The Emergence of Social Democracy in Turkey

The Left and the Transformation of the Republican People's Party

Yunus Emre

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781786724618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Geschichte des Nahen Ostens

The Republican People's Party (RPP), also know as the CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi), stands as the main opposition party - one of two major political currents, second only to the Erdooan's AK Party. Established as the founding party of Ataturk's republican regime, the RPP has a history of hostility of leftist parties. Despite this, by the mid-1960s, the RPP had re-orientated itself as left of centre, as the growing influence of the left inside the RPP pushed it in a new direction. This is hailed as the entry point of social democratic politics into Turkey, and is the focus of Yunus Emre's impressively researched book. Through extensive primary research, Emre tracks the fluctuations in Turkish politics from the single-party period to the making of a new regime following the 1960 coup, looking at the place of both the RPP and the left in this trajectory. The RPP's internal struggles in this period, in particular around the working class movement and the legal right to strike, debates over anti-imperialism and land reform, and the role of the military in politics provide the political context into which a new social democratic agenda emerged.
Engaging with the body of literature on social democratic movements, Emre analyses the reasons for the 'delayed' emergence of social democracy in Turkey. He argues that the absence of European style social democratic formations in Turkey can be traced back to the developments around the adoption of a left of centre position by the RPP. From the 1960s to the present, the RPP has oscillated between a social democratic position and its Kemalist roots in the early republican single-party regime - this book analyses the fundamental point of change in this process. It is essential reading for scholars of Turkish politics and modern history, providing insight into the development of Turkey's founding political party, the left and social democratic movements.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: THE SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT AND IDEOLOGY

Social democracy has played a central role in the making of modern societies. In the twentieth century, it became one of the main political powers that shaped the political structure of European countries. In organisational and electoral terms, social democratic parties have been very successful. From the 1980s, social democracy began to spread beyond Europe. In this process, social democratic movements have been organised in many peripheral countries. Today the international solidarity organisation of the social democratic parties, the Socialist International, has 112 full members from 95 different countries.

In western academia, there is an extensive literature on the history and theory of social democracy. This literature provides useful insights for the analysis of the topic at hand. As discussed above, the main focus of this book is the emergence of social democracy in Turkey. More specifically, this book deals with the question of how the socialist left in Turkey influenced the rise of the social democratic movement. In order to analyse this topic, it is also necessary to deal with questions such as how social democracy evolved, and what the main differences are between different countries and regions in social democratic politics. Theoretical explanations of social democracy also must be evaluated in this context.

The Evolution of Social Democratic Parties

Modern political parties emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe. The social democratic working class party was the vanguard of this party model. In the early stages of this movement, the economic and social demands of the working class were represented by the liberal democrats. Social democratic parties were then founded as the political organisations of the working class. The social democratic working class parties in different countries had similar demands, such as the eight-hour work day, the prohibition of child employment, universal male suffrage and peace.

The socialist parties had organisational peculiarities, although in the early period of the formation of this movement, bottom-up, effective and disciplinary party organisation was typical. In his outstanding work on the history of the European left, Geoff Eley describes this situation as “the modern mass party, which became the prevailing model of political mobilisation in general between the 1890s and the 1960s, was invented by socialists in the last third of the nineteenth century.”¹ Thus the social democratic political party was a new type of political organisation that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century as the organisation of the working class itself.

In this context, the first important socialist party was founded in Germany in 1863. Until this point, there had been a coalition between the liberal parties and labour organisations that was known as “the Lib-Lab coalition.”² Under this coalition, labour supported liberal democratic politicians. This support was the direct result of the heritage of the 1848 revolutionary uprisings, during which the working class and liberal democrats had been on the same front.

