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Selected Works of İbrahim Kaypakkaya
The Selected Works of Ibrahim Kaypakkaya includes some of the most influential writings by this major leader of the Communist movement in Turkey, and founder of the Communist Party of Turkey/Marxist-Leninist (TKP/ML).
The Selected Works are necessary reading for anyone interested in the class structure of modern Turkey, the development of Turkey's anti-revisionist movement, and the struggle for Kurdish self-determination. Of particular interest is the "Kurecik Regional Report" which is similar to Mao's "Hunan Report", a creative attempt to think through the specific class contradictions of modern Turkey. "The Theses of Shafak Revisionism Regarding the Kemalist Movement" is of historical importance, useful for those interested in Kemalism - a key ideology of the Turkish ruling classes - and the ways in which the communist movement, before the revolutionary break of which Kaypakkaya was part, were unable to break from national chauvinism. Perhaps the most important essay in this collection, however, is "The National Question in Turkey", the first Marxist treatment of the Kurdish Question that thoroughly argued for the right of national self-determination in regards to Kurdistan. Written around five years before the founding of the PKK, Kaypakkaya's examination and defense of the Kurdish right to national self-determination was not only controversial when it was written, but has determined the political line of those revolutionary organizations in Turkey who have declared solidarity with the Kurdish struggle for self-determination since then.
The Selected Works are necessary reading for anyone interested in the class structure of modern Turkey, the development of Turkey's anti-revisionist movement, and the struggle for Kurdish self-determination. Of particular interest is the "Kurecik Regional Report" which is similar to Mao's "Hunan Report", a creative attempt to think through the specific class contradictions of modern Turkey. "The Theses of Shafak Revisionism Regarding the Kemalist Movement" is of historical importance, useful for those interested in Kemalism - a key ideology of the Turkish ruling classes - and the ways in which the communist movement, before the revolutionary break of which Kaypakkaya was part, were unable to break from national chauvinism. Perhaps the most important essay in this collection, however, is "The National Question in Turkey", the first Marxist treatment of the Kurdish Question that thoroughly argued for the right of national self-determination in regards to Kurdistan. Written around five years before the founding of the PKK, Kaypakkaya's examination and defense of the Kurdish right to national self-determination was not only controversial when it was written, but has determined the political line of those revolutionary organizations in Turkey who have declared solidarity with the Kurdish struggle for self-determination since then.
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Published January 1, 2014
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January 24, 2023
This was actually draft translation but due to the things that I can't reveal in here it was published before its final version came to existence. Many quotes Kaypakkaya used wasn't translated by the translator in this version (he was tracking down to original quotes so that he could include their official English translations). There are also some missing parts in this translation. Readers must keep in these issues in their minds, however, still this might provide some insights into the views of Kaypakkaya for the people who are interested in him, tho it's obvious that it can't said that this volume exactly represents his views. I recommend readers to obtain National Question in Turkey by Kaypakkaya from Foreign Languages Press (published as "On National Question"), which it's a good and corrected translation that also includes missing parts and quotes of classics by Kaypakkaya.
November 26, 2024
Ibrahim Kaypakkaya is a famous name in Maoism. At least he used to be, when there were Maoists. He is also about as uninsightful as possible. I made it a quarter of the way through but no more. Reading this is a tremendous waste of time, except if you want to hear the same standard, Maoist sloganeering from yet another country.
Mao’s work was never theoretically sophisticated and there is much that is wrong with it but it was always clear-sighted on the realities of China and the strategies needed at any one time. Kaypakkaya doesn’t demonstrate any knowledge of Turkey, Turkish Kurdistan or of Kurdistan in general. Kaypakkaya shows himself to be a dogmatism without real knowledge of the dogmas he upholds.
It starts with the introduction. The author knows English so poorly, it is utterly unintelligible. He doesn’t know about the existence of adjectives so he strings them together like English is agglutinative. (Turkish itself is agglutinative.) He doesn’t seem to know any English grammar whatsoever. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote it in Turkish and just rammed it into Google Translate.
