Telling Young Comrades About Demir Küçükaydın

From the Cell to the Blog, from Kıvılcımlı to Robots, a Revolutionary Life

October 18, 2026 at 10:00 PM43 min readAuthor: Oğuz Demirkapı

Doors of Iron: Telling Young Comrades About Demir Küçükaydın

From the cell to the blog, from Kıvılcımlı to robots: a revolutionary life spanning more than half a century, an open archive and a friendly reckoning

Dear Young Comrades,

First, briefly: What is in this piece?

Demir Küçükaydın was born in 1949 in Savaştepe, Balıkesir, the son of a family of Macedonian migrants who had fled the Balkan Wars. His father was a worker in the lignite mines of Soma. He himself came out of the generation of '68. While studying sociology at night school he worked by day as a construction worker and organiser, and served in the leadership of Dev-Genç. He worked on organising Hikmet Kıvılcımlı's newspaper Sosyalist, and later published the newspaper Kıvılcım. Because of the articles in that paper he was first sentenced to decades in prison; the sentence was later reduced to 17 years. He served about ten years in prison, in Toptaşı, Niğde and Malatya. In Niğde he took part in an attempt to dig a tunnel, and when it was discovered he took the blame alone. For refusing to sing the national anthem he spent 15 months in an observation cell. After the 12 September coup he left for Europe. He lived in exile in France and Germany, for years drove a taxi twelve hours a night, and wrote in the time that was left.

Today he is 77. He is still writing. His blog, Demir'den Kapılar ("Doors of Iron", in Turkish), holds 1,026 posts, and more than ninety of his books are openly available for anyone to download free of charge. His latest collection, Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde: Yazılar 2017–2018 (On the Threshold of a Revolution: Writings 2017–2018), was published this month. The book deals with the artificial intelligence and robotics revolution, the process of becoming human, the "errors" of Engels and of Kıvılcımlı, a critique of Harari, and the political economy of Bitcoin. It is published under a Creative Commons licence and carries a permanent DOI.

In this piece you will find, in order:

How we got to know him in Gezi Park, and why he still gives us energy,
His life in a chronology, especially his years in prison,
His lifelong relationship with Hikmet Kıvılcımlı, one of both loyalty and criticism,
What he wrote about "being a democrat", and its essence,
Why his election analyses are valuable, and why he was sometimes wrong,
His fascination with technology and the principle that "our labour is public property",
The book Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde,
And finally, the criticisms we put to him. We wrote them using exactly the method he taught: the harshest criticism and the deepest respect can stand side by side.

This piece is not a commemoration, because Demir Hoca is among us and at work. Nor is it just an introduction, because we are not content with introducing him. We might call it a comradely reckoning.

1. Why are we telling his story?

The Turkish left has an illness: we either turn people into idols or we ignore them. Demir Küçükaydın has been exposed to the second a great deal. He himself has written about it bitterly many times. Although he is the person who has written most about Kıvılcımlı, he was not invited to contribute to a Kıvılcımlı collection. In the 2023 elections he produced warning articles and videos for months and received "not the slightest echo". A cultural centre in Kadıköy withdrew a hall from a symposium because he was among the speakers.

We are telling his story for three reasons:

Because he is a chain of memory. Few people are left who unite in a single life Kıvılcımlı, the circle around Deniz Gezmiş, 12 March, the prisons of 12 September, the migrant workers' movement in Europe, the press of the Kurdish freedom movement, and the forums of Gezi.
Because he teaches a method. He teaches us not to argue without defining our concepts, to read an election not as "who got how many votes" but as "how were the forces positioned", and to write not for bombast but to leave a lesson for future generations.
Because he is a living example of the knowledge commons. He compiled and typeset himself the books no publisher would print, and opened them to everyone. What we at Knowledge Commons argue for, he has been doing alone for years.

2. An "uncle" at Gezi: How did we get to know him?

We met Demir Hoca in Gezi Park. In June 2013 he was turning 64. We saw him among the tents, the forums and the solidarity kitchens, phone in hand, talking with young people beside him. We admired his energy despite his age, his fascination with technology, and how quickly he learned the language of the young. His energy gave all of us energy.

The ironic thing is that at the time he thought otherwise. On the first day of the resistance he wrote on his blog that if he went to Beyoğlu he might be able to observe more, but there he would be no more than a burden among young people telling him "uncle, stand aside". He thought the best contribution he could make was to write at his computer (Notes and Lessons of the "Gezi Park" Resistance, 1 June 2013, in Turkish).

He both wrote and came. In his own words, he wrote on almost every day of Gezi and, as far as he knew, was the person who wrote most during the Gezi period. These writings were later published as a book, Gezi Direnişi Yazıları (1 Haziran – 29 Temmuz) (Writings on the Gezi Resistance, 1 June – 29 July). When the period of the parks and forums began, he compiled the lists of forums one by one and took part in the "Legacy of Gezi" workshops. He gathered everything he wrote after Gezi on a collection page (in Turkish).

