Rosa Luxemburg
Social Democracy and the National Struggles in Turkey
First Published: October 8, 9, 10, 1896 in the Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung, the German Social Democratic paper in
Dresden.
Source: Revolutionary History in “The Balkan Socialist Tradition”, Vol.8 no.3, 2003.
Translated: (from the German) by Ian Birchall
Transcription/Markup: Edward Crawford/Brian Basgen
Copyleft: Luxemburg Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2004. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
I: The Turkish Situation
IN the party press, we all too often encounter the
attempt to represent the events in Turkey as a pure product of the play of
diplomatic intrigue, especially on the Russian side.[A] For a time, you could even come across voices in the press which argued that the Turkish outrages were mainly an invention, that the Bashi-Bazouks were true Christian paragons, and that the revolts of the Armenians were the work
of agents paid with Russian roubles.
What is above all striking about this position is that
it is in no way fundamentally different from the bourgeois standpoint. In both
cases, we have the reduction of great social phenomena to various ‘agents’,
that is, to the deliberate actions of the diplomatic offices. On the part of
bourgeois politicians, such points of view are, of course, not surprising:
these people actually make
history in this sphere, and hence the thinnest thread of a diplomatic intrigue
has great practical importance for the position they take with regard to
short-term interests. But for Social Democracy, which at the present time
merely elucidates
events in the international sphere, and which
is above all concerned to trace back the phenomena of public life to deeper-lying
material causes, the same policy appears to be completely futile. On the
contrary, in foreign policy as in domestic politics, Social Democracy can adopt
its own position, which in both spheres must be determined by the same
standpoints, namely by the internal social conditions of the phenomenon in
question, and by our general principles.
So how do these conditions stand with regard to the
national struggles in Turkey which concern us here? Until recently in part of
the press, Turkey was still being portrayed as a paradise where the ‘different
nationalities have coexisted peacefully for hundreds of years’, ‘possessed the
most complete autonomy’, and where only the interference of European diplomacy
had artificially created dissatisfaction, by persuading the happy peoples of
Turkey that they are oppressed, and at the same time obstructing the innocent
lamb of a Sultan from carrying out his ‘repeatedly granted reforms’.(1)
These assertions are based on extensive ignorance of
the conditions.
Until the beginning of the present century, Turkey was
a country with a barter economy, in which every nationality, every province and
every community lived its own separate existence, patiently bore the suffering
to which it was accustomed, and formed the true basis for an oriental
despotism. These conditions, however oppressive they might be, were nonetheless
distinguished by great stability, and could therefore survive for a long time
without provoking rebellion on the part of the subjugated peoples. Since the
beginning of the present century, all this has changed considerably. Shaken by
conflict with the strong, centralised states of Europe, but especially
threatened by Russia, Turkey found itself compelled to introduce domestic
reforms, and this necessity found its first representative in the person of
Mahmud II [Ottoman Sultan (1808-1839)]. The reforms abolished the feudal government, and in its place
introduced a centralised bureaucracy, a standing army and a new financial
system. The modern reforms, as always, involved enormous costs, and translated
into the language of the material interests of the population, they amounted to
a colossal increase in public taxation. High indirect duties, collected on
every head of cattle and every piece of straw, customs duties, stamp duties and
taxes on spirits, a government tithe with a periodical additional charge every
quarter, and then a direct income tax, which came to 30 per cent in the towns
and 40 per cent in the countryside, and with it a tax in lieu of military
service for Christians, and finally more compulsory services — henceforth this
was how the people had to pay for the expenses of the reformed state. But it is
only the peculiar system of government that exists in Turkey that gives a true
idea of the burdens that are borne. In a strange mixture of modern and medieval
principles, it consists of an immense number of administrative authorities,
courts and assemblies, which are bound to the capital city in an extremely
centralised manner in their conduct; but at the same time all public positions
are de facto venal, and
are not paid by the central government, but are mostly financed by revenue from
the local population — a kind of bureaucratic benefice. Thus the pasha can
fleece the province to his heart’s content, so long as he sends as large as
possible a sum of money to Istanbul; thus the cadi (judge) is by virtue of his office
financed by exactions, since he must himself pay an annual tribute to
Constantinople for his office. The most important, however, is the system of
taxation, which, lying in the hands of a mülterim, a tax farmer, in comparison to whom the
intendant-general of the French ancien réime looks like the Good Samaritan, ends up with a total
lack of system and rules, and unlimited arbitrariness. And finally, in the hands
of the bureaucracy, the compulsory services were turned into a means of
unbridled extortion and exploitation of the people.