But there was one impotent takeaway from this introduction. Even through all the unintelligibility, it was clear the writer used empty, verbose, Maoist rhetoric. The standard: ‘The people are the heroes but I have to incessantly praise glorious chairman Rando Loser.’
Kaypakkaya doesn’t salvage the collection. The first piece is “report” on the situation in Kurucik. He talks about all and sundry but doesn’t say anything meaningful. It reminded me a lot of a middle school presentation. He tells us how much manure different peasants use on their fields, the cities and countries of choice for expatriates from certain villages, he lists all random revolutionary groups in the country just to say they have no or little presence in the region. What stood out to me particularly was the lack of conclusions. It reads like someone just told him to write a presentation on “Marxism and Kurucik” and he copied bunch of semi-relevant information from an Encyclopaedia.
He does make a class ‘analysis’. In other words, he rehashes 3 categories from Lenin’s & Mao’s works without drawing any tactical conclusions. But these categories are, to Kaypakkaya’s own admission, not relevant in Kurucik. He says so on the first page of the report! So why have an entire chapter rehashing Mao’s Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society? Kaypakkaya himself says that landlords are not interested in buying Kurucik fields because they’re so unprofitable. He says 99% of the population consists of peasants too poor to feed themselves with the yield of their lands. So why drone on for pages about landlords and the distinction between the poor and middle peasantry? Again, it seems like Kaypakkaya thought he’d impress people by cramming as much as he could into the text, even if it clearly isn’t relevant, simply to impress people with his theoretical knowledge. But every time when he does this, he spends many pages rehashing things Lenin, Stalin or Mao said in one or two paragraphs. He never gets deeper than the most basic terminology and even that he doesn’t seem to understand.
Next up, an article on how to read Mao. Strangely, Kaypakkaya starts with an analysis of the situation in Turkey. Or rather, an ‘analysis’ of Turkey. Because the whole analysis consists of him quoting Mao. Mao said certain things were relevant in China back in the day, therefore they must be relevant in Turkey today. Not only must they be relevant, they must be key. Kaypakkaya ignores that these articles are from 1920’s & 30’s China. If Mao says you can hide troops in a field, then surely we can do so too. Just ignore that Mao’s fields were rice fields on hills and thus littered with walls and that Turkey has a large airforce. This is the kind of analysis Kaypakkaya makes. But not quite this intelligent. One of his brilliant conclusions is that soldiers should have weapons to fight with and that they shouldn’t just abandon these after every battle. But based on rules like these, he concluded his forces mastered warfare to such an extent, they could survive an onslaught by “hundreds of thousands” Turkish soldiers. The result? Kaypakkaya was killed not two years later and his party was decimated.
Obviously, it sucks for him that he was tortured for months and killed. It sucks for him he was forced to fight a fight he didn’t want when Turkey outlawed Communism. I am not happy he was killed. But I’m also not happy he got his comrades killed with he kind of obviously foolish leadership that drips off of every page. How many people got killed because Kaypakkaya couldn’t tell Turkey from China? How many of his comrades were tortured because he led them so poorly? Kaypakkaya was a fool who ran major party into the ground though sheer buffoonery, philistinism and dogmatism. I pity the peasants who for this foolishness with their life at least as much as I pity Kaypakkaya himself.
He thus reasons they can survive an onslaught by the vastly superior Turkish military.[Pp. 52-53] The Result? Kaypakkaya was killed and his movement destroyed.
There is something else remarkable. Kaypakkaya seems to have no vision. There’s no ideals, no dreams. Nothing. He drones on and on about the debts of local farmers and how they’re leaving for elsewhere. Does he want to develop the area? What is his vision? Central planning? Communes? Production campaigns? Labour armies? Turning the sea to lemonade? What are you up to, Comrade Ibrahim? Nothing, it seems. It’s not just that he has no utopian schemes; when he writes about setting up base areas, he totally ignores how they’ll be run. Instead, he writes about manure. With Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, you see their work almost brimming with suggestion for the future. Even when they ignore this question explicitly, they give such an image of the situation you almost but can’t draw the conclusions to which their arguments lead. From Kaypakkaya we learn that going to Germany is a good alternative to getting more manure.
