Hikmet Ali Kıvılcımlı (1902, Pristina, Kosovo Vilayet, Ottoman Empire – 1971, Belgrade) was a Turkish communist leader, theoretician, writer, publicist, and translator.
[2] Kıvılcımlı was again arrested in 1929 due to his political activity and ongoing links with the now illegal Turkish Communist party and imprisoned in Elaziğ, in Eastern Turkey for 4 years.
[7] In 1970, Kıvılcımli and his supporters were active in the Federation of Revolutionary Youth of Turkey (Turkish: Devrimci Gençlik, DEV-GENÇ), a Marxist–Leninist Organisation founded in 1965.
[12][13] Kıvılcımlı's 'History Thesis' (Turkish: Tarih Tezi) was in part his attempt to deal with what he called the ‘originality of Turkey’ and focused mostly on an understanding of pre-capitalist societies - in particular the rise and fall of civilisations which he defined as ‘historical revolutions’.
[11] Taking inspiration from Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), Friedrich Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (1377), Kıvılcımlı developed this theory in his 1965 work History Revolution Socialism (Turkish: Tarih Devrim Sosyalizm).
[14] According to Kıvılcımlı, 'barbarian nomads' who lived an egalitarian lifestyle which he described as ‘primative socialism’ fought against class-stratified civilisations which were unable to organise the necessary ‘collective action’ to resist them.
[16] After the Ararat Rebellion of 1930, the Turkish Communist Party (TKP) took the position that the Kurdish movement of the day was reactionary, a product of backward feudal social relations, and in service to British and French imperialism.
[17] Kıvılcımlı's ideas failed to convince others in the TKP, and the party reverted to the analysis it held in 1925, that the issues in the Kurdish regions of Turkey arose from the continuation of feudalism in those areas.
[3] Among his publications are Türkiye İşçi Sınıfının Sosyal Varlığı (The Social Existence of the Turkish Working Class), 1935; Tarih, Devrim, Sosyalizm (History, Revolution, Socialism), 1965; his masterpiece, and Yol: TKP'nin Eleştirel Tarihi (The Way: Critical History of the Communist Party of Turkey), consisting of a series of texts, written for the Central Committee of the TKP in 1932, published in 1979–1982.