, açık felsefi tartışmadan çok tarikat silsilesine dayanan bir öğreti aktarımıyla süregelen bir “medrese” önderleri etrafında örgütlendi.

“Akademi” sözcüğünün kendisi —bugün bilimsel titizlik ve açık araştırmayla özdeşleşmiş bu sözcük— Atina dışında, Tanrıça Athena’ya adanmış, Tunç Çağı’ndan beri dini kültlere ev sahipliği yapan, kendi duvarları içine kapanmış, şehrin dışında, demokratik kamusal alandan yalıtılmış kutsal bir zeytin korusundan adını alır. Akademisyenler Platoncu Akademi’yi Pisagorcu —manastır toplulukları için kullanılan terimle— "ksenobiyatik bir kurum” olarak tanımlamıştır. Platon’un kurduğu Akademi bir üniversite değildi. Bir sığınaktı. Siyasi hırsları, mülkleri ve inisiyatik dereceleri olan kapalı bir yoldaşlık topluluğuydu. Bu kurumları “felsefi” diye adlandırırken İslam dünyasındaki yapısal eşdeğerlerini “bağnazlık” ya da “yobazlık” diye nitelendirmek, öze ilişkin bir ayrım değildir. Uygarlık çevresine dayalı kategorik ayrımdır ve sadece bundan ibarettir.

Örüntü Mısır’da başlar. Yeni Krallık döneminde Amon rahipleri öylesine büyük kurumsal güç ve zenginlik biriktirdiler ki, doğrudan firavun iktidarıyla rekabete girdiler. Herihor, MÖ 1080 dolayında, hem Amon Başrahibi hem de firavun unvanlarını aynı anda taşıyordu; yani inisiyatik yoldaşlık devleti ele geçirmişti. Firavun Akhenaton’un Aton monoteizmini devrimci biçimde dayatması ruhani bir uyanış değil, Amon rahipliğinin iktidarına karşı siyasi bir karşı harekâttı.

Pisagor, Mısır’da geçirdiği belgelenmiş olan yıllar boyunca tam da bu geleneği —inisiyatik hiyerarşisiyle, ezoterik bilgi tekeli ve siyasi hırslarıyla Mısır'ın sırlar cemaati geleneğini— özümsedi ve Yunan dünyasına taşıdı. Peter Kingsley’nin Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic’te (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995) gösterdiği üzere, erken Yunan felsefesi laik, akılcı bir araştırma çalışması değil, kökleri Mısır ve Yakındoğu gizem kültlerinde yatan ezoterik bir geleneğin yerelleştirilmiş haliydi. Kroton’daki Pisagor topluluğu modern anlamda bir felsefe okulu değildi. Katı beslenme kuralları, inisiyasyon ritüelleri, ortak mülkiyet ve açık siyasi hedefleri olan bir tarikattı: Pisagorcular demokratik bir ayaklanmayla kovulmadan önce Kroton’un yönetimini kısa süreliğine ele geçirmişti.

Tarih boyunca bu soydan süregelen kesintisiz bir örüntü akar. Şah İsmail ve Safevi tarikatı Kızılbaş topluluklarını örgütleyen ve 1501’de devlet iktidarını ele geçiren bir Sufi tarikatiydi. Humeyni hareketi, “Velayeti Fakih” doktriniyle din adamlarının devlet iktidarını almaları için teorik meşruiyet sağlayan hiyerarşik Şii din adamları örgütüydü. Batı geleneğinde de inisiyatik hiyerarşileri ve karşılıklı kollama ve kayırma şebekeleriyle üç yüzyıl boyunca siyasi iktidarla kesişen Masonluk ve Gül-Haç gibi örgütler vardır.

Bu örüntüyü gözlemlemek için tarihin derinliklerine inmeye gerek yoktur. Türkiye’de yapısal mantık kendini neredeyse ders kitabı netliğiyle yeniden üretmiştir. FETÖ —Gülen şebekesi— Temmuz 2016 darbe girişiminden önce kırk yıl boyunca orduya, yargıya ve Millî Eğitim Bakanlığı’na vb. sızdı. Kadroları tasfiye edilince yeri boş kalmadı. Nakşibendiliğin bir kolu ve Adıyaman kökenli bir tarikat olan Menzil, boşalan kadrolara sistematik biçimde yerleşti; bu süreç en belirgin biçimde Sağlık Bakanlığı’nda işledi ve olgu kendi gündelik dilini üretti: FETÖ değil METÖ. Yapı aynıydı: İnisiyatik hiyerarşisiyle, karşılıklı kollama ve kayırma şebekeleriyle, kodlanmış sadakatle kurumları ele geçirme ve hiçbir zaman açıkça dile getirilmeyen siyasi bir hedefle çalışan ruhani bir biraderlik…

Batı entelektüel tarihinin MÖ 5. yüzyıl Atina’sında gördüğü ve “felsefe okulu” adını verdiği yapı tam olarak budur.

Philosophia’dan Aşk-ı Hikmet’e: Büyük Sahtekârlık

Yunanlılar bu pratiğe “philosophia” adını verdiler: Bilgelik sevgisi, başa bir deyişle aşk-ı hikmet… Sözcüğün kendisi Avrupamerkezciliğin sonradan dayatacağı ayrımı baştan geçersiz kılar. Zira Sufi geleneği tam da bu formülasyonu kullandı: Bilgeliğin, hikmetin âşığı, aradığı şeyin kendisini tükettiği talip. Ama aynı pratik, Platon’u kutsallaştıran Avrupalı akademisyenler tarafından “felsefe” değil “mistisizm” olarak adlandırıldı. “Philosophia” ile “aşk-ı hikmet” farklı alfabelerle yazılmış aynı sözcüklerdir, aynı gerçeğe işaret ederler. Birine akılcı öbürüne akıldışı deme kararı filolojik değildi. Siyasiydi.

Sahtekârlık dilin kendisine kodlanmıştır. Yunanca söylendiğinde “philosophia” laik Batı akılcılığının temeli oldu. Arapça söylendiğinde “aşk-ı hikmet” dini bağnazlığın kanıtı hâline geldi. İki geleneği köklerinde birbirinden ayıran ne yapısal ne yöntemsel ne de entelektüel hırs bakımından herhangi bir fark vardır. Fark sadece adlandırmayla ilgilidir. Adlandırma ise tek bir tarafça, her iki taraf için de, yalnızca kendi çıkarına olacak şekilde yapıldı.

Bunun sonuçları tüm düşünce tarihinde gorülür. İbn Rüşd, Batı Avrupa’nın metinlere erişimini tümüyle yitirdiği bir dönemde Aristoteles üzerine mantık yöntemini koruyan ve geliştiren sistematik şerhler üretttiğinde akademisyenler onun çalışmasını özgün düşünce değil aktarım olarak sınıflandırdı. İbn Sina, yüzyıllarca Batı Avrupa’da eşi görülmeyecek bir karmaşıklıkta bir epistemoloji ve metafizik inşa ettiğinde ilahiyat dosyasına kaldırıldı. Farabi olağanüstü bir titizlikle siyaset felsefesi geliştirdiğinde, büyük ölçüde önüne geçtiği Yunanlılara ancak dipnot muamelesi gördü.

Çifte standart en çıplak ifadesini benzer bir karşılaştırmada bulur. Platon’un Devlet’i —demokratik katılıma açıkça düşman, felsefi bir seçkinler tarafından otoriter yönetimin planı— Batı siyaset felsefesinin kurucu metnidir. Farabi’nin El-Medinet’ül-Fazıla’sı, altı yüzyıl sonra yazılmış, aynı soruları karşılaştırılabilir bir incelikle ele alan ve Platon’un çerçevesini daha karmaşık bir siyasi ilahiyata doğru genişleten bir eserdir. Yapısal paralellik tamdır. Ama sınıflandırma aynı değildir: Biri “felsefe”, diğeri “İslam mistisizmi” kategorisine konmuştur. Kategorilendirmedeki fark metinler arasındaki hiçbir farka karşılık gelmez. Tamamen yazarların mensup olduğu uygarlık adresine karşılık gelir.

Karşılaştırma genişletildiğinde sınıflandırma büsbütün çöker. Thomas More’un Ütopya’sı ve Tommaso Campanella’nın Güneş Ülkesi —her ikisi de Batı siyaset felsefesinin kanonik metinleri— ilahiyat içeriğiyle doygun metinlerdir. Campanella, ideal kentinin temellerine astrolojiyi ve Hermetik mistisizmi gömen bir Dominiken rahibiydi. More, inancı için idam edilen bir Katolikti. Bu gerçeklerin hiçbiri onları felsefi kanonun dışına atmaz. Farabi’nin Platoncu siyaset teorisiyle hesaplaşması, İbn Sina’nın sistematik epistemolojisi, Gazali’nin titiz mantıksal argümanı: Bunlar More ya da Campanella’ya eşit ya da onlardan daha az ilahiyatçı eğilimdeki düşünürler tarafından üretilmiştir. Yine de din dosyasına kaldırılırlar. Ölçüt içerikteki ilahiyat değildir. Hiç olmadı. Ölçüt ve fark, yazarların uygarlık adreslerinden ibarettir.

İbn Tufeyl’in 12. yüzyılda kaleme aldığı Hayy bin Yakzan, toplumdan ve dinden tümüyle yalıtılmış olarak büyüyen bir insanın salt akıl yoluyla hakikate ulaşıp ulaşamayacağını araştıran felsefi bir romandır. Yani Aydınlanma’nın “doğal akıl” öncülü, Aydınlanma’dan beş yüzyıl önce dile getirilmiştir. Robinson Crusoe onun yapısal torunudur. Locke’un “tabula rasa”sı onun felsefi yankısıdır. Metin 1671’de Latince’ye çevrildi ve Avrupa’da okundu. Geleneğe girdi, geleneği biçimlendirdi ve ardından felsefe değil, Arapça bir “ilginçlik” olarak sınıflandırıldı. Tohumlarını ektiği fikirlerin öncüsü olarak neredeyse hiç tanınmadı.

“Batı uygarlığının kökeni olarak Yunan akılcılığı” hurafesi bir Yunan icadı değildi. Bir Avrupa uydurmacasıydı. 18. ve ve 19. yüzyıllarda, buna ihtiyaç duyan bir uygarlık projesine kullanılabilir bir geçmiş sağlamak üzere inşa edildi. Kadim Yunanlıların gerçekte pratiğe döktüleri şey —gizem dini, inisiyatik biraderlik, ezoterik siyaset— Avrupa’nın onlardan miras aldığını iddia ettiği akılcı laik felsefeyle hiçbir benzerlik taşımıyordu. Miras icat edilmişti ve icat, Martin Bernal’in gösterdiği üzere, kesin bir ideolojik amaca hizmet etti: Aklı yalnızca Avrupa’ya has kılmak ve Avrupa dışındaki her şeyi —Yunan düşüncesinin fiilen beslendiği gelenekler dahil— kalıcı bir akıldışılık gölgesine yerleştirmek…

Antik bir felsefe okulu ile siyasi bir tarikat arasındaki fark hiçbir zaman yapısal olmadı. Her zaman uygarlığa dayalı oldu. Nitekim, uygarlığa dayalı kategoriler tanım değildir. Hükümlerdir: Güçlülerin, kendileri hakkında, kendi elleriyle yazdığı hükümler… 【●】

The trial and execution of Socrates in 399 BC is one of the most durable myths of Western intellectual culture. The image of a solitary truth-seeker condemned by an ignorant democracy has survived two and a half millennia largely intact — not because it withstands historical scrutiny, but because it serves what Martin Bernal called Helenomania: the ideological project of constructing Greece as the exclusive birthplace of Western reason. Even those sceptical of Greek exceptionalism have often left this particular myth untouched.

The Socrates we know is not a historical figure in any recoverable sense. He wrote nothing. Every word attributed to him passed through the editorial hand of Plato — an aristocrat with family connections to the Thirty Tyrants and every reason to construct a particular image of his teacher. What we call “Socratic philosophy” is Platonic ventriloquism.

The historical record, examined without the filter of this mythology, tells a different story. Socrates was not a solitary thinker pursuing truth through rational inquiry. He was the central figure of a philosophically coherent, politically oriented circle whose organisational character bore closer resemblance to an initiatory brotherhood than to an open school of thought — a network with consistent aristocratic allegiances, esoteric tendencies, and a demonstrable pattern of producing men who would act violently against the democratic order.

His most prominent associates — Alcibiades, Critias, Charmides — were members of an organised aristocratic network hostile to Athenian democracy. For Socrates and for Plato, democracy was mob rule — the tyranny of numerical majority over wisdom and virtue. The Republic is, among other things, the most sophisticated ancient argument against democratic governance ever written.

The political consequences were concrete and violent. Critias — one of Socrates’s closest associates — led the oligarchic coup of 404 BC, the regime of the Thirty Tyrants, which briefly abolished the Athenian democratic order — slave-holding, excluding women and resident foreigners, and restricted to a minority of the population, but nonetheless one of the many examples in world history of a genuine experiment in popular self-governance, and one that its oligarchic enemies recognised as a threat worth destroying. Alcibiades betrayed Athens to Sparta. The network had a consistent political profile: aristocratic, anti-democratic, willing to use organised violence against the democratic order.

Socrates was tried and condemned five years after the coup’s defeat, in a political context where his connections to the oligarchic faction were well known to his jurors. The charges — impiety and corrupting the youth — were the legal form of what was in substance a political prosecution. He was not condemned for asking philosophical questions. He was condemned for his organisational role in a network that had attempted to destroy Athenian democracy.

The charge of “corrupting the youth” has been consistently misread — or deliberately obscured — by the Hellenomaniac tradition. In fifth-century Athens, where pederastic relationships were a normalised social institution, sexual corruption was not a prosecutable category in any meaningful sense. The charge carried a precise political meaning that Socrates’s contemporaries would have understood immediately: turning young men away from their democratic obligations, instilling in them contempt for popular governance, and orienting them toward oligarchic allegiance. The evidence was not abstract. Alcibiades — intimate associate of Socrates — had told the Spartans that democracy was “acknowledged foolishness” before betraying Athens entirely. Critias — another of Socrates’s closest connections — had led the Thirty Tyrants in the systematic murder of democratic citizens. The “youth” that Socrates had corrupted were not morally wayward adolescents. They were the cadre of an anti-democratic network. The charge named, in the only legal language available, what was in substance a political crime: the organised ideological preparation of men who would act violently against the Athenian democratic order.

Socrates could have escaped. The means were arranged, the friends willing, the city unlikely to pursue him into exile. He refused. The parallel with certain figures in the history of politically organised religious movements is instructive. Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, was 86 years old and in the advanced stages of prostate cancer when US-Israeli strikes hit Tehran in February 2026. He could have been evacuated. He chose to remain. In the Shia tradition he embodied, martyrdom is not defeat — it is the highest strategic and spiritual act: the death that transforms a leader into a legend, a movement into a cause, a political network into something that outlasts any state’s ability to destroy it. Socrates understood, or those around him understood, the same logic. A Socrates in exile is a footnote. A Socrates who drinks the hemlock — condemned to death, he administered it himself, in a scene Plato staged for posterity with the precision of liturgy — becomes the founding myth of Western intellectual freedom. The hemlock was chosen.

What posterity made of this is the great Hellenomaniac inversion. Plato — himself an aristocrat deeply hostile to democracy, with family connections to the Thirty Tyrants — constructed the Socratic myth. The politically oriented brotherhood leader became the martyr of free rational inquiry. The anti-democrat became the symbol of open intellectual culture.

The Structural Pattern: From Egyptian Temples to Menzil

Socrates was not a unique case. He was an instance of one of the most persistent structural patterns in political history: the organised initiatory brotherhood pursuing or exercising political power behind a philosophical or spiritual façade.

What Western intellectual history calls “Greek philosophy” was, in its organisational form, a series of closed initiatory communities whose structural resemblance to what other traditions would call religious sects, tekkes — Sufi brotherhoods combining spiritual instruction, communal living, and initiatory hierarchy — or mystery brotherhoods is not metaphorical but precise. Thales left no school, no text, no method of open inquiry — only cosmological assertions structurally indistinguishable from the animist theologies of contemporaneous traditions. The Pythagorean community at Croton operated under strict dietary prohibitions, communal property arrangements, initiation rituals, and a hierarchy of esoteric knowledge accessible only to the initiated — a description that applies with equal accuracy to a Bektashi tekke or a Hurifi circle. The Epicureans withdrew into the Garden, a bounded community with loyalty obligations and a master’s doctrine to be preserved intact. The Stoics organised around a continuous lineage of school heads, with doctrinal transmission that owed more to tarikat succession than to open philosophical debate.

The very word “Academy” — today synonymous with scientific rigour and open inquiry — derives from a sacred grove outside Athens, site of Bronze Age religious cults dedicated to Athena, enclosed within its own precinct walls, outside the city, isolated from the democratic public. Scholars have described the Platonic Academy as a Pythagorean cenobitical institution — the precise term used for monastic communities. The Academy Plato founded was not a university. It was a sanctuary: a closed brotherhood with political ambitions, property holdings, and initiatory gradations. To call these institutions “philosophy” while calling their structural equivalents in the Islamic world “obscurantism” or “fanaticism” is not a distinction of substance. It is a distinction of civilisational category — and nothing more.

The pattern begins in Egypt. The priests of Amon during the New Kingdom accumulated such institutional power that they entered into direct competition with the pharaonic state. Herihor, around 1080 BC, held simultaneously the titles of High Priest of Amon and pharaoh — the brotherhood had captured the state. The pharaoh Akhenaton’s revolutionary imposition of Aton monotheism was not a spiritual awakening but a political counter-offensive against the Amon priesthood’s power.

It was precisely this tradition — the Egyptian mystery school with its initiatory hierarchy, its esoteric knowledge monopoly, and its political ambitions — that Pythagoras absorbed during his documented years of study in Egypt and carried back to the Greek world. As Peter Kingsley demonstrated in Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), early Greek philosophy was not secular rational inquiry but the localisation of an esoteric tradition whose roots lay in Egyptian and Near Eastern mystery religion. The Pythagorean community at Croton was not a philosophical school in any modern sense. It was a religious sect with strict dietary laws, initiation rituals, communal property, and explicit political goals: the Pythagoreans briefly governed Croton before being expelled by a democratic uprising.

From this lineage flows a continuous pattern: Shah Ismail and the Safavid order — a Sufi tarikat that organised the Kizilbash communities and seized state power in 1501. Khomeini’s movement — a hierarchical Shia clerical network whose doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih provided the theoretical justification for clerical state power. In the Western tradition: Freemasonry and Rosicrucianism, whose initiatory hierarchies and networks of mutual advancement have intersected with political power across three centuries.

The pattern does not require historical distance to be observed. In contemporary Turkey, the structural logic has replicated itself with almost pedagogical clarity. FETÖ — the Gülenist network — infiltrated the military, judiciary, and education ministry over three decades before its failed coup attempt of July 2016. When its cadres were purged, the vacancy was not left empty. The Menzil tarikat — a Naqshbandi brotherhood originating in Adıyaman — moved systematically into the positions thus vacated, most visibly in the Ministry of Health, where the phenomenon acquired its own vernacular label: not FETÖ but METÖ. The structure was identical: a spiritual brotherhood with initiatory hierarchy, networks of mutual advancement, coded loyalty, and a political objective — institutional capture — never openly stated until the moment of attempted execution.

This is precisely the structure that Western intellectual history calls, when it encounters it in fifth-century Athens, a “philosophical school.”

The Fabrication: From Philosophia to ʼAshq al-Hikmah

The Greeks named their practice philosophia — the love of wisdom, ‘ashq al hikmah. The word itself forecloses the distinction that Eurocentrism would later impose. For the Sufi tradition used precisely this formulation — the lover of wisdom, the seeker consumed by the object of his seeking — and was told, by the same European scholarship that canonised Plato, that what it practised was mysticism, not philosophy. The categories were not discovered. They were assigned. Philosophia and ʼashq al-hikmah are the same words, in different alphabets, pointing to the same reality. The decision to call one rational and the other irrational was not philological. It was political.

The fabrication is encoded in the language itself. Spoken in Greek, philosophia became the foundation of secular Western rationality. Spoken in Arabic, ʼashq al-hikmah became evidence of religious obscurantism. No structural difference, no methodological difference, no difference in intellectual ambition separates the two traditions at their origins. The difference is purely nominal — and the nomination was done by one party, about both parties, in its own interest.

The consequences run through the entire history of ideas. When Ibn Rushd produced systematic commentaries on Aristotle that preserved and extended logical method at a moment when Western Europe had lost access to the texts entirely, scholarship classified his work as transmission rather than original thought. When Ibn Sina constructed an epistemology and metaphysics of a sophistication that would not be matched in Western Europe for centuries, he was filed under theology. When Al-Farabi developed political philosophy of extraordinary rigour, he was treated as a footnote to the Greeks he had substantially surpassed.

The double standard achieves its most naked expression in a direct comparison. Plato’s Republic — a blueprint for authoritarian governance by a philosophical elite, explicitly hostile to democratic participation — is the founding text of Western political philosophy. Al-Farabi’s Al-Madina al-Fadhila, written six centuries later, engages the same questions with comparable sophistication and extends Plato’s framework into a more complex political theology. The structural parallel is exact. The classification is not: one is philosophy, the other is Islamic mysticism. The difference in categorisation corresponds to no difference in the texts. It corresponds entirely to the civilisational address of their authors.

The classification collapses entirely when the comparison is extended. Thomas More’s Utopia and Tommaso Campanella’s Civitas Solis — both canonical texts of Western political philosophy — are saturated with theological content. Campanella was a Dominican friar who embedded astrology and Hermetic mysticism into his ideal city’s foundations. More was a Catholic martyr who died for his faith. Neither fact disqualifies them from the philosophical canon. Al-Farabi’s engagement with Platonic political theory, Ibn Sina’s systematic epistemology, al-Ghazali’s rigorous logical argumentation — all produced by thinkers equally or less theological in their orientation than More or Campanella — are nonetheless filed under religion. The criterion is not theological content. It never was. The criterion is the author’s civilisational address. Nothing more.

Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, written in the twelfth century, is a philosophical novel exploring whether a human being, raised in complete isolation from society and religion, could arrive at truth through reason alone — the founding premise of Enlightenment epistemology, stated five centuries before the Enlightenment. Robinson Crusoe is its structural descendant. Locke’s tabula rasa is its philosophical echo. The text was translated into Latin in 1671 and read across Europe. It entered the tradition, shaped the tradition — and was then classified not as philosophy but as an Arabic curiosity, barely acknowledged as a precursor to the ideas it had demonstrably seeded.

The myth of Greek rationality as the origin of Western civilisation was not a Greek invention. It was a European fabrication — constructed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to provide a usable past for a civilisational project that required one. What the ancient Greeks actually practised — mystery religion, initiatory brotherhood, esoteric politics — bore no resemblance to the rational secular philosophy Europe claimed to have inherited from them. The inheritance was invented. And the invention served, as Martin Bernal demonstrated, a precise ideological purpose: to locate reason exclusively within Europe, and to locate everything outside Europe — including the traditions from which Greek thought had actually drawn — in the permanent shadow of irrationality.

The difference between a philosophical school and a political sect has never been structural. It has always been civilisational. And civilisational categories are not descriptions. They are verdicts — written by the powerful, about themselves.【●】

The world is changing at a pace and in a direction that demands clarity. Across the left and among progressive forces internationally, two questions dominate political discussion: Is the United States moving toward fascism? Is a world war coming?

These questions are asked with increasing urgency — and answered with increasing confusion. Some dismiss the fascism danger as hyperbole, pointing to the continued functioning of American democratic institutions. Others declare the threshold already crossed, evacuating the concept of its analytical precision. On the war question, some place their hopes in an expected rupture between the United States and Europe, anticipating that inter-imperialist contradictions will resolve the danger from within. Others see world war as already underway in its opening phases — in Ukraine, Gaza, Iran and the Taiwan Strait.

Confusion on these questions is not merely academic. It has direct political consequences. A movement that misreads the stage of the fascist danger will either mobilise too late or exhaust itself in premature confrontations. A movement that misunderstands the war dynamic will build its strategy on foundations that the actual balance of forces will demolish.

This article is written to cut through that confusion.

We argue that the two questions cannot be separated. Fascism and world war are not parallel dangers developing on independent tracks. They are two dimensions of a single structural crisis: the crisis of American hegemony. Understanding this connection — its economic roots, its class dynamics, its military logic, and its political implications — is the precondition for any serious strategic response.

Our method is explicit. We use the analytical tools that the Marxist tradition has developed for precisely these questions: Marx's analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production, Lenin's concept of finance capital and imperialism, and Dimitrov's definition of fascism. We do not apply these concepts dogmatically — as sacred texts whose conclusions are predetermined. We test them against today's concrete reality, asking of each: is it still valid? Where does it hold? Where does it strain? Where do the variables need updating?

We resist the opposite temptation equally: the inflation of concepts, the endless production of new vocabulary that mistakes novelty of form for novelty of substance, and in doing so renders the analytical tools of Marxism blunt and unusable. A carpenter works with the tools of carpentry. When a tool no longer cuts, it is replaced — not multiplied into a hundred variations of itself.

The variables have changed. The structural logic has not.

Digital infrastructure has replaced heavy industry as the dominant accumulation base. Algorithmic suppression has joined paramilitary violence as an instrument of social control. Hypersonic missiles have extended the reach and speed of imperial force projection. But the class relationships that drive these developments — the imperative of accumulation, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the drive of the most aggressive fraction of capital toward state capture — remain structurally identical to what Marx, Lenin, and Dimitrov analysed.

The analysis that follows is not written as prophecy. It is written as a warning — and as an argument for the political tasks that the situation demands.

Part One: The Theoretical Framework — Testing the Tools

Every analysis of a concrete situation requires theoretical tools. The question is not whether to use them but which ones — and whether they still cut.

We propose three: Marx's analysis of capitalism as contradictory value production, Lenin's concept of finance capital, and Dimitrov's definition of fascism. Not because they are sacred texts but because they have not yet been superseded. Each will be tested against today's reality before being applied to it.

A Note on Method

These concepts are not applied here as sacred texts or closed systems. They are analytical tools — and like all tools, they must earn their place in each concrete situation. A concept valid in one context may strain or require modification in another. Where that happens, we say so. Where a genuinely new phenomenon resists existing categories, we acknowledge it rather than forcing it into a pre-existing mould.

What we resist is the opposite temptation: the inflation of concepts, the endless production of new vocabulary that mistakes novelty of form for novelty of substance. The carpenter works with the tools of carpentry. When a tool no longer cuts, it is replaced — not multiplied into a hundred variations of itself.

Marx: Contradictory Value Production

Is this still valid? Yes — and more visibly so than at any point since the 1930s. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall is not a theoretical curiosity. It is the structural motor behind the financialisation of the economy, the desperate search for new accumulation frontiers, and the growing resort to state power to compensate for the limits of the market. What appears as political chaos in Washington is, at its root, the surface expression of this deeper contradiction.

Where does the concept strain? Marx analysed value production in an era of industrial capitalism. Whether digital products — data, algorithms, software — constitute commodities in Marx's sense, whether they contain socially necessary labour time, remains genuinely contested. Data and algorithms may function as powerful instruments of coordination and control over value circulation — but they do not, in themselves, produce value. This distinction matters. It is a reason to apply the framework carefully, not a reason to abandon it.

Lenin: Finance Capital

Lenin defined finance capital as the fusion of banking and industrial capital into monopoly. Is this still valid?

Yes — but with a significant development. Today's dominant capital is not merely the fusion of bank and factory. It is the fusion of financial, industrial, and digital infrastructure capital into platforms that control not just production and credit but the very nervous system of the global economy. Amazon, Nvidia, BlackRock — these are not aberrations. They are finance capital in its most advanced form.

Where does the concept strain? The traditional definition risks obscuring an important internal differentiation within finance capital itself — between speculative-rentier capital that lives off financial manipulation, and infrastructural-monopoly capital that controls physical and digital production networks. Lenin's concept covers both but does not distinguish between them. This distinction matters for understanding the current intra-bourgeois conflict.

Dimitrov: Fascism

Dimitrov's definition: fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital.

Is this still valid? Yes — precisely because it is a scientific abstraction, not a historical portrait. It identifies a structural relationship: when finance capital can no longer maintain class rule through democratic institutions, its most aggressive fraction moves toward open dictatorship.

Where does the concept strain? In two places. First, the form of 'open terror' has changed. Paramilitary violence in the streets has not disappeared but it is no longer the primary instrument. Algorithmic suppression, financial exclusion, digital surveillance — these are today's terror mechanisms. The substance is the same; the form is new. Second, Dimitrov's definition requires us to identify which fraction of finance capital is the most reactionary and aggressive in any given moment. This is an empirical question, not a theoretical one. It must be answered concretely.

Dimitrov: The Fracture of Bourgeois Consensus

Bourgeois democracy is not, at its core, a system designed for the benefit of all citizens. It is an arrangement among the different fractions of the bourgeoisie themselves — an agreement not to exercise dictatorship over one another. Competing fractions of capital coexist within shared institutional rules: courts, regulatory agencies, legislative procedures, international agreements. No single fraction captures the state entirely. This balance serves the general interests of capital as a whole, not the narrow interests of any one fragment.

The capitalist state, under normal conditions, is precisely this: the guardian of capital's general interests, not the instrument of any particular fraction. It manages crises, mediates conflicts, and maintains the conditions for accumulation across the board.

Fascism marks the breakdown of this arrangement. One fraction — the most reactionary, the most aggressive, the most desperate — abandons the shared rules. It seizes the state not to serve capital in general but to serve itself in particular. It exercises dictatorship not only over the working class but over other bourgeois fractions as well. Rival capitals are expropriated, criminalised, subordinated.

This is why fascism is not merely a working-class problem. It represents a rupture within the bourgeoisie itself — a moment when the common institutional framework that protected all fractions collapses under the weight of one fraction's drive for total dominance.

The United Front: A Strategy Born from the Analysis

The united front policy, first systematically formulated by Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern in 1935, was not a tactical improvisation. It followed directly and necessarily from the analysis.

If fascism is the dictatorship of one fraction of finance capital over all others — over the working class above all, but also over other bourgeois fractions, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasantry, and significant sections of the population — then the force capable of resisting it must be correspondingly broad. The united front is not a compromise of principles. It is the political expression of the structural reality that fascism creates multiple victims, not one.

Dimitrov's answer was clear: all of them. The working class leads — because it bears the heaviest burden and has the least to lose — but it does not fight alone. This is not a theoretical footnote. It is the political horizon toward which the entire analysis points.

Part Two: The Fractions of the American Bourgeoisie

The American ruling class is not a monolith. It is internally differentiated — divided into fractions whose accumulation bases, strategic interests, and relationships to the state differ significantly. Understanding these differences is the precondition for understanding the current conflict.

A Note on Nomenclature

The names we give to the fractions of the American bourgeoisie are not arbitrary labels. Each name is derived directly from the fraction's accumulation base — that is, from the concrete answer to the question: where does this capital grow, and how? This is the only scientifically defensible basis for naming. A fraction of capital is defined not by what it says about itself, not by its political rhetoric, not by the party it funds or the ideology it professes — but by the material conditions of its reproduction. Show us where a capital grows and we will show you what it is, what it needs, and what it will do to protect itself.

When we name a fraction, we are not expressing a preference or making a rhetorical choice. We are identifying a structural reality. The reader is invited to test each name against the evidence presented — and to reject it if the evidence does not support it.

Speculative-Rentier Capital

At the apex of the financial system sit the great asset management firms — BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street — alongside the major investment banks. These entities do not primarily produce value. They manage, circulate, and multiply it. Their accumulation base is not the factory or the platform but the financial instrument — the derivative, the bond, the equity stake.

Does Lenin's concept apply here? Partially. These firms are deeply fused with industrial and technological capital through ownership — they are the largest institutional shareholders of virtually every major corporation. In this sense the fusion Lenin described is present. But today's speculative-rentier capital has moved toward pure financial manipulation, increasingly detached from the production of value. It is finance capital in its most parasitic form.

Its political preference follows from its accumulation base: institutional stability, predictable legal frameworks, international agreements, multilateral organisations. Chaos is its enemy. It needs the rules of the game to remain intact — because the game is the rules.

Infrastructural-Monopoly Capital

This is the capital that controls not money flows but the physical and digital infrastructure of the global economy — semiconductors, cloud computing, logistics networks, energy systems, communication platforms. Here Lenin's concept applies most fully. Nvidia produces chips but is simultaneously a financial giant. Amazon operates logistics and retail but its most profitable division is cloud infrastructure. These are platforms that other capitals cannot function without.

This fraction does not merely accumulate — it extracts. Traditional industries, agriculture, manufacturing, finance itself — all must rent their operational existence from these platforms. This is monopoly capital in its most advanced form. Its political preference is aggressive: it does not need stable rules — it needs to write the rules.

Traditional Industrial Capital

The classical bourgeoisie — manufacturers of machines, vehicles, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, aerospace outside the military sector — still exists. It employs millions, operates factories, produces tangible goods. But this fraction has largely lost its independence. It is subordinated financially to the rentier fraction through credit and equity, and operationally to the infrastructural fraction through digital dependency. It retains political weight — tariff demands, industrial policy lobbying — but it is no longer a hegemonic force in its own right. It is a junior partner, pulled in different directions by the two dominant fractions.

The Military-Industrial Complex and Its Transformation

Eisenhower named it in his farewell address in 1961. He warned against the organic fusion of a permanent military establishment with a large arms industry, and the acquisition by this combination of unwarranted influence over state policy. He saw that this fusion created a structural interest in permanent conflict — that the complex could not reproduce itself without threat, without arms expenditure, without war.