Actually, we do get one section on his vision. He writes that he wants to liberate all toilers. But this only comes up because tries to imitate Marx’ & Engels’ Critique of the Gotha Programme. He says that it doesn’t communicate the “ultimate goal” which is ??? Kaypakkaya doesn’t explain. He just says peasants cannot liberate themselves, therefore the name “worker-peasant party” is “unscientific”.
I also take issue with the way in which he abuses the term “science”. Lenin, in his What the Friends of the People Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, says that Marx’s work wasn’t a real theory until Capital because only then did he give a testable and tested explanation of the structure of society. Before that, it was a hypothesis.
In the same text, Lenin (seems to) equate “socialism” and “sociology” at some points. This is illustrative if a meaning the word had that it doesn’t have anymore today. When Saint-Simon — succeeded by Auguste Comte — established sociology in France, the conclusions he drew from it were termed “socialism” by his followers. So socialism meant at once the scientific planning of society but also the results of scientific inquiry about society. These two fell together because, once you established a course of action through social science, then you’d have to carry it out for it to be of any use. Thus, the two meanings were entangled.
Obviously, since then there have been social scientists who came to the conclusion that things should not be planned. In fact, Saint-Simon himself was one of these. His policy recommendations were directed at universities and grass-roots reformers more often than to politicians or mass-movements. he opposed the workers’ movement until shortly before his death. He thought the state would lose relevance. But universes wouldn’t and neither would banks. He gave both a major role in his vision. He was a kind of in between of Marx and Murray Rothbard. This makes sense, his scheme was to avoid another revolution by using science. So no mass-movement for him. No scary political action. He did make an appeal to the Congress of Vienna but those were hardly scary anti-revolutionaries.
Friedrich Engels, in his Draft Communist Confession of Faith, wrote the Communists and the Socialists are two different groups, a judgment echoed in a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, where it was written that the Socialism was the respectable, intellectual movement whereas Communism was the cruder, but better, mass-movement.
Marx & Engels took the social science of the Socialists and brought it to the real mass-movement, scuttling the utopian schemes and solutions but keeping the well-grounded critique of present, therefore studyable, institutions. In The Condition of The Working Class in England, Engels outlines the merger of socialist knowledge with the workers’ movement. In the Communist Manifesto, the section on rival Socialist currents describes, among other things, every (inferior, harmful) alternative to the unification of Socialist knowledge and the workers’ movement. At the time when “social-democracy” went from the name for all participants of the 1st International to Marxists specifically, Karl Kautsky said “Social-Democracy is the merger of socialism and the workers’ movement.” This was the phrase on the masthead of Iskra when Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov headed it. Drawing on this tradition, for Lenin, the meaning of socialism was politics rooted in social science, instead of theology or philosophy. At least in this one text it was. For Marx, Engels & Lenin “science” wasn’t just a label you slap onto opinions to sound cool.
But for Kaypakkaya, it is. This is understandable to an extent. People in underdeveloped countries often liked to slap “science”, “development” and “modernisation” onto anything they said. That doesn’t make it correct. And because Marxist parties were the main Western supporters of third world liberation movements, a lot of the rhetoric those movements used got transplanted here. Kaypakkaya, as an internationally renowned martyr, is in party to blame for the confusion. But we should not exaggerate his importance. His martyrdom may have international fame but his theories don’t. Most Western student-activists cannot tell their arse from Mount Vesuvius. We can hardly blame Kaypakkaya for turning them stupid. But if students were more intelligent, they’d start to read their heroes and learn to reject them. In truth, Kaypakkaya is only remembered among hard-core Maoists who spent too much time online.
I mentioned above Kaypakkaya imitated The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Kaypakkaya wrote his own critique of his party’s programme. First he writes Marx on the importance of party programmes, then Engels on the same. No doubt, his comrades found this very impressive. Kaypakkaya neglected to mention that both quotes are from The Critique of the Gotha Programme, only a few pages apart.