His verdict on Gezi was harsh too. In the foreword to the sixth-anniversary collection he wrote that Gezi had been defeated, and that it had left behind no accumulation "organisational, political, theoretical or programmatic". In his view the Paris Commune had been defeated but had left a lesson thanks to Marx's analysis. Gezi had no such analysis (The Lessons and Analysis of the Gezi Movement, 2019, in Turkish). You may not fully agree with this verdict. But a revolutionary who tries to draw lessons from a movement he was part of, rather than praise it, must be taken seriously.

3. A life: Chronology

The chronology below is based on the Biyografya and Aktüel Sanat pages (both based on Küçükaydın's own accounts), the author biography at Kitapyurdu, the interview with Halka Dergi and his own blog posts (all in Turkish).

Period	Event
10 June 1949	Born in Savaştepe, Balıkesir. The family were Macedonian migrants who had fled the Balkan Wars. When he was two they moved to Soma. His father worked for the Western Lignite company and was among the founders of the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) in Soma.
School years	Boarded at Balıkesir High School, moving in his final year to Karşıyaka Boys' High School. In Karşıyaka he joined the TİP.
1967–1968	Enrolled in the evening programme of the Sociology Department at Istanbul University. Took part in the occupations of '68 and acted together with the circle around Deniz Gezmiş. Chose not to collect his diploma.
1968–1970	Elected to the leading bodies of Dev-Genç. With the trade unionist İsmet Demir, worked as a steel fixer and organiser on the building sites of a power station, a cement factory, a refinery and an opera house, and contributed to the organising of the Construction Workers' Union.
Early 1970s	Received guerrilla training with the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Returned after about four and a half months. Was caught at the Karkamış border crossing, tortured, and held in the prisons of Nizip and Antep.
The 12 March period	Held for about five months in the Davutpaşa barracks in the Dev-Genç Istanbul trial.
1970s	Worked on organising Kıvılcımlı's newspaper Sosyalist. After Kıvılcımlı's death, published six issues of Kıvılcım, a newspaper continuing his line.
After 1974	The Ecevit government sent Kıvılcım to the State Security Court. The first sentence is reported as 36 years (he himself says mockingly "a hundred years"); it was later reduced to 17 years.
The prison years	Served about a year and a half in Toptaşı and seven years in Niğde. Took part in an attempt to dig a fifty-metre tunnel; when the attempt was discovered he took responsibility and was given solitary confinement. Was put back in solitary for protesting the executions after 12 September, and was tried for insulting the President. Spent 15 months in an observation cell in Malatya E-Type Prison.
Around 1984	After his release he was sent to do military service in Sarıkamış. Took sick leave and, with the help of the Fourth International, left the country.
France	Became a political refugee. Worked with the LCR, the French section of the Fourth International.
Germany	Moved to Germany, where workers from Turkey were concentrated, worked with the GİM, and drove a taxi. Published the magazine Ne Yapmalı (What Is to Be Done) for migrants. Wrote for Devrimci Marksist Tartışma Defterleri (Revolutionary Marxist Discussion Notebooks) and Sosyalizmin Sorunları (Problems of Socialism).
1992–2003	Wrote weekly columns in Özgür Gündem, then in Özgür Politika. In this period he built a close theoretical and political relationship with the Kurdish freedom movement.
Late 1990s – 2000s	As the internet was just spreading, he ran the forums Kürdistanlı Sosyalist Forumu, Tarihsel Maddecilik ve Sosyalizmin Sorunları, Yeni Serbest Kürsü and Yazılar ve Yankıları. He founded the internet magazine Köxüz.
2001	Organised the Hikmet Kıvılcımlı Symposium held near Wremen in Germany. For the participants he prepared a CD containing all of Kıvılcımlı's works and an archive of the classics.
2004–2007	Wrote the Manifesto of Democracy for the Middle East. Marksizmin Marksist Eleştirisi (A Marxist Critique of Marxism, Versus, 2007) and Tersinden Kemalizm: İsmail Beşikçi Eleştirisi (Kemalism in Reverse: A Critique of İsmail Beşikçi, Araf) were published.
2012–2013	Was one of the organisers of the second large Kıvılcımlı Symposium, held at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul.
2013	Took part in Gezi, on the street and in writing.
2017–2018	Wrote the series "Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde" on Steemit. Suffered a stroke during the 2018 election campaign.
2022–2023	Produced nearly 40 articles and videos for the presidential election. He collected them under the title Kassandra'nın Laneti (The Curse of Cassandra, in Turkish).
2025–2026	Made all his books and archives downloadable (in Turkish). Had ChatGPT summarise his views and published the summary with his corrections (in Turkish). In October 2026, Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde was published.

4. The prison years: The school of a generation

Young comrades, note one figure: a 17-year sentence for a newspaper of six issues, and ten years actually served.

This was a "crime of writing" case. After Kıvılcımlı died in 1971, Demir Küçükaydın and his comrades published his writings and his line in the newspaper Kıvılcım. At the time the paper came out, Turkey was governed by a "left" government, the Ecevit government. It was this government that sent the paper to the State Security Court. Years later Demir Hoca summed it up like this: because of Kıvılcımlı's ideas, he had become the person who served the most prison time after Kıvılcımlı himself (On the Hikmet Kıvılcımlı Book, 2017, in Turkish).