Obviously a system of government constituted in this
way is fundamentally different from the European model. While with us the central
government fleeces the people and thereby maintains its officialdom, over there
on the other hand the officialdom fleeces the people off its own bat, and
thereby finances the central government. Consequently, in Turkey, officialdom
appears as a special, numerous class of the population, which in its own person
directly represents an economic factor, and whose existence is financed by the
professional pillage of the people.
At the same time, and in connection with the reforms,
there resulted a shift in the conditions of land ownership of the Christian
peasants, again strongly to their disadvantage in relation to the Turkish
landowner. The latter, generally a former feudal lord, was able to make his
office hereditary, quite on the Christian model. When Spahiluk (feudal tenure) was abolished by the
reform, and the tithes hitherto paid by them to the Spahis were redirected to
the public exchequer, he sought to assert himself in the character of the owner
of landed property; as a result a new tax for the peasants - ground rent - grew
up alongside the old tithes, a tax which regularly amounted to a third of the
net proceeds after deduction of the tithe. For the Christian peasant, there
often remained no salvation amid all these wondrous things other than to transfer
a small piece of land per oblationem (as a conditional gift) to the Muslim Church, and
then to receive it back as a leasehold on which rent was due, but which was at
least free of tithes. So by the end of the 1870s, mortmain property in Turkey
amounted to more than half of all cultivable landed property.
Thus the reforms were accompanied by a terrible
deterioration in the material conditions of the people. But what made them
particularly unbearable was a quite modern feature which had become involved in
the situation — namely, insecurity: the irregular tax system, the fluctuating relations
of land ownership, but above all the money economy as a result of the transformation of tax
in kind into tax in money and the development of foreign trade.
The old conditions had deteriorated, and their
stability was gone forever.
II. The Disintigration
The moment in the history of Turkey dealt with in our
previous article is, in a certain respect, reminiscent of Russia. But while
there the reforms after the Crimean War[B] created at one and the same time the
rapid development of capitalism and a material foundation for administrative
and financial innovations and for the further development of militarism, in
Turkey an economic transformation corresponding to the modern reforms was
completely lacking. All attempts to create a native industry in Turkey
miscarried. The few factories founded by the government produced goods that
were of poor quality and expensive. The absence of the most elementary
preconditions of bourgeois order — security of persons and property, at least
formal equality before the law, a civil law separate from religious law, modern
means of communication, etc - make the appearance of capitalist forms of
production an absolute impossibility. The trading policy of the European states
towards Turkey operates in the same direction, exploiting its political
impotence to ensure an unprotected market for its own industries. Until now,
alongside trade, usury has been the only manifestation of domestic capital. Economically,
therefore, Turkey remained with the most primitive peasant agriculture, in
which in many cases the property relations had not even got rid of their
semi-feudal character.
It is clear that a material base for the money economy
constituted like this had not grown in parallel with the forms of government
and financial taxes associated with it, that it was flattened by it, and, as it
could not develop, it was moving into a process of disintegration.
The disintegration of Turkey became glaringly obvious
in two extremes at the same time. On the one hand, a permanent deficit arose in
the peasant economy. This acquired a tangible expression in the usurer, who had become an organic element of the
village community, and indicated the internal festering of conditions like an
abscess. Three per cent monthly interest rates were a permanent phenomenon in
the Turkish villages, and the regular epilogue to the silent drama of the
village was the proletarianisation of the peasant, without forms of production
being available in the country which would have enabled him to be absorbed into
a modern working class, with the result that he all too often sank down into
the lumpen-proletariat. These phenomena are further linked to the decline of
agriculture, devastating famines and foot-and-mouth disease.
On the other hand, there was the deficit in the state
treasury. Since 1854, Turkey had taken the road of endless foreign loans. The
usurers of London and Paris operated in the capital just as the Armenian and
Greek usurers operated in the villages. Ruling became ever more difficult, and
those ruled became ever more dissatisfied. Bankruptcy in the capital and
bankruptcy in the villages; palace revolutions in Constantinople and popular
risings in the provinces - these were the ultimate results of internal decline.
