The left, politics and conspiratorial thought

What we have recently lived through requires us to think about the meaning of politics as well. Politics is the level that befits human beings and that makes human beings human, because by its very essence it is a level that emphasizes human will, reason, problem-solving ability, and knowing, recognizing and reaching agreement with the other. In the end it requires parties who know each other. It requires these parties to seek a common path or ground together even when they are in fierce competition or even conflict with one another.

The political level is one over which we should tremble, because when this level is destroyed or distorted, reason, will, freedom, peace and trust suffer great harm.

I have touched on various tendencies or approaches that erode and distort the political level in many earlier pieces. Approaches that regard the people as a mass that needs to be placed under tutelage and has not proven its maturity... or approaches that imagine society as an integral community and depict every claim of difference as sedition, for example, inevitably put a brake on the development of political reason.

Among the approaches that paralyze political reason, we also counted conspiracism, which presupposes that behind everything happening in plain view there are higher planners. The problem with conspiratorial thought is not that there are no conspiracies in the world. On the contrary, conspiring, viewing society as a field of engineering, is itself one of the most important dimensions of politics. There are covert or open alliances and agreements among people. What makes conspiracism a problem is attributing what happens to imaginary relationships that can never be proven or to fabricated agreements, without any evidence, without relying on any concrete data.

Conspiratorial thought has theoretical assumptions that unchanging hierarchies of power are at work. There are certain centers of power, and everything unfolds as they plan. This approach leaves no place for human beings, for society, for will; hence politics is left helpless before these superior forces, there is no precaution it can take, because even the precautions it takes are part of the plans of those superior forces.

In connection with the Gezi events, we did not point to any relationship, alliance or operation that was not in plain view. The development of the events, their inflaming, their provocation, the widening and narrowing of the circle of alliance at certain stages, together with their reasons, all unfolded in plain view, so much so as to leave no need for any conspiracy theory. Are we not to see cunning in socialists and the forest-massacring finance-capitalists rising up hand in hand against a government that has undertaken a democratic and economic revolution, under the name of defending a tree? And what kind of theoretical consideration does it leave room for that the actors who have stood in the front ranks of all the attempts against democracy so far also stand in the front ranks of these events? Keep the theory of the conspiracy for yourselves; what we have seen is enough for us already.

The role the left has assumed in this event of course deserves a separate assessment. The meaning attributed to the Gezi Park actions, and the tactics and strategy they applied to arrive at a revolution through these actions, have to rest from beginning to end on an approach that completely cancels politics and instrumentalizes all the other actors of society. Which of the people's troubles this path or this revolution will cure, and what it promises people, are not important at all. What matters is the coming to power of the left's chosen modern (or postmodern) princes. Because being kept away from power creates for them a diasporic state of mind that can never be compensated. The ending of this diaspora will be possible when the left reaches its Zion, that is, the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Nowhere in what the left presents of itself in the Gezi actions is there politics; there is either the cancellation of politics by a conspiratorial mind or its rejection in a militant language. In fact, at this stage you can pick up from the article by Taha Özhan (in yesterday's Sabah), who got ahead of me and made an excellent analysis of the ideological roots of the incompatibility of the left and politics. In parallel with what is expressed in that article, I can say the following.

By its nature, the socialist left represents the most important conspiratorial deviation in which the political level is denied. Because it never considers what happens in the world to be limited to what is visible, and explains it with a level of invisible (unseen, ghaybi) reality that it gives the impression that only it knows. The masses are invited to believe in this level of reality, which in fact only the clever ones of the left see.

Politics itself is already a field that exists for the interests of capitalism (or the ruling classes) and serves them. Everything taking place at the level of politics is in fact nothing but reflections (epiphenomena) onto us of events taking place inside a kind of cave called capitalism.

This mode of thought is by its nature very prone to conspiracies that can in no way be proven and are described at the theoretical level. If one looks at the literature, the discourses, the news and the analyses of the Turkish left, one sees nothing but this kind of conspiracy production. At this level of thought, frankly, no place is left for the political.

In fact, the left's being swept into such a metapolitical politicality also presents a great contradiction with its acknowledging a field like political economy. Because the claim of "political economy" itself carries an emphasis that puts the political into the heart of the economy. Political economy rejects the claim that the economy is actually a scientific and technical matter and therefore not open to human differences. Accordingly, the claim that the nature of economic processes is apolitical in character is regarded as the highest ideological illusion.

Despite this, the field opened to the political cannot save the left from conspiratorial thought, from the metapolitical deviation, because in the end, from the economic reductionism that proves more dominant, a "political sphere" is separated off and assumed to be an abstract field entirely dependent on the economic level, which is the real determinant. In this case, the autonomous nature of many events is ignored. Every event is again evaluated as part of a larger story, disregarding the importance of its own existence.

You see, who actually needs to confront the conspiratorial deviation of thought that has come onto the agenda because of the Gezi Park events?

The Turkish left is, both because of the theoretical sources of the left and because of Turkey's own contexts, ontologically and epistemologically condemned to the production of conspiracies. But within this production, somehow, there is also raising the cry of "conspiracist" against others.