Three scenes from the prison years are instructive:

The tunnel in Niğde. A group of prisoners dug a fifty-metre escape tunnel. When the tunnel was found, Demir Hoca took responsibility and was given solitary confinement. Carrying individually the cost of a collective action was the ethics of that generation.
Against the executions of 12 September. When the junta began the executions, he protested from his cell. What he got in return was a new spell of solitary and an "insult" case.
Fifteen months in Malatya. For refusing to sing the national anthem, he was held for 15 months in an observation cell. The source of this stance was not stubbornness. That day he was defending with his body an idea he would theorise years later: refusing to tie the state to a nation, a language or a lineage. He lived the proposition "being a Turk and being a democrat are incompatible" before he wrote it.

For him prison was also a school. When he wrote that Kıvılcımlı too had spent 22 years of his life in dungeons and that, despite this or precisely because of it, he became a great theorist, he was also describing his own experience. You can see what Niğde meant for this generation in the piece he wrote years later to defend Ertuğrul Kürkçü, a contemporary of his whom he has criticised harshly (Defending Ertuğrul Kürkçü, March 2026, in Turkish). In that piece he reminds today's left of a principle: criticising someone in the harshest theoretical and political terms is no obstacle to maintaining a comradely and friendly relationship with them. In his view the two attitudes can, and must, exist side by side.

Keep this principle in mind. In the last section of this piece we will apply the same to him.

5. A lifelong dialogue with Kıvılcımlı

We will need to write about Hikmet Kıvılcımlı (1902–1971) separately on this site. Briefly, he is the most original Marxist theorist of history and society to have come out of Turkey. With his "thesis of history" he argued for the revolutionary role of barbarians in history, and with the concept of the "commune" that primitive communal relations shape history even thousands of years later. He spent 22 years of his life in dungeons.

Demir Küçükaydın's relationship with Kıvılcımlı has three layers.

5.1. Protector and propagator

In the 1970s he responded to the "criticisms" that smeared Kıvılcımlı: his critiques of the criticisms of Kıvılcımlı by Mihri Belli and Murat Belge (1976, both in Turkish) are among them. In 1978, still in the midst of his prison years, he wrote "The Development of Marxist-Leninist Doctrine and Hikmet Kıvılcımlı" (in Turkish). That piece opens with a remark of Lenin's: Marx's theory is not something completed and inviolable; it is the cornerstone of a science that socialists must develop in all directions. The piece is a reply to those who sniggered, "what contribution to theory could someone who spent 22 years in the dungeons of a backward country make?"

In 2001 he organised the Kıvılcımlı symposium in Germany and collected all of his works on a CD. That CD is still downloadable today. In 2012–2013 he organised the second symposium in Istanbul. He compiled what he had written about Kıvılcımlı over fifty years as Kıvılcımlı Üzerine Yazılar (1975–2012) (Writings on Kıvılcımlı, 1975–2012).

5.2. Critic: "It is not we who criticise Kıvılcımlı, but the Kıvılcımlı in us"

As much as he is the person who has defended Kıvılcımlı most, Demir Hoca is also the one who has criticised him most harshly. The title of his 2012 piece is startling: "Why and How Was Kıvılcımlı a Reactionary Nationalist?" (in Turkish). The piece's logic is this: Kıvılcımlı's İhtiyat Kuvvet: Milliyet (Şark) (The Reserve Force: Nationality (the East)), regarded as his most important work against nationalism, opens with Marx's saying, "A people that oppresses others cannot itself be free." For Küçükaydın, even this saying assumes "a people" to be a community defined by language, religion and lineage, and therefore rests on a reactionary concept of the nation. In this sense Kıvılcımlı, who relied on this saying, the hundreds of thousands of socialists who relied on him, and Küçükaydın himself, who once held this view, are all "reactionary nationalists".

The finest sentence in the piece is this: If we had not read Kıvılcımlı, we could not criticise him like this. Here it is not we who criticise Kıvılcımlı, but the Kıvılcımlı in us. For him, the way to keep Kıvılcımlı's memory alive was to criticise him in the most merciless way.

With the same attitude, on the 42nd anniversary of his death he published a critical assessment of Kıvılcımlı's contributions to the theory of history and society (in Turkish). In this piece he openly acknowledges that, looking at Kıvılcımlı's last political writings, one gets the impression of "a typical Stalinist and Turkish nationalist". But, recalling Marx's remark that "if essence and appearance were the same, science would be superfluous", he argues that Kıvılcımlı made contributions on a scale no Marxist after Marx and Engels had made. Foremost among these, in his view, is grasping Marxism not as a philosophy or an economic doctrine but as a science of history and society.

Hoca is also harsh towards those who pass themselves off as Kıvılcımlı's heirs. In his view, the army-bureaucracy tried to hollow out Kıvılcımlı, as it did Deniz Gezmiş and Che, and turn him into "one of the symbols of ulusalcılık" (nationalist neo-Kemalism), and largely succeeded. But Kıvılcımlı's spirit, even if most of those who took part were unaware of it, was at Gezi.