How, he moves to his first argument. The party should not be called the Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Party because the name isn’t scientific. This is obviously in imitation of Marx’ & Engels’ argument that the term “social-democrat” had not scientific value. Marx & Engels argued the term did not communicate the class and economic analysis of the Communists. Kaypakkaya argues “Worker-Peasant Party” is “unscientific” because it doesn’t communicate the “ultimate goal” of the Communists. In other words, it isn’t in line with the normative part of his beliefs. For Kaypakkaya, his personal view of how things should be, his “goal”, is “science”. Buzzword nonsense. Phrase mongering, as Lenin would say.
Somehow, Kaypakkaya manages to be wrong even when he’s blatantly imitating.
Kaypakkaya’s art was to take some random phrase by Mao and say ‘This is now the key to all reality, if we just cling onto this and we’ll win.’ When something else happens, no worries, Kaypakkaya surely has another Mao quote to explain it….. had he not got himself killed. At least he seems to have a actually read some Mao. He even uses one Mao article to further illustrate a point made in another, which is the only time he draws a connection of any kind. But he did his best not to think about it too deeply. After all, he’s taking quotes out of context and making a mess.
I do not want to psychoanalyse him too much but could it be that Kaypakkaya said so little because he didn’t want to be proven wrong? If you ramble about manure where you should be giving policy recommendations, your policies can never be proven wrong. He sticks so closely to the beaten path while putting so much emphasis on his (lacking) theoretical learning, I find it difficult to see any other explanation than that he was a nervous, young dude trying to convince people that he was smart. But he wasn’t. The only time he soars from well-treaded ground is to emphasise his lofty “ultimate goal”. But the point he makes there is so uncontroversial among Marxists and he is so clearly imitating Marx himself that this seems like nothing but a flourish to draw attention to his noble motivations. He never exposed himself. He never allowed himself to be wrong. And so he was never right.
Mao’s work was never theoretically sophisticated and there is much that is wrong with it but it was always clear-sighted on the realities of China and the strategies needed at any one time. Kaypakkaya doesn’t demonstrate any knowledge of Turkey, Turkish Kurdistan or of Kurdistan in general. Kaypakkaya shows himself to be a dogmatism without real knowledge of the dogmas he upholds.
It starts with the introduction. The author knows English so poorly, it is utterly unintelligible. He doesn’t know about the existence of adjectives so he strings them together like English is agglutinative. (Turkish itself is agglutinative.) He doesn’t seem to know any English grammar whatsoever. I wouldn’t be surprised if he wrote it in Turkish and just rammed it into Google Translate.
But there was one impotent takeaway from this introduction. Even through all the unintelligibility, it was clear the writer used empty, verbose, Maoist rhetoric. The standard: ‘The people are the heroes but I have to incessantly praise glorious chairman Rando Loser.’
Kaypakkaya doesn’t salvage the collection. The first piece is “report” on the situation in Kurucik. He talks about all and sundry but doesn’t say anything meaningful. It reminded me a lot of a middle school presentation. He tells us how much manure different peasants use on their fields, the cities and countries of choice for expatriates from certain villages, he lists all random revolutionary groups in the country just to say they have no or little presence in the region. What stood out to me particularly was the lack of conclusions. It reads like someone just told him to write a presentation on “Marxism and Kurucik” and he copied bunch of semi-relevant information from an Encyclopaedia.
He does make a class ‘analysis’. In other words, he rehashes 3 categories from Lenin’s & Mao’s works without drawing any tactical conclusions. But these categories are, to Kaypakkaya’s own admission, not relevant in Kurucik. He says so on the first page of the report! So why have an entire chapter rehashing Mao’s Analysis of Classes in Chinese Society? Kaypakkaya himself says that landlords are not interested in buying Kurucik fields because they’re so unprofitable. He says 99% of the population consists of peasants too poor to feed themselves with the yield of their lands. So why drone on for pages about landlords and the distinction between the poor and middle peasantry? Again, it seems like Kaypakkaya thought he’d impress people by cramming as much as he could into the text, even if it clearly isn’t relevant, simply to impress people with his theoretical knowledge. But every time when he does this, he spends many pages rehashing things Lenin, Stalin or Mao said in one or two paragraphs. He never gets deeper than the most basic terminology and even that he doesn’t seem to understand.