The Lib-Lab coalition, however, entered a crisis in the 1860s.³ The main worker organisation of the period, the Workers’ Educational Union (Arbeiterbildungsvereine) was divided as a result. The name of this new organisation was the General German Workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV). This was the first party of the working class in the world. The founder of the party, Ferdinand Lassalle, was an opponent of the Lib-Lab coalition. He thought the working class should remain distant from the bourgeoisie and become organisationally and ideologically autonomous.⁴ ADAV defined its mission as to “enlighten workers about their class situation and to press for universal, equal and direct male suffrage.”⁵

The reaction of the supporters of the Lib-Lab coalition was the foundation of a new association called the Federation of German Workers’ Associations (Verband Deutscher Arbeitervereine, VDAV), which was to encourage the workers to support the liberal democrats.⁶ However, this organisation was not able to prevent the crisis of the liberal–labour alliance.⁷ VDAV was divided between the socialist majority and liberal democrat minority. In 1869, it was split further and the socialist majority founded the Social Democratic Workers’ Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, SDAP). Among the founders of the party, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel were the most important, and were deeply influenced by the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The Social Democratic Workers’ Party and the General German Workers’ Association merged in Gotha in 1875. This new party, named the Social Democratic Party of Germany, SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), became very successful in electoral and organisational terms. The party participated in the first elections in 1877, receiving 9.1 per cent of the total votes. The enactment of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1878 did not end the development of the socialist movement.⁸ Barclay and Weitz write that,

Driven underground or into exile by Bismarck’s anti-socialist law from 1878 to 1890, socialism took on its heroic cast, a movement of faith and progress propagated by a persecuted minority. When the law lapsed more or less concurrently with Germany’s powerful drive into the first rank of industrial nations, the SPD was well poised to recruit supporters from the ever growing numbers of industrial workers.⁹

When the Anti-Socialist Law was rescinded in 1890, the party won 19.7 per cent of the total votes cast.

The voting rate of the party increased in every election. The social democratic vote had been only 2 per cent in 1871. By 1912, it had become the largest party in Germany, with 34.8 per cent of the total votes. In addition, the party constructed a huge organisation. When the founder of ADAV, Ferdinand Lassalle died in 1864, ADAV had had only 4,600 members.¹⁰ Fifty years later, the number of SPD members was greater than one million.¹¹

The success of the German social democrats encouraged the establishment of socialist parties in other European countries. Donald Sassoon writes that in the last decade of the nineteenth century, socialist parties were founded in almost all European countries.¹² Geoff Eley notes that the middle third of the nineteenth century became a separation point between the socialists and the liberals.¹³ The foundation of socialist parties in European countries was almost simultaneous: Belgium, 1885; Norway, 1887; Austria and Sweden, 1889; Italy, 1892.¹⁴ In France, small socialist parties and groupings came together and established the French Section of the Workers’ International (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière, SFIO) in 1905.¹⁵ In Great Britain, trade unions formed the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 that became the Labour Party in 1906.¹⁶ So at the start of the twentieth century, almost all European countries had social democratic parties similar to the German model, the SPD.

One of the main reasons for the international growth of social democratic parties and the commonalities between those parties was the existence of organisations known as workingmen internationals. The first international (International Working Men’s Association) was founded in 1864, a time at which there were no nationally organised social democratic political parties except for the German parties.¹⁷ It had a heterogeneous character. Albert Lindeman writes that,

The most important contingent by far was that of the English trade unionists, whose goals for the International centreed around protecting labour standards in England against the importa-tion of cheap foreign labour. In addition to this large delegation were some surviving Owenites and Chartists, Proudhonists and Blanquists from France, Polish democrats, and nationalist revolutionaries from some countries as Ireland and Italy, for whom the social question was secondary in importance.¹⁸

The First International was dissolved in 1876 because of a conflict between anarchists and Marxists. The Second International was formed during the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution in Paris in 1889, and it was dissolved with the outbreak of the First World War. As discussed above, social democratic parties were founded in almost all European countries in the era of the Second International as the political organisations of the working class.