5.3. Trying to go beyond: "The commune is the missing link"

In his 2001 symposium paper, republished in 2019 (in Turkish), he presents Kıvılcımlı's concept of the "commune" as the key to the present. The answer to Acemoğlu's question "why do some nations remain under the rule of centralised-bureaucratic states?", to Weber's question "why Protestantism?", and to the question "why is there not the slightest democratic transformation in Turkey?" lies, in his view, in the commune: in the erasure of the commune in the millennia-old centres of civilisation.

In Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde, he argues with Kıvılcımlı in another field. He concedes that Kıvılcımlı saw the importance of fire in the process of becoming human before many palaeoanthropologists did, but takes up in two long chapters the "errors" he fell into in explaining this process (see section 9).

In 2023 he hailed Garbis Altınoğlu's critique of Kıvılcımlı in a whole book as the "highest regard" (in Turkish) that could be shown to Kıvılcımlı. Against those who commemorate Kıvılcımlı "with respect" and never discuss a single line of his, he sets those who take him seriously and criticise him.

The lesson for young comrades from this section is this: loyalty to a master means not repeating his words, but trying to go beyond his limits using his method.

6. "Being a democrat": Twenty years in pursuit of a concept

The most persistent theme on Demir Hoca's blog is the definition of the concepts "democrat" and "democracy". There are dozens of posts with these words in their titles. A few of them (all in Turkish):

A Call to Radical Democrats, or to True Democrats (2014)
Golden Rules for Democrats (2014)
The Basic Problem of Socialists and Democrats (2014)
Why Is There No Democratic Movement or Party in Turkey? (2015)
Why and How Should Socialists and Democrats Defend the HDP? (2015)
What Is Democracy, and Are There Democrats in Turkey? (2016)
Why Are There No Strong Democratic Movements in the World and in Turkey? (2015/2017)
Democrats and Elections – Theory, Programme, Strategy, Tactics (2018)
A series of notes on the Peoples' Democratic Congress (the first, 2011)

6.1. Definition: Democracy is formal equality

Demir Hoca's starting point is a definition taken from Lenin: democracy means formal equality. Whatever their language, religion, lineage, political views and culture, everyone is equal before the law. No language, religion or lineage is privileged over the others. Beyond this formal equality lies socialism, that is, social and economic "real equality". Beyond that lies communism, where the concept of equality itself is transcended.

From this he draws two startling conclusions:

"Turkish democracy" is a contradiction. It is an oxymoron like "a square circle". If a nation has been defined by Turkishness (or Kurdishness, or Frenchness), then however "democratically" the state functions, this democracy resembles the democracy of slave-owners in the ancient cities: it is the democracy of Turks, and it means inequality for those who are not Turks.
Having democratic aspirations is not the same as being a democrat. He explains this with the example of the Alevis. Because they are oppressed by a state defined by Sunni Islam, Alevis resist with democratic aspirations. But when they demand that "the state recognise the cemevis", they make an undemocratic demand that accepts the state's interference in belief and merely stretches it. The democratic demand is the abolition of the Diyanet and the complete withdrawal of the state from this field. The same criterion is applied to the Kurdish movement. In his view, even the programme of the movement's most left-wing section is not fully democratic, because it does not oppose defining the nation by a language and a history.

That is why he does not hesitate to write this sentence: "There are no democrats in Turkey." In his reply to a journalist friend's objection that "this generalisation is not your style", he says the proposition is a deliberate provocation. His aim is to draw his interlocutors into discussing the basic concepts and the programme.

6.2. The golden rule: The state is guilty

After the Kobani protests, in a climate in which even those who called themselves democrats blamed the demonstrators, he proposed this principle: for the ordinary citizen, the rule "everyone is innocent until proven guilty" applies. But when it comes to the state and the government in Turkey, the rule works the other way round: the state is guilty until proven otherwise by an independent court. It is the state's duty to prove its innocence. If someone fighting for democracy in Turkey follows this rule, the likelihood of making mistakes in situations requiring sudden decisions falls almost to zero (Golden Rules for Democrats, in Turkish).

Today, faced with trustees, the Can Atalay case, newspaper closures and trials conducted under the "terror" label, this rule is still the compass that should come to mind first.

6.3. Programme: A world republic

He himself sums up the programmatic counterpart of this understanding of democracy like this: everything national should be withdrawn entirely into the private sphere. The Diyanet should be abolished. Officials should be elected, recallable and paid an average worker's wage. Appointed governors and district governors should be abolished. The security forces should be tied to elected local bodies. State and corporate secrecy should be abolished. Borders should be open to working people. And all of this should ultimately unite in a nation-blind world republic. In the systematic summary (in Turkish) he had an AI produce from texts he chose himself, this programme can be seen clearly.

It is not hard to see that this list of demands comes from the Paris Commune and from Marx's The Civil War in France. Demir Hoca's contribution is to reread this programme radically against today's world of nation-states. We share most of this programme. We explain where we part ways in the last section.

7. Election analyses: Reading not the photograph but the war

Demir Hoca's writings on elections run from 1979 to today. He collected those up to 2014 in a compilation called Seçim Yazıları (Election Writings). The rest are on his blog: the two elections of 2015, the 2017 referendum, 2018, 2019 and 2023. The value of these writings for young comrades lies less in individual predictions than in method.