Next up, an article on how to read Mao. Strangely, Kaypakkaya starts with an analysis of the situation in Turkey. Or rather, an ‘analysis’ of Turkey. Because the whole analysis consists of him quoting Mao. Mao said certain things were relevant in China back in the day, therefore they must be relevant in Turkey today. Not only must they be relevant, they must be key. Kaypakkaya ignores that these articles are from 1920’s & 30’s China. If Mao says you can hide troops in a field, then surely we can do so too. Just ignore that Mao’s fields were rice fields on hills and thus littered with walls and that Turkey has a large airforce. This is the kind of analysis Kaypakkaya makes. But not quite this intelligent. One of his brilliant conclusions is that soldiers should have weapons to fight with and that they shouldn’t just abandon these after every battle. But based on rules like these, he concluded his forces mastered warfare to such an extent, they could survive an onslaught by “hundreds of thousands” Turkish soldiers. The result? Kaypakkaya was killed not two years later and his party was decimated.
Obviously, it sucks for him that he was tortured for months and killed. It sucks for him he was forced to fight a fight he didn’t want when Turkey outlawed Communism. I am not happy he was killed. But I’m also not happy he got his comrades killed with he kind of obviously foolish leadership that drips off of every page. How many people got killed because Kaypakkaya couldn’t tell Turkey from China? How many of his comrades were tortured because he led them so poorly? Kaypakkaya was a fool who ran major party into the ground though sheer buffoonery, philistinism and dogmatism. I pity the peasants who for this foolishness with their life at least as much as I pity Kaypakkaya himself.
He thus reasons they can survive an onslaught by the vastly superior Turkish military.[Pp. 52-53] The Result? Kaypakkaya was killed and his movement destroyed.
There is something else remarkable. Kaypakkaya seems to have no vision. There’s no ideals, no dreams. Nothing. He drones on and on about the debts of local farmers and how they’re leaving for elsewhere. Does he want to develop the area? What is his vision? Central planning? Communes? Production campaigns? Labour armies? Turning the sea to lemonade? What are you up to, Comrade Ibrahim? Nothing, it seems. It’s not just that he has no utopian schemes; when he writes about setting up base areas, he totally ignores how they’ll be run. Instead, he writes about manure. With Marx, Engels, Lenin and Mao, you see their work almost brimming with suggestion for the future. Even when they ignore this question explicitly, they give such an image of the situation you almost but can’t draw the conclusions to which their arguments lead. From Kaypakkaya we learn that going to Germany is a good alternative to getting more manure.
Actually, we do get one section on his vision. He writes that he wants to liberate all toilers. But this only comes up because tries to imitate Marx’ & Engels’ Critique of the Gotha Programme. He says that it doesn’t communicate the “ultimate goal” which is ??? Kaypakkaya doesn’t explain. He just says peasants cannot liberate themselves, therefore the name “worker-peasant party” is “unscientific”.
I also take issue with the way in which he abuses the term “science”. Lenin, in his What the Friends of the People Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, says that Marx’s work wasn’t a real theory until Capital because only then did he give a testable and tested explanation of the structure of society. Before that, it was a hypothesis.
In the same text, Lenin (seems to) equate “socialism” and “sociology” at some points. This is illustrative if a meaning the word had that it doesn’t have anymore today. When Saint-Simon — succeeded by Auguste Comte — established sociology in France, the conclusions he drew from it were termed “socialism” by his followers. So socialism meant at once the scientific planning of society but also the results of scientific inquiry about society. These two fell together because, once you established a course of action through social science, then you’d have to carry it out for it to be of any use. Thus, the two meanings were entangled.
Obviously, since then there have been social scientists who came to the conclusion that things should not be planned. In fact, Saint-Simon himself was one of these. His policy recommendations were directed at universities and grass-roots reformers more often than to politicians or mass-movements. he opposed the workers’ movement until shortly before his death. He thought the state would lose relevance. But universes wouldn’t and neither would banks. He gave both a major role in his vision. He was a kind of in between of Marx and Murray Rothbard. This makes sense, his scheme was to avoid another revolution by using science. So no mass-movement for him. No scary political action. He did make an appeal to the Congress of Vienna but those were hardly scary anti-revolutionaries.
