Ten youths hanged, hundreds killed in military operations, seventy confirmed deaths in custody, tens of thousands of political prisoners, trade union activities banned and political parties outlawed. No, not Poland — this is the ugly record of eighteen months of army dictatorship in Turkey, a member of NATO. The silence of the capitalists in Europe and the USA is deafening. In an article recently received from inside Turkey, Turgut Taylan analyses the social forces involved in the Turkish coup, as the leaders of the militant union confederation, DISK, go on trial for their lives.
Turkey before the coup had one of the largest, and best-armed, leftist movements in the world, as well as a highly organised and militant working class and an extremely politicised Kurdish national movement (Kurds make up one fifth of Turkey's population of 45 million). The coup therefore was a massive setback for the working class internationally, changing the balance of forces in favour of imperialism in the entire region. This fact has not escaped the notice of the US administration. The US Defence Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, declared his country's intent to speed up their aid with the 'modernisation' of the Turkish army after his visit in December 1981; and announced the formation of a 'Joint Defence Council' to guarantee Turkish involvement in a Rapid Deployment Force (RDF) unit for south west Asia — outside the official ambit of NATO. For revolutionaries, events in Turkey once again confirm the principal thesis of Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution: that in those countries 'peripheral' to the capitalist metropoles, the bourgeoisie cannot rule through the institutions of parliamentary democracy but is forced to rely on the most brutal repression to create the conditions for 'successful' capitalist development: South Korea, Taiwan, Iran under the Shah, the Phillipines, Brazil are the most prominent examples.
The Background
Military intervention is not an unusual phenomenon in the short history of the Turkish republic.¹ The foundation of the bourgeois republic itself in 1923 owed much to the active role of the ex-generals of the Ottoman Empire, and up until 1950 the country was ruled by the party founded by Atatürk, the leader of the bourgeois revolution, within the structures of a quasi-corporatist state. The passage to multi-party parliamentarianism in the wake of the Allied victory at the end of the Second World War brought along with it a dialectic of constant oscillation between more democratic forms of bourgeois rule and episodes of military intervention, arising with startling regularity at the end of each decade, respectively in 1960, 1971 and 1980. Yet despite the apparent similarity of these three episodes, each military regime had a different social basis, expressed the domination of a different power bloc, and displayed a certain logic of its own. I will here restrict myself to an exploration of the historical situation leading up to the recent coup of 12 September 1980, in order to assess the prospects for the future of Turkish society.
The immediate background to the coup was, of course, the widespread political terror that had taken Turkish society in its grip during the last few years. On taking power, the junta exploited this situation to the full for the ideological legitimisation of its regime. In this it attained considerable success, one that should not come as a surprise in a society where the toll of deaths for political reasons had reached some three thousand in the twenty months preceding the coup. Despite defensive retaliation by the left and some mindless acts of individual terror committed in its name, the overwhelming responsibility lay with the fascist National Action Party (NAP), which came to determine to a remarkable extent the development of the Turkish political scene in the years after 1977. In order to understand the strategy of the NAP, however, one has to go behind the rhetoric of the junta, behind the appearance of endless political strife, and search for the real determinants that shaped the complex political conjuncture which paved the way for a swift take-over of power by the military.