7.1. The four principles of the method

1. An election is not the war itself, but a photograph of the war at that moment. The basic mistake of those who assess elections is to take the election itself for the struggle and to analyse it in terms of votes lost and won, campaign tactics and the choice of candidates. The right analysis decodes the interests of the social forces, how they are positioned and their strategies. What is reflected in the votes is the result of this positioning (Election Results and Methodology, 2015, in Turkish).

2. The decisive force not named in the analyses. In explaining the difference between 7 June and 1 November 2015, he draws attention to an actor no one took into account: the army and the "state party". He writes that before 7 June the General Staff showed "in a language the experts would understand" that it was not behind Erdoğan, and that before 1 November this positioning was reversed. For him the HDP's inability to campaign, the burning of its offices, and the Suruç and Ankara massacres were the consequences of this shift (The Decisive Force Never Mentioned in Analyses of the Election Results, in Turkish). The Erdoğan–ulusalcı (nationalist) alliance openly formed after 2016 strengthened this reading in retrospect.

3. The legal name and the political essence are different. As early as April 2015 he wrote "7 June Is Not an Election but a Referendum" (in Turkish). In his view, what was being voted on in that election was not which party would get how many votes but the choice between the threshold system left over from 12 September and an unaccountable presidential regime. Calling the election an "election", like calling the guerrilla a "terrorist", would be to accept the definition not of the oppressed but of the rulers. After the 2017 referendum he repeated the same thesis in "Erdoğan Had Lost the Referendum – 7 June Was Not an Election but a Referendum" (in Turkish).

4. The measure of success is not votes. After 2018, while everyone declared the CHP a failure and the HDP a success, he wrote the opposite: "On the Elections and After: The CHP Succeeded, the HDP Failed" (in Turkish). His logic was this: for a revolutionary the measure of success is what has been added to the self-organisation, political education and mobilisation of the oppressed. Deriving success from the number of votes reproduces "parliamentary cretinism". Considering the CHP a "left party" and finding it a failure is also wrong. The CHP is a state party that has made the survival of the state an end in itself. That party's success is measured by its ability to gather the masses carrying aspirations for democracy under its own banner and keep them in reserve for the state classes. By this measure the CHP had succeeded.

7.2. Predictions: Hits and misses

We have to be honest: Hoca's method is strong, but not all his predictions came true.

Hits. Reading 7 June as a plebiscite, identifying the shift in the army's position on 1 November, and the 2018 finding that "the CHP succeeded" were borne out over time. The concrete action he proposed for election day in 2018 was also a genuine proposal: to follow the results gathered in front of the Supreme Election Council (YSK) and the state broadcaster TRT. In his view, this would prevent the streets being left to gangs and make up for the cowardice of the CHP leadership.
Misses. In his last prediction, on 27 May 2023, he wrote that the clues showed Kılıçdaroğlu could win the second round (in Turkish). Kılıçdaroğlu lost. In Kassandra'nın Laneti, published afterwards, Hoca argued that his real proposal (that the HDP stop laying the paving stones of the opposition's defeat by adopting an independent strategy) had been confirmed by the defeat. There is something to this defence, but the last-day prediction was wrong. Saying so does not diminish his worth. On the contrary, the method he teaches demands precisely that predictions be tested against facts and that the wrong ones be abandoned.

What young comrades should take from this is: on election night, look not at the percentages on the screens but at how the forces shifted in the six months before and after the election.

8. A fascination with technology, and "our labour is public property"

We said that what surprised us most at Gezi was his fascination with technology. This fascination is not an ornament but a method.

In the late 1990s, when the internet was not yet widespread, he set up and ran discussion forums. He copied the online archive of the classics "with a special program" and saved it from being lost.
In 2011 he followed Tahrir through Al Jazeera's live broadcasts and commented almost minute by minute.
In 2017 he published the series "Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde" on Steemit, a blockchain platform that rewards authors with cryptocurrency. The same year he wrote a seven-part series on the political economy of Bitcoin.
In 2018, in "Bitcoin, Blockchain and Preventing Election Fraud" (in Turkish), he proposed blockchain for election security.
In 2022 he first opened his election strategy to discussion on Clubhouse, then explained it in 21 videos. He has a YouTube channel and a podcast on SoundCloud.
In 2026, in response to his readers' complaint that "you write too long", he had ChatGPT summarise his views. While everyone else was getting AI to do their work and presenting it as their own, he did the opposite: he published the AI's summary under its own name, correcting the first four paragraphs in bold to show where it went wrong (the post, in Turkish). A small but exemplary model of working with AI transparently and honestly.
In 2026 he published Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde under a CC BY 4.0 licence, with a permanent DOI on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.23349955), in PDF and EPUB.

Beneath all of this lies the same principle: "As always, our labour is public property." He opened to everyone his more than ninety books, the Kıvılcımlı archive, the forum archives and the archive of the classics, without asking anyone's permission and without charging anyone.

