REVOLUTION FROM THE TOP
Lens, Sidney
Revolution from the Top By Sidney Lens Istanbul TO YOU, a Westerner, my opposition to the right to strike probably sounds harsh. But here in Turkey we have to force democracy on 80 per cent of...
...Why should it...
...There is a vicious circle whirling away...
...American mechanization has catapulted 300 Turks into the million lira income class where there were only ten a few years ago...
...Some, but far from all, are ffow legitimate labor organizations...
...But what if the program succeeds...
...The Revolution from the Top, 30 years after Ataturk expelled the Greeks, Italians, and the Sultan from Turkey, has done pathetically little for the man on the street...
...The government hedged on granting the right to strike, police pressure still made itself felt in union halls and factories, opposition was dismissed as "Communism," and the social atmosphere generally seemed stagnant...
...without tr.ue political opposition capable of directing social action against forces which impede progress—without all this the state just drifts with the tide...
...This is not only a large fixed charge against the taxpayer but a great deterrent to efficiency in state industry...
...Pushing their way through in every direction are human trucks —men with loads on their backs running up to 300 pounds—making deliveries for $1 or $1.50 a day...
...You see, ours is a revolution from the top, not the bottom...
...To give to violence the perfect touch, High voltage that consumes activity, Bids well to be the final form of art...
...For the present it is working on a five-year program with American aid, with the resettlement as its goal...
...In 1949 there were only 2,000 tractors in Turkey...
...Ninety per cent of its foreign exchange is earned through farm exports...
...In guarded secrecy We plot the transformation of all matter...
...without a cooperative movement capable of keeping the fruits of a peasant's labor within his family...
...Average national income is only $128 per capita...
...The state has been left with the task of resettling at least a half million families...
...But here in Turkey we have to force democracy on 80 per cent of the people...
...Should the international demand for cotton or wheat decline, its economy would face a crisis...
...Will the peasants live at subsistence levels as "rugged" individualists on the new land...
...This Is the Age This is the age of tremors and explosions: Earth, made unsafe by conquest of the air, Knows those corruptions and those swift corrosions Which only logarithms of despair Could fabricate...
...It changes under the impetus of individual idealism or Marshall Plan aid, but it moves only infinitesimally, whichever of the dominant parties is in power...
...Therein lies the tragedy of the Revolution from the Top—it is not under sufficient pressure by the masses'to eliminate the social obstacles to greater production and greater productivity...
...It set up the Karabuk mill far removed from where it could be shelled by sea...
...The police were not so omnipresent as in the past...
...In 1933 Ataturk and Bayar develMay, 1953 25 oped the philosophy of etatism: the state would build its own industry...
...Mechanized farming has caused tens of thousands of tenant farmers to lose their land...
...Yet, despite these advances, the SIDNEY LENS, on a year-long swing around the world, is reporting his major findings in a series of articles for The Progressive, of which this is the fourth...
...In Istanbul, where Europe meets Asia, the present also meets the past...
...Today 70 per cent is in state hands...
...And it will doubtless be acclaimed as such Once shocks of higher relativity Have smashed the Geiger Counter of the heart...
...Stimulated by such mechanization cotton production increased more than six times in value...
...Some of this prosperity has trickled down to peasants in the Anatolia region, but thousands are worse off...
...In 1950, when the first free election was held, people of all classes showed their hostility to nearly three decades of dictatorship by voting in the new party candidates almost six to one...
...Or will they be formed into effective cooperatives with state-provided machinery and collective marketing facilities...
...Despite the revolution of Ata-turk in 1923, despite innumerable changes for the better, the dead hand of the old empire is still very much in evidence...
...Engineers and managers are appointed on the basis of political pull rather than efficiency, and workers are assigned to jobs based on whom they know rather than how they work...
...Then the door to democracy was opened just enough to permit Celal Bayar, an old collaborator of Mustapha Kemal Ata-turk, to form a "Democratic Party...