On the international front, the overall context was marked by the growing importance of the Middle East for imperialism and the setback suffered by the US with the Iranian revolution in February 1979 and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. These developments made it an absolute imperative that Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO, and militarily one of the most powerful allies of the West in the region, enjoy a period of stability. A second problem was the resurgence of Islam as a political force in the region, representing social interests that clash with those of imperialism. The Iranian revolution had given a certain impetus to the Islamic fundamentalism of the National Salvation Party (NSP). It is no coincidence that a fortnight before the coup, the foreign minister of the ruling Justice Party (JP) government was given a vote of no-confidence on a platform which was exceptionally anti-American in terms of Turkish politics. An additional element was the need to heal the wounds of the southern flank of NATO by laying the foundations of a Greco-Turkish 'rapprochement' which seemed to require certain concessions from the Turkish side, not easily obtainable under a parliamentary regime where all bourgeois parties have constantly fed upon a strong anti-Greek chauvinism. It is, then, no wonder that NATO officially declared its relief upon receiving news of the coup. After all, hadn't Turkey's airforce chief, now a junta-member, General Tahsin Sahinkaya, been a guest of the Pentagon only days before the coup. It should also come as no surprise to find Turkey's present government tightening up its relations with carefully selected countries in the Middle East, foremost among which stand the arch-reactionary Saudi kingdom and the oil shiekhdoms, along with other pro-imperialist countries like Egypt, Jordan and Somalia.²
However important may be the international factors that gave a certain impetus to the military takeover in Turkey, one should carefully avoid the pitfall of abstracting from the specific class struggle within the country itself and of explaining away the coup by recourse to the supposedly omnipotent hand of the US. This was in fact what the Stalinists of the Turkish Communist Party (CP) tried to do in the days following the coup: for them history, it seems is no longer a history of class struggle but the mirror image of the conflict between US imperialism and the Soviet Union, a conflict that by itself determines events all over the globe. This sort of reductionist representation is far from capturing the complexity of the picture and there are rich lessons to be learned through a study of class struggle within Turkey in the two decades before 1980.
One has, first of all, to distinguish the long-run tendencies of the class struggle from those of the period immediately preceding the coup. As regards the first, what has to be stressed is the inadequacy of the political regime that came into being after the 1960 coup for a sustained process of capital accumulation in Turkey. Bearing the imprint of a very specific constellation of class struggle in a peculiar historical context, the 1960 coup gave birth to the constitution of 1961 with its system of checks and balances and, more importantly, to a political system that admitted, for the first time in Turkish history, independent working class activity in the political arena. The contemporaneous growth and organisation of the proletariat and the powerful struggles waged in the late '60s revealed to the Turkish bourgeoisie that the political and economic rights of the working class imposed a harsh burden on the accumulation of industrial capital which had not yet passed beyond its phase of infancy, with a feeble degree of concentration (though not of centralisation). Although many of these popular gains were subject to an inevitable erosion in the period of military intervention between 1971-1973 and the successive right-wing Nationalist Front coalitions between 1975-1977, the bourgeoisie was not able to wrest decisive victory from the working class. This victory had to incorporate a radical restructuring of the basic framework of politics in Turkey and this could only be carried through under a dictatorship not accountable, even in an indirect way, to the criticism of the masses. The onset of the severe crisis of capital accumulation in the years following 1977, then, caught the Turkish bourgeoisie unprepared for the impending turmoil.
This crisis of accumulation, articulated as it was to the crisis of world capitalism and further sharpened through this very articulation, was in fact the crisis of a certain mode of accumulation experienced by most Latin American countries at the end of the sixties. This mode of accumulation had as its axis of valorisation those sectors of social production which had as outlets the internal market. This meant for Turkey a position within the world market of dependency on capital equipment and intermediate goods creating insuperable barriers for the uninterrupted flow of accumulation. These barriers expressed themselves as a huge deficit on external payments and galloping inflation (Turkey's foreign debt at the time of the coup amounted to $16 billion owed to 250 different imperialist banks).
But the underlying problem concerned the productive structure of capital and the consequent low level of the productivity of labour. To overcome this formidable obstacle of capital accumulation, a profound restructuring of capital was indispensable. This was the logic behind the adoption by the JP government at the beginning of 1980 of the neo-liberalist economic policies of international monetarism, policies which were only to be deepened by the military after 12 September 1980. However, this sort of restructuring of capital, not unfamiliar to the British worker, has two corollaries with significant political implications. First, it requires a drastic deflation of the economy and an accompanying centralisation of capital, tending therefore to divide the ruling bloc by alienating at least a certain section of small and medium capital and the petty bourgeoisie.³ Secondly, it necessitates a policy of austerity and hence a frontal assault on the gains of the working class and other labouring strata of the population. All in all, this sort of programme, inserted within a backward capitalist country, can only be carried out by a government with a very narrow social basis deriving its power mainly from the repressive apparatus of the state. The only other alternative, with no guarantee of success, would have been a 'grand coalition' of big bourgeois parties. Such a coalition of 'responsible' bourgeois parties — JP and Republican Peoples Party (RPP) — which was constantly on the agenda of the ruling classes in the last few years before the coup, was all the more necessary since the NAP (the strongest fascist party in the whole of Europe) posed after 1977 a radically different solution with its forceful strategy of tension. Working its way towards a civil war through acts of individual terror and large-scale massacres in various provincial cities, the NAP was able, after 1978, through its 'success' in the Maras massacres (where, according to official figures, at least 120 people were killed by a reactionary mob led by NAP activists) to impose its terms on the political development of the country.⁴ This alternative of a grand coalition envisaged by the most 'civilised' representatives of the bourgeoisie, proved to be an impossibility in the conditions of class polarisation the society had been undergoing.