This is exactly what Knowledge Commons stands for: knowledge belongs to everyone. While capital encloses the general intellect and locks it into models, a 77-year-old revolutionary distributing the entire product of his life under an open licence is a concrete practice of class struggle in the field of knowledge. It is a small-scale example of what we call "the restitution of the general intellect" in the Socialist AI Manifesto.

9. Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde: What does the book say?

9.1. The structure of the book

The 242-page book consists of 20 pieces written between November 2017 and January 2018. The pieces have been corrected only for spelling and punctuation; the content has not been touched. There are three parts:

Part	Chapters	Main question
On the Threshold of a Revolution	1–10	Are artificial intelligence and robotics a revolution on the scale of the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions? What are humanity, society and labour?
A Critique of Harari's Sapiens	11–13	What is wrong with explaining society through biology and psychology, and what is the political counterpart of this error?
The Political Economy of Bitcoin	14–20	Can something digital be "money"? What are Bitcoin's use value, its value and its future?

9.2. The main theses

1. This is not "Industry 4.0" but the threshold of a new civilisation. Hoca refuses to see the artificial intelligence and robotics revolution as a stage of the industrial revolution. For him this revolution is a qualitative change in the productive forces on the scale of the Neolithic Revolution, the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. The difference is its speed: the earlier ones took thousands or hundreds of years, this one will take place within decades. In 2017 this observation was made at a time when much of the left regarded the subject as science fiction. We agree with the essence of this observation. Our book Labour in the Age of Artificial Intelligence starts from a similar intuition.

2. "Why can robots not produce surplus value?" The Marxist core of the book is the fourth chapter. Staying faithful to the conceptual system of Capital, he says: only living labour creates value and surplus value. Robots, however intelligent, are fixed capital. In a society where robots produce all use values, the production of surplus value, and therefore capitalism, is impossible. The image of a capitalism based on robot slaves working on other planets is as absurd as spaceships faster than light. That is why, for him, this revolution carries the potential to "stuff grass into the bell of capitalism" (that is, to silence it for good).

3. Society is a distinct form of being. For Hoca, society is a third form of being, after inanimate and living being, with its own laws of motion. Harari's basic error is to explain society with biological and cognitive categories ("the cognitive revolution", "shared fictions"). This error, in his view, is not academic but political: it lies at the root of an impasse stretching from the dissolution of Gezi and of the "No" assemblies to the HDP's programmeless politics (chapter 13: "What the HDP and Harari Have in Common").

4. The errors of Engels and of Kıvılcımlı. This is the most controversial part of the book. For Hoca, Engels's famous essay "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" makes a category error. The stone axe and the stick in the process of becoming human are organs, that is, they must be treated with biological categories. Regarding them as means of production and speaking of "the part played by labour" means using a social category before society has come into being. Kıvılcımlı, for his part, saw the importance of fire before the anthropologists, but fell into a similar confusion.

5. From the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. The disappearance of labour means the disappearance of production, and therefore of society. That is why, for him, Marx's "realm of freedom" is not a new form of society but the transcendence of the social. Hoca writes that this is as much a danger as a hope: if this revolution cannot break the "thick shell" of nation-states and capitalist relations, it may destroy humanity, like a chick that cannot be born inside the egg.

6. Bitcoin. Hoca begins by saying that digital objects normally have no value because they can be copied without labour, and can be made valuable only through monopoly and prohibition. He sees Bitcoin as an exception to this. In his view, thanks to mining it contains "a real concentration of labour value", it has all the physical properties needed to be a general equivalent, and it was born as a tool against states' and banks' creation of money out of nothing. He observes that states, bankers and "statist-nationalist Marxists" have formed a spontaneous alliance against Bitcoin. The series ends with an analysis, through network effects, of the Bitcoin community's slogan "Hodl!" (hold without selling).

9.3. The value of the book

This book is an early and courageous attempt to think with the categories of Capital, at a time when the left either did not see artificial intelligence at all or spoke of it with the fear that "it will take our jobs" or the dream that "it will solve everything". The thesis that robots do not create value is a basic tool we use today in debates on physical AI and in our criticisms of Musk's promises of "abundance". The insistence that society cannot be reduced to biology is a solid antidote to the "human nature" narratives stretching from Harari to the preachers of technology.

We discuss what the book sees well and what it misses in the next section.

10. Friendly but harsh: Our criticisms

At the start we recalled Demir Hoca's own principle: criticising someone in the harshest way and maintaining a comradely relationship with them can coexist. Just as he looked at Kıvılcımlı through "the Kıvılcımlı in us", we try to look at him through the Demir Küçükaydın in us. The criticisms below were written from a Marxist-Leninist line based on the independent organisation of the working class, the Leninist conception of the party, and a critical but committed view of the experiences of socialist construction.