In the six decades since, the complex has not merely persisted. It has transformed — and the nature of that transformation is critical to understanding the current political situation.

The traditional component remains: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Boeing. These companies live entirely off state contracts. Their accumulation base is not the market but the Pentagon budget. They are state-dependent monopolies whose survival requires not peace but permanent threat.

But a qualitatively new component has emerged, and the evidence of its fusion with the traditional complex is concrete and documented.

In 2013, Amazon Web Services signed a $600 million contract with the CIA for cloud computing infrastructure. In 2021, after protracted legal dispute, Microsoft won the $10 billion JEDI contract — the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure — to provide cloud services to the entire US Department of Defense. Amazon subsequently secured its own $10 billion NSA cloud contract. The companies that dominate civilian digital infrastructure now run the classified systems of American intelligence and military power.

Palantir Technologies — founded with CIA seed funding through In-Q-Tel, the agency's venture capital arm — provides data analytics and targeting systems to the CIA, NSA, FBI, and Pentagon. Its software has been deployed in battlefield targeting in multiple conflicts. Peter Thiel, Palantir's founder, simultaneously sits at the intersection of Silicon Valley venture capital and direct state intelligence relationships.

Nvidia's graphics processing units power both the large language models that drive civilian artificial intelligence and the autonomous targeting systems of the next generation of weapons platforms. The same chip that runs a chatbot guides a drone strike. This is not coincidence. It is the structural convergence of two previously distinct accumulation streams into a single technological base.

SpaceX's Starlink network, developed as a commercial satellite internet service, became the critical communications infrastructure for Ukrainian military operations — demonstrating in real time that private digital infrastructure and military operational capability are now inseparable. Anduril Industries, founded by former figures from the Silicon Valley venture capital world and explicitly oriented toward autonomous weapons systems, represents the next generation: companies built from the outset at the intersection of digital technology and military application.

The personnel flows confirm the structural fusion. Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, chaired the Pentagon's Defence Innovation Board. The revolving door between Silicon Valley and the defence establishment has become a structural feature, not an exception.

And at the ownership level, the integration is complete: BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street — the same asset management giants that are the largest shareholders of Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft — are simultaneously the largest institutional shareholders of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. The financial architecture that sits above both the civilian digital and the traditional military fractions is identical.

The result is what we term militarist-digital monopoly capital — not an alliance between two separate industries, but an organic fusion whose accumulation simultaneously requires Pentagon contracts and platform monopoly, military state power and digital infrastructure control. This is finance capital in Lenin's sense, but at a qualitatively higher level of integration and state dependency than Lenin's original formulation envisaged.

Part Three: The Drive for Total Dominance — Who Against Whom

Militarist-Digital Monopoly Capital: The Dominant Drive

The organic fusion described above gives militarist-digital monopoly capital a structural characteristic that distinguishes it from all other fractions: it does not merely benefit from state power — it requires the state as an organic component of its own accumulation. Without Pentagon contracts, without intelligence budgets, without state-backed exclusion of foreign competitors, this fraction cannot reproduce itself.

This structural dependency drives a specific political offensive. The goal is not to influence the state from outside — through lobbying, campaign finance, revolving doors. The goal is to become the state. To replace the institutional apparatus with direct factional control. To eliminate the regulatory frameworks that constrain accumulation. To use executive power as a weapon against rival fractions.

This is what Dimitrov meant by the seizure of state power by the most aggressive fraction of finance capital. The form is new — no uniformed paramilitaries, no single charismatic dictator in the classical mold. But the structural logic is the same: the subordination of the state to the narrow interests of one fraction, at the expense of all others.

The Dollar Question

For speculative-rentier capital, dollar hegemony is the foundation of existence. The entire architecture of this fraction's global power — bond markets, dollar-denominated debt, capital flow dominance, the ability to impose financial sanctions — rests on the dollar's status as the world's reserve currency. If that status erodes, the fraction's power erodes with it.

For militarist-digital monopoly capital, the dollar is an instrument — powerful and useful, but not irreplaceable. This fraction's accumulation base rests on physical and digital infrastructure: chips, weapons systems, cloud platforms, energy networks, satellite systems. These assets retain their structural importance regardless of what currency denominates global transactions.

This asymmetry produces a structural paradox at the heart of the current conflict: the fraction most dependent on dollar hegemony is having that hegemony undermined by the policies of the fraction that depends on it least. Tariff wars, the dismantling of multilateral institutions, the erosion of rule-based international order — all of these damage dollar credibility and accelerate the search for alternatives.

Militarist-digital monopoly capital is simultaneously pursuing a second strategy: not to capture the dollar system but to bypass it. The infrastructure of cryptocurrency and digital payment systems is overwhelmingly controlled by Silicon Valley capital. If dollar hegemony erodes, this fraction is structurally positioned to provide alternative financial infrastructure — one it controls directly, without the institutional constraints that the current system imposes.

This connects to a deeper point that Radhika Desai's recovery of Marx's original analysis of money illuminates. Marx did not treat money as merely a commodity like others. He analysed it as an autonomous and dangerous force in the circulation of capital — containing within itself the seed of crisis. The crisis of dollar hegemony is not an external shock to the system. It is the internal contradiction of a capitalism whose most aggressive fraction is sawing off the branch on which its rival sits — while having already constructed an alternative branch for itself.

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve sits at the centre of this tension. For speculative-rentier capital, Fed independence is essential — it is the institutional guarantor of dollar credibility and global financial stability. For militarist-digital monopoly capital, the Fed is a constraint to be overcome.

The drive to subordinate the Fed follows the same logic as the drive to dismantle other regulatory institutions. If the state is to serve the narrow interests of the dominant fraction rather than the general interests of capital as a whole, then no institution — including the central bank — can remain genuinely independent.

The Structural Advantage of Militarist-Digital Monopoly Capital

The observation that militarist-digital monopoly capital appears stronger is not merely an impression. It is structurally grounded — and its most telling indicator is cross-party dominance.

The Democratic Party passed the CHIPS and Science Act, dramatically expanded military spending, prosecuted the technology war against China, and maintained Trump-era tariffs on strategic sectors. The Republican Party does the same, but more aggressively and with fewer institutional constraints. The fraction does not need one party. It has both. A fraction that must rely on a single political vehicle is vulnerable. A fraction embedded in the state apparatus regardless of which party governs is structurally secure.

Its opponent — speculative-rentier capital — has no equivalent cross-party presence. Its institutional base is eroding as the international order it depends on dissolves. And here lies the deepest structural asymmetry: militarist-digital monopoly capital feeds on disorder. Every rupture in the international order generates new military contracts, new technology wars, new state subsidies. The chaos that destroys its rival's accumulation base expands its own.

An Unfinished Process

This drive toward total dominance has not succeeded. The process is ongoing — and its outcome is not structurally predetermined. The volatility of the Trump administration is itself the clearest evidence of this. What appears as erratic policymaking is not personal inconsistency. It is the surface expression of a deeper structural tug of war. Neither side has won. The balance shifts week by week, decision by decision, appointment by appointment.

The MAGA Phenomenon: A Fraction Used and Discarded

MAGA as a bourgeois programme represented a distinct and ultimately subordinate fraction of capital: medium and small enterprises squeezed by globalisation, fossil fuel and extractive capital, real estate and construction capital. These are not the forces of militarist-digital monopoly capital. They were mobilised, they served their purpose, and they are now being set aside as the dominant fraction consolidates its grip on the state apparatus.

Tulsi Gabbard's removal from her position as Director of National Intelligence is particularly revealing. She represented a non-interventionist current within the MAGA coalition — directed specifically against the permanent war machine, the intelligence apparatus, and the institutional momentum toward foreign intervention. Militarist-digital monopoly capital cannot tolerate an anti-interventionist at the head of the national intelligence apparatus. Her removal signals that within the Trump administration, the anti-war current of MAGA has been defeated.

The social base that MAGA mobilised was real — and its grievances were real. Industrial workers of the Rust Belt whose factories closed, small business owners crushed by platform monopolies, rural populations economically and culturally left behind, religious conservatives mobilised through cultural warfare. This is the classical fascist mobilisation mechanism that Dimitrov identified: genuine popular anger, structurally produced by capitalism's contradictions, captured and redirected toward targets that leave the system itself untouched.

Now that the MAGA wing is being discarded, this mass base is politically suspended. The question of where this social force goes next — toward organised labour, toward another wave of right-wing populism, toward passivity — is directly relevant to both the fascism question and the united front strategy that the situation demands.

Part Four: The Structural Connection Between Fascism and World War

We have been asking two questions: Is the United States moving toward fascism? Is a world war coming? These are not two separate questions. They are two dimensions of a single structural process — and understanding their connection requires starting from the economic foundations.

The United States is losing its global hegemonic position. This is not a political judgement. It is an economic fact — and one that is more advanced than conventional measurements suggest. In 1945, the United States produced approximately fifty percent of world GDP. Official figures today place this at around twenty-five percent — but even this overstates the real productive capacity of the American economy.

American GDP accounting is deeply inflated by financial transactions that produce no real value. Consider a concrete illustration. A cargo ship leaves San Francisco loaded with goods bound for Japan. Before that ship reaches its destination, the cargo it carries may change hands nine times on the New York financial markets. Each transaction is recorded as economic activity and counted toward GDP. But no new value has been produced. The same physical goods have simply been bought and sold — on paper, at a desk, through a screen — nine times over. Strip out this financial inflation and the real productive capacity of the American economy — its ability to manufacture goods of tangible use — has declined far more sharply than official figures acknowledge.

As this economic base erodes, one instrument of hegemonic maintenance remains available: military superiority. And here the structural connection between the hegemonic crisis, the fascist tendency, and the war danger becomes visible.

It would be an oversimplification to say that war requires fascism. The historical record does not support this. The United States conducted the wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq under formally democratic political arrangements. The capacity to wage war does not depend on the presence of a fascist state.

What fascism makes possible is a qualitatively different kind of war — total, systemic, sustained against peer adversaries at enormous human and economic cost, insulated from democratic scrutiny and popular opposition. The wars that American militarist-digital monopoly capital may find itself structurally driven toward — confrontation with China, direct conflict with Russia, large-scale war against Iran — are not of the same character as the colonial interventions and proxy conflicts of the post-1945 period. They are wars that would require the full mobilisation of national resources, the suppression of domestic opposition, and the elimination of the institutional constraints that make democratic accountability possible.

Fascism does not cause this kind of war. But it creates the political conditions under which this kind of war becomes executable — by silencing opposition, dismantling institutional brakes, mobilising the mass base through nationalist fervour, and legitimising emergency measures as permanent features of governance.

This is the structural connection. Fascism and world war are not parallel dangers. They are two faces of the same hegemonic crisis — one turned inward, one turned outward.

Part Five: The Fascism Question — Has the Threshold Been Crossed?

The question must be posed precisely. Dimitrov's definition gives us the analytical instrument. The task is to apply it without wishful thinking in either direction — neither minimising a real and advancing danger nor declaring a threshold crossed before the evidence warrants it.

Testing the Definition

Is militarist-digital monopoly capital the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist fraction of American finance capital? The evidence points in this direction.

It exhibits the strongest reactionary tendency because it is systematically dismantling the institutional frameworks — regulatory agencies, judicial independence, legislative oversight — that even bourgeois democracy requires to function. It is not merely conservative. It is actively destructive of the existing order, including the bourgeois order.

It exhibits the strongest chauvinist tendency because it has made economic nationalism, anti-immigrant mobilisation, and cultural warfare the ideological vehicles of its political programme — deployed not as sincere convictions but as instruments of mass mobilisation and factional legitimation.

It exhibits the strongest imperialist tendency because its accumulation base structurally requires permanent conflict, military escalation, and the aggressive subordination of foreign economies and states. It does not merely benefit from imperialism. It cannot reproduce itself without it.

The Threshold

The United States has not crossed the fascist threshold. Not yet. Elections continue. Courts still rule against the executive — as the Supreme Court's interventions on tariff policy demonstrated. Opposition media, though under sustained pressure, still functions. The legislative branch, though weakened, has not been dissolved. Rival fractions of capital retain institutional footholds and the capacity to resist.

But the direction of travel is unambiguous and the pace is accelerating. Executive power is being concentrated at a rate without precedent in modern American history. Regulatory agencies are being dismantled or captured. The Justice Department is being deployed against political opponents. The independence of the Federal Reserve is under sustained assault. International agreements and multilateral commitments are being unilaterally abandoned.

The 'terrorist' dimension is advancing in its contemporary form: algorithmic suppression of political dissent, financial exclusion of opponents, mass surveillance infrastructure of unprecedented scale, and the systematic criminalisation of protest and opposition activity.

The Bonapartist Interlude

There is a historically grounded intermediate category that may more precisely describe the current American situation: Bonapartism, or Caesarism — the concentration of executive power in a single figure or faction that elevates itself above the normal mechanisms of bourgeois class rule, presenting itself as standing above all factions while in reality serving the interests of the most aggressive one.

Marx analysed this phenomenon in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. When the bourgeoisie can no longer rule through its normal democratic mechanisms — when factional conflict paralyses the institutional order — it may surrender formal political power to a Bonaparte figure who promises to restore order while actually advancing the interests of the dominant fraction. The current American situation bears the structural hallmarks of this moment.

This is not yet full fascism in Dimitrov's precise sense. But it is the antechamber to it. The Bonapartist moment is historically unstable — it either resolves into a new bourgeois equilibrium or accelerates toward open dictatorship, depending on the depth of the structural crisis and the strength of organised popular resistance.

The Verdict

The fascist threshold has not been crossed. But the structural pressures driving toward it are stronger than the institutional forces resisting it — and that balance is shifting. The process is advanced, the direction is clear, and the conditions that might arrest it are weakening.

Dimitrov's definition remains the correct analytical instrument. The variables have been updated — digital terror mechanisms for paramilitary street violence, algorithmic suppression for censorship, executive decree for emergency law. The structural logic — the drive of the most aggressive fraction of finance capital toward the seizure of state power — is identical.

Part Six: The War Question — Structure, Not Accident

The Military Trap: A Hegemon Without Viable Options

The strategic reality that American militarist-digital monopoly capital confronts is this: the military instruments on which it depends to resolve its hegemonic crisis are either insufficient against peer adversaries or mutually destructive if actually used against them.

On the nuclear dimension, the strategic balance has shifted in ways that American strategic planning did not anticipate. Russia's Sarmat ICBM carries between ten and fifteen independently manoeuvrable warheads — the most advanced American delivery systems carry four to five. Russia's Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, travelling at speeds that existing missile defence systems have not demonstrated a reliable capability to intercept, represents a qualitative shift in the balance of strategic forces. Russia's Borei-class nuclear submarines patrol both the Atlantic and Pacific continuously, placing American territory within range of second-strike retaliation regardless of any first-strike scenario. The geographic invulnerability that underpinned American strategic thinking for two centuries has structurally eroded.

On the conventional dimension, the record is equally clear. The United States has not won a war against a determined adversary since 1945. Vietnam demonstrated that territorial occupation of a committed population is unsustainable regardless of military superiority. Afghanistan confirmed it over two decades. Ukraine is demonstrating, in real time, the limits of Western conventional military power against a peer adversary — and Ukraine is not Iran, not Turkey, not China.

Iran has withstood decades of economic sanctions, targeted assassinations of its scientists, cyberattacks against its nuclear infrastructure, and proxy warfare against its regional allies. Its regional influence has not diminished. Its nuclear programme has not been halted. The case of Iran is not a marginal example — it is a structural demonstration that regime change through pressure short of full-scale invasion has reached its limits, and that full-scale conventional invasion is not a viable option.

The conclusion toward which this evidence points is not that war is impossible, but that the forms of war available to American militarist capital are increasingly mismatched with its strategic objectives. A hegemon in this position — its economic dominance eroding, its military options structurally constrained, its institutional legitimacy declining — faces a dynamic that historical precedent suggests is among the most dangerous in international politics.

The Fascist Dynamic and the Loss of Rational Calculation

There is one further argument that must be made — and it is perhaps the most sobering of all.

American militarist-digital monopoly capital may believe that a fascist political order can be controlled — that it can be used to silence opposition, mobilise the mass base, and remove institutional constraints, while remaining ultimately subject to rational direction. This is precisely what the German bourgeoisie believed about Hitler.

Thyssen, Krupp, IG Farben and the broader German industrial and financial establishment financed Hitler's rise, cleared his path to power, and convinced themselves that he was a manageable instrument — a useful demagogue who would crush the left and serve their accumulation interests while remaining ultimately subject to their direction. The calculation was catastrophically wrong.

Once in power, fascism develops its own internal dynamic. It is no longer controllable by the class fraction that created it. The institutional constraints that might have moderated the most extreme impulses have been dismantled — by the same bourgeoisie that now finds itself unable to apply the brakes. The machinery of repression, mobilisation, and war, once set in motion, follows its own logic.

Hitler continued the war after Stalingrad — after it was clear to any rational military or economic calculation that the war was irretrievably lost. He continued because fascist political logic is not the same as rational economic logic. The result: Germany in ruins, European civilisation devastated, tens of millions dead. And the very capital interests that brought Hitler to power largely destroyed along with everything else.

A nuclear-armed state moving in a fascist direction, trapped in an unresolvable hegemonic crisis, unable to restore dominance through either conventional or nuclear means, and progressively stripped of the institutional brakes that rational bourgeois governance provides — represents a configuration whose historical precedents are not reassuring. The danger is not that American militarist capital will rationally calculate its way to a nuclear exchange. The danger is that a fascist political dynamic, once sufficiently advanced, removes the institutional and political mechanisms that would prevent an irrational decision from being made and executed.

Europe: Not Distancing but Militarising

Early assessments that Trump's pressure on NATO — its tariff wars, its rhetorical challenges to the alliance — would produce a European strategic realignment have proven incorrect. The opposite has occurred.

Europe has not moved toward independence. It has moved toward deeper military integration with the United States — but on terms that serve the strategic interests of American militarist-digital monopoly capital. And what is being built in Europe is not defensive capacity. It is offensive capability. The language of 'defence spending' and 'deterrence' is ideological cover for a qualitative shift in the military posture of the continent.

Finland's accession to NATO added over 1,300 kilometres of direct land border between NATO and Russia. Saint Petersburg, Russia's second largest city, now sits approximately 150 kilometres from NATO territory. Norway is leading the construction of a Nordic command structure that is acquiring the characteristics of an offensive regional platform, with discussions of nuclear weapons storage that go beyond deterrence toward first-strike capacity. Poland is allocating close to four percent of GDP to military buildup along its eastern frontier — not a defensive line but a forward deployment zone. Germany and France, despite occasional rhetoric about European strategic autonomy, remain structurally incapable of independent action.

The economic dimension must not be overlooked. European militarisation is simultaneously a transfer of European public resources to American militarist-digital monopoly capital. F-35 orders, Patriot missile systems, American-manufactured weapons platforms — the expansion of European military budgets flows overwhelmingly into the profit columns of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and their digital partners.

A Warning Against False Hopes

Those who have built their analysis of the current world situation on the expectation of a fundamental American-European rupture are not analysing the world as it is. They are projecting onto it a wish — the wish that the contradictions of American imperialism will resolve themselves through inter-imperialist fragmentation, without requiring organised popular resistance to bring them to a halt.

The structural reasons why this rupture has not occurred and is unlikely to occur in the near term are clear. European capital cannot break from the American system without breaking from the financial architecture, the intelligence networks, the command structures, and the market access on which its own accumulation depends. The cost of genuine independence would be existential. No fraction of European capital is prepared to pay it.

NATO: An Instrument of Control and Aggression, From the Beginning

NATO was never a defensive alliance. This is not a retrospective judgement made in light of recent developments. It is what the historical record shows from the organisation's inception in 1949.

When NATO was founded, the Soviet Union had not attacked Western Europe and showed no credible intention of doing so. The Warsaw Pact — the Soviet-led military alliance that NATO's apologists present as the threat NATO was built to counter — was formed six years later, in 1955, as a direct response to NATO's existence and to West Germany's rearmament and integration into the alliance. The sequence alone is revealing: NATO came first.

NATO had a second, equally fundamental purpose that Western historiography systematically obscures: the control of America's own allies. It was constructed not only against the Soviet Union but against the possibility of an independent European power centre — to ensure that European bourgeoisies remained subordinated to American strategic direction, that their military capacities were integrated into American command structures, and that no European state could develop an autonomous foreign policy that challenged American capital's interests.

De Gaulle understood this. In 1966 he withdrew France from NATO's integrated military command precisely because he recognised that membership meant strategic subordination. He was correct — but the structural pressures of economic and financial integration with the American system proved too strong. France returned to full NATO membership in 2009.

The Historical Record: Who Was Actually Aggressive?

The claim that NATO was built to counter Soviet expansionism collapses under the weight of the historical evidence.

In October 1944, Churchill flew to Moscow and presented Stalin with the 'percentages agreement' — a handwritten division of southeastern Europe into spheres of influence. Greece — a Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean country of enormous strategic significance, the gateway to the Middle East and the Suez Canal — was assigned ninety percent to Britain. Stalin signed. And he kept his word.

At the moment of that agreement, the communist-led National Liberation Front — ELAS — had effectively won the military struggle in Greece. They had fought the German occupation with mass popular support and emerged as the dominant political and military force. Power was within their grasp. Stalin did not move to support them. He had assigned Greece to the British sphere and he honoured that assignment.

In December 1944, British forces landed in Athens and opened fire on ELAS fighters. A full-scale civil war followed from 1946 to 1949, with direct American military and financial support. The most powerful revolutionary movement in the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean was crushed — while the Soviet Union watched.

When Churchill offered Stalin Norwegian territory as far south as Narvik — a warm water Atlantic port of enormous strategic value — Stalin refused. He was not building an empire. He was securing a buffer within an agreed framework.

In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party came to power in 1948 through a constitutional and parliamentary process — having received over forty percent of the vote in 1946, the strongest electoral performance of any communist party in postwar Europe. In Poland and Hungary, the socialist parties that came to power did so through complex political processes rooted in real social dynamics — land reform that distributed feudal landholdings to the peasantry generated genuine popular support — not simply through Soviet imposition, as Western historiography insists.

Compare this record with the American one. The CIA financed the 1948 Italian elections to prevent the Italian Communist Party — the backbone of the anti-fascist resistance — from coming to power. The French Communist Party was forced out of coalition government under direct American pressure. In Iran in 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew the democratically elected government of Mosaddegh. In Guatemala in 1954, they did the same to Arbenz.

The question of who was aggressive and who was defensive answers itself when the evidence is laid out without the distorting lens of Cold War ideology. NATO was an instrument of control and aggression from its founding. It remains so today — expanded, deepened, and now operating at full capacity in the strategic encirclement of Russia and the preparation for confrontation with China.

We write the history as it was. We owe no apologies to those whose power depends on it being written otherwise.

The Global South: Class Differentiation Within the Bourgeoisie

As Lenin argued at the Second Congress of the Comintern in 1920, the national bourgeoisie in colonial and semi-colonial countries has an objective interest in resisting imperial domination that makes it a potential, if conditional, ally in the struggle against imperialism.

The national bourgeoisie is anti-imperialist because it cannot be imperialist — not because of any inherent or permanent quality. In its own market it faces competition from foreign monopolies with vastly superior capital and technology. Its attempts at independent development are blocked by patent walls, technology transfer restrictions, and the conditionality of imperial financial institutions. This structural position generates an objective interest in resistance to imperial domination.

But this anti-imperialism is conditional and historically bounded. When conditions change — when national capital accumulates sufficient strength, when state power supports its expansion beyond national borders — the national bourgeoisie ceases to be national. It becomes imperialist. It does not change its character. It fulfils it. The working class must enter any alliance with the national bourgeoisie with full awareness of this dynamic and with its own political independence intact.

This alliance does not extend to the collaborationist-dependent bourgeoisie — whose accumulation through agency agreements, licensed production, franchise systems, and integration into imperial supply chains places its structural interests closer to imperialism than to national liberation. At the decisive moment, this fraction gravitates toward accommodation with imperial capital. It cannot afford to do otherwise.

And it extends still less to the comprador bourgeoisie — the direct domestic instrument of imperial extraction. The comprador fraction does not merely depend on imperial capital; it is its local mechanism. Its concrete forms are well established: the local partner of foreign monopolies through whom the bulk of profit flows abroad; the intermediary of raw material extraction exported without value addition; the domestic representative of imperial financial institutions implementing debt relationships that serve external creditors. This fraction stands not merely outside the united front — it stands as one of its targets.

Conclusion: The Stakes and the Tasks

We began with two questions. Is the United States moving toward fascism? Is a world war coming? The analysis gives us answers — not prophecies, but structurally grounded assessments of where the forces are moving and what structural pressures they are generating.

The United States is not yet a fascist state. But the process of fascisation is advanced, the direction is unambiguous, and the conditions that might arrest it are weakening faster than those driving it forward. The bourgeois consensus — the agreement among capital fractions not to exercise dictatorship over one another — is fracturing. The state is no longer functioning primarily as the guardian of capital's general interests. It is becoming the contested instrument of its most aggressive fraction.

World war is not structurally inevitable. But the pressures driving toward it are stronger than at any point since 1939. A declining hegemon, whose real productive capacity is hollowed out beneath layers of financial inflation, whose military options are increasingly mismatched with its strategic objectives, and whose most aggressive capital fraction requires permanent conflict to reproduce its accumulation base — this is a configuration whose historical precedents are not reassuring.

The connection between these two dangers is the central argument of this article. Fascism is not an independent domestic political development that happens to coincide with international tension. It is the political form that a declining hegemon tends to adopt when it can no longer maintain consent at home or dominance abroad through normal means. It removes the institutional brakes on catastrophic decision-making. It makes the previously unthinkable executable.

The German bourgeoisie believed it could control Hitler. It could not. The fascist dynamic, once sufficiently advanced, overrides the rational calculations of the very class fraction that created it. A nuclear-armed state moving in a fascist direction, trapped in an unresolvable hegemonic crisis, unable to restore dominance through either conventional or nuclear means, and stripped of the institutional brakes that rational bourgeois governance provides — represents a configuration of danger without clear historical precedent.

We do not write this to produce despair. We write it because clarity about the structural forces at work is the first condition of effective resistance.

Dimitrov's analysis pointed toward a political conclusion that remains valid today: the united front. Not as a slogan inherited from another era but as the practical political task of this one. The broadest possible alliance of forces — with the working class at its centre, independent of any fraction of imperialist capital, but open to alliance with national bourgeois forces in the Global South whose objective interests place them in opposition to imperial domination — against the most reactionary, most chauvinist, most imperialist elements of finance capital.

The bourgeoisie that builds fascism cannot control it. History has demonstrated this at a cost of tens of millions of lives. The organised forces of labour and popular resistance — domestically and internationally — are the only force whose interests are fully and permanently incompatible with the system generating the danger.

That is the political horizon this analysis opens. Not a prophecy. A task.【●】

"Rome fell."

It is one of the most frequently repeated sentences in the history of Western civilisation — repeated so often that it has ceased to function as a historical judgement and become instead a cognitive reflex. The second sentence follows automatically: "Byzantium was Rome's continuation." The third is almost always: "The Ottomans were something else entirely."

The problem with these three sentences, placed in sequence, is not that they are individually false. It is that they perform a specific ideological function. Rather than illuminating the complexity of imperial history, they organise it into neat, reassuring containers — containers that happen to align with extraordinary precision with the requirements of the Hellenomaniac narrative as explained by Martin Bernal in Black Athena. A Rome that fell, a Byzantium that preserved it, and an Ottoman Empire that represented a radical break: this sequence is not a description of historical reality. It is the architecture of a political argument.

Modern historiography's deepest methodological preference is for clean beginnings, definitive endings, and tidy categories. Empires, however, do not oblige. They do not die on a Tuesday morning. They dissolve, transform, fragment, and re-emerge in altered forms. The question at the centre of the Rome debate is therefore not "did Rome continue?" It is: why does the modern world insist on reading the past through the categories of the nation-state?

The Anachronism at the Heart of the Debate

The automatic projection of the modern state model onto ancient imperial formations is one of the most consequential intellectual errors in Western historiography — and one of the least examined, precisely because it is so thoroughly naturalised.

When the contemporary reader looks at the past, the template is already in place: one people, one language, one centre, one identity, one territory with defined borders. This template is not a neutral analytical tool. It is the product of a specific historical moment — the 19th century, the age of nationalism, the age of Helenomania — and it was not constructed to illuminate ancient history. It was constructed to legitimise contemporary political projects. As Benedict Anderson demonstrated in Imagined Communities and Ernest Gellner in Nations and Nationalism, the nation is a modern invention — a product of print capitalism, mass education, and industrial standardisation. To read ancient empires through this lens is not historical analysis. It is anachronism dressed as scholarship.

Rome was not a nation-state. Its essence lay not in any modern conception of ethnic or cultural identity but in its capacity to hold vast and diverse geographies under a single political order. What made Rome Rome was not the ethnicity of its rulers, the language of its administration, or the religion of its population — all of which changed, repeatedly and dramatically, across the centuries of its existence. What made Rome Rome was its sovereign system: the capacity to articulate taxation, law, military organisation, and provincial administration into a functioning whole across an enormous territorial range.

The history of Rome is, from beginning to end, a history of transformation. Republican Rome and late imperial Rome are not the same formation. Pagan Rome and Christian Rome are not the same formation. Latin-dominant Rome and Greek-speaking Eastern Rome are not the same formation. And yet historians call all of these "Rome" — because the institutional continuity, however transformed, was real and was recognised as such by contemporaries.

This is the point at which the argument must become precise. There are two tempting but equally inadequate responses to the question of imperial continuity.

The first: "If the state calls itself Rome, it is Rome." This apparently reasonable position contains a serious theoretical problem. If self-identification is the sole criterion, historical analysis collapses into the uncritical reproduction of state propaganda. Every state defines itself as it pleases. The historian's function — to analyse, to contextualise, to interrogate — disappears.

The second: "If the institutions have changed, it is no longer Rome." This position is equally untenable, because Rome's institutions changed continuously across a millennium. By this standard, Rome ceased to be Rome long before 476 AD — or never was Rome at all, since every institution it possessed evolved beyond recognition.

The resolution lies neither in pure self-identification nor in pure institutional continuity, but in what might be called the reproduction of the sovereign form: the capacity to re-generate, under new historical conditions and in new cultural registers, the essential political functions — territorial administration, legal order, military organisation, fiscal extraction — that constituted the imperial system. Continuity, in this framework, is not sameness. It is the persistent re-production of a political form across transformation.

Byzantium Was Not Rome's Continuation — It Was Rome's Evolution

What we call "Byzantium" is itself a modern historiographical construction. The state that modern scholarship designates by this name never used it. Its rulers called themselves Roman emperors. Its legal system was Roman law. Its political claim was the Roman claim. Its population called itself Romioi — Romans.

The name "Byzantium" was introduced by the German historian Hieronymus Wolf in 1557 and popularised in the 18th century by Montesquieu and Gibbon — both writing, it should be noted, in a period of accelerating European self-definition against the Ottoman Other. The conceptual separation of "Byzantium" from "Rome" was not a scholarly discovery. It was a political decision: to terminate the Roman succession at a point that excluded the Greek-speaking Orthodox empire and, by extension, its Ottoman successor from the inheritance of Roman legitimacy.

The more historically accurate formulation is the one this article has been building toward: what we call Byzantium was not Rome's continuation but Rome's evolution. It had changed — Christianised, Hellenised, territorially contracted, dynastically transformed. But it had re-produced the sovereign form under new historical conditions. The emperor remained the Roman emperor. The law remained Roman law. The administrative apparatus remained, in its essential architecture, the apparatus of Roman imperial governance.

Ernest Gellner's observation about nationalism applies with equal force here: the continuity that matters is not cultural or ethnic but organisational. What persists across the transformations of imperial history is not a people or a language or a religion but a political form — the capacity to govern, to tax, to adjudicate, to defend. Rome, understood in this way, did not fall in 476 AD or in 1453 AD. It transformed.

The Ottoman Question

It is precisely when the Ottoman Empire enters the analysis that modern historiography most consistently loses its nerve.

The Christianisation of Rome — the transformation from the pagan empire of Augustus to the Christian empire of Constantine — is treated by the dominant narrative as a natural evolution. The Greek-speaking turn of the Eastern Empire — the transformation from Latin administrative culture to Greek liturgical and literary culture — is similarly absorbed into a story of continuous development. These are presented as internal changes within a single historical subject.

The Ottoman transformation is presented differently. Here, the narrative speaks of rupture, conquest, replacement. A Muslim Turkic dynasty takes Constantinople: this, the dominant historiography insists, is categorically different from a Christian dynasty taking it, or a Latin dynasty, or a dynasty of any other origin that had done so in the centuries before. The criterion shifts — and the shift is never acknowledged, because to acknowledge it would be to expose it as ideological.

What actually happened in 1453 must be examined without this double standard.

Mehmed II did not present himself as the destroyer of Rome. He presented himself as its heir. He took the title Kayser-i Rum — Caesar of Rome. He visited the ruins of Troy and declared that he had avenged Hector — placing himself within the same civilisational narrative that European aristocrats had claimed for themselves for a millennium, the narrative of Trojan-Roman succession that, as we have seen, dominated European self-understanding until it became politically inconvenient after 1453. He protected the Orthodox Patriarchate, guaranteed its institutional continuity, and incorporated it into the Ottoman millet system — which, as this article has argued, was not a gesture of tolerance but the standard technology of pre-modern tributary governance: the same technology that Rome itself had applied to the diverse religious and cultural communities of its empire.