Turkish monopoly capital finally cast its dice in favour of military rule. Thus the junta can be described as the united front of the big bourgeoisie, implemented through military means where the traditional political parties of the class have failed.
Organised Working Class Movement
Given the undeniable mobilisation and the heroic activity of the Turkish left in the period preceding the coup, it is somewhat surprising that within the country there has been as yet so little opposition to the junta. Not that the movement has been completely shattered and atomised: the recent successive waves of hunger strikes in the prisons of Ankara and Istanbul show that the cohesion and morale of militants are to a certain extent intact. However, the activity of the left has almost exclusively been confined to propaganda in Western Europe, especially concentrating on international organisations such as the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. The efficacy of this strategy is very doubtful: although European bourgeois governments have already had to concede certain ground to international solidarity expressed by the working class movement in Europe — for instance, in cutting off EEC 'aid' to Turkey from the 1982 Budget and in taking a 'hard line' in the Council of Europe. But, until now, the left has built its strategy on the assumption that, whatever the form of government, Turkey needs European financial support desperately and could not but heed its demands. This is true, but only to a certain degree. Recent developments have made it possible for the Turkish state to borrow quite massively on the international market for money (which, as is proved by the case of Chile after 1976, is notorious for its indifference to 'human rights', or for that matter, anything human) and Arab banks, guided by reactionary Arab politics. Indeed, under these conditions, Turkey's expulsion from Europe could, ironically, set free the more reactionary forces in Turkish society instead of weakening the rule of the junta. What is being criticised here is not the effort put in to provoke international pressure on Turkey, but the exclusive emphasis that has been placed on this mode of opposition.
This strategy of the Turkish left cannot, however, be understood or criticised solely with reference to the period after the coup, for its adoption is but the expression of the incapacity of the movement to put up any other sort of resistance. But in order to understand the roots of this impotence, one has to analyse the historical development that has shaped the Turkish left. This cannot even be attempted here.⁵ Suffice it to say that under the dead weight of third-worldist, nationalist and Stalinist traditions, the Turkish left was not able, despite the enormous potential displayed by the masses on different occasions in the course of the seventies, to present the labouring masses of the country with a specific, independent position of its own, a position that would distinguish itself from the platforms of the bourgeois parties. Sections of it opted unscrupulously for tail-ending the 'left-wing' bourgeois RPP, while others waded through the troubled waters of the so-called 'vanguard war', providing a perfect example of the mentality of substitutionism. The Turkish left therefore, never took deep roots in the working class and was unable to lead the masses into action at the necessary moment. There was certainly coming into existence a heterogeneous group of revolutionaries who assessed the situation critically and looked for a way out of this double impasse, but it was too late for this new tendency to acheive a breakthrough before the onset of the long awaited debacle.
The future of Turkish 'Democracy'
Most observers of the Turkish scene are inclined to believe that the army will return to its barracks within one or two years, after the promulgation of the new constitution and the passing of political legislation. This is a somewhat rash extrapolation from the earlier military episodes where the army's direct intervention in political life did not exceed two and a half years. General Evren, of course, keeps reiterating his promise of a 'return to democracy', but he has been very careful not to specify a calendar for this. In an interview with the Financial Times correspondent some months ago, he would not even commit himself to a five-year period of transition. More important than Evren's personal intentions is, of course, the objective logic of class struggle. The most important factor in this respect is the duration of the crisis of capital accumulation. The draconian austerity measures which are being implemented at the moment are likely to bear fruit only over an extended period of repression of the working class, and even in that case 'success' for the bourgeoisie is contingent upon overall developments in the capitalist world economy, where prospects are not very bright for the near future.
