Performing Revolutionary Populism: The Revolutionary Path Movement in Turkey

Abstract

Revolution scholars have noted the utility of populist appeals for creating a broad-based revolutionary movement. Yet little is known about how activists enact populism in order to mobilize mass support for a revolutionary political project. This study addresses this need through a case study of the Revolutionary Path, a revolutionary socialist organization that attracted a large and diverse following in Turkey in the second half of the 1970s. The main argument of the study is that revolutionary populism entails non-discursive as well as discursive performances. In a receptive social and political climate, a populist discourse facilitates the formation of a broad revolutionary coalition, for it helps revolutionaries create a collective identity that can unify diverse social groups and demands against the regime. However, the mobilizational power of revolutionary populism ultimately rests on embodied performances that (1) dramatize the opposition between “the people” and its “enemies,” (2) demonstrate the moral and pragmatic legitimacy of revolutionaries as the representatives of “the people,” and (3) generate moral outrage against power holders. The analysis presented shows that Revolutionary Path activists accomplished these symbolic and affective tasks through three analytically distinct types of embodied performance: contentious, prefigurative, and lifestyle.