Friedrich Engels, in his Draft Communist Confession of Faith, wrote the Communists and the Socialists are two different groups, a judgment echoed in a later preface to the Communist Manifesto, where it was written that the Socialism was the respectable, intellectual movement whereas Communism was the cruder, but better, mass-movement.
Marx & Engels took the social science of the Socialists and brought it to the real mass-movement, scuttling the utopian schemes and solutions but keeping the well-grounded critique of present, therefore studyable, institutions. In The Condition of The Working Class in England, Engels outlines the merger of socialist knowledge with the workers’ movement. In the Communist Manifesto, the section on rival Socialist currents describes, among other things, every (inferior, harmful) alternative to the unification of Socialist knowledge and the workers’ movement. At the time when “social-democracy” went from the name for all participants of the 1st International to Marxists specifically, Karl Kautsky said “Social-Democracy is the merger of socialism and the workers’ movement.” This was the phrase on the masthead of Iskra when Lenin, Plekhanov and Martov headed it. Drawing on this tradition, for Lenin, the meaning of socialism was politics rooted in social science, instead of theology or philosophy. At least in this one text it was. For Marx, Engels & Lenin “science” wasn’t just a label you slap onto opinions to sound cool.
But for Kaypakkaya, it is. This is understandable to an extent. People in underdeveloped countries often liked to slap “science”, “development” and “modernisation” onto anything they said. That doesn’t make it correct. And because Marxist parties were the main Western supporters of third world liberation movements, a lot of the rhetoric those movements used got transplanted here. Kaypakkaya, as an internationally renowned martyr, is in party to blame for the confusion. But we should not exaggerate his importance. His martyrdom may have international fame but his theories don’t. Most Western student-activists cannot tell their arse from Mount Vesuvius. We can hardly blame Kaypakkaya for turning them stupid. But if students were more intelligent, they’d start to read their heroes and learn to reject them. In truth, Kaypakkaya is only remembered among hard-core Maoists who spent too much time online.
I mentioned above Kaypakkaya imitated The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Kaypakkaya wrote his own critique of his party’s programme. First he writes Marx on the importance of party programmes, then Engels on the same. No doubt, his comrades found this very impressive. Kaypakkaya neglected to mention that both quotes are from The Critique of the Gotha Programme, only a few pages apart.
How, he moves to his first argument. The party should not be called the Revolutionary Worker-Peasant Party because the name isn’t scientific. This is obviously in imitation of Marx’ & Engels’ argument that the term “social-democrat” had not scientific value. Marx & Engels argued the term did not communicate the class and economic analysis of the Communists. Kaypakkaya argues “Worker-Peasant Party” is “unscientific” because it doesn’t communicate the “ultimate goal” of the Communists. In other words, it isn’t in line with the normative part of his beliefs. For Kaypakkaya, his personal view of how things should be, his “goal”, is “science”. Buzzword nonsense. Phrase mongering, as Lenin would say.
Somehow, Kaypakkaya manages to be wrong even when he’s blatantly imitating.
Kaypakkaya’s art was to take some random phrase by Mao and say ‘This is now the key to all reality, if we just cling onto this and we’ll win.’ When something else happens, no worries, Kaypakkaya surely has another Mao quote to explain it….. had he not got himself killed. At least he seems to have a actually read some Mao. He even uses one Mao article to further illustrate a point made in another, which is the only time he draws a connection of any kind. But he did his best not to think about it too deeply. After all, he’s taking quotes out of context and making a mess.
I do not want to psychoanalyse him too much but could it be that Kaypakkaya said so little because he didn’t want to be proven wrong? If you ramble about manure where you should be giving policy recommendations, your policies can never be proven wrong. He sticks so closely to the beaten path while putting so much emphasis on his (lacking) theoretical learning, I find it difficult to see any other explanation than that he was a nervous, young dude trying to convince people that he was smart. But he wasn’t. The only time he soars from well-treaded ground is to emphasise his lofty “ultimate goal”. But the point he makes there is so uncontroversial among Marxists and he is so clearly imitating Marx himself that this seems like nothing but a flourish to draw attention to his noble motivations. He never exposed himself. He never allowed himself to be wrong. And so he was never right.
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