The geographical argument is equally compelling. Anatolia had been known as "Rum diyarı" — the land of Rome — for centuries before the Ottoman conquest. The Seljuk sultanate of Anatolia had called itself the Sultanate of Rum. The great Sufi poet Celaleddin Rumi took the epithet "Rumi" — man of Rome — to identify his geographical and civilisational location. When Mehmed II took Constantinople, he was not entering foreign territory. He was entering the heartland of what the region had called Rome for four hundred years before his arrival.

The institutional continuity argument runs in the same direction. The Patriarchate that had functioned under Byzantine emperors continued to function under Ottoman sultans. The millet system that organised communal life under Ottoman administration was structurally identical to the system of communal autonomy that Rome had always applied to the diverse populations of its empire. The fiscal and administrative techniques of Ottoman provincial governance drew directly on Byzantine precedent — a continuity that Ottoman administrators themselves acknowledged and that modern scholarship has increasingly documented.

None of this means that the Ottoman Empire was identical to its predecessors. It was not. It had its own distinct political theology, its own dynastic logic, its own cultural production. But this is precisely the point: Rome had never been identical to itself across time. The Rome of Trajan was not the Rome of Constantine. The Rome of Justinian was not the Rome of Heraclius. Each transformation was substantial. None was treated as a categorical break — until the transformation involved a Muslim dynasty, at which point the criterion of continuity was silently replaced by the criterion of religious identity.

This silent substitution is Turcophobia's deepest historiographical operation. It is not argued. It is assumed. It shapes the questions that are asked and the questions that are not asked. It determines which transformations count as evolution and which count as rupture. And it does so in the service of a political conclusion that was reached before the historical analysis began: that the Ottoman presence in the former Roman territories was an alien intrusion, an occupation, a civilisational break — rather than what the evidence actually suggests: the latest in a long series of imperial transformations of the same sovereign form, across the same territories, by rulers who understood themselves, and were understood by their subjects, as operating within the same imperial tradition.

The Geography That Changed Its Name

The ideological operation is visible nowhere more clearly than in the treatment of Anatolia itself.

During the Roman and Byzantine periods, Anatolia is consistently presented in the dominant Western narrative as part of the "European world" — a natural extension of the civilisational space centred on the Mediterranean. Its cities — Ephesus, Antioch, Nicaea, Caesarea — are treated as Roman cities, Christian cities, cities of the West. Their architecture, their philosophy, their theology are incorporated without question into the narrative of Western civilisational development.

After the Turkic migrations and the Ottoman consolidation, the same geography is recoded. Anatolia becomes "Asia." The same cities — now Efes, Antakya, İznik, Kayseri — are treated as Oriental, as Eastern, as outside the civilisational space they had occupied a century before. The geography has not changed. The people living in it have not been entirely replaced — as the ancient DNA evidence increasingly confirms, Anatolian population continuity across the Bronze Age, the classical period, the Byzantine period, and the Ottoman period is substantial. What has changed is the ideological framework through which the geography is perceived.

This recoding is not innocent. It performs the function that Helenomania requires: to construct Anatolia as the Other, the space of civilisational absence against which European presence defines itself. The same territory that was "ours" when it was Roman becomes "theirs" when it is Ottoman — not because anything fundamental changed in the territory, but because the ideological requirements of the narrative changed.

Konstantinopolis makes this visible with particular clarity. The city appears in three successive chapters of the standard Western narrative: as the second centre of Rome, as the capital of Byzantium, and as the Ottoman capital. In each chapter, the framing shifts. The Roman Constantinople is presented as a continuation of classical civilisation. The Byzantine Constantinople is presented as the guardian of Greek culture against Oriental barbarism. The Ottoman Constantinople — İstanbul — is presented as the usurpation of a Christian heritage.

But the city is the same city. Its strategic position — controlling the passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, bridging Europe and Asia — is the same position that made it the capital of Rome's eastern empire, the capital of the Byzantine state, and the capital of the Ottoman empire. As Eberhard Zangger observes, Troy held this position for two thousand years; Istanbul has held it for three thousand. The geopolitical logic that made both cities imperial centres is identical. What differs is not the city but the story being told about it — and the political interests that story serves.

Why the Debate Never Ends

The Rome debate will not be resolved by new evidence. It will not be resolved by more careful philology or more rigorous archaeology. It will not be resolved because it is not, at its core, a historical debate. It is a political one.

What is being contested is not the past. It is the legitimacy of the present. The question of whether the Ottoman Empire was or was not the legitimate successor to Rome is, in its political implications, a question about whether the Ottoman presence in the former Roman territories constituted occupation or governance, intrusion or succession. And that question — as this article has argued from its opening pages — was answered in advance, by the financial and geopolitical interests of 19th-century European powers, before any historical evidence was examined.

The most unsettling possibility — the one that the dominant narrative is structurally unable to accommodate — is this: Rome did not end. What ended, in 1453, was not Roman imperial governance of the former Roman territories. What ended was European Christian control of the city that had been the symbolic centre of that governance. The imperial form — the capacity to hold diverse peoples, languages, and religions under a single sovereign order, administering them through their own communal institutions while extracting tribute and maintaining order — continued. It continued in Ottoman Istanbul as it had continued in Byzantine Constantinople and Roman Constantinople before it.

If this is correct — and the institutional, geographical, and demographic evidence suggests that it is — then the "occupation" narrative collapses entirely. You cannot occupy what was never yours. You cannot restore what never ceased to exist in a different form. The Greek state of 1830 was not the restoration of something that the Ottomans had destroyed. It was the creation of something new — carved out of a living imperial order by the financial and strategic interests of powers whose concern for Hellenic civilisation extended precisely as far as their need for a client state in the eastern Mediterranean.

History, as this article has argued throughout, does not always produce the clean endings that ideology requires. Rome is the most instructive case. It transformed so many times, across so many centuries, under so many dynasties and religions and languages, that the question of when it "ended" becomes, on examination, a question about which transformation we have decided, for political reasons, to call an ending.

The decision to call 1453 an ending — rather than a transformation — was made in the courts and academies of 15th and 16th-century Europe, for reasons that had nothing to do with historical accuracy and everything to do with the urgent need to construct a civilisational boundary between Christian Europe and its Ottoman neighbour. That decision has been repeated, refined, and institutionalised for five centuries. It shapes every textbook, every museum label, every political speech that invokes the "clash of civilisations."

It is not history. It is Turcophobia's founding myth — and like all founding myths, it tells us less about the past it claims to describe than about the political anxieties of those who constructed it.【●】

İnsanlık tarihinin en sık tekrarlanan cümlelerinden biridir bu. O kadar sık tekrar edilmiştir ki artık tarihsel bir yargı olmaktan çok zihinsel bir refleks hâline gelmiştir. Ardından ikinci cümle gelir: “Bizans Roma’nın devamıydı.” Üçüncü cümle ise genellikle şöyledir: “Osmanlı ise bambaşka bir dünyaydı.”

Sorun şu ki, bu üç cümle yan yana geldiğinde açıklayıcı olmaktan çok uyuşturucu bir etki yaratıyor. Çünkü tarihin karmaşıklığını çözmek yerine onu düzenli kutulara yerleştiriyorlar. Modern tarih yazımının en sevdiği şey de budur: net başlangıçlar, kesin çöküşler, temiz ayrımlar ve rahatlatıcı kategoriler.

Oysa imparatorluklar böyle işlemez.

İmparatorluklar bir sabah ansızın ölmezler. Çözülürler, dönüşürler, parçalanırlar, başka biçimlerde yeniden ortaya çıkarlar. Bu yüzden Roma tartışmasının merkezindeki asıl mesele “Roma devam etti mi?” sorusu değildir. Asıl mesele, modern dünyanın geçmişi neden hâlâ ulus-devlet mantığıyla okumakta ısrar ettiğidir.

Bugün birçok insan geçmişe bakarken otomatik olarak modern devlet modelini geçmişe yansıtır: tek bir halk, tek bir dil, tek bir merkez, tek bir kimlik… Bu şablon o kadar güçlüdür ki antik imparatorlukları bile aynı mantıkla okumaya başlarız. Oysa Roma İmparatorluğu böyle bir yapı değildi.

Roma’nın özü, modern anlamda “Romalı olmakta” değil, çok geniş coğrafyaları tek bir siyasal düzen altında tutabilme kapasitesinde yatıyordu. Onu güçlü yapan şey yalnızca lejyonları değildi; aynı zamanda vergiyi, hukuku, askerî örgütlenmeyi ve taşra yönetimini birbirine bağlayabilen devasa bir egemenlik sistemiydi. Bu yüzden Roma’yı yalnızca bir etnik ya da kültürel kimlik olarak okumak ciddi bir anakronizmdir.

Aslında Roma’nın tarihi baştan sona dönüşüm tarihidir. Cumhuriyet dönemindeki Roma ile geç imparatorluk dönemi aynı değildir. Pagan Roma ile Hristiyan Roma aynı değildir. Latin ağırlıklı Roma ile Yunanca konuşan Doğu Roma da aynı değildir. Ama bütün bu değişimlere rağmen tarihçiler hâlâ bunların hepsine “Roma” demeye devam ederler.

İşte tartışmanın düğüm noktası tam burada başlıyor.

Çünkü bir taraftan şunu söyleyenler vardır: “Devlet kendisini Roma olarak görüyorsa Roma’dır.” İlk bakışta mantıklı görünen bu yaklaşım, aslında büyük bir teorik problem taşır. Eğer yalnızca özdeşlik beyanını ölçüt kabul edersek, tarihsel analiz büyük ölçüde devletlerin kendi propagandasına dönüşür. Her devlet kendisini istediği gibi tanımlayabilir. O zaman tarihçinin işi nedir?

Fakat öteki uç da aynı ölçüde sorunludur. Eğer yalnızca kurumlara bakarsanız, o zaman Roma’nın kendisi bile tarih boyunca defalarca “başka bir şeye” dönüşmüş görünür. Çünkü Roma’nın ordusu değişmiştir, hukuku değişmiştir, dini değişmiştir, dili değişmiştir, yönetici elitleri değişmiştir. Bu durumda da “gerçek Roma”yı belirlemek neredeyse imkânsız hâle gelir.

Bu yüzden Roma tartışmasını tek bir ölçüte indirgemek mümkün değildir. Sorun da tam burada başlar: modern tarih yazımı karmaşık tarihsel süreklilikleri basit kategorilere dönüştürmek ister.

Bugün “Bizans” dediğimiz yapı bunun en iyi örneğidir. Çünkü Bizans İmparatorluğu kendisine hiçbir zaman “Bizans” demedi. Bu isim modern tarih yazımının sonradan yaptığı bir sınıflandırmadır. O devletin yöneticileri de halkı da kendilerini Roma olarak tanımlıyordu. İmparator Roma imparatoruydu. Hukuk Roma hukukuydu. Siyasal iddia Roma iddiasıydı.

Bu nedenle “Bizans Roma mıydı?” sorusu bile aslında modern bir zihinsel çerçevenin ürünüdür. Çünkü sorunun içinde gizli bir varsayım vardır: Sanki ortada önce “gerçek Roma”, sonra da onun “taklidi” ya da “devamı” olan başka bir yapı vardır.

Oysa tarih bu kadar temiz ilerlemez.

Daha rahatsız edici ihtimal şudur: Bizans, Roma’nın “devamı” değil, Roma’nın tarihsel evrimiydi. Değişmiş, dönüşmüş, Hristiyanlaşmış, Yunancalaşmış ama aynı büyük siyasal formu başka bir tarihsel koşul içinde yeniden üretmiş bir yapıydı.

Asıl gerilim ise Osmanlı İmparatorluğu söz konusu olduğunda ortaya çıkar. Çünkü Osmanlı, modern tarih yazımının rahat kategorilerini bozar.

Bir taraftan Osmanlı açık biçimde farklıdır. Farklı bir hanedan düzeni kurar, farklı bir meşruiyet dili kullanır, İslami bir siyasal çerçeve oluşturur. Ama öte taraftan tamamen boş bir coğrafyada ortaya çıkmaz. Aynı büyük şehirleri yönetir, benzer idari problemlerle uğraşır, önceki imparatorluklardan kalan birçok tekniği yeniden işler ve aynı imparatorluk alanı üzerinde yeni bir merkez kurar.

İşte tam bu noktada modern tarih yazımı çoğu zaman tökezler. Çünkü Hristiyanlaşan Roma’yı “doğal dönüşüm” olarak gören anlatı, Müslüman Osmanlı’yı çoğu zaman “tam kopuş” gibi sunar. Oysa tarihsel gerçeklik bu kadar sade değildir.

Din değişimi elbette önemlidir; fakat tek başına açıklayıcı değildir. Çünkü Roma dünyası zaten yüzyıllar boyunca sürekli değişmiştir. Paganlıktan Hristiyanlığa geçiş nasıl Roma’yı otomatik olarak “Roma olmaktan çıkarmadıysa”, sonraki dönüşümleri de tek bir eksene indirgemek mümkün değildir.

Burada asıl belirleyici olan şey, imparatorlukların aynı kalması değil, büyük egemenlik alanlarını yönetebilme kapasitesini farklı biçimlerde yeniden üretebilmeleridir.

Modern tarih yazımının en büyük sorunlarından biri de budur: tarihi sürekli “devam” ve “kopuş” ikiliğiyle düşünmek.

Oysa büyük siyasal yapılar bu kadar mekanik işlemez. İmparatorluklar bazen çöker ama kurumları yaşamaya devam eder. Hanedanlar yok olur ama yönetim teknikleri sürer. Diller değişir ama merkezî egemenlik biçimleri başka yapılarda yeniden ortaya çıkar.

Bu yüzden “Roma düştü mü?” sorusu bile yanıltıcı olabilir.

Belki daha doğru soru şudur:

Roma’dan sonra aynı coğrafyada egemenlik nasıl yeniden üretildi?

Bu soru bizi kimlik savaşlarından daha verimli bir yere götürür.

Çünkü tarih çoğu zaman devlet isimlerinden daha derin süreçlerle ilgilidir. Aynı şehirler, aynı ticaret yolları, aynı vergi mekanizmaları, aynı stratejik merkezler farklı hanedanlar altında yeniden örgütlenebilir. Değişen şey yalnızca bayraklar değildir; ama her şeyin tamamen sıfırlandığını düşünmek de tarihsel olarak yanıltıcıdır.

Bugün Anadolu’nun tarihine bakışımız bile bunun izlerini taşır. Roma döneminde çoğu zaman “Avrupa dünyasının” parçası gibi anlatılan Anadolu, Türklerin yerleşmesinden sonra bir anda “Asya” olarak kodlanmaya başlanır. Coğrafya değişmez; değişen, tarihsel anlatının ideolojik çerçevesidir.

Aynı durum Konstantinopolis için de geçerlidir. Şehir bir dönemde Roma’nın ikinci merkezi, sonra Bizans başkenti, ardından Osmanlı payitahtı olarak anlatılır. Oysa şehir aynı şehirdir. Değişen şey, onu hangi tarihsel hikâyenin içine yerleştirdiğimizdir.

Belki de bu yüzden Roma tartışması hiçbir zaman tamamen bitmeyecek. Çünkü burada tartışılan şey yalnızca geçmiş değildir. Aynı zamanda bugünün dünyasının geçmişi nasıl okumak istediğidir.

Ve belki en rahatsız edici ihtimal şudur:

Roma gerçekten “bitmiş” bir imparatorluk olmayabilir.

Belki Roma, farklı isimler ve farklı meşruiyet biçimleri altında yeniden ortaya çıkan büyük egemenlik düzenlerinin tarihsel hafızasıdır.【●】

Social consciousness encompasses the totality of worldviews, conceptions, theories, and social psychology — in other words, all the values of spiritual life that constitute the ideological dimension of a society's superstructure. Social consciousness is not an independent domain separate from material existence. On the contrary, it rests upon material social relations and material social being. By social being we mean the material and social conditions and relations that have matured through the preceding process of social development, and within which every individual finds themselves already situated. The legal regularities governing these relations and conditions determine the living conditions of human beings. Social being always exists in a historically determined form, within the framework of a specific socio-economic formation. The mode of production — understood as the unity of productive forces and relations of production — is the means by which society appropriates its conditions of life. The specific character and historical particularity of social being is stamped, in every society, above all by property relations.

Social Consciousness

The roots of social consciousness are to be found within existing social being. As Marx put it: "Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. … It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness." Social consciousness is a reflection of the various aspects of social life, and ultimately of the objective world as a whole. It does not merely reflect social relations; it also reflects the relations between human beings and nature, and the relations within nature itself. Views about nature are thus shaped by material social relations and the economic base. This rich content exists in the form of various modes of social consciousness — political, juridical, philosophical, scientific, moral, aesthetic, and religious — which have taken shape throughout human history and have progressively differentiated themselves from one another.

The various forms of social consciousness find their objective foundations in different aspects, relations, and elements of social life. Their subjective foundation, however, lies in the capacity of human consciousness — developed over the course of history — to reflect objective reality in different ways, and in the diverse forms of mental comprehension. Social consciousness is not the sum of the individual consciousnesses within a society; it is socially conditioned and shaped, a product of the totality of social development.

The Class Character of Social Consciousness

In class societies, social consciousness bears a class character. In societies riven by irreconcilable antagonisms, it gives expression both to the theories and views of the dominant classes and to those of the oppressed. The irreconcilability of these views finds its expression in the ideological class struggle, which pervades every domain of social life. As Marx famously stated: "The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, consequently also controls the means of mental production, so that the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are on the whole subject to it."

At the same time, social consciousness displays a relative independence from the economic base. This relative independence manifests itself in several ways. Both social consciousness as a whole and each of its particular forms follow their own developmental laws. The development of social consciousness does not simply mirror, step by step, the development of material social relations; nor is it possible to trace every individual idea back to a single, directly corresponding material cause. New ideas and conceptions typically build upon the existing intellectual inheritance — evaluating, modifying, and carrying it forward. Yet the manner in which this inheritance is taken up, transformed, or developed is ultimately determined, in the last instance, by material social relations and the class interests arising from them.

The Necessary Function in Social Development

The relative independence of social consciousness also manifests itself in its capacity to actively influence the process of social development. Social consciousness fulfils a necessary function in the development of society. As Engels observed: "In the history of society the actors are all endowed with consciousness, are men acting with deliberation or passion, working towards definite goals; nothing happens without a conscious purpose, without an intended aim."

Through ideas, theories, and conceptions, human beings come to know and become conscious of their natural and social environment, their class position, and their objective interests. They grasp, to a greater or lesser degree, the tendencies of society's development in accordance with its objective laws. Formulating tasks, goals, and programmes grounded in theory, they seek either to consolidate the existing social order or to bring it to an end and replace it with a new one. The goals set by social consciousness can be realised only insofar as they correspond to the objective laws of social development — that is, insofar as the social consciousness that grounds them derives from the material conditions of social life and its objective developmental laws. As Marx and Engels put it: "Ideas can never lead beyond an old world order but only beyond the ideas of the old world order. Ideas cannot carry out anything at all. To carry out ideas men are needed who dispose of a certain practical force."

The Socio-Economic Formation

At this point we must return to the concept of the socio-economic formation, which is one of the foundational concepts of the materialist conception of history and of social theory. It should be noted that this concept has frequently been mistranslated or inadequately rendered in various languages — replaced by vague approximations such as "formation," "configuration," or "social arrangement" that fail to capture its specific theoretical content. This is not merely a terminological inconvenience; it reflects a more general tendency to dilute the precision of Marxist categories in translation.

The concept reflects human social life in a generalised form, as a system of social relations governed by specific laws, as a social organism. As such, it encompasses all the important aspects and elements of social life in their general regularities and mutual interactions — above all the productive forces, the economic base constituted by the relations of production, social relations, and the superstructure. The concept of the socio-economic formation makes it possible to grasp these elements as a historically determined type of society.

Productive Forces and Relations of Production

By productive forces we mean, in the most general sense, the totality of the material and subjective factors of the production process: on one side, human beings with their capacities, productive experience, skills, and general knowledge; on the other, the means of production, productive technology, and organisation. The productive forces exist in an inseparable connection with the prevailing relations of production, and together they constitute the historically determined mode of production.

Relations of production are the totality of material social relations that arise between individuals in society in the course of producing, exchanging, and distributing material wealth — relations that exist independently of human consciousness. The relations of production are determined by the level of development of the productive forces, and together with them constitute the mode of production.

Social Relations

Social relations are the totality of the reciprocal relations arising from human activity in material social production and in all spheres of life within a given socio-economic formation. They encompass socio-economic, socio-political and juridical relations, as well as the various ideological relations of human beings. Historical materialism distinguishes between the material social relations of human beings and their ideological social relations. Material social relations are those that exist independently of human consciousness; ideological relations are derived from them and constitute their reflection in consciousness.

The concept of the socio-economic formation was introduced by Marx and represents one of the greatest discoveries in the understanding of history and social science. As Lenin noted, this discovery made it possible to "generalise and systematise the facts" relating to conditions in different countries, and thereby enabled a transition "from the description and idealisation of social phenomena to their strict scientific analysis."

The analysis of various socio-economic formations demonstrates that material social relations are always primary, foundational, and determinant in relation to ideological relations. The economic base of society is the immediate foundation of the superstructure; but the mode of production constitutes the determining condition of society's material life. This analysis further shows that the transformation and development of the socio-economic formation is a lawful, objective, and historical process. The general concept of "society" is thereby concretised, through the concept of the socio-economic formation, into a specific type of society — one that emerges in accordance with general regularities wherever conditions permit, regardless of the particular historical characteristics it may display in different countries.

Base and Superstructure

The conceptual pair of base and superstructure must also be examined here. The original German term used by Marx and Engels is Basis und Überbau — rendered in English as "base and superstructure," and in French as “base et superstructure”. This pair of concepts expresses the lawful connections and mutual interactions between the economic relations of a socio-economic formation and all other relations within it.

The base of a socio-economic formation consists of the totality of economic relations determined by the level of development of the productive forces. The most important element of these economic relations is the relations of production; the relations of distribution are determined by the relations of production.

The superstructure of a socio-economic formation consists, on the one hand, of the state, legal, and educational institutions of society that rise upon and are determined by the base — together with the totality of ideas such as political, juridical, cultural, scientific, moral, and artistic conceptions and worldviews — and, on the other hand, of society's system of social consciousness as a whole.

Marx's celebrated formulation in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy bears repeating here: "In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life."

The base of society is not identical with the mode of production, since the mode of production comprehends the productive forces and the relations of production in their dialectical unity, and constitutes the economic foundation of social development. The base, by contrast, is the economic foundation of society's superstructure. While the concept of the base reflects the relationships among material social relations, the concept of the superstructure expresses the relationships among the ideological social relations of a socio-economic formation — relations determined by those material relations. Both types of social relation are simultaneously the result and the precondition of human activity. The distinguishability of material and ideological relations within a society becomes possible only through the consistent application of materialism to the study of society — an application that makes it possible to grasp the causal connections within the diversity of social phenomena.

The Two-Sided Function of the Superstructure

In a class society characterised by irreconcilable antagonisms, the superstructure operates in a two-sided manner. It can be used, on the one hand, to preserve the existing base, and on the other, to bring about conditions conducive to the construction of a new base. Which of these functions it serves depends on which class controls it.

More precisely: the dominant and decisive elements of the superstructure serve to guarantee, by every available means, the preservation of the existing social order — above all its economic base. These dominant elements are above all the coercive forces at the disposal of the ruling class: the state, the law, ruling political parties, and the various mechanisms through which consent is enforced. The views and organisations of the oppressed classes, by contrast, are oriented towards overthrowing the existing economic base and replacing it with a new one, while simultaneously working to counteract the institutions of the superstructure.

The conclusion that follows is clear: the superstructure exercises an active influence on the course of social development. Engels expressed this as follows: "The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, such as constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and especially the reflections of all these real struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious ideas and their further development into systems of dogma — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form."

Social Revolution

The recognition that the entire history of humanity is nothing other than the process of the lawful emergence, development, and supersession of one socio-economic formation by a higher one represented a revolution in the understanding of history and of social consciousness. For the first time, it became possible to comprehend society materialistically, as a process governed by objective laws; to apply the principle of knowable regularity to social development; and to understand and demonstrate social phenomena in their inner connections.

How does one socio-economic formation give way to another? The replacement of an obsolete socio-economic formation by a new one is what we call a social revolution. Revolution manifests itself in the transfer of political power from a reactionary to a progressive class. In class societies marked by irreconcilable antagonisms, social revolutions arise from the inevitable conflict between developing productive forces and the relations of production that have become a fetter upon them. This conflict constitutes the social terrain of the class struggle between the reactionary classes — who defend the obsolete relations of production and the social and political order arising from them, above all through the use of state power — and the ascending progressive classes. This struggle reaches its culmination in social revolution.

What is decisive in social revolution is the overthrow of the power of the reactionary class and the establishment of the power of the progressive class. The obsolete relations of production are abolished, and along with the economic base, the entire superstructure is gradually transformed. The result is a new and higher socio-economic formation. For this reason Marx declared: "Revolutions are the locomotives of history." But for this locomotive to move, the broad masses of the people must participate in the revolution. What draws them in is the capacity of the rising new ruling class to represent progressive ideas against the reactionary ruling class of the old society, and to present its own interests as the interests of society as a whole.

Ideology

At this point we must return to the concept of ideology. Ideology is a system of socio-political, philosophical, religious, artistic, juridical, moral, and other ideas that is conditioned by the material relations of society, gives expression to the interests of specific classes, and is oriented towards influencing human thought, feeling, and action — creating views and value judgements, and establishing norms of behaviour, in accordance with those interests. From this it follows that ideology has a class character. The form and content of a class's ideology are conditioned by that class's position within a historically determined society — and in particular by the relationship between that class and the ownership of the means of production. Ideologies thus reflect objective social relations within the limits set by the politics of a given class. The ideologies of the ruling classes contain distorting and illusory elements, as well as the endeavour to justify existing social relations.

The Reflection of Social Relations in the Heavens

Since religion is one of the forms of social consciousness, it reflects these relations. With this observation, we return to the question with which we began: what is religion?

In the course of historical development, and in pre-capitalist social formations, the ideologies of the ruling classes found expression in religious forms. For this reason, the passing of one socio-economic formation and its replacement by a new and more advanced one was accompanied by corresponding changes in religious thought. The transformations of society were projected into the heavens. In Engels's formulation, religion is "nothing but the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life, a reflection in which the terrestrial forces assume the form of supernatural forces." The phrase "external forces which control their daily life" carries, in its social context, the meaning of material social relations. While fetishism, magic, totemism, and animism were the typical religious forms of primitive communities and tribal societies, polytheism and ethnic religions emerged with the transition to class societies. The emergence of world religions, by contrast, is bound up with the rise of feudalism. In class societies, religion as a rule takes on the character of a special ideology — comprising a series of socio-political, socio-economic, moral, ethical, aesthetic, juridical, and other ideas and theories, articulated within a theological framework together with a formulated system of dogmas. Religion has also frequently been used as a banner by socio-political opposition movements.

The Sociology of Religion

The typical religious forms of primitive and tribal societies — fetishism, magic, totemism, and animism — gave way, with the transition to class societies, to polytheism and ethnic religions. The emergence of world religions is bound up with the rise of feudalism. Here we approach the subject from the standpoint of Marxist sociology of religion.

Marxist sociology of religion, in contrast to its bourgeois counterpart, is a branch of atheism — or more precisely, a new stage in the development of atheist thought: scientific atheism. Marxist atheism transcends the class limitations of feudal and bourgeois atheism, applying materialist philosophy consistently to the history of religions and explaining them within their historical development.

The study of religions as socially determined phenomena constitutes the subject matter of Marxist sociology of religion. It examines the emergence, development, functioning, and decline of religions; the nature of their constituent elements and structures; and the role they play in the life of societies. The basic principles of Marxist sociology of religion were formulated in the works of Marx and Engels, and subsequently by Lenin. The founders of Marxism rejected the idealist and theological view that religion is a phenomenon existing outside and above society, with an autonomous essence of its own, and drew attention instead to the fact that the roots of religion lie in the world itself.

Bourgeois sociology of religion emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although some of its principles were laid down by Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim are generally regarded as its founders. Two currents can be distinguished within bourgeois sociology of religion — secular and confessional — both of which rest on various forms of philosophical idealism (Neo-Kantianism, positivism, pragmatism, phenomenology, and so forth).

World Religions and Other Religions

Unlike bourgeois sociology of religion, the Marxist approach does not classify religions primarily according to whether they are monotheistic or polytheistic, or according to whether they claim divine revelation. Instead, it distinguishes between world religions and all others. This does not mean rejecting the view that the development from polytheism to monotheism represents a genuine evolution involving qualitative leaps. It does mean, however, taking account of the following: while some monotheistic religions have become world religions, Judaism, for example, has remained an ethnic religion. Buddhism, on the other hand, which differs in certain respects from classical monotheism, has become a world religion.

The distinguishing feature of the world religions is that they emerged at great historical turning points — at the transition from one socio-economic formation to another. They took shape as world empires were evolving; as Engels put it in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, when "the need arose to complement the world empire with a world religion." We use the word "took shape" deliberately, rather than "were born," because the world religions did not remain as they were at their origins. They emerged at the threshold of the transition from tribal society to the state — before this transition was fully complete — and underwent significant changes in the course of it, being adapted as required to meet new needs. This is true of all three world religions. None of them came to power during the lifetime of their founders.

The world religions are characterised by missionary activity, which takes various forms. They are supranational in scope, since empires are, by definition, multinational. Three religions answer to this description: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Judaism, despite being the origin of the latter two, did not acquire this character — for reasons that are themselves historically determined.

The religions outside these three emerged as characteristic of pre-feudal types of society and, in the course of their evolution, did not assume the function of ideologies of the ruling classes of feudal empires.

Pre-Feudal Society

Since the world religions correspond to the establishment of feudal empires, an examination of their formation requires a look at the pre-feudal types of society, the socio-economic formations on which they rested, and the transition from these to the feudal socio-economic formation.

In human history, the socio-economic formation preceding feudalism is primitive society — the formation that arose with the development of human communities and their separation from the animal world, and that constitutes the first stage of every people's history. The relations of production in this classless society were characterised by communal ownership of the means of production, conditioned by the low level of productive forces and the underdeveloped social division of labour. Over time, alongside communal ownership, personal ownership of weapons and certain tools of use emerged. The proceeds of collective labour — gathering, hunting, fishing, cultivation, animal husbandry — were distributed equally. Because the level of production was low, human beings were to a very great degree dependent on nature, and this dependence found expression in childlike religious representations.

Alongside the sexual division of labour, the development of productive forces over a long period gave rise to the first, second, and third social divisions of labour: first, the separation of animal husbandry from agriculture; then the emergence of handicrafts; and subsequently, conditioned by the exchange this gave rise to, the formation of trade. The rising productivity of labour, the three stages of the social division of labour, and the progressive differentiation of production made it possible to produce more than was needed to satisfy immediate daily needs — that is, a surplus product began to be generated. The result was the emergence of private ownership of the means of production, which led to economic inequality, the division of society into irreconcilable classes, and the dissolution of primitive society.

From Primitive Society to Feudal Society

In classical Marxist literature, the transition from primitive to feudal society was typically presented as passing through a slave-owning stage. Contemporary scholarship, however, tends towards the view that the forms of dependency arising from the dissolution of primitive society can be subsumed under a broader category. On this view, the dissolution of primitive society gave rise to a socio-economic formation in which the surplus product was appropriated by the dominant class through extra-economic means. The characteristic feature of social relations in this transitional stage was either slavery — as in the classical Marxist account, specific to Greece, Rome, and parts of India and pre-Columbian America — or proto-feudal relations of dependency. Slave-owning production was thus a specifically Mediterranean and regionally limited form of transition from primitive society to feudalism, rather than a universal stage of development. Elsewhere, human societies generally passed directly from the dissolution of primitive society to feudal social order. The final stages of tribal society constituted a phase in which classes were taking shape and the state was beginning to form. It should be remembered that these stages did not unfold simultaneously in all societies.

State and Religion

In the capitalist mode of production, surplus product takes the form of surplus value, and the ruling class appropriates it through the workings of the economy itself, without recourse to external coercion. In pre-capitalist modes of production, however, this appropriation is not a natural outcome of the economic process. The feudal state creates the mechanisms through which the surplus product is appropriated by extra-economic means. The state is the concrete embodiment of this mechanism.

Since no mechanism can function on the basis of coercion alone, the ruling class must also generate consent among the labouring population. This consent requires justifications and formulations that legitimate the appropriation of the surplus product. It is religious ideology that meets this need.

The dissolution of tribal societies passes through a stage characterised by the intensification of dominance-dependency relations generated by inter-tribal exchange and warfare, and by the formation of tribal confederations. These confederations are the last stage before the emergence of the state — the advanced embryonic form of the state. The leap to the state follows. The state is the product of a specific stage in the development of society — not something imposed upon it from outside, but the product of its internal contradictions. As Engels noted: "The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises when, where, and to the extent that the class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable."

Engels also articulated the relationship between the state and ideology as follows: "Once the state has become an independent power in relation to society, it produces a further ideology … The state presents itself to us as the first ideological power over mankind … The ideologies which are still higher, that is, which are further removed from the material, economic base, take the form of philosophy and religion."

Since the state is the state of a particular class, the ideology it generates is likewise that of the ruling class.

The Leap to the State and Religion

At the threshold of the leap to the state, world religions begin to enter the life of societies that are still at the tribal stage. Such a society either adapts its own tribal religion to meet the needs of the new situation, or comes into contact with existing religions — those of societies that completed this transition earlier and made the corresponding adaptations. Which of these occurs depends on specific historical circumstances, geographical proximity, and related factors. These contacts can take various forms, but they rarely take place peacefully; violent forms almost always accompany or predominate over peaceful ones such as missionary activity.

