ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the original theses of Hikmet Kivilcimli, who spent more than 20 years in Turkish prisons and exile, mostly during the period of the Kemalist One-Party State. A monumental figure of the Turkish socialist movement, he played leading roles both as a politician and theorist from the 1920s until his death. One of the central arguments of historical materialism is that “material productive forces”, along and in conflict with “relations of production”, determine the course of history and revolutionary replacement of one mode of production with another. A belief in shared common descent was the symbolic basis of asabiyyah. Kivilcimli detected three forms of the effectiveness of primitive socialism/collective action in modern civilization. In countries where capitalism has not established a fully-fledged bourgeois society, at the very margins, residues of primitive socialist elements can be detected. The parallels Kivilcimli established between the national revolutionary and the barbarian, between anti-colonial national revolution and the Migration Period, are very clear.