...Atay's observation of a revolution from the top not only seemed to fit Turkey but symbolized the whole character of the Near East...
...Without a real labor movement forcing the capitalists and the state to pay higher wages—and to rationalize...
...In agriculture Turkey has made phenomenal improvements in recent years with the aid of the Marshall Plan...
...A country or a continent to shatter Is now implicit plan and policy...
...There is no true incentive to increase productivity...
...The whole fabric of etatist industry is shot through with bureaucracy...
...Today, privately run, it produces 450 tons with 15 workers...
...But side by side with this progress runs the age-old social problem of the peasant...
...Other opposition parties came into existence, including two small Socialist —but no Communist—parties...
...In textiles, where the government owns half the facilities, the private entrepreneurs have reaped a fortune just keeping their prices at levels set by the government plants and scooping in vast profits through low production costs...
...With the help of AFL's international representative, Irving Brown, the unions were permitted to federate into a national organization...
...Gerhard Friedrich Such inefficiency makes it impossible for state industry to compete with the private sector...
...It dams the waters to real industrial expansion...
...True, in Turkey the state has cut a wedge of state-owned industry...
...Two million acres of farmland have been reclaimed and much land distributed...
...Why should he invest it in a hazardous manufacture which bring far less...
...II Industrialization is further impeded by the fact that private capital refuses to flow into industry...
...Disease and poverty are still the lot of the common man...
...Tens of thousands of them work here, with few tools and no machinery...
...A Chicago labor leader, Lens is the author of two books, "Left, Right and Center" and "The Counterfeit Revolution" and has written for many publications, including The Yale Review, the Harvard Business Review, and The Bulletin of The Foreign Policy Association...
...Despite Ata-turk's revolution they are held back from moving smoothly to the next economic stage—manufacture...
...A cement factory owned by the government before the war produced 350 tons a day with 165 workers...
...The nation remains at the mercy of international trade-winds...
...The tiny crooked streets that wind away from the port introduce you to an economy uniquely different from what we know in the West...
...On the other side, the state does nothing to squeeze nascent capital out of the merchant class...
...In planning their steel mills the government took into account only military considerations...
...half the textile plants, 90 per cent of steel, 28 per cent of cement, 100 per cent of heavy chemical, 30 per cent of shoes, 100 per cent of sugar and alcohol...
...But it was also hundreds of kilometers removed from sources of coal and iron ore, thus making the whole operation quite expensive...
...America sent in 8,000 more, but private purchases have run the number up to 35,000...
...His party, the Republican People's Party, had not only been the government party from 1923 to 1946, but the only party...
...This too is a large fixed charge on the populace...
...they are against it...
...Despite a capacity of 300,000 tons yearly, it only produces 90,000...
...Wheat and cereals doubled...
...The significant feature of modern Turkey, as with most of the Near East, is that the rich are growing richer and the poor remain that way...
...Along other pathways are rows of wood-workers, spinning primitive lathes with crude bows and chiseling into the wood with amazing precision by guiding a metal tool with their overdeveloped feet...
...The state is thus torn between two alternatives: either it must introduce public corporations, like our TVA, to run its present enterprise efficiently, or it must increasingly tax agriculture (80 per cent of the population) to pay for uneconomic industry...
...The speaker was Falih Rifki Atay, a venerable journalist and spokesman for the opposition...
...There had been some changes since then...
...But this industry is far from efficient...
...State paternalism keeps an enormous bureaucracy in the saddle...
...democracy" was undoubtedly clipped—circumscribed by philosophies and traditions inherited from the past...
...A merchant capitalist earns 40 per cent or 50 per cent a year on his capital...
...Almost two of every three registered workers in Istanbul suffer from tuberculosis...
...Elsewhere are the shoemakers, basket-weavers, carpenters, printers, tailors, and the rest, each on a separate street, evidently a throwback to the days when they were organized into medieval guilds...
...Turkey, like all underdeveloped countries, needs a rounded economy...
Vol. 17 • May 1953 • No. 5