A new religion influences the society it encounters in one of two ways. Either the ruling classes adopt the new religion first and seek to impose it on the rest of society; or the popular classes begin to enter the new religion. In the first case, the people may express their opposition to the pressure of the ruling class by adopting heterodox currents within the new religion. In the second case, the ruling classes make the necessary adaptations and accept the new religion — which then loses its oppositional character and becomes the state religion. Even in this institutionalised form, the religion continues to play the same role as in the first case. Popular opposition again finds expression in heterodox currents.

Christianity

Of the world religions that became the religions of feudal empires, Christianity and Islam are monotheistic. Engels pointed to the social conditions that gave rise to monotheistic religions in the following terms: "Without a single king there could be no single God … The idea of a single God who controls various natural phenomena and holds together the conflicting forces of Nature is nothing but the reflection of the oriental despot, who, apparently, holds together conflicting individuals and classes."

On Christianity, again from Engels: "But a world religion cannot be created by imperial decrees. The new universal religion, Christianity, was already quietly developing, from the combination of generalised Oriental, particularly Jewish, theology and vulgarised Greek, particularly Stoic, philosophy. … What Christianity originally looked like must first be laboriously discovered, since its official form, as it has come down to us, is merely that in which it was adopted as the state religion to suit the purposes of that state as modified by the Council of Nicaea. The mere fact that it became the state religion 250 years after its origin suffices to prove that it was the religion best corresponding to the conditions of that time. In the Middle Ages, in the same proportion as feudalism developed, Christianity grew into the religious counterpart of it, with a corresponding feudal hierarchy. And when the bourgeoisie arose, there developed, in opposition to feudal Catholicism, first in the south of France, among the Albigenses … Protestantism. … The Middle Ages had attached to theology all the other forms of ideology — philosophy, politics, jurisprudence — and made them subdivisions of theology." A Christian system of religious law had thus taken shape. The notion that Christianity had no such legal-religious code is mistaken. Its dissolution was only made possible by the establishment of bourgeois dominance and the success of the Enlightenment.

Islam

Like the other world religions, Islam did not remain as it was at its origin — it evolved in response to changes in the social life of human beings. This development found expression in the Sunnah, based on the Hadith — the corpus of accounts of the Prophet Muhammad's actions and sayings — and thus in traditional Islamic law. The development of the Sharia proceeded in parallel with these social needs.

It is a widespread but mistaken belief that Islam, unlike the other world religions, came to power during the lifetime of its founder. It is true that the Prophet Muhammad succeeded in establishing his authority over Medina and Mecca during his lifetime. But this authority cannot be described as a "state" in the full sense. It was a transitional stage in the passage from tribal society to the state — an embryonic form of the state. Even under the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar, the classical institutions of the state had not yet fully matured. A certain level of institutional maturity was reached only under Uthman, and continued to develop under the Umayyads. Islam's definitive form as an imperial religion was achieved under the Abbasids, who adopted and adapted the traditions of the Sassanid Empire. Just as Christianity was unable to remain in its original form and was declared the state religion by Constantine once it had been adapted to serve imperial needs, Islam underwent the same transformation. In this respect there is no essential difference between the two.

Buddhism

Of the three world religions, Buddhism is not monotheistic, though it contains the idea of a "supreme divinity." Buddhism first emerged in the first millennium BCE, but its formation was closely connected with major changes in Indian society — the dissolution of tribal relations and traditions, and the emergence of large-scale states. Under these conditions, the old tribal religions were no longer adequate to meet the needs of the new social relations. Brahmanism, which had arisen with the emergence of slave-owning societies, began to be interpreted in a wide variety of ways. The different interpretations — all of them preaching a form of religious salvation — were largely synthesised by the third century CE to form Buddhism. This synthesis finds its expression in the belief, shared by followers of Buddhism, that the religion was founded as the result of the teachings of a single individual (the Buddha Shakyamuni) — who thus assumed, in a certain sense, the function of a prophet.

Buddhist teachings provided a convenient ideological foundation for the ruling classes. All the evils of the world, including exploitation, are the consequence of the individual's own errors — committed in previous lives. The individual's present condition is the karma they have prepared for themselves through the actions of a prior existence. Rather than struggling against these evils, one must be gentle and patient; thus one will mature, and ultimately attain unity with the Divine Being without being reborn into this world. Buddhism spread considerably in India under the Kushan dynasty, but gradually lost influence and was displaced by Hinduism, disappearing from India almost entirely after the twelfth century. Beyond India's borders, however, it continued to spread — primarily in its Mahayana form. In China it took shape in the fifth century as Chan (Zen) Buddhism; in Tibet it developed into Lamaism between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Hinduism

Hinduism emerged under more specific conditions. When Buddhism spread in India, it did not encompass the entire population of the subcontinent. In India's highly diverse ethnic landscape, Buddhism was adopted only by those groups that had reached the corresponding stage of social development; a large population continued to practise tribal beliefs and Brahmanism. When Muslim armies began their campaigns of conquest into India in the eighth century, they referred to the people beyond the Indus as "Hindus" — a term that came to be used for all those who did not convert to Islam. Hinduism recognises a universal creator (Brahma), together with two further deities — Vishnu and Shiva. This trinity bears some resemblance to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The Hindu pantheon includes further deities, among them the Buddha, regarded as the tenth avatar of Vishnu. A distinctive feature of Hinduism is that it subordinates worship to a series of ritual practices: if the individual performs these rituals correctly (that is, if the Dharma is fully observed), they will be liberated from the cycle of rebirth and attain Moksha. As is evident, Hinduism too arose with the emergence of class societies and evolved in accordance with the socio-economic formation to which it corresponded. It is not classified as a world religion because it was not carried beyond India as the religion of a feudal empire; the feudal empires established in India adopted other religions. Hinduism has remained largely confined to the Indian subcontinent.

Conclusion: Religion as a Mirror of Social Being

We began with a question: what is religion? Having traced the emergence and transformation of religious forms across the successive stages of human social development, we are now in a position to answer it with some precision.

Religion is not a self-subsisting phenomenon standing above or outside of society. It is not the expression of an autonomous spiritual impulse, nor the manifestation of a timeless encounter between the human and the divine. It is a form of social consciousness — and like all forms of social consciousness, it is rooted in the material conditions of social being, shaped by the relations of production, and stamped by the class character of the society that produces it.

This is what the historical record consistently shows. In primitive society, where human beings stood largely helpless before the forces of nature, religion took the form of animism, fetishism, and totemism — a fantastic reflection of real natural powers that could not yet be understood or controlled. With the dissolution of primitive society and the emergence of classes, the gods multiplied and differentiated, mirroring the differentiation of society itself. With the rise of great empires, monotheism emerged — not as a spiritual discovery, but as the ideological counterpart of concentrated political power. And as each new socio-economic formation replaced the last, religion was not simply discarded; it was adapted, reformed, and refashioned to serve the needs of the new ruling class.

The world religions — Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam — are the most striking illustration of this process. Each arose at a great historical turning point. Each was remade in the course of that transition. Each provided the ideological cement for a feudal imperial order, justifying the appropriation of the surplus product by extra-economic means and generating the consent that coercion alone could never secure. And in each case, the heterodox and heretical currents that broke from the official religion were the religious expression of class antagonisms that could find no other outlet.

None of this diminishes the sincerity of the countless human beings who have lived and died within these traditions, or the genuine comfort, solidarity, and meaning that religious community has provided to the oppressed as much as to the privileged. But Marxist analysis does not ask whether religion is sincerely held. It asks what social function it performs, and in whose interest. The answer, across the historical record, is consistent: religion reflects the social relations of its time, and in class society it reflects above all the interests of the dominant class — while simultaneously providing, in its heterodox and popular forms, a language of resistance for those it oppresses.

Engels's formulation remains the most concise: religion is "the fantastic reflection in men's minds of those external forces which control their daily life." As long as human beings face social forces they cannot master — forces that appear to them as natural, inevitable, or divinely ordained — the conditions for religious consciousness persist. The transformation of those conditions is not a matter of argument or enlightenment alone. It is a matter of transforming the material relations that give rise to them.

We began, then, with a question about religion. We end with a recognition that the question of religion is inseparable from the question of society — of how human beings produce their lives, how they relate to one another in that production, and how they come to understand, or misunderstand, the world they have made.【●】

References

Manfred Buhr and Alfred Kosing, Kleines Wörterbuch der marxistisch-leninistischen Philosophie, Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 1974.

A Dictionary of Believers and Nonbelievers, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1989.

Sergei Tokarev, A History of Religion, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1989.

Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969.

Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976.

Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1978.

Every great work of art leaves behind a set of questions. For Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote, written at the dawn of the seventeenth century, the oldest and most fundamental of these is deceptively simple: how original is it? Did Cervantes conjure his masterpiece — this devastating parody of chivalric romance, this labyrinthine carnival of illusion and disillusionment — from nothing? Or does it carry, in its bones, the deep imprint of traditions that preceded it, traditions that did not originate in Spain, or in Europe at all?

The question matters beyond biography or literary attribution. How we answer it determines how we understand not only Cervantes's genius but the novel as a form: where it came from, what historical forces brought it into being, why it flourished where and when it did, and why, in the places where it once burned most brightly, it now flickers. To follow this question honestly is to embark on a journey that crosses centuries and continents — from the storytelling traditions of the medieval Islamic world to the drawing rooms of nineteenth-century Europe, from the crisis-ridden pages of Western postmodernism to the living literatures of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, where something resembling the novel's original energy has reappeared, or perhaps never left.

The argument of this essay proceeds from a specific historical and aesthetic standpoint: that of socialist realism, understood not as a bureaucratic formula but as a living critical method — the conviction that literature's highest obligation is to represent the full complexity of human experience in its social and historical totality, to take sides in the struggles of its time, and to do so with the formal rigour and psychological depth that great art demands. From this standpoint, the history of the novel is not a story of linear progress emanating from a single civilisational source, nor is it a story of inevitable decline into fragmentation and exhaustion. It is, rather, a story of what the Marxist tradition calls uneven development — the law by which transformation arises not from the most advanced and entrenched centres of power, but from the margins, where old structures have not yet hardened into obstacles and new syntheses remain possible — and of the struggle, in every generation, between the novel's capacity to illuminate the social world and the forces that seek to reduce it to a commodity.

Think of it in geological terms: the centre of a continental plate is massive, stable, and static. Nothing interesting happens there. The earthquakes, the volcanoes, the creation of new mountain ranges — all of this happens at the edges, where two different plates grind against each other under enormous pressure. So too with culture. At the centre of a society, fixed orthodoxies harden into academies, royal courts, publishing conglomerates — institutions deeply invested in the status quo, expertly positioned to determine what counts as literature and what does not. Transformation arises in the borderlands, where different cultural plates collide, where old social structures crack, and where no new orthodoxy has yet hardened to take their place.

Cervantes himself was a man of such borderlands: a soldier, a captive, a tax collector, a failed playwright, writing in a Spain already beginning its long imperial decline. The form he invented drew on sources his contemporaries would have considered peripheral, even suspect. And the novel he set in motion has obeyed, across four centuries, precisely the logic by which it was born: flourishing at the edge, ossifying at the centre, and finding its vitality again, as it always has, somewhere unexpected.

Cide Hamete Benengeli: More Than a Literary Game

Midway through the first part of Don Quixote, Cervantes performs an act of literary sleight of hand so audacious that readers have been debating its meaning ever since. He interrupts his own narrative to announce that the manuscript before us is not, in fact, his own composition. He claims to have discovered, in the marketplace of Toledo, a bundle of Arabic papers written by one Cide Hamete Benengeli — a name that combines the Arabic honorific Sidi (Lord or Master) with a surname suggesting, variously, aubergine, or son of the stag, depending on which etymological path one follows. These papers, Cervantes tells us, contain the true history of Don Quixote, which he has had translated into Castilian by a Morisco for a modest fee. He, Cervantes, is merely the editor, the intermediary, the man who happened upon the truth by accident in a Toledo bazaar.

The temptation is to read this as pure comedy — a sophisticated joke at the expense of the chivalric romances Cervantes was satirising, which routinely claimed spurious ancient sources to lend themselves an air of authority. And comedy it certainly is. But to stop there is to miss the deeper logic of the device.

Consider the cultural geography of the gesture. Cervantes did not invent a French chronicler or an Italian historian or a classical Latin source. He invented an Arab one. The chivalric romances he was parodying always claimed their stories were translated from ancient Greek or Latin — gestures toward classical authority. Cervantes makes the opposite substitution, and in the intellectual landscape of seventeenth-century Spain, that substitution carried enormous subversive weight. The Iberian Peninsula had spent seven centuries in intimate, violent, and profoundly productive contact with Islamic civilisation. The libraries of Córdoba had once held hundreds of thousands of manuscripts at a time when Christian monasteries in the north held perhaps a few dozen; they had been the intellectual centre of the world. Arab scholars had preserved, translated, and extended the Greek philosophical and scientific inheritance at a moment when much of Christian Europe had lost access to it. Toledo itself — the city where Cervantes claims to have found the manuscript — had been, in the twelfth century, the greatest translation centre in the Western world, where Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars actively collaborated to render Arabic texts into Latin, texts that then flowed outward to ignite the Renaissance across Europe.

By placing his foundational manuscript in the hands of an Arab historian discovered in Toledo, Cervantes was not merely making a joke. He was forcing his readers to look at a massive cultural debt — one that the official imperial Catholic culture of the Spanish Inquisition could not tolerate acknowledging, but that fiction, operating under the cover of comedy, could illuminate with oblique honesty.

That debt was real, and it was personal. Between 1575 and 1580, Cervantes was held captive in Algiers, having been captured by Ottoman corsairs on his return from the Battle of Lepanto. Five years of captivity in a city that was simultaneously a centre of Ottoman power, a hub of Mediterranean trade, and a meeting point of Arab, Berber, Turkish, Jewish, and European cultures gave him an education that no Spanish university could have provided. Algiers was a cosmopolitan cauldron: a society of extraordinary complexity in which identities were fluid, in which a literal lingua franca — a mixed pidgin — had evolved so that people of entirely different realities could communicate, negotiate, survive. In that environment, storytelling was not a drawing-room luxury. It was currency. It was how one navigated, bargained, and endured. When Cervantes returned to Spain and eventually turned to prose fiction, he carried that world inside him — not as exotic ornament, but as structural possibility.

Cide Hamete Benengeli is, therefore, more than a literary game. He is the ghost in the machine — the visible trace of an Eastern narrative tradition that Cervantes could not claim openly but could not write without. He is the trace of an inheritance that the novel, in its very first great flowering, was already concealing even as it depended upon it.

Cervantes's Sack: The Eastern Frame Meets the Western Picaresque

To understand what Cervantes actually built, it helps to understand what he had to work with — and what he found insufficient.

The dominant prose fiction tradition available to him in sixteenth-century Spain was the picaresque: a form that had emerged, with considerable vitality, from the social dislocations of a Spain in which old hierarchies were crumbling and new ones had not yet solidified. The picaresque novel — exemplified by the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554) and Mateo Alemán's Guzmán de Alfarache (1599) — followed a low-born protagonist, the pícaro, through a series of episodic adventures in which he served various masters, survived by his wits, and offered, through his wanderings, a satirical panorama of Spanish society. It was a form of considerable energy and social acuity. But it had a structural problem: it was, by its very nature, additive rather than integrated. The rogue goes to a tavern, gets into a brawl — toss it in the sack. He meets a corrupt priest who starves him — toss it in. He is swindled by a blind man — toss it in. One episode followed another; characters appeared and disappeared; the narrative accumulated rather than cohered. The picaresque novel was, structurally speaking, a bag with no bottom — capable of receiving any amount of material but incapable of giving that material shape, meaning, or resolution.

Cervantes inherited this tradition and found it insufficient. What he needed — and what he found, through the cultural channels that his Algerian captivity had opened — was a principle of integration: a way of holding disparate materials together within a unified narrative architecture without suppressing their diversity or forcing them into artificial resolution. That principle came from the East.

The great narrative traditions of the medieval Islamic world were built around the concept of the frame story — a structural device of extraordinary sophistication and flexibility. In One Thousand and One Nights, the frame is Sheherazade's survival: the king has sworn to execute a new bride every morning, so she tells a story and leaves it on a cliffhanger as the sun rises, and he spares her to hear the ending the following night. The stakes of this frame — a woman narrating against death — charge every individual tale with urgency. Stories about genies, merchants, and sailors are not random items tossed into a bottomless bag; they are acts of survival, and the meaning of each is inflected by its position within the whole. In Kalila wa Dimna — the Arabic adaptation of the Sanskrit Panchatantra, one of the oldest story collections in human history — animal fables are embedded within a philosophical dialogue between a king and his counsellor, recontextualising them as deep political advice and critique of power. In the Persian Tuti-Nameh, or Book of the Parrot, a parrot tells stories night after night to prevent a woman from committing adultery while her husband is away — the frame generating both the stories and the tension that gives them urgency. In each case, the frame is not merely a container. It is a meaning-producing structure: it establishes relationships between stories, creates ironic or thematic resonances across narratives, and gives the whole an architecture that the individual parts could not achieve alone.

Cervantes took this principle and applied it to the picaresque tradition he had inherited. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza's journey through the plains of La Mancha becomes precisely such a frame: a structure capacious enough to contain interpolated novellas — most famously "The Tale of Foolish Curiosity," a complete short novel embedded within the larger narrative, which echoes its core themes about the destructive desire to know the absolute truth — the life stories of characters encountered along the road, debates about the nature of fiction and history, and even, in the second part of the novel, characters who have read the first part and whose behaviour is shaped by that knowledge. Don Quixote and Sancho actually meet people who debate the accuracy of Cide Hamete Benengeli's account with the historical figures standing right in front of them — a metafictional loop that predates the term by three centuries. The journey is what holds it all together, as Scheherazade's survival holds together the Thousand and One Nights. But unlike the picaresque journey, which simply accumulates, the Cervantine journey integrates: every digression reflects back on the central story, every interpolated tale illuminates something about the nature of illusion, reality, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.

This is what we might call Cervantes's sack: not a bag without a bottom, but a structure — inherited from the East, adapted to the West, and deployed in the service of something new — that could hold the full complexity of human experience without either spilling it or compressing it into false unity. He closed the bottom of the picaresque bag. He stitched a container, engineered from Eastern schematics, capable of holding the chaotic totality of human experience without forcing it into a simplistic moral lesson. It was, and remains, the foundational achievement of the novel as a form. And it was achieved, characteristically, not at the centre of literary power — not in the great humanist academies of Italy or the royal courts of France — but at the margins: by a man who had spent five years as a captive in North Africa, who wrote in a Spain already in decline, and who drew on traditions that his own culture officially regarded with suspicion.

This is the first appearance, in the history of the novel, of what the Marxist tradition identifies as the law of uneven development: the principle that genuine transformation tends to arise not from the most entrenched and defended centres, but from the zones where different traditions meet under pressure, where the absence of a fixed orthodoxy makes synthesis possible, and where necessity drives invention. Cervantes did not invent the novel because Spain was the most advanced literary culture of his time. He invented it, in part, because he was a man of the margins operating at the intersection of worlds.

The Golden Age and Its Limits: The Bourgeois Novel in Ascent and Decline

The form that Cervantes invented did not immediately find its fullest expression. Don Quixote was a beginning — extraordinary, irreducible, and in certain respects so advanced that the literary culture of its time could not fully absorb it. The novel as a sustained, socially comprehensive, psychologically deep form of art had to wait for the historical conditions that would make it necessary: the rise of the bourgeoisie as a confident, expansive, and — in its ascending phase — genuinely progressive social class.

Those conditions emerged, unevenly and at different speeds, across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. What they produced was the golden age of the bourgeois novel — a period in which prose fiction became, for the first time in history, the dominant literary form of an entire civilisation. But it is essential, from the outset, to understand the precise historical limits of this achievement. The bourgeoisie that made the English, French, and American revolutions, that dismantled feudal hierarchy and proclaimed the rights of the individual, was a progressive force only in its ascending phase — only so long as its own interests coincided, however partially and imperfectly, with the broader interests of humanity. That coincidence was always temporary, always contradictory, and always destined to dissolve as the class consolidated its power and revealed the true nature of the social order it was building.

The great realist novel was, in this sense, the self-portrait of a class at the height of its powers — and the unwitting document of its historical limitations. It needed an art form that could map what Marxist theory calls the social totality: the connections between the deepest private thoughts of a single individual and the massive economic and social forces shaping the world. It needed a form that could move seamlessly from the bedroom to the stock exchange, from the provincial farm to the capital city. The novel, as Cervantes had constructed it, turned out to be the perfect instrument — capacious enough, integrated enough, flexible enough to hold the full complexity of bourgeois social experience and give it shape.

Balzac's Human Comedy proceeds from the conviction that society is a totality that can be comprehended and mapped with the rigour of a naturalist classifying species — cataloguing every social type and showing exactly how they interact in the ecosystem of capitalist Paris. Engels famously observed that he learned more about French society from Balzac than from all the professional historians and economists combined: the compliment cuts both ways, for Balzac's panorama reveals not only the energy of a rising class but its rapacity, its cynicism, and its systematic destruction of every human value it claimed to uphold. Stendhal maps the intense psychological cost of living in a society that demands conformity while promising freedom: Julien Sorel must constantly calculate his seductions and his loyalties, performing an identity he despises in order to climb a ladder he secretly scorns. Tolstoy holds the micro and the macro simultaneously without breaking — moving from the fleeting private thoughts of Natasha Rostova at her first ball to the panorama of Austerlitz, integrating the intimate and the world-historical with an effortlessness that conceals its immense formal difficulty. Dickens stuffs the entire city of London into his sack: the fog of the Chancery Court in Bleak House connects the highest aristocratic families to the poorest street sweeper, insisting that society is an inescapable web of mutual responsibility — and mutual exploitation.

What these writers share is a fundamental confidence in the novel's capacity to represent the social world as a knowable totality. But it is a confidence already shadowed, in the most honest of them, by the recognition of what that world actually is. Balzac's panorama is also an indictment. Tolstoy's empathy extends, scandalously for his class, to the serfs. Dickens's London is a city of systematic cruelty in the language of Christian charity. The bourgeois novel, at its best, was already in tension with the class that produced it — which is precisely why it achieved what it achieved. The energy of great realism came not from the bourgeoisie's confidence alone but from the friction between its proclaimed values and its actual practice.

The geographical concentration of this golden age is itself instructive. The great realist novel flourished overwhelmingly in France, England, and Russia — the three societies where the contradictions of capitalist modernity were most sharply developed. France, with its revolutionary legacy and restless class struggles. England, the first industrial society, already generating the urban poverty and social dislocation that factory capitalism produced. Russia, that vast semi-feudal empire where European modernity arrived in distorted and compressed form, producing the agonising friction between the educated Western-facing aristocracy and millions of enslaved serfs that Dostoevsky and Tolstoy turned into art. The novel flourished where contradiction was sharpest. This is the law of uneven development operating within the history of literary form — and it already points toward the limits of the achievement. A literature built on the energy of contradiction will fracture when those contradictions can no longer be contained within the form that expressed them.

The writers named here — Balzac, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Dickens — are representative figures of a tradition far larger than any list can contain, and to name them is not to forget the others. Flaubert, whose Bouvard and Pécuchet — that magnificent, unfinished monument to the bankruptcy of bourgeois positivism, in which two retired copy-clerks systematically attempt to master every branch of human knowledge and fail, with perfect comic consistency, at every one — stands as one of the most devastating satirical novels in any language, and whose Madame Bovary remains the most merciless dissection of the illusions that bourgeois society sells to those it simultaneously imprisons. Zola, whose Rougon-Macquart cycle mapped the biological and social determinisms of French capitalism with a comprehensiveness that Balzac himself might have envied. Turgenev and Goncharov in Russia, who between them captured the paralysis and the longing of a society that knew it needed to change and could not bring itself to do so. Thomas Hardy and Elizabeth Gaskell in England, who extended Dickens's social conscience into the rural world and the industrial north respectively, insisting that the novel's obligation to represent the full range of human experience admitted no exceptions of class or geography. Theodor Fontane in Germany, whose Effi Briest achieves in a single novel what lesser writers could not achieve in a dozen: the complete portrait of a society's cruelty dressed as propriety, its destruction of a human being conducted with perfect manners and absolute indifference.

In Italy, Giovanni Verga's verismo — that unflinching, unsentimental representation of Sicilian peasant and fishing communities in The House by the Medlar Tree and Mastro-don Gesualdo — produced a body of work that Gramsci himself recognised as a critical instrument for understanding the southern question, the structural poverty and exploitation that Italian unification had done nothing to resolve and much to deepen. Alberto Moravia, writing in the twentieth century under the shadow of fascism, extended this tradition into the bourgeois interior: his novels are clinical dissections of a class whose moral emptiness he rendered with a coldness that was itself a form of indictment.

These writers, and many others who cannot be named here without transforming an essay into a catalogue, constitute the full breadth of a golden age that no single essay can do justice to. What unites them — across national traditions, across the considerable differences of temperament and technique that separate a Flaubert from a Zola, a Turgenev from a Goncharov, a Hardy from a Gaskell — is the conviction that the social world is knowable, that the novel's obligation is to know it, and that knowing it honestly requires neither the falsification of optimism nor the falsification of despair, but only the disciplined, patient, and courageous act of looking.

The Tear Begins: Modernism as the Crisis of Bourgeois Consciousness

The confidence that sustained the great realist novel was not destined to last. The bourgeoisie that had made revolutions and written manifestos about human dignity and universal reason was, by the final decades of the nineteenth century, becoming something different. The expanding, competitive capitalism of the industrial revolution was consolidating into monopoly capital: vast corporations and financial conglomerates concentrating wealth in fewer hands, requiring colonial expansion to find new markets and raw materials. The class that had proclaimed the rights of man was now administering the scramble for Africa. The class that had celebrated individual reason was now organising the industrial slaughter of the First World War. The gap between the bourgeoisie's proclaimed values and its actual historical practice had become impossible to ignore — and the artists most sensitive to this gap were the first to register it in the forms of their work.

Modernism was the formal response to this crisis. But it was not a unified response, and the differences within it are as significant as the similarities. To treat Proust, Joyce, Woolf, and Kafka as a single movement is to obscure a distinction that matters enormously from the standpoint of socialist realism: the distinction between withdrawal and exposure, between the novel that turns inward because the social world has become unbearable and the novel that turns the unbearability of the social world into its very subject.

Proust retreated into the labyrinth of involuntary memory, producing work of extraordinary psychological refinement but severing the connection between the individual and any larger social or historical reality. Where Balzac's protagonist was trying to conquer Paris, Proust's narrator eats a madeleine dipped in tea and regresses into childhood. The active world-conquering will of the bourgeoisie is gone. The social world is still present — brilliantly, mercilessly observed — but the characters are paralysed, confined to their salons, obsessively analysing their own micro-interactions, contemplating their own aesthetic decline. The bourgeoisie, in Proust, has become a class engaged primarily in the contemplation of its own dissolution.

James Joyce shattered narrative voice into streams of unedited consciousness, creating in Leopold Bloom the most intricately realised interior in literary history — and the most socially isolated. Bloom walks through Dublin rubbing shoulders with hundreds of people, but he is trapped inside the labyrinth of his own mind. The connection between the individual and the social totality has been severed. Virginia Woolf dissolved the external world into the texture of consciousness itself, arguing that the realist novel's symmetrical progression from birth to death was a lie — which was true enough, as far as it went, but which replaced one simplification with another, substituting the luminous halo of private perception for the social world that private perception is embedded in and shaped by.

These were, from a socialist realist standpoint, responses of withdrawal: formally brilliant, historically revealing, but ultimately a confession of defeat — the bourgeois consciousness turning away from a social world it could no longer honestly represent, and calling that turning away a deeper truth.

Kafka is a different matter entirely — and the difference must be stated clearly.

Where Proust and Joyce retreated into consciousness, Kafka advanced into the machinery of the world. Where they dissolved the social totality into streams of private perception, he dissected it with the precision of a surgeon and the mercilessness of a satirist. The Trial, The Castle, In the Penal Colony — these are not documents of withdrawal. They are documents of exposure: the most systematic and unsparing anatomy of bureaucratic power, institutional irrationality, and the mechanisms by which modern systems crush the individual that the twentieth century produced.

And they are, to a degree that is consistently underestimated, profoundly funny. This is not incidental. It is the source of Kafka's particular power — and it is what connects him, across the apparent gulf of style and sensibility, to a much older tradition of critical realism.

The Castle is, from the correct angle, a masterpiece of satire in the fullest sense. K. arrives in a village and attempts to gain access to the Castle authorities. There are officials, and secretaries of officials, and secretaries of those secretaries, and assistants whose function nobody can quite determine. Files are lost, appointments are cancelled, corridors multiply, jurisdictions blur. Every bureaucrat speaks with perfect courtesy and complete unhelpfulness. Every procedure is followed with scrupulous exactitude and produces no result whatsoever. The comedy is precise and merciless: the system is not cruel in any personal sense — it is simply perfect, and its perfection is its cruelty. Any reader who has waited in a government office, navigated an insurance claim, or attempted to reach a human being through an automated telephone system will recognise the world Kafka is describing. He wrote it in 1922. It has not dated by a single day.

This is the lineage of Gogol — and Kafka knew it, acknowledged it, drew from it directly. Gogol's The Overcoat, The Government Inspector, Dead Souls: the same anatomy of bureaucratic absurdity, the same comedy of institutional power rendered in its full, self-serious, self-defeating glory. A minor official becomes obsessed with an overcoat. An entire town prostrates itself before a man they mistake for a government inspector. Dead serfs are bought and sold as assets. In Gogol, as in Kafka, the system is not described from outside as a target of political denunciation. It is rendered from inside, in its own logic, with such fidelity that the logic itself becomes the indictment. The laughter it produces is the laughter of recognition — and recognition, in this tradition, is always also horror.

Gogol stands at the origin of Russian critical realism — the tradition that runs through Saltykov-Shchedrin to Chekhov, that feeds into the socialist realist inheritance, that insists on the novel's capacity to hold the social world up to the light and let its contradictions speak for themselves. Kafka, writing in Prague in the early twentieth century, at the intersection of German, Czech, and Jewish cultural traditions, at the periphery of the Habsburg Empire in its final dissolution, is — from this angle — not a modernist at all in the sense that Proust and Joyce are modernists. He is a critical realist working in the tradition of Gogol, deploying the tools of satire and the logic of the absurd not to escape the social world but to illuminate it with a clarity that straightforward realism could not achieve.

The same current flows, in a different key, through Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe — that extraordinary novel in which a young officer arrives at a remote frontier fortress to await an enemy that never comes, and watches his entire life drain away in the performance of a duty whose purpose has long since ceased to exist. Where Kafka's comedy is sharp and architectural, Buzzati's is melancholic and lyrical — closer to Chekhov than to Gogol in its emotional register — but the diagnosis is the same: the system does not need to be cruel in any personal sense; it need only be perfectly, indifferently itself, and the human being inside it will be destroyed as thoroughly as if destruction had been the intention all along.

The great bourgeois intellectuals who read Kafka with the deepest pleasure — and they always read him with great pleasure, with the particular satisfaction of a mind encountering another mind working at full capacity — are recognising precisely this: the intellectual rigour, the formal precision, the comedy that is also diagnosis, the absurd that is also exact. To read The Castle carefully is to understand something about how power operates that no sociological treatise conveys with equal force.

The tear in the sack, in other words, was not uniform. Proust and Joyce unpicked it deliberately, transforming the tearing into an aesthetic programme. Kafka tore at it from the other side — not to display the tear but to show what was straining against the fabric from within. The difference is everything.

The tear had begun. It would widen. But it would not go unanswered.

The Other Modernism: Socialist Realism and the Sack That Held

While the great modernists of Western Europe were dismantling the novel's architecture, something fundamentally different was happening in the Soviet literary tradition. The sack that the Western bourgeois novel had begun to tear was not abandoned. It was seized, transformed, and filled with new historical material by writers who refused the modernist conclusion that the social totality had become unknowable — who insisted, on the contrary, that the social world was not only knowable but that the novel's highest obligation was precisely to know it, to represent it in its full complexity, and to do so from the standpoint of the class that was making history rather than the class that was losing it.

This was not, as Cold War cultural politics long insisted, merely a matter of state-mandated optimism or propagandistic simplification. The reduction of Soviet literature to its worst examples — the schematic, didactic, thesis-driven works that the bureaucratisation of socialist realism too often produced — has obscured a body of fiction of genuine and lasting power. To judge Soviet literature by its propaganda is as misleading as judging the European novel by its penny dreadfuls. The real measure lies elsewhere.

Maxim Gorky occupies the pivotal position. At precisely the moment when the Western novel was fracturing under the weight of historical crisis, Gorky was engaged in something that looks, in retrospect, like a deliberate counter-pressure: the construction of a socialist realist tradition adequate to the full complexity of Russian and Soviet experience. The Artamonov Business (1925) is, structurally, a Balzacian enterprise — three generations of a merchant family traced from the founding of a linen factory in the mid-nineteenth century through the collapse of the old order in 1917. The rise and decay of Russian capitalism, crystallised in a single family's fate. But where Balzac mapped the bourgeoisie at the height of its confidence, Gorky maps it from the perspective of its historical end. The sack is intact — the social totality is still comprehensible and representable — but the class that once filled it with energy is visibly exhausting itself across generations, its vitality draining into purposelessness and dissolution. Gorky took the Cervantine inheritance and turned it against the class that had perfected it.

