Self-Alteration Through Leftist Revolutionary Militancy 

Christopher Houston 

This paper explores the hope – and also the claim – of revolutionary socialist movements that revolutionary struggle produces altered individual selves, as well as the changed ‘collective ontology’ of participants. To explore this hope and assertion, I first briefly describe two very different projects (and portrayals) of socialist revolutionary situations and events, as well as the forms of self-alteration they enable. The first is in the Soviet Union in the years 1931-1933 and concerns the storied building of the White Sea-Baltic Sea Canal, as well as its collectively written and disturbing contemporaneous ‘live history’ edited by Maxim Gorky. The second takes place in Algeria and revisits alterations in individual and collective practices and consciousness experienced by those participating in the anti-colonial war against the French, as described by Pierre Bourdieu in his analysis in the book The Algerians. 

The paper then brings these two very different accounts of revolution and their descriptions of the fabricating of a ‘new man’ into dialogue with the militant politics of Turkey in the late 1970s. Revolutionary (devrimci) political parties and organizations, legal and illegal, flourished in Istanbul and Ankara in the years 1976-1980 even as state institutions pursued repressive legal and police actions against them, and a state-armed Turkish-supremacist ‘civil-society’ movement (the ülkücüler) escalated violent anti-communist confrontation at the same time. This interconnected, sprawling, and bitterly factionalized revolutionary enterprise and movement came to a jarring halt with the military insurrection of 12th September 1980, leading to three years of martial law, – more in the Kurdish areas – a new illiberal constitution, and ongoing slander and suppression of socialist parties and organizations in Turkey almost up until the present. Here was a revolutionary project that unlike in Algeria resulted not in victory but in failure, and which for political reasons related to that defeat has been consequently difficult to research.  

In discussing this revolutionary endeavour in Istanbul in those years, I focus upon perceptual truths, activist practices, and pedagogical processes by which both novice and experienced militants in revolutionary organizations in Istanbul in the late 1970s sought to modify their own spatial, ethical, and social perceptions. For activists in some groups, their experience of political activism was understood as clearly transformative, foretaste of the socialist organization of society to come. The attempted carving out of ‘liberated zones’ (kurtulus bolgeleri) in some of Istanbul’s poorest informal settlements was apprehended as the making of a foothold on the future. By contrast, according to the theory of other groups, individual self-alteration during the phase of revolutionary struggle could at best be only partial, even as factions educated partisans towards a new awareness of their collective fate, class interests, and historical formation. Complete or total self-alteration awaited the arrival of a socialist society animated by radically different imaginary significations and structured by new institutions.

The paper concludes (I think!) that militants both ardently pursued as well as passively experienced changes of perspective, of language, of perception, of skill, of knowledge dependent on intersubjective encounter, of affective consciousness, and of ethical action. Amongst other things, we might call their self-mobilization a striving for ‘epistemic agency’ (Guenther 2017), given that organizations were encountered as places of learning, both for student activists, workers, and shantytown inhabitants who sought to join them. As in all forms of political activism, becoming a revolutionary was arduous even as this demanding mobilization was embraced.