It was impossible to find a way out of this situation. The remedy could only
have been achieved through a total transformation of economic and social life,
through a transition to capitalist forms of production. But there did not exist
and do not exist either the basis for such a transformation or a social class
which could come forward as its representative. The ‘repeatedly granted
reforms’ of the Sultan could obviously not obviate the difficulties, since they
were necessarily no more than further juridical innovations, which left social
and economic life undisturbed, and often simply remained on paper, since they
were opposed to the dominating interests of officialdom.
Turkey cannot regenerate itself as a whole. From the outset, it consisted of several
different lands. The stability of the way of life, the self-contained nature of
provinces and nationalities had disappeared. But no material interest, no
common development had been created which could give them internal unity. On
the contrary, the pressure and misery of jointly belonging to the Turkish state
became ever greater. And so there was a natural tendency for the various
nationalities to escape from the whole, and instinctively to seek the way to
higher social development in autonomous existence. And thus the historic
sentence was pronounced on Turkey: it was facing ruin.
Even if all the subjects of the Ottoman government
came to experience the misery of a decaying state organism, and the various
Muslim peoples - Druzes, Nazarenes, Kurds and Arabs - also rebelled against the
Turkish yoke, the separatist tendency above all spread to the Christian lands.
Here the conflict of material interests often coincided with national
frontiers. The Christian is denied his right, his oath is valueless against a
Muslim, he cannot bear arms, and as a rule he cannot hold any public office.
But what is even more important, as a peasant he often occupies the land of a
Muslim landowner, and is sucked dry by Muslim officials. At grassroots level,
therefore, there is frequently a class struggle - a struggle of the small peasants and tenants with
the class of landowners and officials, as for example in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, where the conditions are strongly reminiscent of Ireland. Thus the
opposition produced by economic and legal pressure found here a ready-made
ideology in the national and religious conflicts. The admixture of religious
elements was bound to give them a particularly crude and savage character. And
thus all the elements were present to create a struggle to the death of the
Christian nations with Turkey, the struggle of Greeks, Bosnian-Herzegovinians,
Serbs and Bulgarians. And now the sequence has reached the Armenians.
In the face of the social conditions which we have
briefly sketched out here, the claims that the risings and national struggles
in Turkey have been artificially produced by agents of the Russian government
seem no more serious than the claims of the bourgeoisie that the whole modern
labour movement is the work of a few social democratic agitators. Admittedly
the dissolution of Turkey is not advancing purely by its own momentum.
Admittedly the tender hands of Russian Cossacks rendered midwife’s services at
the birth of Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria, and the Russian rouble is the
permanent stage-manager of the historic drama of the Black Sea. But here
diplomacy is doing no more than throwing a burning stick into inflammable
material, of which mountains have accumulated during centuries of injustice and
exploitation.
What we have to deal with here is an historical
process developing with the inevitability of a law of nature. The impossibility
of the continuation of archaic economic forms in Turkey in the face of the
fiscal system and the money economy, and the impossibility of the money economy
developing into capitalism, that is the key to understanding events on the
Balkan Peninsula. The basis of the existence of Turkish despotism is being
undermined. But the basis for its development into a modern state is not being
created. So it must perish, not as a form of government, but as a state, not
through the class struggle, but through the struggle of nationalities. And what
is being created here is not a regenerated Turkey, but a series of new states,
carved out of the carcass of Turkey.
This is the situation. Now we have to discuss what
position Social Democracy
has to take in relation to the Turkish events.
III: The Point of View of Social Democracy
Now what can be the position of Social Democracy
towards the events in Turkey? In principle, Social Democracy always stands on
the side of aspirations for freedom. The Christian nations, in this case the
Armenians, want to liberate themselves from the yoke of Turkish rule, and
Social Democracy must declare itself unreservedly in support of their cause.
Of course in foreign politics, just as in domestic
questions, we should not see things too schematically. The national struggle is
not always the appropriate form for the struggle for freedom. For example, the
national question takes a different form in Poland, Alsace-Lorraine or Bohemia.
In all these cases, we are faced with a directly opposing process of capitalist
assimilation of the annexed lands to the dominant ones, which condemns the
separatist efforts to impotence, and it is in the interests of the
working-class movement to advocate the unity of forces, and not their
fragmentation in national struggles. But in the question of the revolts in
Turkey, the situation is different: the Christian lands are bound to Turkey only
by force, they have no working-class movement, they are declining by virtue of
a natural social development, or rather dissolution, and hence the aspirations
to freedom can here make themselves felt only in a national struggle; therefore
our partisanship cannot and must not admit of any doubt. It is not our job to
draw up practical demands for the Armenians, or to determine the political form
which should be aspired to here; for this, Armenia’s own aspirations would have
to be taken into consideration, as well as its internal conditions and the
international context. For us, the question in this situation is above all the
general standpoint, and this requires us to stand for the insurgents and not against them.