10.1. Table: Where do we meet, and where do we part?

What does Demir Hoca say?	Our objection
Democracy is formal equality, and the first task of the revolution is to purge the state of every language, religion and lineage. Socialists should pursue, as in the title of a 2021 piece, "identity politics, not class politics" (in Turkish).	We share the struggle for formal equality. But who will be the subject of the struggle for democracy? If the working class does not lead this struggle with its own independent organisation, even the most radical democratic programme will remain within the horizon of the liberal opposition or of the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation. Democratic tasks do not replace the class struggle; they are a part of it.
Even Marx's saying "A people that oppresses others cannot be free" rests on a reactionary concept of the nation. Every nationalism, even the most democratic, is now reactionary.	Defending Lenin's distinction between the nationalism of the oppressor nation and that of the oppressed nation, and the right of nations to self-determination, is a precondition of internationalism. The goal of a "nation-blind world republic" is beautiful, but postponing the concrete right of an oppressed people today in favour of an abstract equality in the future works, in practice, to the advantage of the oppressor nation.
In Turkey the real ruler is not the bourgeoisie but the state ("the military-bureaucratic oligarchy", "the Eastern state").	The relative autonomy of the state apparatus and the weight of the army-bureaucracy tradition in Turkey are real. But the state, in the last instance, is the power of the capitalist class. The formula "the real enemy is the state" loses sight of TÜSİAD, MÜSİAD and finance capital. This opens the door to a strategy of "alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie against the state".
In 2018 he proposed a "Nation Alliance + HDP partnership"; in 2023 he built the HDP's strategy around the opposition candidate winning.	Tactical alliances may be needed against a fascistic government. But in a bloc led by the CHP, which by Hoca's own account is a "state party", the independent voice of the labour movement is lost. Our priority is an independent front of the labour and socialist forces.
The organisation needed is a single world party. In its absence, every revolutionary should see themselves as a subject acting provisionally in its place.	Internationalism is right. But organisation is built not with an abstract world party or with isolated individuals, but with parties rooted in the working class of each country and their solidarity. His being "isolated", in his own words, and receiving "not the slightest echo" is not an individual misfortune but the fate of unorganised theory. Theory becomes a material force only when it seizes the masses.
He describes Russia and China as "capitalist and bureaucratic dictatorships", even as imperialist, but proposes taking their side on a world scale because they counterbalance the US–NATO bloc. In the 2026 Iran war he more openly supports Iran's resistance.	Making use of the contradictions between imperialists is one thing; taking sides with one imperialist camp is another. The struggle against NATO is our priority too. But assigning a "time-buying" role to the regimes in Moscow, Beijing or Tehran that crush their own workers ties the independent line of the working class to one of the camps. Our stance against imperialist war is against all imperialists.
Religion is the whole of the superstructure that regulates the boundaries and relations of a community. The Enlightenment, and democracy too, are "a religion".	Drawing attention to the unity of the superstructure is valuable. But stretching the concept of "religion" this far blurs its materialist critique as a specific form of ideology of the ruling classes. The struggle for secularism and a scientific world view requires conceptual clarity in a country where political Islam is on the rise.
He reads the Soviet experience mainly through bureaucratic degeneration and anti-democracy. This is a legacy that comes from the Fourth International.	We do not shy away from discussing the mistakes and crimes of the experiences of socialist construction. But rejecting these experiences wholesale under the heading of "bureaucracy" also ignores the achievements of humanity's first workers' state (planning, industrialisation, the defeat of fascism, education and health) and the lessons to be drawn from them.

10.2. Four notes on Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde

1. Timing: 300 weeks have passed. In 2017 Hoca predicted that in 250–300 weeks (that is, in 2022–2023) robots able to do almost every job humans do, from hotel cleaning to cooking and elderly care, would cost less than a carer's annual wage, and that driverless vehicles would wipe out the private car and taxi driving. Those dates have passed. In 2026 humanoid robots are still at the pilot and trial stage, and taxi driving goes on. This is not a "small delay" but a deviation that, by the book's own method, must be dwelt on. There is a gap between technical possibility and capitalist application: capital spreads a technology not simply because it is more efficient but when it is more profitable than exploiting cheap labour. As long as there is cheap care labour coming from the world's poor countries, the robot carer is in no hurry. The migrant care worker's wage is a class relation competing with the price of the robot.

2. We agree with the surplus value thesis, but not with its conclusion. On robots not creating value, we stand where Hoca stands. But drawing from this the conclusion that "capitalism will become increasingly impossible" carries a dangerous automatism. Monopoly capitalism meets the pressure on the rate of profit created by automation not by dissolving of its own accord but by attacking: by intensifying labour, through the transfer of value from peripheral countries, through platform and data rent, through mental Taylorism and surveillance. Capitalism does not die by itself. It is overthrown by an organised class. Hoca senses this danger with the metaphor of "the child who cannot be born", but leaves the question of who the subject is open throughout the book.

3. Bitcoin: labour value, or a waste of energy? The labour and energy expended in mining produce no use value meeting a social need. They serve only to secure scarcity artificially. This cannot count as "socially necessary labour" in Marx's sense. Bitcoin, seen in 2017 as a tool against states and banks, joined finance capital's portfolio from 2024 onwards through Wall Street's exchange-traded funds. The promise of decentralisation turned into a speculative asset with concentrated ownership. "Hodl!" is an individual investment strategy, not a class strategy. (This is neither investment advice nor advice against investing. It is an assessment in political economy.)

