“Is it possible to enable people to make all kinds of decisions about themselves freely by themselves, by ending the domination of small minorities over large majorities?”
In this work, Erkin Özalp, who wrote the book Your Theorist Was a Revolutionary: Marxism and Socialism in the 21st Century and translated many works of Marx and Engels into Turkish, attempts to provide an affirmative answer to the above question by drawing on the relatively recent experiences of struggle in different countries.
Among the many examples examined are the guerrilla war waged by the Maoists in Nepal, Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian Revolution, the Zapatistas’ struggle to make a revolution “from below,” Syriza’s rise to power in Greece and its capitulation, the transformations that Podemos underwent while still in opposition as a party trying to implement the theory of populism in Spain, and the local efforts that brought the Austrian communists the mayoralty of Graz.
Özalp, who evaluates the strategies of struggle implemented after the collapse of the socialist system in light of concrete experiences, discusses in outline how revolutions can be made that are the work of the masses themselves, that do not allow the reappearance of past weaknesses, and that can bring the emancipation of humanity closer, also considering the requirements of the revolutionary struggle in Turkey, and makes concrete suggestions. Without, of course, attempting to offer a ready-made “recipe.”
CONTENTS
A Few Notes About the Translation
Introduction
1. Revolutionary Struggles in Chile from the Unidad Popular to the Present
— Neoliberal transformations and some of their consequences
— The return to democracy and its aftermath
2. Armed Struggle: The Cases of Peru and Nepal
— The rise and fall of the Shining Path in Peru
— The People’s War in Nepal and its consequences
3. Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution
4. People’s Uprisings in Bolivia and Their Consequences
5. Struggles “From Below”
— The Zapatistas and their changing goals
— Land struggles in Brazil
— Bookchin’s concrete revolutionary strategy
— Barcelona en Comú
— The Rojava experience
6. Syriza’s Rise and Submission
7. Radical Democracy and Populism
— The emergence of Podemos and its rapid transformations
— Jean-Luc Mélenchon and France Unbowed (LFI)
— Populism and peopleism
8. Examples of Going Beyond Being “Negligible”
— Graz’s communists who are “helping instead of talking”
— The Workers’ Party of Belgium: From Maoism to “Socialism 2.0”
— Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)
9. General Discussion
— The indispensability of an organized people’s movement
— The indispensability of cadres
— While coming closer to power...
— After coming to power...
— In order to be able to surpass the experiences of the past…
Endnotes
Index
You can find the Introduction here.
The e-book is available on Google Play and Storytel
(Physical copies will be available soon.)
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