A premature liberalisation of the political regime could, by opening up a space for action for the masses, jeopardise the outcome of the whole experiment. There is no doubt that the Turkish bourgeoisie desperately needs to stifle any independent working class activity for the next five years or so. There is, therefore, a contradiction between the needs of capital in the sphere of class struggle and a rapid normalisation of the political scene. This contradiction may, depending on concrete conditions, prolong the life of the dictatorship over and against the wishes of some of the ruling elements. It should not be forgotten that the Brazilian military dictatorship kept promising a rapid liberalisation in the first five years of its existence, only to continue its sway over society in the seventeen years since the coup of 1964.
There are two main obstacles against this sort of an extension of the dictatorship beyond the expected one or two years. One is the pressure of European international organisations. I have already noted that the European bourgeoisie was not unhappy to see the Turkish state clamp down on the workers and carry out the long overdue austerity programme with forceful means. But, putting aside the opposition of the European left, even European capital is not content with a permanent dictatorship on its south eastern flank, if only because of internal pressure and the rather blatant pro-Americanism of the military in Turkey.⁶ Added to this is the danger that the present situation could encourage the military and/or fascist movements to try their hand at a 'Turkish solution' in the various countries of Southern Europe, for example Spain, where there was an attempted coup in February 1981, or Greece, with Papandreou in power. However, in the longer run, the example of Greece, which, under the colonels withdrew from the Council of Europe, but was admitted to the European Community only five years after the return to parliamentarianism, should remind everyone of the possibility of an extended isolation from the institutions of Europe.
The second obstacle, an internal one, concerns the precarious nature of the support given to the dictatorship by the two main bourgeois parties. This support has from the beginning been made conditional upon a return to democracy within a short period. Should there not appear a concrete movement in that direction after the convening of the 'Advisory Assembly', scheduled for the end of this month, these bourgeois elements will certainly put up a rising opposition to the junta. The impact of this sort of a rift within the bourgeoisie should not be underestimated. Moreover, the opposition would gain momentum owing to the fact that European social democracy keeps supporting Ecevit, leader of the RPP, and that the conservative and liberal currents in European politics sympathise with JP leader Demirel. However, as Trotsky pointed out during the rise of fascism in Germany, at certain conjunctures the parliamentary form loses much of its legitimacy for the masses and its viability for the ruling classes. The rampant crisis in every domain of social relations has created an analogous situation in Turkey. This sets formidable limits on both the capacity and the efficacy of potential bourgeois opposition to the dictatorship.
The birth of a bourgeois opposition movement, if it ever takes off, is likely to open more space for the working class movement itself. A quick recovery of the socialist movement (as opposed to spontaneous mobilisations) is, however, improbable given both the casualties it has suffered in terms of its leadership and organisation and the centrifugal forces still active in its bosom, creating an atmosphere highly inimical to the formation of a united front of working class parties and groups. But opportunities for activity should not be overlooked. And here the most important point is the fact that the largest trade union organisation, TURK-IS, is still in existence. Despite the complicity of its top leadership with the junta (its Secretary general is also a minister in the government), there is a lot that socialists can do by working among the rank and file.
The more important question, however, is not the length or brevity of the period of transition to democracy but the precise nature of that 'democracy'. And here it can be said with confidence that the new political regime to which the junta will give birth will bear its imprint in a profound way. Naive souls still believe that it is possible to cajole the junta into drawing up a somewhat liberal constitution. That is because they have not been able to grasp the present dictatorship as a product of the class struggle in the country extending over the last two decades. Because the coup was the only solution in the face of formidable barriers to capital accumulation in Turkey, because it was the answer to the need to radically shift the balance of class forces in favour of the bourgeoisie by recasting the political and social framework, the historical mission of the dictatorship is nothing but the creation of an authoritarian regime disguised as parliamentary democracy. To the restructuring of capital must correspond the restructuring of politics.
The details of this setup may take different forms within a well-defined range. However, contrary to what many commentators have indicated, it is highly unlikely that the new constitution will be drawn up in the image of the French presidential system, unless all systems which give the president priority in political initiative over parliament are considered to be identical.