The Life of Klim Samgin — four volumes, forty years of Russian history, left unfinished at Gorky's death in 1936 — pushes still further. Klim Samgin is an intellectual who perpetually deceives himself: a man whose consciousness is unreliable, contradictory, capable of elaborate self-justification, always slightly out of step with the historical forces moving around him. Gorky demonstrates here what the socialist realist tradition is rarely credited with: psychological depth as a political instrument. The novel holds together the panoramic sweep of Russian history from the 1870s to the Revolution and the granular, unstable interior of a single compromised consciousness — without sacrificing either to the other. The social totality remains knowable; it is Klim who cannot know it, and his inability is itself the subject, the political meaning of the work.

Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don is the apex of what socialist realism could achieve when operating at the highest level of its ambitions. Grigory Melekhov — a Don Cossack caught between the Whites and the Reds, between personal loyalty and historical necessity, between the woman he loves and the world that is destroying everything he knows — is followed across the entirety of the First World War, the Revolution, and the Civil War. What Sholokhov achieves is precisely what Tolstoy achieved in War and Peace: the simultaneous holding of the intimate and the world-historical, the private and the panoramic, without either dissolving into the other. Grigory's fate is not an allegory; it is a fate, specific and irreducible. And yet through it, the full catastrophe of a historical transformation — the annihilation of an entire way of life and the birth of another — is rendered with a completeness and an honesty that no schematic thesis novel could approach. The sack holds. It holds everything. Where Joyce's Leopold Bloom walked through Dublin trapped in the labyrinth of his own consciousness, Sholokhov's Grigory Melekhov walks through history — and history walks through him.

Ilya Ehrenburg represents a different but complementary dimension of this tradition: the novel as direct engagement with contemporary history, written from inside the event. The Fall of Paris (1941), The Storm, The Ninth Wave — these novels were composed in the midst of the catastrophe they describe: the fall of European democracy to fascism, the resistance of ordinary people across occupied Europe, the grinding human cost of the Second World War. What distinguishes Ehrenburg from a mere war correspondent in fictional form is his insistence on the social totality even in extremis: his novels move across classes, nationalities, and ideological positions with a comprehensiveness that the paralysed, interior-facing Western modernism of the same period could not have managed. While Woolf's characters contemplated the texture of consciousness in their drawing rooms, Ehrenburg's were dying in the streets of Paris and Stalingrad — and he was there to record it, with the full weight of the Cervantine sack behind him, with the capacity and the willingness to take sides.

The most unexpected flowering of this tradition came not from the metropolitan centres of Soviet literary culture but from its margins — from Central Asia, from the Kirghiz steppe, in the work of Chingiz Aitmatov. Aitmatov's position is structurally analogous to Cervantes's own: a writer at the intersection of multiple traditions — the ancient Kirghiz oral epic tradition, with its deep roots in steppe culture and pre-Islamic cosmology; the Soviet literary inheritance; and the universal humanist concerns of the novel as a form — operating at the geographic and cultural periphery of a great civilisation, under the pressure of rapid historical transformation, with access to materials that no writer at the metropolitan centre could have brought together. Jamila (1958), which Louis Aragon called the most beautiful love story in world literature, holds personal desire and collective loyalty in tension without resolving either into the other. The White Steamship and The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years reach further: into myth, into the deep structures of Kirghiz cultural memory, into the relationship between the human and the natural world — and from those depths bring back something that neither the Soviet metropolitan tradition nor the Western novel could have produced alone. Aitmatov stitched a new sack from Kirghiz materials and Cervantine architecture, and what he put inside it was the experience of a people at the collision point of ancient culture and modern history — which is to say, the experience of the twentieth century seen from the only angle from which it could be fully seen.

These four writers — Gorky, Sholokhov, Ehrenburg, Aitmatov — do not exhaust the socialist realist tradition, but they define its highest possibilities: the refusal to abandon the social totality, the insistence on psychological depth as political seriousness, the capacity to hold the intimate and the historical within the same structure, and the willingness to write from a standpoint — to take sides in the struggles of their time without reducing those struggles to illustration. They kept the sack intact. They kept it functional. And they did so at precisely the historical moment when the Western bourgeois tradition was displaying its torn fabric as though the tearing were an achievement.

The Dissenting Tradition: Progressive and Anti-Fascist Literature in the West

The modernist withdrawal was not the only response available to Western writers facing the crisis of the early twentieth century. Alongside the literature of fragmented consciousness and formal dissolution, another tradition persisted and deepened — a tradition that refused the conclusion that the social world had become unrepresentable, that history had become unknowable, that the novel's obligation to take sides had become naïve. This was the tradition of the progressive, antifascist, and socialist writers of the West: a current that ran, against the dominant tide of bourgeois modernism, from the trenches of the First World War through the rise of fascism, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and into the long cultural cold war of the postwar decades. It is a tradition that the official canons of Western literature have systematically marginalised — not because it lacks literary achievement, but because its literary achievement is inseparable from a political commitment that those canons cannot accommodate.

What distinguishes these writers from their modernist contemporaries is not a matter of formal sophistication or psychological depth — they possessed both in abundance — but of standpoint. Where Proust and Joyce turned inward, these writers turned outward. Where the modernists transformed the crisis of bourgeois consciousness into a universal condition of human experience, the progressive writers insisted that the crisis had specific historical causes, specific social agents, and specific human victims — and that the novelist's obligation was to name them. Where irony became, in the modernist tradition, a permanent defensive posture, these writers were willing to be sincere: to believe in something, to stand somewhere, to write from a position of solidarity with the human beings whose experience they were representing.

Thomas Mann occupies a singular position in this tradition — singular because his trajectory is itself a historical argument. The author of Buddenbrooks (1901) began his career as the supreme novelist of bourgeois decline: the four-generation saga of a Lübeck merchant family traced from prosperity to dissolution is, structurally, the Cervantine sack filled with the specific materials of German bourgeois culture, its confidence and its contradictions, its aesthetic refinement and its historical exhaustion. But Mann did not stop there, as so many of his contemporaries stopped — did not follow the logic of bourgeois decline into aesthetic withdrawal or political quietism. The Magic Mountain (1924) placed the crisis of European civilisation on the eve of the First World War in the enclosed, allegorical space of a Swiss sanatorium, where the ideological currents of the age debate each other across the beds of the sick and the dying. And Doctor Faustus (1947) — written in American exile, as the full horror of what Germany had become was being revealed to the world — is perhaps the most ambitious single novel of the twentieth century: the biography of a composer who makes a pact with the devil read simultaneously as the biography of German culture, the history of musical modernism, and a reckoning with the question of how a civilisation of extraordinary refinement and achievement could have produced fascism. Mann did not flinch from that question, and he did not answer it with irony. He answered it with the full weight of a lifetime's engagement with German culture, from a position of exile and grief and unbroken moral seriousness.

Louis Aragon represents a different but equally significant trajectory. Beginning as one of the founders of French surrealism — that attempt to liberate the unconscious from the constraints of bourgeois rationality — Aragon made a journey that his former surrealist colleagues regarded as a betrayal but that history has vindicated as a deepening: toward communism, toward realism, toward the conviction that the novel's obligation was not to the liberation of the individual unconscious but to the representation of collective historical experience. His cycle of novels The Real World — of which The Bells of Basel, Residential Quarter, and The Communists are the major volumes — constitutes one of the most sustained attempts in twentieth-century French literature to represent the full social totality of France from the Belle Époque through the Popular Front and into the catastrophe of 1940. Aragon wrote from inside the French Communist Party, from inside the Resistance, from inside the experience of a society fighting for its life against fascism — and his novels carry the weight of that immersion. He was also, it should be noted, among the first major Western writers to recognise and champion the work of Nazım Hikmet and Yaşar Kemal — an act of literary solidarity that was also a political act, a refusal of the cultural borders that the Cold War was drawing across European literature.

Anna Seghers brought to this tradition the specific experience of exile and persecution. The Seventh Cross (1942) — written in Mexican exile after her flight from Nazi Germany — follows seven prisoners who escape from a concentration camp; six are recaptured and crucified on crosses erected as a warning, and the seventh makes his way through a Germany that has been transformed by terror into a landscape of fear and complicity, sustained by the small, dangerous acts of solidarity of ordinary people who have not entirely surrendered their humanity. It is a novel of extraordinary formal control and moral precision — a socialist realist masterpiece in the fullest sense, combining the psychological depth of the great realist tradition with a political seriousness and a human warmth that the modernist tradition, for all its formal brilliance, could not have produced.

Heinrich Böll, writing in postwar West Germany, occupied a position of permanent dissent within the culture of his own society — a society that was rebuilding itself economically with remarkable speed and rebuilding its historical memory with remarkable selectivity. His novels and stories insisted on what West German culture preferred to forget: the complicity of ordinary Germans in the Nazi regime, the continuities between the Third Reich and the Federal Republic, the human cost of a capitalism that measured everything in economic growth and nothing in human dignity. The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum — these are novels of moral witness, written from a standpoint of Catholic socialism that placed him outside every available orthodoxy and inside the only tradition that mattered: the tradition of writers who refuse to make their peace with the world as it is.

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath demonstrated that the American novel, too, was capable of this kind of witness. The Joad family's migration from the Dust Bowl to California — that epic of dispossession, exploitation, and stubborn human solidarity — filled the Cervantine sack with the specific materials of American capitalism in its most brutal phase, and did so with a directness and a moral urgency that the American literary establishment has never quite forgiven. Howard Fast, whose historical novels — Spartacus, Freedom Road, The American — recovered for American readers the revolutionary and radical traditions that official culture was systematically suppressing, paid the price of that commitment with blacklisting and imprisonment during the McCarthy years.

Ignazio Silone's Fontamara — written in Swiss exile after his flight from Mussolini's Italy — gave the antifascist movement one of its most enduring documents: the story of a southern Italian peasant community ground down by poverty, indifference, and fascist violence, told with a simplicity and a moral seriousness that made it, upon its publication in 1933, one of the most widely read antifascist novels in Europe. Cesare Pavese brought to the same tradition a darker, more inward sensibility — his novels and stories map the terrain of Italian working-class and peasant life with a lyricism shadowed by historical violence and personal anguish — but his commitment, until the end of his short life, to the Italian Communist Party and to the project of a literature adequate to the experience of ordinary Italians placed him firmly within this current.

Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo gave this tradition its greatest poetic voices in Spanish — voices that also touched the novel's territory in their epic ambitions and their insistence on representing the full range of human social experience. Neruda's judgment of Nazım Hikmet — that we are good poets, perhaps very good poets, but Nazım was a giant — was the recognition of one committed artist by another: the acknowledgment that the measure of literary greatness is not formal innovation alone but the depth of engagement with the historical experience of one's time, the courage to take sides, and the capacity to make that commitment sing.

What unites these writers — Mann and Aragon, Seghers and Böll, Steinbeck and Fast, Neruda and Vallejo, Silone and Pavese — is not a common style, a common nationality, or even a common political programme. What unites them is a common refusal: the refusal to accept that the crisis of bourgeois consciousness was the crisis of human consciousness as such, the refusal to mistake the exhaustion of a class for the exhaustion of a form, the refusal to abandon the social world as the novel's proper subject and human solidarity as the novelist's proper standpoint. They kept faith with what the novel, at its greatest, had always been: not a display of formal ingenuity, not a performance of cultural sophistication, not a commodity produced for a market, but a form of knowledge — the most comprehensive and humane form of knowledge that literature has yet devised — placed at the service of the human beings whose experience it represents.

The Torn Fabric: Postmodernism and the Aesthetics of Surrender

If modernism was the crisis of bourgeois consciousness, postmodernism was the decision to make that crisis permanent — to transform the recognition that the sack was torn into an aesthetic programme, a philosophical position, and eventually a cultural dominant so pervasive that it became, paradoxically, its own kind of orthodoxy: the orthodoxy of having no orthodoxy, the dogma of having no dogmas, the sincere conviction that sincerity is impossible.

The historical conditions that produced postmodernism are inseparable from the trajectory of capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century: the postwar consolidation of American cultural and economic hegemony, the defeat and deformation of the great emancipatory movements, and the collapse — in the West — of any credible vision of social transformation. What Jean-François Lyotard called “the delegitimation of grand narratives” was not a philosophical discovery but a historical defeat, registered in the cultural superstructure as a loss of faith in the very possibility of meaning. The modernists had still mourned what was lost. The postmodernists stopped mourning. They looked at the ruins of the novel, shrugged, and decided to play games in the rubble — and called this maturity.

The formal strategies of postmodernism are now so familiar as to have become invisible: metafiction that constantly reminds you it is fiction; pastiche that recycles historical styles stripped of the historical content that once gave those styles their meaning; irony as a default mode, a permanent distancing device that immunises the writer against the charge of sincerity. There is an analogy that captures this mode precisely. Imagine a magician who, instead of performing illusions, spends the entire evening meticulously explaining to the audience how his tricks are fake — pointing out the trapdoor under the stage, showing the hidden cards up his sleeve. For the first few minutes, it is intellectually interesting. After an hour, you simply want to be transported. The magician refuses, because he is terrified of looking foolish. Cleverness has become a defence against meaning, and meaning — the willingness to say something true about the world — has become the one thing the postmodern novel cannot afford.

John Barth announced in 1967 that literature had reached the exhaustion of its formal possibilities. Thomas Pynchon's vast, paranoid encyclopaedias deploy immense learning in the service of a vision in which all systems of meaning cancel each other out — where the search for genuine pattern is indistinguishable from conspiracy theory. Don DeLillo maps an America so saturated with media simulation that authentic feeling has become impossible; his characters slide frictionlessly across the surfaces of modern life, unable to reach anything beneath them.

The most commercially successful expressions of this exhaustion are perhaps the most revealing precisely because they are commercially successful — because the market has found in postmodern exhaustion not a crisis but a product. Michel Houellebecq writes with sociological precision but in an emotional register of pure, unrelieved nihilism: a world drained of meaning, solidarity, and genuine connection, populated by characters whose primary experience is a carefully calibrated boredom. It is the literature of a class that has no project left other than managing its own comfort while awaiting its decline — and it sells extremely well to precisely that class. Karl Ove Knausgård withdraws from the social world entirely into the obsessive, granular texture of a single life — thirty pages on making coffee, twenty on cleaning a bathroom — as if the only authentic subject remaining to the novelist is the unmediated micro-experience of the self. The social totality has not merely become unknowable; it has ceased to be a concern.

From the standpoint of socialist realism, this is not a literary development but a literary abdication. The sack is not merely torn. It has been repurposed: it is now a display object, its interesting tears held up for aesthetic contemplation by a literary culture that has confused the exhaustion of a class with the exhaustion of a form.

The Market and the Mimic: When the Periphery Performs for the Centre

The crisis of the Western bourgeois novel did not go unnoticed in the literary cultures of the periphery. On the contrary: it created an opportunity — and an industry. As the European novel exhausted itself in self-referential irony and the American novel in the spectacle of its own surface, the global literary market turned its attention outward, to the margins, in search of what the centre could no longer produce: energy, vitality, the feeling that literature still had something to say about the world.

What it found, or rather what it constructed, was a category: world literature. And like most categories produced by market mechanisms, it told us more about the needs of the market than about the realities it claimed to represent.

The machinery is not difficult to describe. A writer from the periphery — from India, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East — produces work that engages, in some fashion, with the experience of their society. If that work can be made to conform to the formal expectations and thematic preoccupations of the Western literary establishment — if it is sufficiently exotic to seem fresh, sufficiently familiar to seem accessible, sufficiently focused on individual psychology and identity to avoid the discomfort of structural social analysis — it enters the pipeline. Small prizes first. Then invitations to festivals, residencies, prestigious publications. Then the major prizes: the Booker, the International Booker. And finally, for the most successfully packaged, the Nobel — which has travelled so far from its original purpose that it now functions primarily as a branding mechanism for the global literary market, conferring on its recipients not a judgment of literary achievement but a certificate of international marketability.

The Nobel Prize in Literature has not always been this. García Márquez, who received it in 1982, was a genuine revolutionary in the history of the novel — a writer whose formal innovations arose from specific historical necessity, from the attempt to represent a Latin American reality that European realism could not accommodate. One Hundred Years of Solitude is not a charming exotic fantasy. It is a formal response to a specific historical condition: the experience of living in societies where multiple temporalities coexisted without resolution — where pre-Columbian cosmologies, colonial Catholic culture, African religious traditions brought by the slave trade, and the dislocating pressures of American-backed global capitalism were all simultaneously operative, all grinding against each other without resolution. When the entire town of Macondo is struck by an insomnia plague and slowly loses its collective memory — having to label objects, This is a cow. It must be milked — what appears to be magical is in fact documentary: a structural metaphor for a colonised people losing their history. When a foreign banana company massacres striking workers and the town subsequently refuses to believe it happened because the official history has erased it, García Márquez is not writing magical realism. He is writing the realism of historical erasure — the only realism adequate to Latin American experience. He was writing for his own people about their own experience — not performing Latin Americanness for a Northern audience.

The same can be said of Juan Rulfo. Pedro Páramo (1955) — that brief, devastating novel in which a man travels to his father's village and finds it populated entirely by the dead — is the formal expression of a Mexican reality in which the violence of the Revolution, the brutality of the cacique system, and the weight of indigenous cosmology have produced a relationship to time, death, and history that linear realism cannot capture. Rulfo wrote one novel and one collection of stories, and stopped. He had said what needed to be said. The market would have preferred him to keep producing, to build a brand, to become an industry. He refused. That refusal is itself a literary statement.

Naguib Mahfouz presents a more complex case — and its complexity is itself instructive. The Cairo Trilogy — Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street — is a genuine achievement of the first order: three generations of a Cairo family traced through the transformations of Egyptian society from the First World War through the 1952 revolution, rendered with the social comprehensiveness, psychological depth, and historical honesty of the great nineteenth-century realists. Mahfouz was writing for his own society, about his own society, in Arabic — not performing Egyptianness for a Western audience but representing Egyptian reality from inside it, with the full weight of a literary tradition that stretches back to the classical Arabic narrative inheritance that Cervantes himself, four centuries earlier, had drawn upon.

But the Nobel Prize he received in 1988 — the first ever awarded to an Arabic-language writer — introduced a complication that cannot be ignored. The prize did not simply recognise Mahfouz's achievement. It packaged it. It transformed a serious Egyptian novelist, deeply rooted in his own culture and his own political reality, into "the voice of the Arab world" — a representative figure, an ambassador of exoticism, a window through which the Western reader could observe the Orient from a comfortable distance. The irony is sharpened by what happened six years later: in 1994, Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck by an Islamist assailant, in retaliation for his novel Children of Gebelawi, which had been banned in Egypt since 1959. This is not the biography of a writer performing safely for a Western market. This is the biography of a writer whose work was dangerous in his own society, to people with real power and real weapons. That the prize machinery subsequently used him as a marketing instrument for "Arab literature" tells us less about Mahfouz than about the machinery itself.

But the prize machinery, having discovered that peripheral energy sells, proceeded to commodify it. What followed García Márquez in the Nobel pantheon is, with honourable exceptions, a chronicle of the market's appetite for managed exoticism. Salman Rushdie is an instructive case. Midnight's Children (1981) has genuine structural ambition: the protagonist's life linked telepathically to hundreds of children born at the midnight of Indian independence, the private and the historical fused in a single impossible body. But the novel's formal pyrotechnics — the postmodern self-consciousness, the linguistic exhibitionism — owe more to the Western literary tradition that Rushdie absorbed at Cambridge than to any Indian narrative tradition. His subsequent career reveals the limits of a project built on the performance of postmodern wit rather than the disciplined representation of social reality. He is, in the end, a writer of the centre who has chosen the periphery as his material — which is a very different thing from a writer of the periphery who has chosen to represent it honestly.

There is a distinction worth preserving: between the writers whom the Nobel Prize honoured by adding to their marketability — Pamuk, Jelinek, and their like, for whom the prize was a making — and the writers who honoured the Nobel Prize by the weight of what they had already achieved: Sholokhov, García Márquez, Mahfouz. The prize added nothing to these writers. They added everything to the prize. That the same institution could produce both categories tells us precisely what we need to know about how it operates — and what, increasingly, it has become.

The Turkish case is perhaps the most instructive single example of how this mechanism operates — instructive precisely because it requires no theoretical elaboration. The facts speak with sufficient clarity.

Turkish literature in the twentieth century produced writers of the first rank by any honest measure. Yaşar Kemal — whose Memed My Hawk and the vast cycle of The Legend of the Thousand Bulls represent Anatolian life, the land question, poverty, and resistance with the social comprehensiveness and psychological depth of the great nineteenth-century realists — was, by the assessment of those best positioned to judge, among the major novelists of the century, and was known as such to the Western reading world. The prize was not ignorance. It was a decision. Orhan Kemal brought to Turkish fiction what Dickens brought to English: the working class in its full humanity, the systematic cruelties of industrial and agricultural capitalism rendered without sentimentality and without condescension, in novels like Murtaza: The Man of His Duty and On Fertile Lands that stand as the apex of Turkish socialist realism. Aziz Nesin gave Turkish literature its sharpest political conscience, its most fearless satirical voice.

None of them received the Nobel Prize.

But the Nobel committee did eventually turn its attention to Turkish literature. In 2006, it awarded the prize to Orhan Pamuk — a writer who has himself acknowledged that he writes not for Turkish readers but for an international audience, and whose novels offer that audience a Turkey rendered legible in Western terms: the melancholy of a declining civilisation, the conflict between tradition and modernity, the introspective individual consciousness adrift in history. Is Pamuk a skilled writer? Debatable. But he is a writer of the centre performing the periphery — and the Nobel committee rewarded precisely that performance, while the writers who had spent their lives representing Turkish social reality from inside it, without translation for Western consumption, received nothing.

The contrast becomes still more devastating when we turn from prose to poetry. Pablo Neruda — himself a Nobel laureate, himself one of the great poets of the twentieth century — said of Nazım Hikmet something that no prize committee has ever said and no market mechanism could produce: that we are good poets, perhaps very good poets, but Nazım was a giant. The judgment came from a peer of the highest standing, and it was unqualified. Nazım Hikmet — who spent years in Turkish prisons for his communist convictions, who lived his final decade in Soviet exile, who wrote poetry of extraordinary formal beauty and political courage — never received the Nobel Prize. The reasons are not literary. They are political. He was a communist. He was in prison. He was inconvenient.

This is not an anomaly. It is the mechanism operating as designed. The Nobel Prize in Literature does not reward literary achievement in any universal sense. It rewards a particular kind of literary achievement: the kind that can be absorbed by the Western cultural market without disturbing its fundamental assumptions, without demanding any serious reckoning with the social realities that market is built upon.

Time is the most honest editor, and the most patient. The Nobel Prize can accelerate a reputation, amplify a voice, insert a name into the canon with the force of institutional authority. What it cannot do is make that insertion permanent. The writers whom the prize manufactured — whose presence in the canon depends on the prize's authority rather than the work's own weight — will be edited out, quietly and without appeal, as the historical moment that produced both the prize's choice and the reader's appetite moves on. The writers who honoured the prize will remain: not because any institution decreed it, but because Grigory Melekhov's fate, Macondo's hundred years, Cairo's three generations, Çukurova's land and its people — these represent something that does not expire with the market conditions that happened, for a moment, to ignore them. Great literature does not need the Nobel Prize. It needs only time — and time, in the end, always pays its debts.

Conclusion: The Novel Is Not Dead — But the Question Is Who Carries the Sack

We began with a question about originality — about whether Cervantes invented something or synthesised something. The answer, by now, should be clear: it was both, and the distinction matters less than the historical conditions that made the synthesis possible and necessary. The greatest acts of literary creation have always been acts of synthesis — the drawing together of disparate traditions, under the pressure of specific historical conditions, into new formal structures adequate to their moment. Cervantes did this at the intersection of Eastern and Western narrative traditions, at the margins of a declining empire. The great realists did this, drawing on the Cervantine inheritance and the raw material of industrial capitalism. The socialist realists did this, seizing the form at the moment of the bourgeoisie's historical crisis and filling it with new historical content — the experience of a class making history rather than losing it. The progressive and antifascist writers of the West did this, refusing the modernist withdrawal and insisting, against every fashionable current, on the novel's obligation to represent the social world and take sides in its struggles.

The novel has always been a form in motion. Its death has been announced, with great confidence, in every generation since the mid-twentieth century, and in every generation it has proved the announcements premature. What has died, or is dying, is not the novel but a particular historical configuration of it: the European bourgeois novel in its realist and postmodernist phases, the literature of a class that has exhausted its historical energy and can no longer sustain the formal ambitions that energy once made possible. The postmodern novel holds up its torn fabric as though the tearing were an achievement. The prize industry markets the periphery's energy back to the centre in safely packaged form, mistaking exoticism for vitality and marketability for value.

What has not died — what cannot die, as long as human beings live in conditions of historical contradiction and feel the need to make narrative sense of those conditions — is the novel's fundamental project: the attempt to hold the full complexity of human experience within a structure that gives it shape, meaning, and historical truth. This is Cervantes's sack. And the question, at this moment in history, is not only where the sack is being carried but by whom and for whom — whether it is being carried by writers committed to the honest representation of social reality, or by writers performing that commitment for a market that has learned to profit from the appearance of it.

The socialist realist tradition — from Gorky and Sholokhov through Ehrenburg and Aitmatov, from Achebe and Ngũgĩ to the writers working today at the genuine margins of the world system, in conditions of real historical pressure and real social contradiction — insists on a simple but demanding criterion: does the novel know the world it is set in? Does it represent that world in its social totality, with psychological depth and historical honesty? Does it take sides — not in the cheap sense of delivering a political message, but in the deeper sense of standing somewhere, of writing from a position, of refusing the paralysis of permanent irony and the comfort of managed distance?

The sack has moved. It has been repaired, reshaped, restuffed with different materials. It is being carried by different hands, through different landscapes. But where it is being carried honestly — where the writer has not confused the market's appetite for peripherality with the periphery's actual experience, where the form has not been mistaken for the content, where the social world is still being represented in its full and difficult complexity — it is intact.

Cervantes's sack and the torn fabric: in the end, they are the same story. The sack was always being torn, and always being mended, and the mending was always done somewhere unexpected, by someone working at the edge of what the dominant tradition could imagine — and working, crucially, not for the dominant tradition's applause, but because the world demanded to be represented. That is how the novel began. It is how the novel continues. And it is, in all probability, how the novel will go on.【●】

Then, the Universal Rights Party's "Voting Rights for Domesticated Animals" bill audaciously entered the parliamentary agenda...

This audacious proposal ignited a fervent debate concerning the political rights of pets and farm animals: the clucking chickens, the lowing cows, and the buzzing bees.

From the hallowed podium, Mr. Torvald Grimstad, the eloquent spokesman for the Swenordanian Soft Revolution Party (SSRP), passionately defended the radical thesis:

"The eggs of chickens, the milk of cows, the honey of bees... these are not mere biological byproducts, but the tangible fruits of proletarian labor. These creatures, systematically exploited throughout history, have been relegated to a subaltern status. They demand, and indeed deserve, proper representation."

The Swenordanian Confederation of Trade Unions (SCTU) swiftly endorsed this thesis. Their official statement declared that animals, owing to their "inherent lack of capacity for direct representation," must be represented by proxy.

Into this burgeoning confusion stepped the independent MP, Mr. Olaf Bjørnson. He advanced his own peculiar proposition: “Animals”, he argued, “should possess the autonomy to form their own political parties.” This notion was met with a profound, almost comical indifference from the animals themselves. Nevertheless, it proved sufficient to set the ponderous bureaucratic machine into inexorable motion.

Oskopholm's parliament building soon teemed with committees, their numbers proliferating daily. The "Committee for Proletarian Animal Voting Rights" meticulously debated the abstract labor-value of a single egg. The "Subaltern Animal Representation Committee" gravely analyzed whether the faint buzz of a bee could genuinely be construed as a declaration of will. Meanwhile, the "Animal Party Initiative Analysis Committee" dutifully recorded a cow's resonant moo as profound "political rhetoric." Each committee, in turn, begat new sub-committees. Each sub-committee churned out thousands of pages of reports, replete with intricate statistics and bewildering graphs. The very floorboards of the offices groaned and creaked under the sheer, oppressive weight of these accumulating files.

Within his opulent palace, His Majesty King Karl Olaf XVI existed as a mere constitutional shadow. Powerless and utterly helpless, he gazed wistfully at the fjords' cold, indifferent waters. A deep sigh, laden with weary resignation, escaped him as he posed a poignant question to his advisors:

"Is this kingdom destined to perish for naught?" His voice, barely a whisper, echoed softly through the grand chambers. The answer he received, however, remained chillingly immutable:

"Your Majesty, you possess no authority pursuant to the Constitution. Parliament, and parliament alone, must decide."

Queen Karen Ingrid, her brow furrowed with palpable anxiety, murmured, "Are animals truly to govern us?" Crown Prince Hans Erik merely offered a dismissive shrug, a gesture of youthful, detached apathy. Princess Marie Sofie, amidst the palace's pervasive silence, whispered to the fish in her ornate aquarium, "Are you, too, subaltern?" In her innocent eyes, a fleeting glimmer of the surrounding absurdity was reflected.

The parliamentary debates spiraled into an endless, circular labyrinth. Ms. Astrid Lund of the SSRP, her voice rising in righteous indignation, passionately declared, "If animals are denied representation, then our democracy is an egregious lie!" Mr. Knut Evensen from the Cosmic Equality Party, his face flushed with exasperation, vehemently countered, "This is nothing short of utter madness!" Ms. Ylva Sørensen from the Green Economy Party, ever the pragmatist, interjected, "What, pray tell, of Article 4 of the Constitution? Can an egg truly fall under the sacred principle of equality?"

Each question, rather than yielding a definitive answer, merely served to unlock the door to yet another, equally convoluted committee.

The committee specifically tasked with reviewing Mr. Bjørnson's "animal party" proposal convened in a dilapidated old warehouse in Oskopholm. In the cold, damp confines of the room, a chicken's desultory cluck was solemnly recorded as a "no vote." A cow's languid moo was meticulously noted as "indifference." Despite the animals' patent apathy towards the entire political charade, a "Committee for the Analysis of Animal Indifference" was promptly established. This new committee, in its infinite wisdom, produced a hundred-page report, painstakingly investigating whether the precise frequency of a bee's buzz could possibly serve as an indicator of "political apathy."

Amidst this burgeoning labyrinth of bureaucratic absurdity, the Swenordanian Communist Party (SCP), commanding a minuscule 0.01% vote share, issued a concise, one-page manifesto. It emanated from a humble basement flat on the city's desolate outskirts. The language employed was stark, cold, and utterly detached:

"This debate, a meaningless illusion of bourgeois democracy, serves only to distract. Eggs, milk, and honey are biological products, not the fruits of proletarian labor. The very concept of the 'subaltern animal' is naught but the bureaucracy's desperate attempt to legitimize its own existence. All these committees, these endless reports, these farcical votes, constitute a machine meticulously designed to obscure the true class struggle. Swenordania, in its delusion, conceals its own profound void behind the shimmering mask of an 'earthly paradise.'"

The manifesto was mercilessly ridiculed in the Oskopholmbladet newspaper, emblazoned with the mocking headline, "The Cry of a 0.01% Group." The established parties in parliament contemptuously dismissed it as "outdated" and "hostile to democracy." They simply, and collectively, ignored its stark warning.

The SCP's prescient warning was utterly swallowed by the bureaucracy's relentless paperstorm.

Finally, the much-anticipated day of the referendum dawned. Oskopholm's grand squares were hastily equipped with an array of peculiar devices: paw sensors meticulously designed for animal votes, sophisticated cluck analyzers, and highly sensitive buzz detectors.

The voting commenced. Yet, the results were never, ever announced. Millions of pages of reports—on "The Class Value of Eggs," "Political Analysis of Bee Buzz," and "Sociological Study of Animal Indifference"—catastrophically crashed the state's central servers. A bewildered clerk mistakenly stamped an egg as a "ballot paper." Another, equally perplexed, recorded a cow's mournful moo as a "final decision." The countless votes simply vanished, swallowed by an ever-growing mountain of paper.

The committees, predictably, engaged in mutual recrimination. No one could locate the elusive result. The absurd proposal was quietly, unceremoniously shelved, without any official procedure or explanation.

Parliament, with a display of remarkable haste and unanimous accord, issued a triumphant press release:

"Swenordania has bestowed upon the annals of democracy a truly unique process. Although a minor technical glitch regrettably prevented its full completion, our profound democratic depth and unwavering determination have, once again, inspired the entire world. Swenordania shall forever remain the inextinguishable beacon of civilization."

The world's media, with an almost disturbing credulity, relayed this statement with utmost seriousness. The Guardian proudly ran "Triumph of Democracy." Le Monde grandly declared "Triumph of Bureaucratic Perfection." The Washington Post proclaimed, with characteristic gravitas, "Democratic Summit in an Earthly Paradise." Television channels broadcast the news with solemn reverence. The United Nations, in a crowning irony, selected Swenordania as the "Democracy Model of the Year." Countless op-eds were penned, extolling the advanced nature of Swenordanian democracy, its unparalleled guidance for human civilization, and the notion that an earthly paradise could only be attained by diligently following in its illustrious footsteps.

In Swenordania, beneath the veneer of perfection, nothing had fundamentally changed. Chickens continued to cluck, cows to moo, and bees to buzz, oblivious. While humans persisted in their self-appointed role as the animals' proxies, they had, in a deeper, more profound sense, long since forfeited their own voice.

King Karl Olaf XVI continued his melancholic existence as the constitutional shadow in the palace. A profound weariness, a silent acceptance of his predetermined fate, was now deeply etched upon his regal face.

The SCP's forgotten manifesto, a solitary voice of reason, gathered an ever-thicker layer of dust. It lay, unread and unheeded, in a file on a dark, forgotten archive shelf.

Swenordania continued to radiate as an earthly paradise. Yet, no one truly perceived the cold, grey, and utterly meaningless void that festered beneath this meticulously crafted facade of perfection. But Swenordania, nonetheless, cemented its reputation: the world's most mature example of democracy, the undisputed pinnacle of human civilization, and an earthly paradise, indeed【●】

Faşist Savcının Talebi

8 Kasım 1926'da, Roma'daki bir mahkeme salonunda savcı sanığa bakarak tarihe geçecek şu sözleri söyledi: "Bu beyni yirmi yıl boyunca çalışmaktan alıkoymalıyız."

Sanık Antonio Gramsci'ydi. Otuz beş yaşında, boyu zar zor bir buçuk metreyi bulan, çocukluk hastalığının kalıcı olarak eğdiği bir omurga, onu eninde sonunda öldürecek olan tüberkülozun zaten kemirmeye başladığı bir beden… Elinde silah yoktu. Komuta ettiği ordu yoktu. İtalya Komünist Partisi'nin Genel Sekreteri ve teorik yayın organı L'Ordine Nuovo'nun kurucusuydu elbette. Ama bunlar ezilenlerin örgütleriydi, iktidarın değil. Hiçbir fabrikayı, hiçbir bankayı, hiçbir bakanlığı, İtalyan devletinin hiçbir aygıtını yönetmiyordu. Dünyevi güç ölçütleriyle bakıldığında, kronik acılar içinde kıvranan, ezilmiş bir bedene sahip, kovuşturma altındaki hareketi yöneten bir adamdı.

Yine de İtalyan faşist devleti ondan korkuyordu. Bedeninden değil, o iki büklüm, narin bünyenin, çocukluğundan beri süregelen acının taşıdığı kafadan, içindeki beyinden... Zihninden korkuyordu. Savcının sözleri retorik bir süsleme değildi. Siyasi niyetin tam bir ifadesiydi: Zihni susturun, böylece devrimi boğmuş olursunuz.

Mussolini rejimi Gramsci'yi yirmi yıl dört ay beş gün hapse mahkûm etti. Ama o gerçek anlamda dışarı hiç çıkamadı. 27 Nisan 1937'de öldü: Tahliyesinden altı gün sonra, on bir yıllık tutukluluğun yavaş yavaş öldürmesine yettiği bir beyin kanamasıyla. Kırk altı yaşındaydı.

Faşist bir devletin bedensel engelli bir entelektüeli en tehlikeli tutsağı olarak görmesi, Antonio Gramsci hakkında söylenebilecek her şeyi özetliyor. Onun fikirlerinin, ölümünün ardından geçen on yıllarda nasıl bu denli sistematik biçimde çarpıtıldığını, sahiplenildiğini ve anlamsızlaştırıldığını da... Egemen sınıf, kendini koruma içgüdüsüyle, sonraki akademik yorumcuların kariyerleri boyunca gizlemeye çalıştığı özü mükemmel bir netlikte kavramıştı: Gramsci devrimci bir komünistti ve teorileri birer silahtı.

Sardinya’da Geçen Bir Çocukluk: Yoksulluk, Engellilik ve Olağanüstü Bir Zihin

Antonio Gramsci, 22 Ocak 1891'de, İtalya'nın en sömürülen ve en ihmal edilen bölgelerinden Sardinya'nın iç kesimlerindeki küçük, yoksul bir kasaba olan Ales'te dünyaya geldi. Arnavut asıllı küçük bir memur olan Francesco Gramsci ile Giuseppina Marcias'ın yedi çocuğundan dördüncüsüydü. Aile yoksuldu. 1898'de, Antonio yedi yaşındayken, babası Francesco idari usulsüzlük suçlamalarıyla tutuklanarak beş yıl hapse girdi. Aile sefalet içine düştü. Küçük Antonio, kardeşlerini besleyebilmek için ağır yükler taşıdı, ırgatlık yaptı.

Bedenini ömür boyu şekillendirecek fiziksel felaket işte o günlerde başına geldi. Bir düşme, muhtemelen altta yatan Pott hastalığıyla, yani omurga veremiyle birleşince omurgası kalıcı olarak büküldü ve boyu kısa kaldı. Sırtı kamburdu. Bünyesi hep zayıftı. Çocukluğundan itibaren acıyla yaşadı. Annesi, en karanlık anlarında onun bebekliğini atlatamayacağından korkuyordu. O yüzden, Sardinyalı çocuklar için geleneksel olan cenaze elbisesini hazırladı: Küçük, beyaz bir takım elbise.

Ama o hayatta kaldı. Bedeninin yapamadıkları ile zihninin yapabilecekleri arasındaki büyük fark, hayatının akışı içinde neredeyse efsanevi bir boyut kazandı. Öğretmenler yeteneğini anında fark etti. Ailenin yoksulluğuna rağmen, 1911'de Torino Üniversitesi'ne burs kazandı; ünlü dilbilimci Matteo Bartoli'nin yanında dilbilim okudu. Felsefe, tarih, iktisat, siyasi teori ve edebiyatı İtalyanca, Almanca, Rusça ve Fransızca olarak inceledi. Hapisteyken fiziksel ıstırap içinde kaleme aldığı mektuplar bile bugün akademisyenleri hayrete düşüren bir kültürel referans genişliği ve derinliği taşır.

Ama Torino yalnızca bir üniversite şehri değildi. Burası İtalya'nın sanayi kalbi, devasa FIAT otomobil fabrikalarının ve Avrupa'nın en yoğunlaşmış, siyasi olarak en bilinçli işçi sınıfının memleketiydi. Sardinya'nın yoksulluğundan gelen, emekleri sömürülen ve karşılığında hiçbir şey verilmeyen ada köylülerini gözlemleyen genç bir adam için örgütlü ve militan işçilerin görüntüsü, hem bir eğitim hem de bir aydınlanma saǧladı. Gramsci, Torino'da yalnızca bir sosyalist değil, devrimci bir komünist, oldu. Toplumsal dönüşümün yalnızca daha iyi fikirler değil, örgütlü bir sınıf iktidarı gerektirdiğini doğrudan deneyimden kavrayan bir aydın hâline geldi.

“Biennio Rosso”: Kızıl İki Yıl ve Fabrika Konseyleri

Birinci Dünya Savaşı Avrupa'yı paramparça etti ve devrimci solu harekete geçirdi. Bolşeviklerin Ekim 1917'de iktidara el koyması, Marx'ın teorisinin pratikte de mümkün olduğunu kanıtladı: İşçi sınıfı devlet iktidarını alabilir ve yeni bir toplumun inşasına girişebilirdi. 1919 yılında Macaristan ve Bavyera'da, kısa ömürlü sovyet cumhuriyetleri belirdi. İtalya'nın dört bir yanında enflasyon işçi sınıfının gelirlerini perişan etmiş, cepheden dönen askerler vaat edilen ödüller yerine yoksulluk ve işsizlikle karşılaşmıştı.

1919-1920 yılları arasında — İtalyanların “biennio rosso”, kızıl iki yıl diyeceği dönemde — İtalya devrimin eşiğinde durmaktaydı. İşçiler kuzeyde fabrikalara el koyuyor, köylüler güneyde toprakları ele geçiriyordu. Kurulu düzen gerçek anlamda tehdit altındaydı.

İşte tam bu noktada Gramsci, Mayıs 1919'da L'Ordine Nuovo (Yeni Düzen) dergisini kurdu. Bu dergi, Torino fabrika konseyi hareketinin teorik organı olacaktı. Fabrika konseyleri (consigli di fabbrica), büyük FIAT tesislerinde kendiliğinden ortaya çıkmış ve hızla Torino sanayi sektörüne yayılmış, işçiler tarafından seçilen organlardı. Diğer sosyalist aydınlar bunları ilginç ama ikincil bir gelişme olarak görürken, Gramsci onlarda tarihsel önem taşıyan bir işlev olduǧunu anlamıştı.

Haziran 1919'da yayımlanan çığır açıcı bir makalesinde fabrika konseylerini "proleter devletin modeli" ilan etti. Ücret pazarlıǧı yapan bir kurum değil, işçilerin üretimi yönetme, toplumsal yaşamı düzenleme ve nihayetinde burjuva devletinin yerini alma kapasitelerini gösterebildiği embriyonik bir iktidar organı olabilirlerdi. Rus sovyetlerine olan benzerlikleri açıktı. L'Ordine Nuovo harekete teorik bir dil, stratejik bir yön ve siyasi bir enerji kazandırdı. 1920 yazına gelindiğinde kuzey İtalya'daki fabrikaların çoğu işçilerin denetimine girmişti. Olağanüstü birkaç hafta boyunca İtalya kapitalist sınıfının, üç yıl önce Rusya kapitalist sınıfıyla aynı akıbete uǧrayabileceği hissedildi.

Sanayiciler — başta FIAT'ın Giovanni Agnelli'si ve kuzey İtalya'nın çelik ile tekstil patronları — durumun ciddiyetini mükemmel bir açıklıkla kavradılar. Karşılarındaki bir iş uyuşmazlığından ibaret deǧildi. Bu, üretim araçlarının mülkiyetine ve bütün toplumsal düzene karşı bir meydan okumaydı. Yanıtları faşizm oldu.

Mussolini: Burjuvazinin Silahlı Yanıtı

Benito Mussolini, savaş öncesinde İtalyan Sosyalist Partisi'nin radikal kanadının önde gelen bir siması ve partinin gazetesi Avanti!'nin editörüydü. Tarihsel kanıtların önemli bir bölümüne göre, 1914'te Fransız istihbaratı ve müdahaleye can atan İtalyan sanayicileri tarafından finanse edilerek, İtalya'nın Birinci Dünya Savaşı'na girmesini savunmak üzere partiyle yollarını ayırdı. Savaşın ardından Mart 1919'da Fasci Italiani di Combattimento'yu kurdu. Başlangıçta belirsiz bir popülist programa sahip küçük, karmaşık bir milliyetçi gaziler hareketiydi bu.

1920'deki fabrika işgalleri, faşizmi marjinal bir eğilimden sermaye tarafından finanse edilen bir kitle hareketine dönüştürdü. Liberal hükümetin işçi hareketini geleneksel devlet araçlarıyla ezme iradesinden ya da kapasitesinden yoksun olduğu anlaşılınca, sanayi ve tarım burjuvazisi Mussolini'nin kara gömlekli squadrismo'suna yöneldi. Doğrudan toprak sahipleri ve sanayiciler tarafından finanse edilen bu paramiliter birlikler kuzey İtalya'nın köyleri ve kasabaları boyunca sistematik biçimde ilerledi. Sendika binalarını yaktı, sosyalist gazeteleri tahrip etti, işçi örgütçülerini dövüp öldürdü, grevleri koordineli şiddetle kırdı, işçi sınıfı topluluklarını dehşete sürükledi.

Bu, faşist mitolojinin daha sonra ileri süreceği gibi “Marksist zorbalıǧa karşı kendiliğinden gelişen bir halk ayaklanması” değildi. Kapitalist sınıfın organize ve finanse ettiği, faşizmi araç olarak kullanan kasıtlı bir karşı-devrimci saldırıydı. Mussolini'nin Roma Yürüyüşü'nün onu iktidara taşıdığı Ekim 1922'ye gelindiğinde, İtalyan işçi hareketi fiziksel olarak ezilmişti. Biennio rosso sona ermişti.

Gramsci bu süreci, hapishane yazılarına damgasını vuracak analitik kesinliğiyle izledi. Fabrika konseylerinin yenilgisi, kavradığı kadarıyla, yalnızca askeri bir yenilgi değildi; aynı zamanda siyasi ve ideolojik bir başarısızlıktı. Yalnızca devlet şiddetine değil, burjuvazinin rıza üretme ve meşruiyetini keskin toplumsal kriz koşullarında bile sürdürebilme kapasitesine de dayanabilecek geniş sınıf ittifakı, kültürel varlık ve örgütlü siyasi önderliği inşa etmedeki yetersizlikti. Bu düşünceler Hapishane Defterleri’nin teorik temelini oluşturacaktı.

Tutukluluk ve Uzun Ölüm

Faşist diktatörlüğün pekişmesinin ardından Gramsci, İtalya Komünist Partisi'nin temsilcisi olarak Moskova'da bir süre geçirdi. 1924'te İtalya'ya döndü, parlamentoya seçildi ve milletvekilliği dokunulmazlığı ona geçici bir koruma sağladı.

Bu koruma 8 Kasım 1926'da sona erdi. Mussolini'ye karşı — tarihçilerin özgünlüğünü sorguladığı — bir suikast girişiminin ardından faşist hükümet tüm muhalefet partilerini feshetti ve liderlerini tutukladı. Gramsci hapishaneden hapishaneye sürüldü: Roma'da Regina Coeli, Ustica adası, Milano'da San Vittore ve nihayetinde Formia'daki hapishane kliniği ile Roma'daki Quisisana kliniği. 1931'de ağır bir sinir krizi geçirdi; giderek ilerleyen arterioskleroz ve akciğer kanamaları sonunda bünyesinde neredeyse tam çöküşüne yol açtı. Faşist devletin Gramsci'yi idam etmesine gerek yoktu. İhmal yoluyla onu yavaşça öldürüyordu.

Ama o buna rağmen yazdı. 1929 ile 1935 yılları arasında, fiziksel ıstırap içinde, sansür altında, elyazmalarına el konup imha edilme tehlikesiyle yüz yüze, otuz üç defteri yaklaşık üç bin sayfalık analizle doldurdu.

Ezop Dili: Faşist Sansür Altında Devrimci Teori

Gramsci'nin elyazmaları hapishane yetkililerinin incelemesine tabiydi. Devrimci terminolojinin doğrudan kullanımı el konma riskini beraberinde getiriyordu. Çalışmalarını korumak için akademisyenlerin “Ezop dili” adını verdiği yöntemi geliştirdi. Görünürde tamamen akademik bir söylem görünümü altında devrimci teoriyi tartışmasına olanak tanıyan sistematik bir dolaylı ifade kodlamasıydı bu. Gramsci, baldızı Tatiana Schucht'a yazdığı mektuplarda sansürden kaçınmak için dolaylı formülasyonlar kullandığını açıkça kabul etti.

Temel kodlamaların teşhisi güç değil. "Praksis felsefesi" Marksizm'in yerine geçer. "Modern Prens" devrimci Komünist Parti'nin… "Mevzi savaşı" ve "manevra savaşı" devrimci mücadeleye ilişkin stratejik kavramlardır. "Tarihsel blok" egemen sınıfın hegemonik düzenini sürdürdüğü sınıf ittifakını ifade eder. "Organik aydınlar" belirli bir sınıf tarafından üretilen ve o sınıfa karşı sorumlu olan düşünürleri tanımlar. "Sivil toplum" egemen sınıfın rıza ürettiği kurumları — okullar, kiliseler, medya, kültürel örgütler — devletin zorlayıcı aygıtından ayrı olarak ifade eder.

Bu Ezop dili, Gramsci'nin çalışmasının yanlış olarak okunmasında merkezi öneme sahiptir. Belirli terimleri kullanmaktan kaçındığı için, sonraki yorumcular, onun bu terimlerin temsil ettiği asıl kavramları terk ettiğini ileri sürmüştür. Bu yanlış okumaların önemli bir bölümü kasıtlıdır. Gramsci'nin aslında temsil ettiği ideolojiye düşman olanların yönlendirdiği fikrî sahiplenme eylemleridir. Ezop dili, gerçek bir teorik revizyon değil, faşist baskının dayattığı taktik bir zorunluluktu. Gramsci "Modern Prens"ten söz ettiğinde Komünist Parti'yi kastediyordu. "Mevzi savaşı” derken, işçi sınıfının devlet iktidarını ele geçirme koşullarını hazırlamasının yolunu düşünüyordu. Bunu başka türlü okumak yorum değildir. Tahrif etmektir.

İKİNCİ BÖLÜM: Soldan Çalınan Kavram: Kültürel Hegemonya, Devrimci Anlamı ve Akademik Solun Bu Kavramın İçini Boşaltması

Hegemonya: Bir Kültür Teorisi Değil, Bir Silah

Gramsci, kültürel hegemonya kavramını, 1919-1920 devrimlerinin başarısızlığından bu yana Avrupa solunu kemiren somut bir siyasi soruya doğrudan yanıt olarak geliştirdi. Soru şuydu: Egemen sınıf iktidarını yalnızca polis ve ordular aracılığıyla değil, yönetilenlerin görünür rızası sayesinde neden ve nasıl sürdürüyor?

Yanıt hegemonya idi. Egemen sınıf, üstünlüğünü yalnızca zor yoluyla değil, kendi dünya görüşünü toplumun doğal, kaçınılmaz ve genel sağduyusu olarak benimsetme becerisi sayesinde sürdürür. Bu ideolojik egemenlik, sivil toplumun kurumları aracılığıyla korunur: Burjuva tarihini evrensel tarih olarak öğreten okullar; mevcut toplumsal düzeni kutsayan kiliseler; kapitalist varsayımları gerçekçi düşüncenin sınırları olarak çerçeveleyen medya platformları… Bu mekanizmalar aracılığıyla egemen sınıf rıza üretir; kendi sınıf çıkarlarını toplumun genel çıkarı gibi gösterir.

Hegemonya burjuvazinin yönetme biçimiyse, proletarya da bir karşı-hegemonya inşa etmek zorundadır: İşçi sınıfının deneyimine dayanan, burjuva sağduyusuna toplumsal yaşamın tüm alanlarında meydan okuyabilen alternatif bir dünya görüşü… Gramsci'nin "mevzi savaşı"yla kastettiği buydu: Mevcut devlet iktidarıyla nihai yüzleşmenin koşullarını hazırlamak için gerekli uzun, sabırlı ideolojik ve kültürel mücadele çalışması…

Gramsci düşüncesini çarpıtanların sürekli olarak ısrarla üzerinde durduğu üç nokta vardır.

Birincisi: Hegemonya sınıf mücadelesi kavramıdır; burjuvazi ile proletarya arasındaki karşıtlıktan koparıldığında ortadan kalkar.

İkincisi: Mevzi savaşı devrimin yerini almaz, onu hazırlar.

Üçüncüsü: Karşı-hegemonyanın öznesi, devrimci parti önderliğindeki örgütlü işçi sınıfıdır, yani Modern Prens. Parti olmaksızın mevzi savaşı, siyasi bir hedefi olmayan sonsuz bir kültürel lâf ebeliğinden ibarettir.

Frankfurt Okulu, Althusser ve Marcuse: Devrimden Uzaklaşan Üç Yol

Batı solunun Gramsci yorumunu biçimlendiren ilk büyük çarpıtmalar Marksist geleneğin kendi içinden geldi.

Frankfurt Okulu — Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Fromm ve daha sonra Habermas — yirminci yüzyılın en etkili sol düşüncesini üretmişti. Ancak devrimci öznellikle ilişkisi giderek derinleşen bir karamsarlıkla damgalanmıştı. Adorno ve Horkheimer'ın yazdığı Aydınlanmanın Diyalektiği (1944), Aydınlanma'nın içerdiği özgürleşme projesinin kendi karşıtına dönüştüğü, aklın bizatihi kendisinin bir tahakküm aracı hâline geldiği sonucuna vardı. İşçi sınıfı kültür endüstrisine entegre olmuş, artık devrimci bir özne olmaktan çıkmıştı. Eleştirel teori fiilen, devrimin neden imkânsız olduğunu anlatan bir teori hâline geldi. Üstelik bu anlatım, devrimin zorunluluğuna duyulan derin inançla kurulmuş geleneğin dilini kullanıyordu. Akademik sol bu karamsarlığı iştahla benimsedi. Çünkü radikal bir retorik kullanarak Batı sol entelektüel yaşamı ile —onun 1960'lardan bu yana bu denli belirgin özelliği olan— siyasi pasiflik arasındaki uçuruma bir köprü kuruyor, teorik bir meşruiyet sağlıyordu.

Habermas bu tersyüz edişi, Marksist sınıf mücadelesi çerçevesinin yerine "iletişimsel akılsallık" ve “demokratik müzakere" teorisini geçirerek tamamladı. Bu, onu soldan eleştirenlere karşı, liberal demokratik kapitalizmin felsefi olarak şık bir savunusuydu.

Louis Althusser'in "yapısal Marksizm”i de kendi çarpıtmalarını getirdi. "Devletin ideolojik aygıtları" kavramı Gramsci'nin sivil toplum analiziyle yüzeysel bir benzerlik taşır. Oysa Gramsci'nin analizi, işçi sınıfının bu kurumları nasıl dönüştürebileceği üzerinde duruyordu; Althusser'in teorik çerçevesi ise ideolojiyi her alana nüfuz eden, kendi kendini yeniden üreten ve açık bir çıkış yolu bulunmayan yapı olarak ele alma eğilimindeydi. Bireylerin, kendilerinden önce var olan ve onları belirleyen ideolojik yapılara nasıl “maruz kaldıkları” ve bundan nasıl kurtulabilecekleri sorunu ise çözümsüz kalıyordu. Bunun akademik Marksizm üzerindeki etkisi yıkıcı oldu. Sonraki dönemlerde, tarihsel aktör olarak işçi sınıfı — ve onun siyasi iradesinin biçimi olarak parti — akademik marksizm çalışmalarında giderek gözden kayboldu.

Herbert Marcuse de devrimci özneyi tamamen işlevsiz bıraktı. Tek Boyutlu İnsan adlı kitabında (1964), Batı işçi sınıfının tüketim kapitalizmine derinden entegre edildiğini, o nedenle artık devrimci dönüşümün öznesi olarak işlev gösteremeyeceğini savundu. Devrimci özne başka yerlerde aranmalıydı: Öğrencilerde, ırksal ve etnik azınlıklarda, Bohem karşı-kültüründe vb. İşçi sınıfı hareketine köklü organik aydının yerini kampüs protestolarına ilham veren radikal profesör aldı. Modern Prens'in yerini karşı-kültürel etkinlikler aldı. Mevzi savaşının yerine “reddetme jesti” geçti.

Genç Marx ve Genç Lukács: Erken Ürünleri Yağmalamak

Akademik solun teoriyi devrimci bağlamından koparmak için başvurduğu yöntem, aynı operasyona tabi tutulan iki başka figüre de uzanır: Genç Karl Marx ve genç Győrgy Lukács.

Marx'ın 1844 El Yazmaları — yaşarken yayınlanmamıştı — komünist değil de "hümanist" bir Marx arayan akademisyenler için altın madeni oldu. Oysa bunlar, henüz olgun tarihsel materyalizm çerçevesini geliştirmemiş yirmi altı yaşında bir gencin çalışmasıdır. Onları "gerçek" Marx olarak ele almak, taslağı, bitmiş tabloya tercih etmektir. Nitekim, açık seçik siyasi olan nedenlerle tam da bu yapılmaktadır. Merkezi kategorisi felsefi açıdan zengin ama siyasi olarak muğlak "yabancılaşma" kavramı olan bir Marx, merkezi kategorileri “artı değer”, “sınıf mücadelesi” ve “proleter devrim” olan bir Marx'a kıyasla liberal akademik kültürün ağız tadına çok daha uygundur.

Lukács'ın Tarih ve Sınıf Bilinci de (1923), Batı Marksizminin yere göğe koyamadığı eserlerden biridir. Bu kitabın akademik alımlanmasında sürekli olarak örtbas edilen iki şey vardır. Birincisi, Lukács kitabı bizzat reddetmiştir. Yazar, kitabının ciddi teorik hatalar içerdiğini, ekonomik yapı pahasına bilinç üzerinde aşırı bir vurgu yaptığını ve materyalist yöntemle gergin bir idealist ilişki damarı barındırdığını uzun uzun tartışarak defalarca vurguladı. İkincisi, kitap o sırada Macaristan Sovyet Cumhuriyeti'nde Eğitim Halk Komiser Yardımcısı ve sonra Kızıl Ordu'da siyasi komiser olarak görev yapan kararlı bir devrimci komünist tarafından yazılmıştı. Akademik sol, felsefi yoruma açıklığı nedeniyle zengin olanaklar sağlayan bu erken çalışmayı devrimci bağlamından koparmış, yazarın daha sonra kendi yaptığı özeleştirinin üstüne çıkarmış ve onu, —gerçek düşünürlerin hayatlarını adadığı— sınıf iktidarı ve devrimci strateji sorularını silen bir "Batı Marksizmi" inşa etmek için kullanmıştır.

Bu örüntü — erken, tamamlanmamış ya da bağlamına özgü çalışmayı yağmalamak; olgun sentezi görmezden gelmek; devrimci biyografiyi silmek — Marksist geleneğin siyasi içeriğinden arındırılmış prestijine muhtaç olan akademik kültürün kullandığı karakteristik bir yöntemdir.

Eurokomünizm: İlk Büyük Kurumsal Çarpıtma

Gramsci mirasının ilk büyük kurumsal çarpıtması, komünist hareketin kendi içinden geldi. Enrico Berlinguer önderliğindeki İtalya Komünist Partisi (İKP), Gramsci geleneǧinin otoritesini sahiplenirken onun özünden vazgeçti. Eurokomünizm, sosyalizme giden yolun mevcut kurumlar içindeki kademeli reformdan — parlamentoda çoğunluğu kazanmak ve devleti içten dönüştürmekten — geçtiǧini savundu. "Mevzi savaşı" parlamenter kademecilik olarak yeniden yorumlandı. Modern Prens devrim değil hükümet partisi oldu. İKP nihayetinde 1991'de kendini feshetti; halefleri liberal sosyal demokrasiye sürüklendi. Gramsci'nin kurduğu parti, hapishane yazılarının aşmak için tasarlanmış olduğu tam da o reformist mantık tarafından yutuldu.

Laclau, Mouffe, Hall ve Butler: Sınıfsız Hegemonya

En etkili akademik çarpıtma, Ernesto Laclau ve Chantal Mouffe'un 1985 tarihli Hegemonya ve Sosyalist Strateji adlı kitabından geldi. Gramsci'nin hegemonya kavramını aldılar ve radikal bir ameliyat gerçekleştirdiler: Sınıf içeriğini tamamen çıkardılar. Bu yeni hâliyle hegemonya, kapitalizm ile ilişkisinden bağımsız olarak herhangi bir toplumsal harekete uygulanabilir evrensel bir mantık haline geldi. Amaç sosyalist devrim değil "radikal demokrasi", yani merkezinde belirli bir toplumsal özne olmaksızın demokratik taleplerin çoğalmasıdır şeklini aldı. Bu Gramsci'nin teorisini geliştirmek değildir. Onun inkârıdır. Hegemonya ve Sosyalist Strateji, Anglofon akademi dünyasının siyasi teori programlarında yaygın olarak okutulan metinlerden biri haline geldi; devrimci Gramsci olmaksızın Gramsci hakkında düşünmek üzere bütün bir kuşağı yetiştirdi.

Stuart Hall'un Gramsci ile ilişkisi gerçekten aydınlatıcı çalışmalar üretmiştir — onun Thatcherizm'i hegemonik bir proje olarak analizi önemini korumaktadır. Ancak Hall'un Gramsci'si Leninist temellerinden koparılmıştı. "Yeni Zamanlar" projesi, işçi sınıfının artık dönüşümün asıl öznesi olmadığını, sınıfın yerini kimlik ve kültürün aldığını savunuyordu. Sonuç, hegemonik oluşumları büyük bir incelikle tarif edebilen ama esas olarak bu oluşumlara meydan okuyabilecek örgütlü gücü nasıl inşa edeceği sorusunu terk etmiş sofistike bir kültürel analiz geleneği oldu. Hegemonyayı betimlemek, karşı-hegemonya inşa etmenin yerini aldı.

Judith Butler'ın savunduğu toplumsal cinsiyet teorisinin Gramsci ile ilişkisi, onun sağduyu analizine uzak ve yüzeysel bir benzerlikten öteye geçmez. Çünkü sınıf içeriği tamamen boşaltılmıştır. Hegemonya sınıf egemenliğinin ideolojik ifadesi değil, toplumsal cinsiyet normlarının doğallaştırılması olarak anlaşıldığında, karşı-hegemonyanın görevi sınıf iktidarını örgütlemek değil normları sarsmak haline gelir. Modern Prens'in yerini “queer” teorisyen alır. Fabrika konseyinin yerini toplumsal cinsiyet araştırmaları bölümü… Gramsci bu dönüşümde kendi kavramlarını tanıyamazdı.

Solun STK-laşması

1980'lerden bu yana kendini sol olarak tanımlayan önemli bir kesim, kitlesel işçi sınıfı tabanlarına sahip siyasi partiler çevresinde değil, liberal “hayırseverlik” tarafından finanse edilen vakıf, düşünce kuruluşu, STK (demokratik kitle örgütü adlandırması yerine NGO karşılığı olarak bu sivil toplum kuruluşu ismi geçirildi) ve üniversite bölümü ağları çevresinde örgütlendi. Vakıf hibelerine bağımlı örgütler, vakıf bağışçılarının çıkarlarını tehdit eden siyasi hedefleri güdemezler; — bağışçılar da neredeyse istisnasız olarak kapitalist sınıfın üyesidir. Vakıf finansmanlı aktivizmin çerçevesi, Gramscici işçi sınıfı önderliğinde karşı-hegemonya inşa etme projesiyle yapısal olarak bağdaşmaz: Örgütlü işçi sınıfının yerini profesyonel aktivist örgütleri, devlet iktidarı hedefinin yerini sınırlı politik etki hedefi, Modern Prens'in yerini hibe başvurusu alır. Gramsci'nin kavramları, vakıf finansmanlı akademinin elinde, Amerikalı Marksist entelektüel Greg Godels'in "akademik saçmalık" dediği olguya dönüştürülür: Devrimci analizin biçimini yeniden üreten ama içeriğini boşaltan sofistike teorik dil..

Slavoj Žižek: Devrimci Solun Saray Soytarısı

Bu cins teorisyenler kervanına Slavoj Žižek'i de eklemek gerekir; çünkü o birçok bakımdan akademik solun çarpıtmalarının mantıksal doruk noktasıdır. Žižek, Frankfurt Okulu'nun kültürel karamsarlığını, Althusser'in teorik labirentini, Laclau ve Mouffe'un sınıfı tasfiyesini ve Marcuse'un siyasi örgütlenmenin yerine kültürel kışkırtmayı koymasını bir araya getirir ve bütün bunları paketleyerek, özündeki siyasi içerik yokluğunun derinlik sanılmasına yol açan bir gösteri cambazlığıyla ambalajlar.

Žižek kendini komünist olarak sunar, hatta bazen Leninist olduğunu bile söyler. Kimlik siyasetini eleştirmiş, sınıf mücadelesinin evrenselliğini savunmuştur. Retoriği, zaman zaman klasik Marksist eleştiriyle örtüşür. Ama entelektüel pratiği, Gramsci'nin organik aydınla kastettiğinin tam karşıtıdır. “Derinlik şüpheleri”ne yol açan bir hızla ürettiǧi kitapları, her şeyin tek bir sonuca ulaştığı felsefî kışkırtma seli gibidir. Fiilen hiçbir örgütlü siyasal dönüşüm hedefi yoktur. Siyasi entelektüel yaşamda saray soytarısının işlevi zaten budur: O denli coşkulu bir radikalizm performansı sergilemelidir ki, izleyici eğlensin, kışkırtılsın ve nihayetinde felç olsun.

Žižek gerçek özgürleşmenin, mevcut sembolik düzeni kıran bir "eylem"e, hegemonyanın ötesine geçmeyi gerektirdiğini savunur. Bu Laclau ve Mouffe'dan daha radikal görünür. Fakat pratikte aynı işlevi görür. Hiçbir mevcut siyasi biçimin yeterli olmadığında ısrar ederek, gerçek sınıf mücadelesinin verildiǧi fiili örgütlerle ilişkisizlik için teorik bir bahane saǧlar. Gramsci Hapishane Defterleri’ni faşist bir hapishanede, fiziksel ıstırap içinde, devrimci harekete daha iyi somut çalışma araçları sunmak amacıyla yazdı. Žižek ile karşıtlık — Ljubljana'da, Londra'da, New York'ta ve Pekin'de aynı dersi veren, ücretini alıp bir kitap daha yayımlayan Žižek ile — daha tam olamazdı. Batı akademik solunun onu alkışlanan figürlerden biri yapması, bu makalenin teşhis ettiği durumun bizzat bir belirtisidir.

Solun Çarpıtmalarının Ortak Paydası

Tüm farklılıklarına karşın bu çarpıtmaların hepsi ortak bir yapıyı paylaşır. Hegemonyayı sınıftan koparırlar. Modern Prens'i mevcut kurumsal yapılarla daha uyumlu, daha belirsiz bir hâle getirirler. Mevzi savaşını devrime doğru inşa etme stratejisinden, varışı olmayan kültürel politikaya dönüştürürler. Hepsi de kapitalist düzenin süregelmesiyle bağdaşan bir siyaset üretir. Klasik Marksist sonuç yalındır: Sınıftan arındırılmış bir hegemonya teorisi artık Gramsci'nin düşüncesi değildir. Modern Prens olmaksızın mevzi savaşı strateji değildir, sürüklenmedir. Devlet iktidarı hedefinden vazgeçmiş sol, teslim olmuştur.