But what is the
situation with the practical interests of Social Democracy? Do we not fall into a
contradiction with these by taking the aforementioned principled stance? We
think we can prove the exact opposite in three points.
Firstly, the liberation of the Christian lands from Turkey
means progress in international political life. The existence of an artificial
position like that of today’s Turkey, where so many interests of the capitalist
world converge, has a constricting and retarding effect on general political
development. The Eastern Question, together with that of Alsace-Lorraine,
forces the European powers to prefer to pursue a policy of stratagems and
deception, to conceal their real interests under deceptive names, and to seek
to achieve them by subterfuge. With the liberation of the Christian nations
from Turkey, bourgeois politics will be stripped of one of its last idealistic
tatters — ‘protection of the Christians’ — and will be reduced to its true
content, naked interest in plunder. This is just as beneficial to our cause as
the reduction of all sorts of ‘liberal’ and ‘enlightened’ programmes of the
bourgeois parties to being purely and simply questions of money.
Secondly, it follows from the earlier articles that the
separation of the Christian lands from Turkey is a progressive phenomenon, an
act of social development, for this separation is the only way in which the
Turkish lands can achieve higher forms of social life. As long as a land
remains under Turkish rule, there can be no question of modern capitalist
development. Separated from Turkey, it acquires a European form of state and
bourgeois institutions, and is gradually drawn
into the general stream of capitalist development. Thus Greece and Romania have
made striking progress since their separation from Turkey. It is true that all
the newly-emerging states are minor states, but nevertheless it would be wrong
to perceive their establishment as a process of political fragmentation. For
Turkey itself is not a great power in the modern sense of the term. But
in countries with bourgeois development the ground is gradually also being
prepared for the modern working-class movement, for Social Democracy, as for
example is already the case in Romania, and to some extent also in Bulgaria.(2)
Thereby our highest international interest is satisfied, namely that as far as
possible the socialist movement should get a foothold in all countries.
Thirdly and lastly, the process of the dissolution of Turkey
is closely linked to the question of Russian rule in Europe, and this is the
heart of the matter. When even our press from time to time took the side of
Turkey, this clearly did not happen out of innate cruelty, or some special
preference for the partisans of polygamy. Obviously, the basis was an essential
opposition to the appetites of Russian absolutism, which seeks the road to
world dominion over the corpse of Turkey, and wants to use its Christian
nations as a means for its advance on Constantinople. But in our opinion, the
good will was applied in quite the wrong way, and the measures against Russia
were sought in quite the opposite direction from where they really lie.
Previous experience has already shown that in its
policy towards the Balkan Peninsula, Russia usually achieved the exact opposite
to what it was striving for. The peoples freed from Turkish rule have regularly
repaid Russia’s benevolence with ‘base ingratitude’, that is, they have bluntly
rejected an exchange of the Russian yoke for the Turkish. However unexpected
this was for the Russian diplomats, this conduct of the Balkan states was very
far from surprising. Between them and Russia, there is a natural conflict of
interests, the same conflict as exists between the lamb and the wolf, the
hunter and his prey. Dependence on Turkey is the veil which conceals this
conflict of interest, and even allows it to appear superficially and
temporarily as a community of interest. The masses do not engage in complex and
remote reflections. Since the national risings in Turkey are certainly mass
movements, they accept the first and best method that corresponds to their
immediate interests, even if this method is the vile diplomacy of Russia. But
as soon as the chains between the Christian lands and Turkey have been broken,
Russian diplomacy also shows its true face, as pure vileness, and the liberated
land immediately turns instinctively against Russia. If the nations subjugated
by Turkey are Russia’s allies, the nations liberated from Turkey become so many
natural enemies of Russia. Bulgaria’s present policy towards Russia is to a
great extent a result of its semi-freedom, a result of the chain which still links it
to Turkey.
But even more important is another result produced in
this process. The liberation of the Christian lands from Turkey is basically
taken as being likewise a ‘liberation’ of Turkey from its Christian subjects.
It is precisely these which serve as a motive for European diplomacy to operate
in Turkey, and who consign it unconditionally to the Russian side. Moreover, it
is they who in the event of war make Turkey unable to resist. The Christians do
not serve in the Turkish armed forces, but are always ready to rise up against
them. Therefore a foreign war for Turkey always means a second war at home, and
therefore a dispersal of its military forces and a paralysis of its movements.