To enumerate only the most important features that are likely to mark the new regime: a highly restrictive law on trade union rights; the practical impossibility of legal organisation of communist or socialist parties; a president — probably Evren himself during the first term after transition — vested with huge powers, including the right to veto everything passed by parliament; a government attached personally to the president and not accountable to the legislature; a judiciary controlled, directly or indirectly, by the executive; and the impossibility of abrogating the laws passed in the present period by the junta. One may even expect the upper house (the so-called Senate) to consist of a body of senior officers, with rights to veto the decisions of the lower house, which would imply a de facto prolongation of military rule in Turkey.
The necessary counterpart to this bleak picture is the new historical situation opened up for revolutionary socialism in Turkey. For the first time in the history of the bourgeois republic, the bourgeoisie is attempting to wrest from the masses the social and political rights for which they have struggled over an extended period of time. For the first time in its history, the socialist movement finds itself in a situation where it alone will consistently fight for the preservation and extension of the rights and gains of the workers and the other labouring strata against the onslaught of the unified bourgeoisie. For the first time in its history, therefore, the socialist movement faces the objective conditions of building an independent class organisation on a mass scale. There will certainly be formidable obstacles of a legal and political nature. In place of the violence of the dictatorship, the bourgeoisie will substitute the ruse of its mockery of 'democracy'.
But the working class is sure to rise from its ashes and challenge the grotesque project of authoritarian rule in the guise of democracy. When the new constitution is put to a referendum, socialists will have to mobilise the whole class and its allies, other labouring strata and the Kurdish nation, to put up the most important resistance of all to the junta by an overwhelming 'No'. And that will only be the begining of the end.
Postscript
Since the completion of this article, the junta has decided to [illegible] Evren, the future 'democratic' regime will see the birth of totally new parties. This is an ominous development, seeming to confirm the conjecture put forward in this article. The immediate implication is that, having been tipped off by its 'friends' on the impending danger of expulsion, the junta is now ready to withdraw from the various European institutions in the near future, possibly by the end of this year. In the longer run, this decision may even imply that the new 'democracy' will be patterned somewhat in the image of the present regime in Brazil, with a government party and an official opposition party, tolerated only to a certain extent. This is the worst one can expect. But the least one can say is that the military regime is here to stay for substantially longer than two years. Or so it intends.
Footnotes
1 For a detailed account of Turkey's recent history, see C Keyder, 'The Political Economy of Turkish Democracy', New Left Review, No 115, May-June, 1979.
2 An orientation which has led to Turkey being asked by the Arab League to mediate in the Gulf War (Eds).
3 The petty bourgeoisie, which is a most important section of Turkish society, has already seen its position being eroded under the new structures. Except under the conquest of political power by a mass fascist party, which is certainly not the case in Turkey, the petty bourgeoisie loses under a dictatorship much of the political ground which it has secured through intricate bargaining and alliances within the framework of a parliamentary regime. In the Turkish case, the consequences of this weakening of the position of the petty bourgeoisie have been graphically manifested in two developments. On the one hand, the low support prices the government has set for agricultural products have effectively caused a deterioration of agriculture's terms of trade, thereby bringing about a remarkable impoverishment of the rural petty bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the reform of the tax system has shifted a considerable amount of burden from the shoulders of industrial capital to those of the petty bourgeoisie, rural and urban.
4 Paradoxically for many, the NAP, well-known in the West for its so called 'Grey Wolves', a para-military organisation overwhelmingly responsible for the political terror preceding the coup, was singled out, among all bourgeois parties, as the main target. This, though, is only a seeming paradox, for it implies nothing less than the fact that the junta's most powerful rival under conditions of dictatorship is the fascist movement, with strong backing from certain sectors of the armed forces. (It should be added that, to this day, the even more dangerous possibility of a pro-fascist coup has not definitively been averted.)
5 For a useful survey of the Turkish left, from a different point of view, see A Samim, 'The Tragedy of the Turkish Left', New Left Review, No 126, March-April 1981.
6 Since this article was written, the increasing estrangement between the US (open support) and the EEC (critical support) on the question of the junta in Turkey has been compounded by the military clampdown in Poland. Apart from the obvious hypocrisy of the US in particular, the various possible alignments in and between Europe and the US as a result of Poland will have a real impact in Turkey (Eds).