ÜÇÜNCÜ BÖLÜM: Sağın Gramscisi — Yapımcısına Karşı Çevrilen Bir Silah

Bannon, Milei, Meloni, Fransız Yeni Sağı ve Hizmet Ettikleri Ortak Efendi

Sağın Hayranlığındaki Paradoks

Yirmi birinci yüzyılın başında Antonio Gramsci'nin en hevesli okuyucularından bazılarının devrimci solda değil otoriter sağda bulunması tarihsel açıdan çarpıcıdır. Steve Bannon bunu açıkça gösterir. Giorgia Meloni'nin müttefikleri adını anar. Fransız Yeni Sağı, kendi kendini "sağın Gramsciciliği" olarak nitelendiren bir entelektüel gelenek inşa etmiştir. Javier Milei'nin kültür savaşçıları, kamu kurumlarına saldırılarını açıkça Gramscici terimlerle çerçeveler.

Bu bir yanılgı değildir. Kasıtlı bir siyasi sahiplenme eylemidir. Devrimci amacından koparılmış bir yöntemin benimsenmesi, bir silahın çalınması, ama kullanılması amaçlanan davanın ıskartaya çıkarılmasıdır. Sağ, Gramsci'nin siyasi iktidarın yalnızca seçimlerle güvence altına alınamayacağına dair stratejik içgörüsünü almıştır. Terk ettiği yön ise bu içgörüye anlam kazandıran her şeydir: Sınıf analizi, proleter özne, kapitalist sömürüye son verme hedefi ve işçi sınıfı iktidarının örgütsel biçimi olarak Modern Prens. Sonuç sahte Gramscicilik ve karşı-hegemonyaya özgü söz dağarcığını, Gramsci'nin hayatını adayarak devirmeye çalıştığı hegemonik düzeni pekiştirmek için kullanan bir siyaset olmuştur.

Steve Bannon: Plütokrasinin Leninisti

Steve Bannon — eski Goldman Sachs yatırım bankacısı, Breitbart News'in eski genel yayın yönetmeni ve Donald Trump'ın 2016 başkanlık kampanyasının baş stratejisti — çağdaş sağ kanat siyasette belki de en bilinçli Gramscici şahıstır. Gramsci'yi açıkça ve defalarca alıntılamış, hatta siyasi örgütlenme anlayışında kendini Leninist olarak tanımlamıştır — işçi sınıfının kurtuluşuna değil, disiplinli örgütlenmeye ve iktidara el koymanın ön koşulu olarak mevcut kurumsal yapıların kasıtlı olarak yıkılmasına duyulan bir takdire işaret ederek…

Bannon'un merkezî formülasyonu — "siyaset kültürün uzantısıdır" — sınıf içeriğinden arındırıldığında Gramsci'nin hegemonya analizinin tam olarak kendisidir. Kurumsal hedefleri tanınabilir biçimde Gramscicidir: Üniversiteler, medya kuruluşları, kültürel vakıflar ve "idari devlet." Siyasi eyleminin açıkça belirtilmiş hedefi, 2017 Muhafazakâr Siyasi Eylem Konferansı'nda idari devletin "söküp alınması"ydı.

Bannon'ın bu analizden çıkarıp attığı, onu “devrimci” yapan her şeydir. Gramsci'nin mevzi savaşı, işçi sınıfının devlet iktidarını ele geçirmesine doğru bir hazırlıktı. Bannon'un kültür savaşı ise örgütlü işçi sınıfı tarafından değil Robert Mercer — spekülatif fon milyarderi — tarafından finanse edilen plütokratik-milliyetçi bir bloğun iktidarını pekiştirme hazırlığıdır. Yöntem benzer olabilir. Sınıf içeriği zıttır.

Javier Milei: Anarko-Kapitalist Kültür Savaşçısı

Aralık 2023'te Arjantin Cumhurbaşkanlığı'na gelen Javier Milei, liberteryen anarko-kapitalizmi, açıkça Gramscici terimlerle çerçevelenmiş bilinçli bir kültür savaşı stratejisiyle birleştirir. Hükümetinin erken dönemde attığı adımlar — devlet üniversitelerine büyük mâli kısıntılar, devlet medyasına mali desteğinin kaldırılması vb.— solun kurumsal hegemonyasına karşı kültürel bir karşı-saldırı eylemleri olarak planlandı.

Gramscici mantık açıktır: Fikirlerin kurumsal yuvaları vardır. Milei'nin stratejisi sol eğilimli kurumları çökertmek ve yerlerine, —piyasanın doğal ve kolektif örgütlenmenin zorbalık olduğu iddiasıyla— farklı bir anlayış üreten kurumları koymaktır. Sınıfsal tersyüz etme harekâtı daha kesin olamazdı. Gramsci karşı-hegemonyayı, sömürülenlerin kendi kurtuluşlarının temellerini inşa edebilecekleri bir araç olarak teorize etmişti. Milei, tek bir yılda Arjantin'in reel ücretlerini yüzde otuz düşüren politikaları uygularken, aynı teorik çerçeveyi mali sermayenin ülke işçileri üzerindeki iktidarını pekiştirmek için kullandı. Silah, yapıldığı amaç doğrultusunda değil, onu kullanmaları için yapılan insanlara karşı çevrilmiştir.

Giorgia Meloni ve Alessandro Giuli: Post-Faşizmin Kültürel Devrimi

Gramsci'nin doğduğu, hapsedildiği ve öldüğü ülkede — İtalya'da — mirasının post-faşist sağ tarafından sahiplenilmesi özellikle acı bir ironiye sahiptir. Kökleri doğrudan Mussolini rejiminin gazileri tarafından kurulan İtalyan Sosyal Hareketi'ne uzanan Fratelli d'Italia'nın başkanı Giorgia Meloni, solun savaş sonrası kültürel hegemonyasını kırma ihtiyacından açıkça söz eden bir hükümetin başındadır.

En açık ifade, Meloni'nin 2024'te Kültür Bakanı olarak atadığı Alessandro Giuli'den geldi. Giuli, üniversitelerde, devlet yayıncılığında, müzelerde ve sanat vakıflarında muhafazakâr figürlere yer açmak için sağın kültürel kurumlarda bir "mevzi savaşı" yürütme ihtiyacından uzun uzun söz etti. Söz dağarcığı tartışmasız biçimde Gramscicidir. Siyaset ise Gramsci'nin tersyüz edilmiş hâlidir..

Meloni'nin Gramsci'nin gerçek mirasıyla ilişkisi tek bir biyografik ayrıntıda özetlenebilir: Gramsci'nin tutulduğu ve sağlığının tahrip edildiği hapishane, siyasi torunları bugün İtalya'yı yöneten faşist devlet tarafından işletiliyordu. Onun beyninin yirmi yıl susturulmasını talep eden savcılar, Meloni'nin partisinin soyunduğu hareketin hizmetçileriydi. Bu hareketin siyasi mirasçılarının şimdi Gramsci'nin stratejik kavramlarını sahiplenmesi ironi değildir. Bir kutsala el koymadır.

Fransız Yeni Sağı: Yukarıdan Sınıf Savaşı Olarak Metasiyaset

1968'de kurulan araştırma grubu GRECE ile başta Alain de Benoist'ın adıyla özdeşleşen Fransız Nouvelle Droite, Avrupa aşırı sağının entelektüel olarak en sofistike Gramsci sahiplenmesini temsil eder. De Benoist ve yol arkadaşları, métapolitique dedikleri stratejileri konusunda Gramsci'ye olan borçlarını en başından itibaren açıkça kabul ettiler. Yaptıkları şuydu: Sıradan seçim siyaseti öncesinde ve sırasında kültürel ve felsefi varsayımların hedefli olarak ve sabırla yeniden şekillendirilmesi. Sağın uzun yürüyüşü kurumlardan geçiyordu.

Daha yakın tarihe gelindiğinde, Marine Le Pen'in yeğeni Marion Maréchal açıkça kendini "sağın Gramscicisi" olarak nitelendirmiş ve muhafazakâr bir karşı-hegemonik entelektüel kadro inşa etme fikrine dayalı olarak Lyon'da Sciences Po'yu kurmuştur. Dili Gramscicidir. Siyaseti Avrupa milliyetçi sağına özgürdür.

Ortak Efendi: Sermayenin Birçok Yüzü

Bannon, Milei, Meloni, de Benoist, Maréchal… Bu figürler çok farklı siyasi eğilimleri temsil eder gibi görünür. Ekonomi politikası, devletin rolü, din ve Avrupa entegrasyonu konusunda birbirlerinden ayrışırlar. Yine de sınıf analiziyle — Gramsci'nin kendi perspektifiyle — incelendiğinde, farklılıkları temel bir işlev birliğini ortaya koyar. Her biri, kendi ulusal bağlamında ve siyasi kayıt defterinde, aynı projeyle meşguldür: Örgütlü işçi sınıfı siyasetinin tehdidine karşı kapitalist sınıf iktidarının savunulması ve yeniden üretimi.

Bannon'ın milliyetçiliği işçiye karşı finansal ve sınai sermayenin hizmetindedir. Milei'nin liberteryenizmi, devletin zorlayıcı işlevlerini sağlam bırakırken refah devletine ve iş mevzuatına saldırır. Meloni'nin kültürel muhafazakârlığı Avrupa'daki kemer sıkmacı sermayesinin politikalarıyla birlikte yürür. De Benoist'ın etnik metasiyaseti sınıf sömürüsünü “kültürel kader” olarak doğallaştırmaya çalışır. Maréchal'ın kimlikçiliği işçi sınıfı öfkesini sermayeye değil göçmenlere yönlendirir.

Farklı sahnelerde boy gösterirler, farklı dillerde konuşurlar, farklı siyasi kostümler giyerler. Ama ortak bir yapısal konumu paylaşırlar: Her biri kendi bağlamında, mevcut üretim ilişkilerinin — üretim araçlarının özel mülkiyetine dayalı ve satacak yalnızca emekleri olanları sömüren toplumsal düzenin — savunucusudur. Hizmet ettikleri efendi budur. Bu bir komplo ya da eşgüdümlü bir plan değildir, yapısal bir çıkar gereğidir: Sermayenin kendini yeniden üretmedeki ve bunu tehdit eden her türlü siyaseti bastırmadaki çıkarı…

Sağın sahte Gramscicileri, Gramsci'den kültürün sınıf mücadelesinin bir alanı olduğunu öğrenmişlerdir. Kasıtlı olarak üstünü örttükleri şey, Gramsci'nin o mücadelenin karşı tarafında olduğudur. Onu yanlış okumadılar. Ondan çaldılar. Bu bir hırsızlıktır ve bu adla anılmalıdır.

DÖRDÜNCÜ BÖLÜM: Türkiye Laboratuvarı

1980 Darbesi, Sivil Toplum Operasyonu ve Devrimci Solun Tasfiyesi

Darbe ve Entelektüel Yaşam Üzerindeki Etkileri

12 Eylül 1980'de Türk Silahlı Kuvvetleri, ülkenin modern tarihinin en belirleyici siyasi olaylarından biri olacak olan bir askeri darbeyle iktidarı ele geçirdi. Kenan Evren cuntası parlamentoyu feshetti, tüm siyasi partileri yasakladı, on binlerce sendikacıyı, sosyalisti ve solcuyu tutukladı. Bugün bazı değişikliklere hâlâ Türk devletinin temel hukuki çerçevesi olan bir anayasayı, 1982'de askeri yönetim koşullarında yapılan göstermelik bir referandumla yürürlüğe soktu.

Fiziksel baskı zalimce ve sistemliydi. Yüz binlerce kişi gözaltına alındı. İşkence yaygın ve kurumsaldı. Onlarca kişi idam edildi. 1970'lerde gerçek kalite ve nitelikte bir militan, teorisyen ve örgütçü kuşağı yetiştiren, bölgenin en canlı ve savaşkan hareketlerinden biri olan örgütlü Türk solu başsız bırakıldı. Partileri yasaklandı, gazeteleri kapatıldı, önderleri hapsedildi ya da sürgüne gitmek zorunda bırakıldı, tabanı yıllarca sürecek taciz, gözetim ve şiddet altında ezildi.

Ama fiziksel baskı, işçi sınıfı ve entelektüel yaşamında derin kökleri olan bir siyasi geleneği kalıcı olarak etkisizleştiremez. Dikta yönetimi bunu anlıyordu. Böylece sopalar ile işkence hücrelerinin yanı sıra, pek çok bakımdan baskının kendisinden daha kalıcı sonuçlar doğurmuş daha ince bir operasyon devreye sokuldu. Bu ideolojik operasyondu: Sol aydınların enerjilerini devrimci siyasetten sistem-uyumlu bir liberalizme — mevcut düzene hiçbir tehdit oluşturmayan bir liberalizme — yönlendirmek için kasıtlı olarak beslenen ve desteklenen "sivil toplum" söylemi piyasaya sürüldü.

Tasfiye Projesi Olarak Sivil Toplum

"Sivil toplum" kavramı, Türk entelektüel yaşamına 1980'lerin başında girerken, hem askeri otoritarizme hem de karikatürize edilmiş “Türk solunun ‘Jakobenist’ devletçiliği”ne karşı alternatif bir söylem kullanıyordu. Türk solunu pasifleştirmede açık çıkarı olan Batı Avrupa ve Amerikan kaynaklarınca doğrudan ya da dolaylı biçimde finanse edilen dergi, vakıf ve akademik kurumlar, devrimci siyaset ve sınıf mücadelesini değil, siyasal iktidarı denetleyebilecek özerk bir sivil toplumun inşasını savunan aydınlara platform sağladı.

Bu söylemin, özellikle 12 Eylül travmasından sağ çıkmış aydınlar için cazip olan yüzeysel bir inandırıcılığı vardı. Ama teorik yenilik gibi görünen şey, gerçekte bir tasfiye projesiydi. Türkiye'deki "sivil toplum" söylemi, Gramsci'nin sivil toplum kavramını sınıf içeriğinden ve devrimci amacından kopararak onu sınıf mücadelesinin bir alanından kapitalist düzenle bağdaşan — ve nihayetinde ona tabi olan — liberal çoğulculuğun bir alanına dönüştürdü.

Sonuçlar kesin ve yıkıcıydı. Sivil toplum söylemi sol aydın enerjisini devlet iktidarı sorusundan devleti sınırlandırma sorusuna yöneltti: Sınıf niteliğini sağlam bırakırken devletin otoriter eğilimlerini nasıl frenleriz? Modern Prens'in yerini STK, vakıf, akademik konferans ve politika eleştirileri aldı. Sınıf hareketine bağlı organik aydının yerini, öncelikle hibe koşullarına hesap veren, Avrupa vakıfları tarafından finanse edilen profesyonel sivil toplum aktivisti aldı.

"Jakobenizm"in Kötülenmesi ve Devrimci İradenin Yok Edilmesi

Bu tasfiye projesinin merkezinde "Jakobenizm"in sistematik biçimde kötülenmesi yer aldı. Bu terim, stratejik bir belirsizlikle, devlet iktidarını devrim yoluyla dönüştürmeyi amaçlayan her türlü örgütlü siyasi iradeye karşı olumsuz bir anlam yüklenerek kullanıldı. Sivil toplumcu çerçevede Jakobenlik, Türk solunda sözde yanlış gitmiş her şeyi temsil ediyordu. Örgütsel disiplin "otoriterlik" olarak yaftalandı. Her şeyden önemlisi, tarihin örgütlü siyasi müdahale yoluyla bilinçli olarak şekillendirilebileceği inancı reddedildi. Belirli bir taktiğe değil, devrimci siyasetin bizatihi önkoşuluna saldırılıyordu.

Gramsci'nin kendi analizinde Jakobenizm'in oldukça farklı bir şeyi temsil ettiğini belirtmek gerekir. Hapishane Defterleri'nde Gramsci, Jakobenleri Fransız burjuva devriminin en enerjik ve etkili fraksiyonu olarak, kendi sınıflarının dolaysız çıkarlarının ötesine geçme ve eski düzenin direnişine karşı devrimci bir toplumsal dönüşümü dayatma isteklilikleri sayesinde tam da bu denli belirleyici oldukları için analiz etti. Gramsci için Jakoben enerji, işçi sınıfının taklit edip aşması gereken bir nitelikti; tedavi edilmesi gereken bir hastalık değil…

Bu analizi tersyüz ederek — yani "Jakobenizmi"i siyasi tiranlığın eş anlamlısına dönüştürerek — sivil toplumcular kesin bir ideolojik hizmet sundu: Solu kendi örgütsel kapasitesinden korkmaya, kendi siyasi hırslarından utanmaya ve kendi tarihinden kuşku duymaya koşulladılar. Kendi "Jakoben" eğilimlerinden korkmak üzere koşullandırılmış sol, kendi siyasi güçsüzlüğünü kabul etmek üzere koşullandırılmış soldur.

Burjuvazinin İstihdam Operasyonu

Bir kısım sol aydınlar devrimci siyaseti sivil toplum söylemi için terk ederken, Türk burjuvazisi kendini beklenmedik bir kaynağa kavuştu: Sınıf mücadelesinden vazgeçmiş ama analitik becerilerini ve toplumsal ilişkilerini koruyan yetenekli, eğitimli, siyasi deneyimli bireylerden oluşan bir havuzdu bu.

Bazıları sosyalist siyasetten Türkiye'nin neoliberal dönüşümüne entelektüel meşruiyet sağlayan piyasacı-liberal çerçevelerin üretimine geçti. Marksist bir entelektüel gelenekte geliştirilen analitik beceriler, Marksistlerin yıkmayı amaçladığı sistemin savunusu için yeniden yönlendirildi. Diğerleri merkez-sol partilerin yörüngesine girdiler; burada entelektüel güvenilirlikleri, gerçekte programları Türk burjuva modernizminin programları olan partilere ilerici bir görünüş kattılar.

Başka bir kısmı ise STK sektöründe kariyer inşa etti — insan hakları örgütleri, kadın hakları vakıfları, çoğu Avrupa ve Amerikan kaynaklı demokratikleşme girişimleri… STK sektörü solun entelektüel ve örgütsel yeteneğinin önemli bir bölümünü emdi ve mevcut sistem içinde savunuculuğa yöneltti. Sonuç, meşgul, profesyonel ve uluslararası bağlantılı bir sol oldu ve tam da önemli alanlarda siyasi açıdan marjinal kaldı. Sol, kırk yılı aşkın depolitizasyonla örgütsel kapasitesi tahrip edilmiş, entelektüel kadroları STK'lara ve akademik kurumlara dağılmış, teorik çerçeveleri devlet iktidarını ele geçirmekten çok eleştirmeye yönelmiş olarak toplumsal dönüşümlere gebe dönemeçlere hazırlıksız yakalandı. Bugün hâlâ hazırlıksız.

Sonuç: Susturulmak İstenen Beyni Geri Almak

Antonio Gramsci 27 Nisan 1937'de öldü. Kırk altı yaşındaydı. Bedeni on bir yıllık faşist tutukluluğun tahrip ettiği şeydi. Savcının yirmi yıl boyunca susturulmasını istediği beyin — o beyin — bu koşullar altında yirminci yüzyılın en önemli devrimci teorisi gövdelerinden birini üretmişti.

Bu teori, ölümünün ardından geçen on yıllarda hem soldan hem sağdan yürütülen sistematik bir çarpıtma, sahiplenme ve etkisizleştirme kampanyasına maruz kalmıştır. Akademik sol — Laclau ve Mouffe'un sınıf-sonrası "radikal demokrasi"sinden Butler'ın toplumsal cinsiyet performatifliğine, Frankfurt Okulu'nun kültürel karamsarlığından Althusser'in yapısalcı labirentine, Marcuse'un devrimci olana karşı karşı-kültürel olanı ikamesiyle Žižek'in gösteri yoluyla siyasi felç etmesine — Gramsci'nin kavramlarını sınıf içeriklerinden boşaltmış ve mevzi savaşını devrime doğru inşa etme stratejisinden varışı olmayan akademik bir yorum durumuna dönüştürmüştür.

Sağ — Bannon'ın milliyetçi plütokrasisinden Milei'nin anarko-kapitalist kemer sıkmasına, Meloni'nin post-faşist kültürel muhafazakârlığından Fransız Yeni Sağı'nın etnik metasiyasetine — Gramsci'nin stratejik yöntemini çalarken amacını tersyüz etmiş, karşı-hegemoni araçlarını onu meydan okumak için hayatını adadığı hegemonik düzeni savunmak ve pekiştirmek için kullanmıştır. Türkiye'de 12 Eylül sonrası dönemin sivil toplum operasyonu her iki çarpıtmayı eşzamanlı olarak gerçekleştirdi: Gramsci'nin bozulmuş bir sivil toplumcu okumasını devrimci solu tasfiye etmek için konuşlandırdı ve solun kendi terk ettiği ideolojik alanı otoriter sağ kanatlı bir hareketin gerçek karşı-hegemonyas inşa etmesi için açtı.

Bu çarpıtmalar ilk bakışta çelişkili görünür. New York üniversitesindeki sınıf-sonrası akademisyen ile Buenos Aires'teki liberteryenci kültür savaşçısı arasında pek ortak şey varmış gibi görünmez. Frankfurt Okulu eleştirel teorisyeni ile Steve Bannon siyasi yelpazenin zıt uçlarında yer alıyor gibi görünür. Türk sivil toplumcu STK profesyoneli ile Giorgia Meloni'nin kültürel muhafazakârı doğal düşmanlar gibi görünür.

Ama sınıf analizinin — Gramsci'nin kendi perspektifinin — merceğinden bakıldığında, farklılıkları temel bir işlev birliğine erir. Her biri, kendi farklı biçiminde, egemen sınıfın her zaman kendi en temel tehdidi olarak belirlediği tek siyasi projenin etkisizleştirilmesine katkıda bulunur: kendi devrimci partisi önderliğinde, karşı-hegemonyayı devlet iktidarının ele geçirilmesinin ve sömürüye değil kolektif insan kurtuluşuna dayalı bir toplumsal düzenin inşasının koşullarını hazırlayan çalışma olarak örgütlü işçi sınıfı.

Görünürde farklı efendilere hizmet ederler. Özde tek birine: kendi sonsuz yeniden üretimindeki ve bunu tehdit eden her türlü siyaseti bastırmadaki çıkarındaki sermayenin sınıf iktidarına.

Gramsci'yi geri almak, her şeyden önce bunu adlandırmak demektir. Hapishane Defterlerini olduğu şey olarak okumak demektir — bir faşist hapishanede, devrimci hareketin daha iyi somut çalışma araçlarına kavuşması amacıyla kaleme alınmış devrimci bir komünistin eserleri — herhangi bir siyasi amaç için kullanılabilecek esnek bir kültürel teori olarak değil. Her çarpıtmanın bastırdığı üç noktada ısrar etmek demektir: hegemonyanın bir sınıf mücadelesi kavramı olduğunda; mevzi savaşının devrimi hazırladığında ama onun yerini almadığında; ve Modern Prens'in — hizmet ettiği işçi sınıfına hesap veren örgütlü devrimci parti — isteğe bağlı olmadığında.

Gramsci'nin beynini yirmi yıl susturmayı talep eden savcı, hem solun hem de sağın çarpıtıcılarının bilmezden geldiğini biliyordu: bu fikirler, doğru anlaşılıp doğru uygulandığında, mevcut düzen için tehlikelidir. 1926'da tehlikeliydiler. Bugün hâlâ tehlikeliler. Bu yüzden geri alınmaları gerekir — akademik mülkiyet olarak değil, herhangi bir ideolojik rengin kültür savaşçıları için stratejik ilham olarak değil, Gramsci'nin onları olması için tasarladığı şey olarak: kaybedecekleri zincirlerinden başka bir şeyleri olmayanların elindeki silahlar.【●】

(Makalenin aslı İngilizce olarak yazılmış, yazar tarafından Türkçeye çevrilmiştir.)

—

Ek okuma:

-Greg Godels, "Antonio Gramsci: Theirs and Ours," MLToday (mltoday.com);

-Greg Godels, ZZ's Blog (zzs-blg.blogspot.com);

-Pat Cummings, "Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?", Substack (patcummings.substack.com).

Milo, makalesinde şunları söylüyor:

«Bu makale, İngilizce konuşulan dünyada büyük olasılıkla adı duyulmamış olan ve çalışmaları daha geniş bir ilgi hak eden bir Rus tarihçiye ilişkin son derece kısa bir giriş niteliğindedir. Makale, Balayev’in “Büyük Terör Efsanesi” adlı kitabının ilk paragrafını bile özetlemiyor ve onun kitaplarını ve makalelerini okumanın yerine geçmemelidir.»

Milo'nun yazısının İngilizce aslına aşaǧıdaki baǧlantıdan erişilebilir:

https://open.substack.com/pub/milo1949/p/investigating-the-myth-of-the-great?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2qxqbt

Not London. Not a borrowed grandeur on someone else's soil. This is India — his country, his city, his continent. The hotel has no star rating because star ratings are for people who need reassurance. This place exists above that grammar entirely: private floors with private butlers, a dining room where the air itself seems to have been imported, where the floral arrangements alone cost what a schoolteacher earns in a year in the state just beyond these walls.

The billionaire belongs here. He built here, or inherited here, or both — the distinction barely matters at this altitude of wealth. Outside, the street is his country. Inside, the room is his. And yet.

Two waiters approach the table. Young, English, passing through on some hospitality rotation that will look well on a CV back in Bristol or Edinburgh. They reach for the chairs.

The billionaire is already rising. Already moving.

"Oh, please — you are English. I cannot allow this. I cannot allow you to serve us."

The waiters exchange a glance. Uncertain. They say nothing.

"Please. Sit with us. Honour us with your company."

There is no irony in his voice. No performance for an audience he knows is watching. This is a man alone with his convictions, and his conviction, at this moment, is that the young Englishmen standing before him — salaried, junior, guest workers in someone else's country — occupy a place above him that money cannot touch and ownership cannot revoke. He insists. He insists again. The warmth in his voice makes refusal feel like cruelty.

They sit.

And something shifts. The uncertainty in the waiters' faces slowly resolves into something else — a kind of ease, a settling into the offered position. They begin to speak. And as they do, a curious transformation occurs: the dialect softens, the vowels lengthen, the consonants sharpen into something crisp and deliberate — an English that is more English than the English they speak among themselves, an exaggerated precision that signals, consciously or not, their acceptance of the role they have just been assigned. Guests of honour. Representatives of something. The accent is a costume they are putting on in real time.

The documentary holds the frame without comment. What it captures is a room in which two young men from Bristol or Edinburgh are performing Englishness for a billionaire who asked them to — in his own country, at his own table, with his own money. And all three parties find this perfectly natural.

The empire ended. The nervous system did not.

***

Now place beside this another scene. No camera. A drawing room in Ankara, sometime in the mid-twentieth century. Nurullah Ataç — the most feared and celebrated literary critic in Turkey, a man whose single article could open or close the future of a novelist or a poet — is being flattered by an admirer.

"Sir," the admirer says, "you speak French like a Frenchman, don't you?"

It is meant as a compliment. The highest compliment, in fact, that this world knows how to give: you have transcended what you are. You have passed. You have arrived.

Ataç's answer comes without pause.

"No. Why? Am I disguising as a spy? I speak French like a Turk."

The admirer falls silent. The compliment has been returned, unopened.

This is not false modesty. Ataç's French was flawless — those who heard him knew it. The point was not competence. The point was the assumption embedded in the compliment itself: that sounding like a Frenchman was the destination, and sounding like a Turk was the obstacle to be overcome. Ataç refused the entire architecture of that assumption in a single sentence. He did not want to pass. He had nowhere to pass to. He was already somewhere.

Two scenes. Two responses to the same gravitational pull. In the hotel in India, a billionaire offers his chair and his deference to men who work for wages, because something in him has decided that their origin outranks his fortune. In the drawing room in Ankara, a critic declines to be flattered by the suggestion that he has successfully imitated his betters, because he does not recognize the category.

The difference between these two men is not intelligence. It is not education. It is not even political consciousness, necessarily. It is something prior to all of these: the presence or absence of what Fanon called the zone of non-being — that interior space the colonized subject is taught to feel as lack, as deficit, as the distance between what he is and what he ought to become.

The billionaire lives in that zone and has furnished it magnificently. Ataç had never moved in.

This is where the comprador intellectual is born — not in poverty, not in ignorance, but in that zone. And it is from there that he does his most consequential work.

The Invisible Chain

The comprador intellectual did not arrive with the gunboats. He was not conscripted at gunpoint, did not sign a treaty under duress, did not collaborate out of naked fear. This is precisely what makes him interesting — and what makes him so difficult to see.

The word comprador comes from the Portuguese: to buy. In the political economy of nineteenth-century China, it named a specific figure: the local merchant who served as intermediary between foreign trading companies and the domestic market. He knew the terrain the foreigner did not. He spoke the languages, held the relationships, understood the customs. He was indispensable — and that indispensability was the source of both his privilege and his structural position. He did not work for imperialism with a gun to his head. He worked for it because imperialism was where the trade was, and trade was where his livelihood was. His cooperation was not coerced. It was structured.

Marx saw this clearly before anyone had theorized it as such. "The ideas of the ruling class," he wrote in The German Ideology, "are in every epoch the ruling ideas: i.e., the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production." The merchant who controls the port also, in time, controls what passes as knowledge about trade, about value, about what is worth producing and for whom.

Lenin sharpened the instrument. Imperialism, he argued, was not simply conquest — not the old project of incorporating territory into a sovereign realm. It was something qualitatively new: the export of capital, the formation of monopolies, the extraction of surplus value across national boundaries through the mechanisms of finance. And with it came something equally new: an intellectual aristocracy in the metropolis, bribed with a fraction of the colonial surplus into defending the system that produced it. Lenin was writing about the labour aristocracy of the imperialist core. But the structure he described — a stratum materially rewarded for its ideological service — extends, with modifications, to the periphery. The comprador intellectual is the intellectual aristocracy of the global South: rewarded not in wages but in prestige, in publication, in the currency of metropolitan recognition.

Rosa Luxemburg saw what the economists preferred not to: that capitalist accumulation required, as a structural condition, the systematic plunder of non-capitalist societies. The metropolis did not merely trade with the periphery. It fed on it — on its land, its labour, its raw materials, its captive markets. Luxemburg was writing about cotton and rubber and grain. But the logic extends. The metropolis feeds also on intellectual raw material: on the problems of the periphery, on its histories, its crises, its peoples — as objects of metropolitan theory, processed in metropolitan institutions, validated by metropolitan journals, and returned to the periphery as finished goods bearing the seal of universal knowledge. The epistemological circuit mirrors the economic one. The periphery exports raw experience. The metropolis exports theory.

It was Gramsci who gave us the concept that makes the comprador intellectual visible as a type rather than a failure of individual character. Every social order, Gramsci argued, produces its own organic intellectuals — those who give it coherence, articulate its worldview, manage its cultural reproduction. The bourgeoisie produces economists, jurists, philosophers, journalists. These are not propagandists in the crude sense; they are the class's thinking organs, the people who make its particular interests appear as universal reason.

The comprador intellectual is organic — but organic to a class whose interests are not identical with those of the society it inhabits. He is the thinking organ of a local ruling class that has articulated its own reproduction with the reproduction of the imperialist system. He does not serve imperialism because he is corrupt. He serves it because that is what being organic to his class means. His thought is not distorted thought. It is perfectly functional thought — functioning, however, for a set of interests that are not those of the people whose culture and crises provide his raw material.

Paulin Hountondji named this with surgical precision: epistemological extraversion. "Theoretical demand," he wrote, "comes from outside, just like economic demand." The periphery intellectual produces for an external market — his questions are shaped by what the North finds interesting, his frameworks validated by what the North has already authorized, his career contingent on what the North is willing to publish. He is not lying. He is not even, necessarily, fully aware of it. He has simply learned, as the billionaire in that hotel dining room learned before him, which direction the gravitational field runs.

And this is where the invisible chain becomes most invisible. The billionaire at least produces a visible scene — a body inclining, a chair offered, a documentary camera capturing the reflex in real time. The comprador intellectual produces only text, only argument, only the perfectly reasonable case for why the North's questions are the important questions, why the North's frameworks are the rigorous frameworks, why the North's approval is the meaningful approval.

He does not bow with his body. He restructures reality with his mind, on behalf of those who benefit from that restructuring, and calls it scholarship.

***

Fanon brought to this analysis something Marx and Lenin could not — not because they lacked the conceptual tools, but because the phenomenon itself had not yet fully crystallized: the mass production of colonized intellectuals trained in metropolitan institutions, returning home with degrees and a restructured self. In Black Skin, White Masks, he described what happens when a subject is constituted not through his own gaze but through the gaze of the colonizer — when the image he holds of himself is not his own construction but a reflection imposed from outside, distorted by the need of power to see itself confirmed in the eyes of the dominated. This is not false consciousness in the simple Marxist sense. It is something more intimate: a restructuring of the self at the level of desire, of aspiration, of what one reaches for when no one is watching.

The colonized intellectual, Fanon argued, passes through recognizable stages. First, assimilation — the desperate effort to prove equivalence, to speak the colonizer's language without accent, to master the colonizer's culture without remainder. Then, a turn toward the native past — a romanticization of pre-colonial life that is itself, Fanon noted with characteristic sharpness, a product of the colonial encounter rather than a recovery from it. And then, in the most advanced cases, a genuine rupture — the recognition that liberation is not a cultural project but a political and material one, inseparable from the organized struggle of the people.

The comprador intellectual, in Fanon's schema, is the one who completes the first stage and mistakes it for the last. He has assimilated so thoroughly that he experiences his assimilation as achievement rather than loss. He has learned to ask the metropolis's questions, to answer them in the metropolis's frameworks, to experience the metropolis's approval as the confirmation of his own worth. And he has done this so completely that he cannot see it happening — because the self that would see it has been replaced by the self that benefits from not seeing.

This is the zone of non-being made comfortable. This is the billionaire's dining room, furnished in mahogany and self-congratulation.