Freed from this Christian torment, Turkey would undoubtedly adopt a freer
position in international politics, and its state territory would be more
commensurable with its defensive forces; but above all it would be rid of the
enemy within, the natural ally of every external aggressor. In short,
renunciation of rule over the Christians makes the Ottoman government more
capable of resistance, above all in relation to Russia. This explains why
Russia today is in favour of the integrity of Turkey. It is now in its interest for Turkey to
remain in possession of the bacillus which will cause its disorganisation - the
Christian nations - and for these therefore to remain under the yoke of Turkey
and dependent on Russia, until a favourable moment arrives for it to carry out
its plans with regard to Constantinople. This also explains why we must be in favour of the liberation of the
Christians from Turkey, and not of the integrity of that country.
In our opinion, we should seek the remedy against the
advance of Russian reaction in the aforementioned results of the process of
Turkish disintegration, and not in observations about ‘whether Salisbury[C] is
the man for the job’, or whether he is the man to show the door to the Russians
‘back in Turkey’. And this aspect of the
question is exceptionally important. Russian reaction is much too
dangerous and much too serious an enemy for us to allow ourselves the luxury of
warding off its leaden weight with paper darts, while at the same time ignoring
a serious weapon which circumstances offer us to combat it with. Today
advocating the integrity of Turkey actually means playing into the hands of
Russian diplomacy.
To imagine distant political conjectures in detail is
a fantasy. But it is far from impossible that the resistance of liberated
Turkey and the liberated Balkan lands could frustrate the Russian advance for
so long that Russian absolutism would not live to see the final solution of the
Constantinople question and would have to die, to the benefit of the peoples,
without being able to participate in the settlement of this question of
universal concern.
Thus our practical interests completely coincide with
the principled standpoint, and hence we recommend that the following
propositions be adopted for the present stance of Social Democracy on the
Eastern Question.
We must accept the process of the disintegration of
Turkey as a permanent fact, and not get it into our heads that it could or
should be stopped.
We should give our fullest sympathy to the aspirations
of the Christian nations for autonomy.
We should welcome these aspirations above all as a
means of fighting against
Tsarist Russia, and
emphatically advocate their independence from Russia, as well as from Turkey.
It is no accident that in the questions dealt with here,
practical considerations have led to the same conclusions as our general
principles. For the aims and principles of Social Democracy derive from real
social development, and are based on it; therefore in historical processes it
must to a great extent appear that events are finally bringing grist to the
social democratic mill, and that we can look after our immediate interests in
the best way by maintaining a position of principle. A deeper look at events,
therefore, always makes it superfluous for us to make some diplomats into the
causes of great popular movements and to seek the means of combating these
diplomats in other diplomats. That is just coffee-house politics.
(1)
At present, on the other hand, it is being said that
the Sultan is to blame
for everything. Thus the ‘victim’ becomes the scapegoat. From the following arguments, readers will be
convinced that this has nothing to do with the person, but with the conditions. [Editorial note in Sächsische
Arbeiter-Zeitung]
(2)
The Armenian socialists are therefore in our opinion
on the wrong track when they - as in Die Neue Zeit, Volume 14, no 42 - think they have to
justify their separatist aspirations with an ostensible capitalist development
in Armenia. On the contrary, separation from Turkey is here only the precondition for the germination of capitalism. And of
course capitalism itself is a precondition of the socialist movement. In our
opinion, therefore, the Armenian comrades must - to paraphrase Lassalle - for
the time being concern themselves with a precondition for the precondition of
socialism - a kind of precondition squared. [Luxemburg’s note]
[A]
In the 1890s, especially in Armenia, Crete and Macedonia, revolts constantly flared up against foreign rule by Turkey; these were brutally crushed.
[B]
The defeat of Russia in the Crimean War (1853-56) had
so exacerbated the domestic political situation that the ruling class between
1861 and 1870 had to introduce a series of political reforms, which certainly
were incomplete and contaminated with feudal hangovers, but which nonetheless
encouraged capitalist development in Russia. The most important reforms
concerned the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the formation of rural and urban
organs of self-government in 1864, changes in the administration of popular
education in 1863 and changes in justice in 1864, as well as in the censorship
in 1865.
[C] Robert Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903), was three times British Prime Minister and four times Foreign Secretary between 1878 and 1902.