4. The Engels debate is open. The thesis that treats tools as "organs" is provocative and worth discussing. But it is too early for a definitive verdict. Present-day palaeoanthropology increasingly emphasises the reciprocal interaction (co-evolution) between tool-making and the evolution of the brain. This supports at least part of Engels's intuition. The transition between the biological and the social is itself a dialectical process. Drawing a sharp categorical boundary may make the transition itself invisible.

10.3. A short note on style

A type of sentence recurs in Hoca's writing: "I am the only one who wrote this", "no one saw it", "its truth was proven by the facts". We do not read this as arrogance. It is the voice of someone who has been ignored for half a century. But the lesson for young comrades is this: a correct idea grows stronger only within a collective that will discuss it, correct it and apply it. A revolutionary's greatest work is to leave behind an organised community that will carry the work on after them. Demir Hoca's open archive is an important step in this direction. A collective that reads and discusses this archive can close this gap.

11. A reading route for young comrades

Demir Hoca's 1,026 posts and more than ninety books are daunting at first sight. We suggest this order (all in Turkish):

The summary he chose himself: A Summary of My Views by ChatGPT. You see the whole system in a few pages.
The concept of democracy: Why Is There No Democratic Movement or Party in Turkey? and What Is Democracy, and Are There Democrats in Turkey?
The election method: Election Results and Methodology and The CHP Succeeded, the HDP Failed
Kıvılcımlı: Why and How Was Kıvılcımlı a Reactionary Nationalist? and A Critical Assessment on the 42nd Anniversary of His Death
Gezi: The Lessons and Analysis of the Gezi Movement
Artificial intelligence: Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde. First chapters 1, 4, 9 and 10, then the Harari and Bitcoin parts.
The whole archive: Archive CD and My Books for Download

As you read, keep the objections in the tenth section of this piece beside you. The aim of reading is not to approve or reject but to discuss.

12. Concrete tasks

Reading groups. Let us discuss Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde chapter by chapter in university and workplace reading groups. Chapter 4 (surplus value) and chapters 9–10 (society and the realm of freedom) in particular are a good starting point for entering the debates on artificial intelligence with a class perspective.
Let us protect the archive. Hoca's books and archives currently sit largely on cloud drives. In the spirit of the knowledge commons, let us volunteer to help create mirrors of them in permanent, open repositories (Zenodo, the Internet Archive, open libraries). Let us consult Hoca himself on licensing and preferences.
Conversations across generations. Let us organise conversations, recorded and published under an open licence, that bring together young comrades with this comrade who gave us energy at Gezi. Let us record the experience of prison, exile and migrant work first-hand.
Let us write the criticism. The objections in this piece are a start. Let us deepen them in separate pieces and keep them open to Hoca's replies. As Garbis Altınoğlu did with Kıvılcımlı, let us criticise him by taking him seriously.
Let us apply the method. At the next election, let us carry out a collective study that analyses the positioning of forces before looking at vote shares. Let us write before the election, and after the election test our own predictions openly.

Doors of Iron

The name of his blog is a play on words: Demir'den Kapılar, which means both "doors of iron" and "doors from Demir". Demir Küçükaydın's life, too, is full of doors. The border gate at Karkamış, the iron door of Niğde, the door of the observation cell in Malatya, the door of exile in France, the taxi doors opening and closing all night long in Germany. And after all of these, the door of an archive he never locked, which he left open to everyone.

Recalling the play on words Kıvılcımlı used in his memoirs, he once wrote: "İşimiz bitmeden işimiz bitiyor" ("We are finished before our work is finished"). We wrote this piece while his work is not yet finished, while he is still among us. The best way to thank him is to read what he wrote, to discuss it, to object where we disagree, and to go through the doors he opened and further on.

You gave us energy at Gezi, Demir Hoca. Now we will try to give that energy back by reading and discussing.

Knowledge belongs to everyone. Labour belongs to everyone. Let the doors stay open.

Knowledge Commons

Sources

Writings and books by Demir Küçükaydın (all in Turkish)

Küçükaydın, D. (2026). Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde: Yazılar 2017–2018 (On the Threshold of a Revolution: Writings 2017–2018). köXüz Yayınları. CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23349955
Bir Devrimin Eşiğinde (2017–2018) – introductory post, 17 October 2026
Demir'den Kapılar – blog home page
Görüşlerimin ChatGPT Tarafından Yapılmış Bir Özeti (A Summary of My Views by ChatGPT), 30 August 2026
İndirmek İçin Arşiv CD'si ve Kitaplarım (Archive CD and My Books for Download), 17 July 2025
Ertuğrul Kürkçü'yü Savunmak (Defending Ertuğrul Kürkçü), March 2026
Klasik Marksizm ve Modern Marksizm (Classical Marxism and Modern Marxism), July 2025

On Kıvılcımlı

On democracy and democrats

On elections

On Gezi

Biographical sources (in Turkish)

Related pieces from Knowledge Commons

Topics:Artificial Intelligence and Technology Law, State and Politics Philosophy, Science and Theory Socialism and the Left Culture, Art and Memory

Tags:#intellectuals #socialism #marxism #history #repression #democracy #elections #kurdishquestion #artificialintelligence #blockchain #commons #turkey