In the Second International era, the German social democratic movement was the main model for the working class of Europe. One of the key features of German social democracy was its amalgamated character. It contained both Lassallean working class reformism (in other words, trade union pragmatism) and Marxist orthodoxy. Until the First World War, Marxist orthodoxy and reformism both prevailed in German socialist democracy, as illustrated in the party programmes of the SPD. The first programme, which was approved in Gotha in 1875, had a more Lassallean perspective.¹⁹ In Critique of the Gotha Programme, Karl Marx presented his negative views on this programme.²⁰

After the Anti-Socialist Law, the party programme was renewed in Erfurt in 1891.²¹ In this programme, the Marxist orthodoxy had more influence than it had the first one, although this programme was a balance of reformism and Marxism. It was composed of three sections. In the first section, the programme reflected a classic Marxist perspective on the current political and economic situation. The programme describes the economic situation from a classical Marxist perspective as follows:

Hand in hand with this monopolising of the means of production goes the supplanting of scattered small businesses by colossal businesses, the development of the tool into the machine, and a gigantic growth of the productivity of human labour. But all the advantages of this change are monopolised by the capitalists and great landlords. For the proletariat and the sinking intermediate layers – small masters, peasants – it betokens growing increase of the insecurity of their existence, of misery, of oppression, of slavery, of humiliation and of exploitation.²²

About the political settlement of the question, the programme stated:

private property in the means of production, which was formerly the means of securing to the producer the possession of his own product, has today become the means for expropriating peasants, handicraftsmen, and small producers, and of putting the non-workers, capitalists and great landlords in possession of the product of the workers. Only the conversion of capitalistic private property in the means of production – land, quarries, and mines, raw material, tools, machines, means of communication – into common property, and the change of the production of goods into a socialist production, worked for and through society, can bring it about that production of a large scale, and ever growing productiveness of human labour, shall develop, for the hitherto exploited classes, from a source of misery and oppression, into a source of the highest wellbeing and perfect universal harmony.²³

However, in the second and third sections of the programme, a reform proposal was presented. In the second part, the reforms concerned all of society, such as universal, equal, and direct suffrage; proportional representation; abolition of all laws that placed women at a disadvantage compared to men in matters of public or private law; abolition of all laws that limited or suppressed the free expression of opinion and restrict or suppress the right of association and assembly; and the secularisation of schools, and free medical care.²⁴

In the third section, the programme stated a reform proposal for the protection of the working class, with items like the fixing of a normal working day, the prohibition of the gainful employment of children under the age of fourteen, and an uninterrupted rest period of at least thirty-six hours every week for every worker.²⁵

The first part of the programme thus reflected Marxist prescriptions about the future of the capitalist regime. The ideological and political frame of the party was shaped by this. The second and third parts reflected the reform proposals of trade union pragmatism. It is clear that in this era German social democracy oscillated between reform and revolution.

This position of the social democratic working class movement between reform and revolution was common in almost all European countries, and it continued until the First World War. However, the British case was the main exception. Marxism had very little influence on the development of the British social democratic movement. Prior to the First World War, socialism was not very popular in the working class milieu in Britain.²⁶ The early socialists were mainly from the middle-classes. When the Labour Representation Committee was founded in 1900, the main components were trade unions, the Fabians, the Independent Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Federation. It is important to note that among those actors, the trade unions were the strongest.

Marxist tendencies were represented only in the Social Democratic Federation, and this organisation was not strong enough to transfer Marxism into the Labour Representation Committee and then the Labour Party. The trade union pragmatism became the predominant perspective of the Labour Party.²⁷

In fact, this peculiarity of Britain and its political and economic conditions directly affected the emergence of German revisionism. The thoughts of the father of revisionism, Eduard Bernstein, crystallised while he was living in London as a political refugee between 1888 and 1901.²⁸ Bernstein strongly opposed the Marxist theory of collapse. For him, the proletarianisation and immiseration thesis was falsified by the economic developments as the twentieth century app...