Samir Amin gave the economic structure of this phenomenon its most precise formulation. The periphery, he argued, is not merely underdeveloped — it is structured for extraversion. Its economies are organized not around the needs of their own populations but around the extraction of value for the benefit of the centre. The cotton is grown for Lancashire, not for Cairo. The copper is mined for Detroit, not for Kinshasa. And this structural extraversion has its epistemological mirror: the intellectuals of the periphery are trained to produce not for the needs of their own societies but for the theoretical appetite of the metropolis. Their questions are metropolitan questions. Their frameworks are metropolitan frameworks. Their careers are built on metropolitan recognition.

Amin called the political response to this delinking — the deliberate, organized rupture from the circuits of imperialist accumulation, the construction of an autonomous development path oriented toward the needs of the periphery's own populations. He was writing primarily about economic policy. But the concept translates. Intellectual delinking means precisely what Ataç demonstrated in that Ankara drawing room: the refusal to organize one's thought around the need for metropolitan approval, the insistence on asking one's own questions in one's own way, the recognition that sounding like a Frenchman is not an achievement but a surrender.

Edward Said occupies a more complicated position in this analysis — and must be treated as such, not out of deference but out of precision. Orientalism was a genuine and important intervention: it named the discursive machinery by which the West constructed the East as its inferior other, and it showed how this construction served political and colonial purposes. This was necessary work. But Said's framework has a structural limitation that his admirers have been reluctant to name.

Said worked within the tradition of literary and cultural criticism. His analysis of power was discursive — it concerned representations, narratives, imaginative geographies. What it could not do, and did not attempt to do, was connect these representations to the material circuits that produced and sustained them. There is no class analysis in Said. There is no theory of imperialism in the Leninist sense. There is no account of why certain representations are produced, by whom, for whose benefit, sustained by what institutional and economic arrangements. The discourse floats free of the structure that generates it.

The consequence is that Orientalism, for all its brilliance, cannot explain the comprador intellectual — because the comprador intellectual is not primarily a problem of representation. He is a problem of class position, of institutional location, of the material rewards that flow from epistemological extraversion. He does not simply reproduce Orientalist tropes. He may, in fact, vigorously critique them — and still function as a comprador, because his critique is produced for metropolitan consumption, validated by metropolitan institutions, and serves the metropolitan need for a certain kind of self-critical sophistication that leaves the underlying structure intact.

This is what Amin could explain and Said could not. The comprador intellectual who writes brilliant Orientalism critiques for Duke University Press, draws a salary from a North American research university, and is cited primarily in metropolitan journals is not outside the circuit Amin described. He is its most refined product.

The Mechanisms of Conscription

The comprador intellectual is not recruited. He is produced. And the machinery of his production is so normalized, so thoroughly woven into what passes for merit and excellence, that it has become effectively invisible — which is, of course, precisely the point.

The first mechanism is the prestige economy. Metropolitan universities — Harvard, Oxford, the Sorbonne, the grandes ecoles — function not merely as educational institutions but as the licensing bodies of global intellectual legitimacy. A degree from one of these institutions does not simply certify competence; it confers a particular kind of authority that no provincial excellence can replicate. The periphery intellectual who passes through these institutions returns home transformed — not only by what he has learned, but by the fact of having been there. He carries the seal. And the seal, in the intellectual marketplace of the periphery, is worth more than the content it certifies.

This is not accidental. The concentration of intellectual prestige in metropolitan institutions is itself a historical product of imperialism — of the deliberate destruction of indigenous educational systems, of the channeling of colonial resources into the construction of metropolitan centres of learning, of the decades-long policy of training peripheral elites in metropolitan institutions precisely so that they would return home speaking the colonizer's language, asking the colonizer's questions, administering the colonizer's systems with the colonizer's tools. The prestige economy did not arise organically. It was built, and it was built for a purpose.

The second mechanism is what might be called — with deliberate bluntness — brain capture. The scholarship, the doctoral fellowship, the visiting professorship, the research grant: these are the instruments by which the metropolis draws the most gifted minds of the periphery into its own circuits. The language used to describe this process is the language of opportunity, of excellence rewarded, of the free movement of talent across borders. What it does not say is that the talent moves in one direction, that the institutional frameworks which receive it are not neutral containers but active shapers of what questions get asked and what answers are considered acceptable, and that the career structures which reward it are organized around the needs and interests of metropolitan knowledge production.

Some of these institutions have documented connections to intelligence services and foreign policy establishments that their current inhabitants prefer not to examine too closely. The relationship between certain area studies programmes and Cold War strategic interests, between certain development economics departments and the interests of international financial institutions, between certain human rights research centres and the foreign policy priorities of their host governments — these are not conspiracy theories. They are matters of historical record, available to anyone willing to look. The comprador intellectual, characteristically, tends not to look.

The third mechanism is NGO-ization. Since the 1980s, the proliferation of non-governmental organizations funded by metropolitan foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Soros, Gates, and their counterparts — has created an alternative institutional structure for peripheral intellectuals who do not make the journey to metropolitan universities. This structure is not without its genuine achievements. But its terms are set elsewhere. The Ford Foundation does not fund research into the structural causes of the poverty it claims to address. The Soros network does not fund analysis that identifies its own operations as components of a hegemonic system. The vocabulary of civil society, good governance, human rights, and democratization — the vocabulary that metropolitan funding requires — is not a neutral vocabulary. It is the vocabulary of a particular vision of social order, one that is entirely compatible with the continuation of the economic arrangements that produce the conditions these organizations claim to ameliorate.

The peripheral intellectual who builds his career within this structure learns, with remarkable speed, which questions can be asked and which cannot. He learns that structural analysis of imperialist extraction is not fundable, that class analysis makes donors uncomfortable, that the language of systemic critique must be carefully modulated into the language of reform, of capacity building, of stakeholder engagement. He does not experience this as censorship. He experiences it as professionalization.

The fourth mechanism is the psychological. Fanon described it, but it bears elaborating in the specific context of intellectual production. The colonized subject who has been trained to experience metropolitan approval as the measure of his own worth does not simply seek that approval instrumentally — he needs it, in the way one needs the confirmation of a mirror that has been made the only mirror available. The citation in a metropolitan journal, the invitation to a metropolitan conference, the positive review from a metropolitan scholar: these are not merely career milestones. They are, for the comprador intellectual, ontological events. They confirm that he exists, that his thought is thought, that his voice is a voice worth hearing.

This need is the invisible engine of epistemological extraversion. It explains why the comprador intellectual continues to produce for a metropolitan market even when he is materially secure, even when his local audience would be more than sufficient, even when he knows — if he allows himself to know — that the metropolitan institutions which validate him are themselves embedded in the structures he claims to critique. The chain is not economic, at this level. It is psychic. And psychic chains, as Fanon understood, are the hardest to break — because breaking them requires not merely a change of position but a reconstruction of the self.

The fifth mechanism is the most paradoxical, and therefore the most important to understand. It is the radical comprador — the intellectual who makes his career from the critique of imperialism, of colonialism, of hegemony, of Eurocentrism, and who does so entirely within the circuits of metropolitan validation. He publishes his critiques at Duke University Press. He delivers his indictments of Western knowledge production at conferences funded by Western universities. He collects his salary from institutions whose endowments are built on the very accumulation he theorizes. And he is celebrated, in metropolitan academic circles, for doing so — because a certain kind of critique, when it remains safely within the bounds of discursive analysis, when it generates no organizational threat, when it produces no program of action oriented toward the actual transformation of the structures it describes, is not dangerous to those structures. It is useful to them. It performs the function of self-criticism, which sophisticated hegemonic systems require in order to renew themselves.

This is the comprador intellectual at his most consequential — and his most invisible. The crude collaborator, the straightforward apologist for power, is easy to identify and easy to dismiss. The radical comprador is far more dangerous, because he occupies the position of critic while performing the function of stabilizer. He gives the system a conscience it does not actually have, and in doing so, he makes the system more durable.

There is a word in Ottoman Turkish that captures this structure more precisely than any contemporary social science vocabulary: devshirme. The children taken from the periphery of the empire — Serbian, Croatian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek — brought to its centre, and sorted by aptitude: the most gifted into the Enderun, the palace school, the institution that produced viziers, administrators, the thinking class of the imperial order. The less gifted into the Janissaries — the military instrument, disciplined and effective, but not entrusted with thought. In both cases, the child was first unmade: separated from his family, his language, his religion, his prior self. Then remade, in the image the centre required.

The most consequential thing about the Enderun was not what it taught. It was what it replaced. The child who entered as a Serbian or a Greek left as an Ottoman — and the more completely he made this transition, the higher he rose. His excellence was real. His transformation was real. And both were entirely in the service of a system he had not chosen and could not, from within, see whole.

The modern comprador intellectual is the devshirme of the imperialist knowledge order. The Enderun has been replaced by Harvard, by Oxford, by the Sorbonne. The mechanism has been modernized. The coercion has been made invisible. The child is no longer taken by force — he competes, eagerly, for the privilege of being unmade and remade. But the structure is the same: peripheral talent, central formation, and a self reconstructed in the image of what the centre needs.

A Typology of the World-System

The comprador intellectual is not a single figure. He is a structural position — and that position looks different depending on where in the world-system it is occupied. A typology is necessary, not for the sake of academic completeness, but because the mechanisms of conscription vary with the historical and geopolitical location of the periphery in question, and a theory that cannot account for these variations cannot serve as a guide to practice.

The first type is the most legible: the intellectual of the directly colonized periphery. In sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in the Caribbean, the comprador intellectual emerges directly from the institutional structures of colonial education — the mission school, the colonial university, the system designed not to produce thinkers but to produce administrators, translators, and intermediaries. Macaulay's famous minute on Indian education is the founding document of this project: the explicit intention to produce a class "Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect." The comprador intellectual of the directly colonized periphery is Macaulay's most successful product — and the success of the project is measured precisely by the fact that he no longer experiences himself as a product of anything. He experiences himself as educated.

The second type is less obvious and, for that reason, more instructive. It is the intellectual of the never-colonized but peripheralized former empire — Turkey, Russia, Iran, China. These are societies that possessed, before their encounter with Western modernity, autonomous and sophisticated intellectual traditions of their own. They were not colonized in the direct sense: no Macaulay wrote a minute about them, no mission school system was imposed on their children. And yet the outcome, at the level of intellectual production, often resembles the colonized case with remarkable fidelity.

The mechanism here is not imposition but aspiration — the aspiration of local ruling classes to integrate with the dominant global order on terms that required the progressive abandonment of indigenous intellectual frameworks. In Turkey, this took the form of the Westernizing reform project, whose intellectual dimension was the systematic privileging of European frameworks, European languages, and European validation over the rich Ottoman and Islamic intellectual heritage that preceded it. The comprador intellectual of this type (following the reforms envisaged by the Tanzimat Edict, issued by the ruling powers of the time in 1839, they came to be known as the ‘Tanzimat intellectuals’) is produced not by a colonial school system but by the choices of a modernizing elite that confused Westernization with development and metropolitan approval with intellectual legitimacy.

What makes this type particularly interesting — and particularly difficult to see — is the simultaneous operation of civilizational nostalgia alongside intellectual mimicry. The Turkish comprador intellectual may be deeply invested in Ottoman revival as a cultural-political project while simultaneously organizing his intellectual production entirely around the need for Western academic recognition. Another type of intellectual who publishes critiques of Western hegemony in English, in Western journals, for Western audiences, has not escaped the circuit he claims to critique. He has found a more sophisticated way of remaining within it. Civilizational pride and epistemological extraversion are not opposites. They are, in the Turkish and Russian cases especially, frequent companions.

The third type inhabits a position that is structurally anomalous but empirically important: the intellectual of the wealthy periphery within the formal North — Scandinavia, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the smaller European states. These are societies that are materially integrated into the imperialist core, that benefit from the extraction of surplus from the global South, and that in no meaningful sense can be described as dominated or dependent in economic terms. And yet their intellectual production is organized around an Anglo-American centre that they did not create and cannot control. The Norwegian sociologist publishes in English. The Belgian political theorist cites American and British authorities as the primary arbiters of whether an argument is theoretically serious. The New Zealand historian situates her work within frameworks developed at universities she has visited but does not inhabit.

This is epistemological extraversion without economic distress — comprador intellectualism as cultural habit rather than structural necessity. It is, in some ways, the purest form of the phenomenon, because it cannot be explained by material compulsion. No one is forcing the Scandinavian academic to organize her intellectual life around Anglo-American validation. She does so because the prestige economy has become so thoroughly internalized that it no longer presents itself as a choice. It presents itself as quality. To publish in Nature or the American Political Science Review is simply to do good work. That this definition of good work was constructed by and for a particular intellectual centre, and that it systematically marginalizes ways of knowing that did not develop within that centre, is not something the system encourages its participants to examine.

The fourth type is the most complex, and deserves extended treatment: India. India is simultaneously a directly colonized periphery — subjected to two centuries of British extraction, its educational systems deliberately restructured by Macaulay and his successors — and the inheritor of one of the world's most ancient and sophisticated intellectual traditions. This combination produces a comprador intellectual of unusual depth and unusual self-contradiction.

The Fanonian dynamic is nowhere more visible than in the Indian case. The Indian intellectual who has been educated in the Western tradition — at Oxford, at Columbia, at the London School of Economics — returns to a country whose civilization predates his educators' by millennia, and yet experiences, in certain rooms, in certain conversations, a familiar inclination: the sense that his thought requires metropolitan certification to be fully real. He may write brilliantly about decolonization. He may critique Eurocentrism with surgical precision. And he may do all of this while remaining entirely within the institutional and epistemological circuits that make his critique legible — and therefore safe — to the metropolis.

The Indian left intellectual who writes for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian — who has learned, with great sophistication, to translate the crises of Indian society into terms that metropolitan audiences find comprehensible and morally instructive — is not simply reporting. He is performing a function of mediation that has a structural location in the imperialist knowledge order. He is the comprador in his most articulate and most sympathetic form: a man who genuinely believes he is speaking truth to power, while speaking, primarily, to power's drawing room.

The partial exception — and it must be treated as partial — is the early Subaltern Studies project. The attempt to recover the history of peasant insurgency from below, to read colonial archives against the grain, to take seriously the political agency of those whom both colonial and nationalist historiography had rendered voiceless: this was a genuine methodological rupture. But the rupture was incomplete, and its incompleteness is instructive. Subaltern Studies was institutionalized in Western universities. Its key texts were published by Oxford University Press. Its theoretical interlocutors were, increasingly, Derrida and Foucault rather than Lenin and Luxemburg. The project that began as a critique of metropolitan knowledge ended, in significant measure, as a prestigious metropolitan sub-field. The devshirme system absorbed it.

The fifth position in this typology is not a type but a rupture — the moments and figures in which the comprador circuit is broken. Walter Rodney, whose How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was written not for metropolitan academic audiences but for the African working class, and who paid for this choice with his career and ultimately his life. Samir Amin, who spent decades building institutional alternatives to metropolitan knowledge structures — journals, research centres, intellectual networks — oriented toward the needs of the periphery's own populations. The early Via Campesina, which produced its own analysis of agrarian capitalism without reference to whether that analysis would be legible at Harvard. These are not romanticized exceptions. They are data points that tell us something about the conditions under which intellectual delinking becomes possible: an autonomous organizational base, material independence from metropolitan funding, and the deliberate cultivation of an audience that is not the metropolis.

The comprador intellectual cannot break the chain by thinking differently. He must be differently located — institutionally, materially, organizationally. This is Gramsci's lesson, applied to the epistemological question: the Modern Prince is not a concept. It is a political organization with the capacity to sustain an intellectual practice that the market, the foundation, and the metropolitan university will not sustain.

The Comprador Intellectual as Organic Intellectual of the Ruling Class

Gramsci's distinction between traditional and organic intellectuals is, by now, familiar enough to have been domesticated — cited in introductions, glossed in textbooks, and thereby stripped of its analytical edge. To recover that edge, it is necessary to insist on what Gramsci actually meant: not that some intellectuals are politically engaged and others are not, but that every intellectual, whether he knows it or not, is organically connected to a class — that is, performs a function in the reproduction of a particular social order, regardless of his subjective intentions or self-understanding.

The comprador intellectual is organic. This must be stated clearly, because the temptation — particularly among those who share his political vocabulary — is to treat him as a traditional intellectual gone astray, a potentially neutral figure who has been captured by the wrong interests and might, with sufficient persuasion, be recaptured. This is a misreading. The comprador intellectual is not a neutral figure who has been compromised. He is a functional figure who is performing, with considerable effectiveness, exactly the role that his class position requires of him.

And his class position is doubly determined. He is organic, first, to the local ruling class of his society — the class that has articulated its own reproduction with the reproduction of the imperialist system, that requires ideological legitimation for arrangements of exploitation and dependency that are, without such legitimation, difficult to sustain. He provides this legitimation not by defending these arrangements directly — that would be too crude, too visible — but by naturalizing the frameworks within which they appear inevitable, by occupying the space of critique in ways that leave the structural arrangements untouched, by producing the sophisticated, internationally validated discourse that allows the local ruling class to present itself as modern, cosmopolitan, and intellectually serious.

He is organic, second, to the imperialist system itself — not as a direct agent of any particular state or institution, but as a structural element in the reproduction of a global knowledge order that serves the interests of the imperialist core. He does this by maintaining the epistemological circuits through which the periphery's raw intellectual material flows to the metropolis for processing and return. He does it by training successive generations of peripheral students in metropolitan frameworks. He does it by occupying the position of the authoritative voice on his own society — the voice that metropolitan institutions, metropolitan media, and metropolitan policymakers consult when they need to know what is happening in the periphery and what should be done about it.

This double organicity produces a characteristic double bind. The comprador intellectual is, typically, a figure of genuine local prestige — cited, consulted, celebrated in his own society, at least within the circles that matter to him. And he is simultaneously a figure of metropolitan visibility — published, invited, recognized in the institutions of the North. These two forms of prestige reinforce each other: his metropolitan recognition makes him authoritative at home, and his local authority makes him interesting to the metropolis. He occupies, in this sense, a genuinely privileged position — and the privilege is inseparable from the function.

The right understands this, even when the left does not. The incorporation of postcolonial critique, of subaltern studies, of decolonial theory into the curricula of elite Western universities is not an accident, and it is not a victory. It is a mechanism of absorption — the same mechanism by which every hegemonic system incorporates its most sophisticated critics in order to demonstrate its own openness and to drain those critiques of their organizational potential. Gramsci called this transformismo: the process by which oppositional figures and movements are absorbed into the hegemonic bloc, neutralized, and made to serve the reproduction of the order they set out to challenge.

The radical comprador is transformismo's highest achievement. He is the critic who has been so thoroughly absorbed that he no longer experiences his absorption as such. He experiences it as influence. He has been given a seat at the table — at the editorial board, at the conference panel, at the prize committee — and he has confused the seat for the room, and the room for the world.

Toward Intellectual Delinking

The question that remains — the question that a purely analytical account cannot answer — is what is to be done. Not in the abstract, not as a matter of individual moral resolution, but structurally: what are the conditions under which intellectual delinking becomes possible, and what does it actually require?

It is necessary to begin by clearing the ground of the most common misunderstanding. Intellectual delinking is not cultural nationalism. The turn toward indigenous knowledge systems, toward pre-colonial intellectual traditions, toward a romanticized authenticity that existed before the contamination of Western modernity — this is not delinking. It is, as Fanon recognized in his account of the second stage of the colonized intellectual's development, a reaction formation: a response to metropolitan domination that remains organized around metropolitan domination, defined by it in negation. The intellectual who replaces French theory with Ottoman mysticism, who substitutes Hindu philosophy for Anglo-American social science, who performs an elaborate recovery of pre-colonial wisdom — and who does all of this for metropolitan audiences, in metropolitan journals, with metropolitan funding — has not delinked. He has found a more exotic way of remaining linked.

Nor is intellectual delinking a matter of language. Writing in Turkish rather than English, in Swahili rather than French, in Hindi rather than the language of the former colonizer — this may be a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient one. The comprador intellectual can operate entirely within a vernacular language and still produce thought that is organized around metropolitan questions, metropolitan frameworks, and the implicit metropolitan audience that he has internalized so thoroughly that it no longer requires an actual metropolitan reader to function. The mirror is internal. Changing the language of the reflection does not change the structure of the mirroring.

What intellectual delinking requires is something more fundamental and more difficult: an autonomous institutional base, an autonomous funding structure, and an autonomous audience — one that is constituted not by the metropolis but by the organized political movements of the periphery's own working classes and peasantries.

This is Samir Amin's lesson, translated from political economy to epistemology. Amin argued that economic delinking did not mean autarchy — it meant reorienting the organizing principle of economic activity from the needs of the world market to the needs of the domestic population. The analogous epistemological move is to reorient the organizing principle of intellectual activity from the questions and validation structures of the metropolitan knowledge order to the needs of the people whose lives provide the raw material of that intellectual activity. This is not a modest proposal. It requires the construction of institutions — journals, universities, research centres, publishing houses — that are not dependent on metropolitan funding, not oriented toward metropolitan validation, and not staffed by intellectuals whose careers have been shaped by the devshirme system.

It requires, in other words, a Modern Prince — Gramsci's term for the political organization capable of sustaining a counter-hegemonic project over time. Without an organizational base of this kind, intellectual delinking remains an individual gesture, admirable and isolated, incapable of the institutional reproduction that would make it something more than a personal exception. Nurullah Ataç refusing to be flattered by the suggestion that he speaks French like a Frenchman is a magnificent gesture. But Ataç alone does not constitute a counter-hegemonic intellectual tradition. He constitutes a reminder of what such a tradition would have to look like — and a measure of how far we remain from building it.

The invisible chain is, in the end, invisible not because it is subtle but because those who wear it are precisely the people most loudly committed to breaking all the others. They have the vocabulary of liberation. They have the theoretical frameworks of anti-imperialism. They have read Fanon and Gramsci and Amin, and they cite them with great sophistication in the journals of the institutions that sustain the order these thinkers spent their lives opposing.

The billionaire in that hotel dining room will not be liberated by being told about his comprador nervous system. He requires a different world — one in which the gravitational field no longer runs in the direction he has spent his life learning to follow.

The same is true of the intellectual. The chain will not be broken by insight alone. It will be broken — if it is broken — by the construction of the organizational and institutional conditions under which a different kind of thought becomes not merely possible but necessary: thought that is answerable not to the metropolis but to the people, not to the prestige economy but to the struggle, not to the Enderun but to the world that the Enderun was built to administer and that has not yet finished deciding whether to remain administered.【●】

Güneşin doğduğu her şantiyede

Çarkların döndüğü her atölyede

Alın teri karışır toprağa, taşa

Selam olsun emeğin kavgasına.

​Nakarat

1 Mayıs, sesimiz yankılanır her yerde

Zulmün karanlığı biter bu seherde

El ele, omuz omuza, tek yürekte

Yaşasın işçinin hür iradesi!

​2. Kıta

Söküp atacağız paslı zinciri

Yaratacağız güneşli günleri

Fabrikalar, tarlalar bizim olacak

Dünya barışla, adaletle dolacak.

​Nakarat

1 Mayıs, sesimiz yankılanır her yerde

Zulmün karanlığı biter bu seherde

El ele, omuz omuza, tek yürekte

Yaşasın işçinin hür iradesi!

​Final

Birleşen ellerle, sarsılmaz inançla

Yürüyoruz aydınlık yarınlara!

“Neutrality” is one of the most persuasive illusions of modern political language. It presents itself not as a position among others, but as a space outside all positions. Yet this “outside” is often nothing more than the most refined form of an already embedded power structure.

At first glance, neutrality appears to signify a stance above conflict. But a closer look reveals something different: it is a framing mechanism that determines how conflict itself becomes visible, intelligible, and legitimate. Once this frame is in place, what counts as a legitimate actor, a valid question, or an acceptable reality is already partially decided.

The issue, then, is not whether neutrality exists, but how it is produced. In most cases, neutrality is not an ethical stance; it is a narrative technology—one that allows power relations to operate without naming themselves.

Conceptual Ground: Hegemony and Framing

To understand neutrality, one must first expose the hegemonic ground on which it operates. No discourse claiming neutrality can be separated from the historical and social relations of power that sustain it.

Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony is central here. Hegemony is not merely domination through coercion, but a system in which consent is actively produced. This consent is reproduced not only through political institutions, but also through cultural norms, educational structures, and, crucially, the production of knowledge itself.

From this perspective, what is presented as “neutral” discourse is in fact embedded within this process of consent production. Neutrality does not indicate the absence of conflict; it indicates the prior organization of how conflict can be spoken about.

Hegemony determines not only what can be said, but also what is perceived as natural. In this way, a historically situated perspective is elevated into a seemingly universal standpoint. The discourse of neutrality is precisely the linguistic form of this universalization.

The International System and “Neutral” Actors

The international system presents itself as a rule-based order. Yet the universality of these rules is inseparable from historical power asymmetries.

Institutions such as the United Nations claim universal representation. However, the structure of decision-making reveals persistent inequalities between representation and effective power. The existence of veto systems and hierarchical organs demonstrates that equality is formally declared but materially constrained.

Similarly, organizations like NATO define themselves through the language of defense and collective security. Yet what counts as defense, intervention, or aggression is not fixed; it shifts according to geopolitical position and strategic interest. The vocabulary of security thus becomes a site where neutrality is rhetorically asserted but structurally absent.

These institutions do not operate outside power; rather, they translate power relations into normative language, thereby rendering them administratively legitimate.

Language, Framing, and the Production of Legitimacy

The most intensive operation of neutrality takes place at the level of language. Language does not merely describe reality; it organizes it.

Terms such as “intervention,” “occupation,” “operation,” “humanitarian assistance,” or “crisis” do not neutrally label events. They actively reshape the moral and political status of those events. The same material situation can be rendered legitimate or illegitimate depending on its linguistic framing.

Visibility is therefore not accidental. Some events are continuously amplified, while others are structurally marginalized. This asymmetry is not descriptive but productive: it determines what counts as a public reality.

Neutrality, in this sense, functions as a filter that renders these selections invisible, presenting them as self-evident rather than constructed.

The Limits of the Solution Repertoire

Solutions described as “neutral” often aim not at transforming structures, but at managing their consequences. The emphasis shifts from causes to effects.

Ceasefires, humanitarian corridors, reconstruction programs, and stabilization frameworks rarely address the underlying production of conflict. Instead, they regulate its outcomes, turning crisis into a manageable condition rather than a resolved contradiction.

What emerges is not resolution but governed instability. The system is maintained not by eliminating conflict, but by containing it within administratively acceptable boundaries.

Within this logic, “realistic” solutions are those that leave the structure intact. Proposals that question the structure itself are dismissed as impractical or destabilizing. The space of possible solutions is therefore already ideologically pre-filtered.

Conclusion: The Ideological Function of Neutrality

Neutrality is not an absence of position; it is a position that conceals itself as absence.

Within hegemonic systems, neutrality does not eliminate conflict—it determines how conflict is framed, perceived, and disciplined. It is not a balancing point but a framing power.

The central issue is therefore not whether one is neutral or not, but which realities are made visible under the name of neutrality. Once visibility is structured, truth is already partially organized.

Neutrality, in its final form, is not an epistemic ideal but a linguistic and institutional mechanism that stabilizes existing power relations while rendering them invisible.【●】

“Tarafsızlık” modern siyasal dilin en güvenilir görünen yanılsamasıdır. Çünkü kendisini bir konum olarak değil, bütün konumların dışında bir yer olarak sunar. Oysa “dışarı” fikri, çoğu zaman içerideki güç ilişkilerinin en rafine biçimde yeniden üretildiği noktadır.

Tarafsızlık, ilk bakışta çatışmanın üstünde durma iddiasıdır. Fakat daha yakından bakıldığında, çatışmanın nasıl tanımlanacağını belirleyen görünmez bir çerçeveye dönüşür. Bu çerçeve kurulduğu anda, hangi tarafların meşru, hangi soruların sorulabilir, hangi gerçekliklerin görünür olduğu da önceden belirlenmiş olur.

Dolayısıyla mesele tarafsızlığın varlığı değil, nasıl üretildiğidir. Çünkü tarafsızlık, çoğu durumda bir etik duruş değil, bir anlatı teknolojisidir: Hegemonya ilişkilerini, adlandırmadan sürdüren bir söylem rejimidir.

Kavramsal Zemin: Hegemonya ve Çerçeve

Tarafsızlık iddiasını anlamak için, dayandığı hegemonik zemini açığa çıkarmak gerekir. Çünkü hiçbir “nötr” söylem, tarihsel ve toplumsal güç ilişkilerinden bağımsız değildir.

Antonio Gramsci’nin hegemonya kavramı burada belirleyicidir. Gramsci'ye göre, hegemonya, zorla dayatılan bir düzen değil; rıza üretimi üzerinden işleyen bir toplumsal bütünlüktür. Bu rıza yalnızca siyasal kararlarla değil, kültürel normlar, eğitim yapıları ve bilgi üretim biçimleriyle yeniden üretilir.

O nedenle “tarafsız” olduğu iddia edilen her söylem, aslında bu rızanın içinde çalışır. Tarafsızlık, çatışmanın yokluğu değil; çatışmanın hangi sınırlar içinde konuşulabileceğinin önceden belirlenmesidir.

Hegemonya yalnızca neyin söylenebileceğini değil, neyin “doğal” kabul edileceğini de belirler. Böylece belirli bir tarihsel bakış açısı evrenselmiş gibi sunulur. Tarafsızlık söylemi tam da bu evrenselleştirme operasyonunun dilsel biçimidir.

Uluslararası Sistem ve ‘Tarafsız’ Aktörler

Uluslararası sistem kendisini “kurallara dayalı düzen” olarak sunar. Fakat bu kuralların evrenselliği, çoğu zaman tarihsel güç dağılımlarının sonucudur.

Birleşmiş Milletler gibi yapılar, evrensel temsil iddiasıyla kurulmuş olsa da karar alma mekanizmaları içinde yapısal asimetriler barındırır. Temsil ile güç arasındaki bu fark, “eşitlik” söyleminin fiilen nasıl sınırlandığını gösterir.

NATO gibi yapılar ise güvenlik ve savunma kavramları üzerinden kendisini meşrulaştırır. Ama hangi müdahalenin “savunma”, hangisinin “müdahale” sayıldığı sorusu, bu tür yapıların tarafsız olmadığını açık eder. Güvenlik tanımı bile coğrafyaya göre değişir.

Bu kurumlar tarafsız değildir; fakat kendilerini tarafsızlık dili üzerinden meşrulaştırır. Bu da modern uluslararası düzenin en temel gerilimidir: Güç ilişkileri açıkça konuşulmaz, normatif dil üzerinden yeniden paketlenir.

Dil, Çerçeve ve Meşruiyet Üretimi

Tarafsızlık söyleminin en yoğun işlediği alan dildir. Çünkü dil yalnızca gerçekliği ifade etmez; onu kurar.

“İşgal”, “müdahale”, “operasyon”, “insani yardım”, “kriz” gibi kavramlar, aynı olguların farklı politik anlamlara çevrilmesini sağlar. Bu çeviri, olayın kendisinden çok onun nasıl algılanacağını belirler.

Hangi şiddetin “terör” olarak adlandırıldığı, hangi şiddetin “meşru müdafaa” sayıldığı; hangi ölümlerin görünür, hangilerinin istatistik içinde kaybolduğu, dilin kurduğu çerçevenin sonucudur.

Bu nedenle görünürlük rastlantısal değildir. Hangi olayın merkezde, hangisinin kenarda kalacağı; hangi hikâyenin tekrar edileceği, hangisinin sessizce geçştirileceği önceden belirlenmiştir.

Tarafsızlık iddiası burada, bu seçme ve dışlama mekanizmasını görünmez kılan bir örtüye dönüşür.

Çözüm Repertuarı ve Sınırlar

“Tarafsız” çözüm önerileri çoğu zaman sistemi dönüştürmekten çok, sistemi yönetilebilir kılmayı amaçlar. Bu nedenle müdahaleler genellikle sonuçlara yönelir, nedenlere değil.

Ateşkesler, insani yardım paketleri, yeniden inşa programları vb. çatışmayı üreten yapıyı sorgulamaz, yalnızca onun etkilerini düzenler. Böylece kriz ortadan kaldırılmaz, yönetilir hale getirilir.

Bu yaklaşım, “makul çözüm” sınırını da belirler. Sistemi sorgulayan her öneri “ütopik” ya da “gerçekçi olmayan” olarak dışlanırken, sistemi koruyan öneriler “tarafsız” ve “akılcı” kabul edilir.

Böylece çözüm alanı daha baştan daraltılmış olur. Soruların çerçevesi değişmeden, cevapların özgürlüğü mümkün değildir.

Sonuç: Tarafsızlığın İdeolojik İşlevi

Tarafsızlık, kendisini dışarıda konumlandırarak çalışan bir ideolojik mekanizmadır. Gücünü tam da bu görünmezlikten alır.

Hegemonik düzen içinde tarafsızlık, çatışmayı ortadan kaldırmaz; çatışmayı tanımlama yetkisini tekelleştirir. Bu nedenle tarafsızlık bir denge değil, bir çerçeveleme iktidarıdır.

Sorun “tarafsız olup olmamak” değildir. Sorun, hangi gerçekliğin tarafsızlık adı altında görünür kılındığıdır. Çünkü görünürlük seçildiğinde, hakikat de seçilmiş olur.

Sonuç olarak tarafsızlık, iddia edildiği gibi bir üst bakış noktası değil, mevcut düzenin sürekliliğini sağlayan dilsel ve kurumsal bir üretim biçimidir.【●】