"Politics and history between the Sons of Hegel and the Sons of Abraham"

Is it possible for us to interpret and explain today's politics or social tensions through class-based analyses? Truthfully, we are already quite late even for such a question.

The world has come to a place very different from the conditions of the 19th century, when Karl Marx reduced all historical conflicts to a class-centered dynamic. Despite this, the class nostalgias of the left circles in Turkey still stir from time to time. Strangely, they suppose their own fights to be class fights, and do not even think of turning to look at whom they stand against and with whom, and on which side.

Although the Gezi incident produced this tragicomic image without limit and rubbed it in everyone's face, even this did not open their eyes. We could not read a single text of self-criticism in left circles about Turkey's finance capitalists, even its destroyers of the environment, leading, like leftist militants, an uprising in a proletarian jargon against the most populist government and leader Turkey has seen and could see.

In fact, a significant portion of Marxists in the world, as a way of resolving the crisis Marxism has fallen into in explaining the world, accepted that there are very different fields of conflict (antagonisms) in the world and that all these fields cannot be grounded in class alone. Among the different antagonisms that Marx or the early Marxists neglected, even denied, were religious, sexual and ethnic antagonisms. Over time, antagonisms such as environment, recognition and lifestyle joined them.

The acknowledgment of the existence of all these new antagonisms nevertheless could not rescue it from regarding the whole political field as nothing but a field of conflict along the right-left axis. The claim that it is sufficient to try to place the political spectrum, or all political stances and attitudes, within the right-left axis has not been abandoned. As left politics gets stuck, another wind of a "new left" is blown, and the new one is no different from the old. What the left, new and old, seeks is only to be in power, but because it cannot somehow become the power, it turns to presenting this condition as if it were a virtue and to attributing a sanctity to the condition of "always being in opposition."

The "sanctity attributed to the condition of opposition because one is not in power" turns out in fact to be related somewhere to the circuitous theory of power of the Christian priests, of political theology. And one of those who interpreted and named this best, let us admit, is F. Nietzsche. You can read his Anti-Christ a bit as an anti-proletariat as well. When the surface of the left's critiques of power, which turn into hatred of power, is scratched a little, nothing comes out from beneath but an intense longing for and demand of power. Indeed, there can be no demand more natural than this. The problem is that it has been suppressed in such a hypocritical way, just like the desire for power concealed by the Christian ascetic discourse.

Hats off to whoever can fit today's politics, whether of the world or of Turkey, into the right-left spectrum. We have accumulated enough data that there is no longer any need to consult İdris Küçükömer.

The share of the class ground among the motivations of the choice of left politics is by now almost nonexistent. Among the new period's quests for allies by left discourse and politics, which has remained confined to the Nişantaşı circles, the nationalist-racist Kurdish movement ranks first. What motive could be carrying the Turkish left from the earlier nationalist-alliance point to the alliance with Kurds today? Let us go a little deeper: remove the Alevis, as a religious group, from the left movement in Turkey and see what is left. There is still, for better or worse, a left described in the literature, and a margin of deviation between the literature and reality is understandable, but a deviation this large in its practice in Turkey is by now given another name.

Last week I said I would return, if the opportunity arose, to the topic "Politics and History Between the Sons of Hegel and the Sons of Abraham," which appears in issue 50 of tezkire magazine, titled "The Turkish Left: Once Upon a Time There Was and Was Not." This title in fact draws attention to another dynamic that is more valid than the conceptions of the functioning of politics, whether class-based or along the right-left axis. Since the right-wing and left-wing followers of Hegel, reading the axis of politics according to the right-left axis has become a rule. Yet there are deeper historical motives that give direction to political behavior and partisanship, including even one's position on this very axis.

There was of course no problem between the sons of Abraham, that is, Ishmael and Isaac. But the historical divisions that took place among the generations that came after them have given direction to the whole of human history and continue to do so. Great fault lines, referred to today as the Clash of Civilizations, whose validity we, however much we dislike it, unfortunately witness, with their anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, determine the social movements in the world.

Is not even the motivation of a left that has never found its social base among the proletariat, and is instead conditioned to find its social base in finance capitalists as financiers, in Turkish and Kurdish nationalists and in Alevis, related to where it stands in the struggle among the Sons of Abraham?

To see this a bit more clearly, it suffices to look at the Islamophobic reactions everyone has displayed over the last twenty years, at where each stands in world politics.