The Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths (1969 – 1971)

This study scrutinizes the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths as the initial step in the formation of an autonomous Kurdish left movement in Turkey. The organizational dissociation of the Kurdish left from Turkish left was facilitated by the radicalization of social movements, the crisis in the Turkish left and the discontent with the official discourse and practices. Considering the targets to put all Kurdish people together regardless of their political affiliations and to take hold in daily lives of them, this study poses the question that whether the Hearths became the first ethnic-based mass organization with socialist orientations. Despite the evident remnants of economic-led arguments inherited from the Turkish left, this study reveals the rising interest of the Hearths in Kurdish language, history and literature. In view of these inferences, this book revises the Hearths as the first legal organizations to have departed organizationally from the Turkish left while retaining the juxtaposition of socialist and ethnic considerations.