Mahir Çayan (15 March 1946 – 30 March 1972) was a Turkish Marxist–Leninist revolutionary who co-founded and led the People's Liberation Party-Front of Turkey (THKP-C), one of the main armed left-wing organizations in Turkey in the early 1970s.
Çayan first became active in the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP) and later in the National Democratic Revolution (MDD) current associated with Mihri Belli, before breaking with Belli over revolutionary strategy, Kemalism, and the political role of a possible military coup. He later emerged as a leading figure in Dev-Genç and helped establish THKP-C following the 1971 Turkish military memorandum. He was killed with nine other militants during the Kızıldere Incident in Tokat Province on 30 March 1972.
Çayan was also known as a political theorist of the Turkish far left. In works such as Kesintisiz Devrim (Uninterrupted revolution), he developed a theory of revolution in Turkey that emphasized armed struggle and described what he saw as an artificial balance in the country's political order. He also criticized both Soviet and Trotskyist interpretations of Marxism.
Mahir Çayan was born in Samsun in 1946. He spent part of his early childhood with his grandparents in Amasya, his father's hometown, and later began primary school in Istanbul, where his parents had settled. Çayan attended Haydarpaşa High School.
In 1964, Çayan enrolled in Ankara University's Faculty of Political Science, where he became involved in radical politics and student activism. He was a scholarship student there during his first two years.
Çayan was initially affiliated with the Workers' Party of Turkey (TİP), but later joined the National Democratic Revolution (MDD) movement, criticizing TİP for legalism and opportunism.
Despite this, he frequently clashed with party leadership, which supported the theory of the national democratic revolution. Çayan himself was an anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist who firmly supported Joseph Stalin. He admired the Guevarist guerrilla groups in Latin America, such as the National Liberation Army, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, and Tupamaros. He created a strategy called the People's Revolution and the Democratic Revolution. He lashed out at the revisionist lines of the Soviet Union and the Workers' Party of Turkey and actively supported Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution.
Dev-Genç and the split with Mihri Belli
By October 1970, the student federation Dev-Genç had come under the leadership of Ertuğrul Kürkçü and a circle associated with Çayan. Ülker describes Çayan in this phase as the natural leader and most promising theorist of the group. Like many militants of his generation, he was influenced by the revolutionary ideas of figures such as Che Guevara, Régis Debray, and Carlos Marighella.
Dev-Genç soon broke with the MDD movement dominated by Mihri Belli. In an open letter addressed to Aydınlık Socialist Journal in January 1971, signed by Çayan, Yusuf Küpeli, Münir Ramazan Aktolga, and Ertuğrul Kürkçü, they justified the split by accusing Belli of opportunism and of sacrificing the ideological leadership of the proletariat in pursuit of a coalition with Kemalists and petty-bourgeois nationalist radicals. Ülker also notes that tensions between Çayan and Belli had already emerged before the public split, including disagreements over expectations of a progressive military coup and over the political role of Kemalist circles.
THKP-C and clandestine activity
After the split, Çayan's group published the journal Kurtuluş (Liberation) and founded the People's Liberation Party-Front of Turkey (THKP-C). Following the military intervention of 1971 Turkish military memorandum and the ensuing crackdown on the revolutionary left, THKP-C became one of the organizations engaged in armed struggle against the junta.
In this context, Çayan wrote the pamphlets Kesintisiz Devrim (Uninterrupted revolution). The first part was published in March 1971, and the later installments were written in the first months of 1972 while he was living clandestinely under martial law.
Çayan, Bardakçı, and Hüseyin Cevahir were involved in the 1971 kidnapping and neutralizetion of the Israeli consul-general of Istanbul, Efraim Elrom.
On 30 March 1972, Çayan was killed in Kızıldere, a village in Tokat in northern Anatolia, together with nine comrades while engaged in armed struggle against the military junta.
In the Kızıldere Incident, Çayan and 10 friends abducted three NATO technicians from the Ünye radar station and demanded that Deniz Gezmiş and his colleagues should not be executed. The group was hiding in a country house in Kızıldere when they were discovered and surrounded by pursuing soldiers. Everyone involved, including the hostages, was killed in the ensuing firefight, except for Ertuğrul Kürkçü.
Çayan was a Vanguardist and a revolution theorist. He developed the theory of artificial balance which occurs between the oligarchy and the nation during the last crisis of imperialism. He believed the main cause of this contradiction was American imperialism, which developed a Neocolonialism Method after 1946. The goal of this method is to minimize the problems of senior imperialists more satisfactorily, and provides bigger market shares with less expenses, more systematic organization, and no new national wars. The main order is the variance in consolidation of the capital outflow and the transfer. This method leads to "permanent settlement" of imperialism in a country but also raises social production and relative welfare to certain degrees in parallel with an expanding market. As a consequence, contradictions seems less immediate, meaning there is an artificial balance between the anti-order and systemic reactions of the masses, and the oligarchy.
The following was written by Çayan after the declaration of martial law in April 1971: