The state unconscious

Founded in 2015, K24 is one of the very few independent online platforms devoted to culture, literature and critical thinking still operating in Turkey. Its roots go back to the literary monthly Virgül, which debuted in 1997 and ran until 2009, under the editorship of critic Orhan Koçak and Mustafa Arslantunalı, K24’s current editor. Since 2009, K24 (‘K’ stands for kitap, meaning ‘book’) has been published online by P24, the platform for independent journalism in Turkey.

Among the essays, interviews and polemics published in K24 in recent months is Hasan Bülent Kahraman’s piece on ‘the state as the unconscious in the novel’, part of a series on ideological displacement in social thought and the novel in Turkey.

A professor of political and aesthetic theory, Kahraman contends that devlet (the state) has seeped into the ‘unconscious of the masses, society, the individual and the intellectual’ in Turkey. ‘The state is the metaphysics of the Turkish novel,’ he argues.

This observation applies across the political spectrum. On the right, the Turkish state has been sanctified, but the left too has emphasized the state’s ‘maternal’ and ‘benevolent’ nature. Kahraman contrasts this with European authors whose societies were rooted in feudalism but shaped by bourgeois revolutions. Gustave Flaubert and Jean-Paul Sartre, for example, viewed the state and the bourgeoisie as things to be despised.

In 1972, the novelist Oğuz Atay grappled with devlet, Kahraman notes, yet ‘that reckoning was not a rejection, but an attempt at a new positioning’. He goes on to discuss novels by Kemal Tahir and Attilâ İlhan, both of whom wrote ‘from a leftwing perspective’ but were ‘embraced by the right’. In Turkey, Kahraman concludes, ‘the individual cannot be formed within a reality outside of the state’.

Dissident hopes and disappointments

Şahin Alpay and İştar Gözaydın, both political scientists critical of the Erdoğan regime, were arrested by the Turkish authorities after the 2016 coup attempt and detained on terrorism charges as part of the purge on dissident academics. They were only acquitted in 2018, in Alpay’s case after appealing to the European Court of Human Rights. In a wide-ranging conversation, Alpay – also a veteran journalist – talks to Gözaydın about his political trajectory, as related in two recently published volumes of memoirs.

While studying at Ankara University in the 1960s, Alpay started ‘questioning what was happening in this country.’ In 1965, he met members from the district organization of TİP (Turkish Workers’ Party) and, through them, former members of TKP (Turkish Communist Party). Those people ‘planted the seed of ideas in my mind,’ Alpay says. Soon, Alpay and his college friend, Nuri Çolakoğlu, were translating Bertrand Russell’s War and Tyranny in Vietnam. The book’s publisher, Muzaffer Erdost, introduced him to Mihri Belli and other leading figures of Marxism in Turkey at the time.

But Alpay turned against ‘Soviet social imperialism’ and delivered speeches in favour of ‘the Chinese revolution’. After the 12 March 1971 military memorandum, fearful of arrest, he left Turkey to join ‘armed struggle training’ in the Palestinian resistance movement. But ‘after about eight months of armed struggle training in the ranks of the Palestinian resistance movement, I had begun to despise weapons,’ he tells Gözaydın. ‘Finally, I said to myself, if the goal is to build a just society, it must be done through democratic means.’ Alpay left Lebanon to pursue a PhD in political science in Sweden, where he ‘fell in love’ with social democracy. Under the influence of Karl Popper, he decided that ‘Marxist-Leninist solutions’ were ‘incompatible with both freedom and justice’.

After his return to Turkey in 1981, Alpay decided that, ‘if a liberal democratic regime was to be established in Turkey, it needed an interpretation compatible with Islam’. This led him to support Erdoğan’s AK Party, which only ‘turned towards authoritarianism from 2010 onwards’. The AK Party was a movement that ‘initially had an exceptionally progressive and democratic stance, but then gradually took on an authoritarian identity’.

Communists real and false

In another noteworthy interview, Özge İpek Esen talks to historian Emel Akal about the history of the Turkish Communist Party (TKP). Akal has recently published a monograph – title Who Is The Real Communist? – comprising short biographies of influential communists. Mostly members of the Turkish Communist Party, these men knew each other ‘from Paris or Istanbul, from the corridors of Darülfünun or Mekteb-i Mülkiye’ (universities in late Ottoman-era Constantinople). Some fought alongside the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War.

To establish relations with the Bolsheviks, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk asked Fuat Sabit to establish the ‘Turkish Communist Party’ in Baku in March 1920. But the revolutionary communist Mustafa Suphi soon established his own rival organization. His Communist Party of Turkey, Akal contends, ‘has defended the interests of the working class since 1920. The ruling classes, in turn, have not hesitated to exert all kinds of pressure and oppression on their party to prevent the working class from becoming conscious and to exploit the values ​​it creates’.

According to Akal, Mustafa Suphi – who was murdered by political opponents in 1921 – was ‘a brilliant character in every respect’. His example offers a sliver of hope for modern progressives, too: ‘Today, exploitation and plunder are manifesting themselves in every field on a scale unprecedented in the hundred-year history of the Republic of Turkey. But I believe that the working class, those who earn their living through labour, will know how to put a stop to this.’

The feminine street

Hazal Bozyer considers another Marxist mainstay of early 20th-century Turkish history: Suat Derviş. A Turkish novelist, journalist and political activist, who was among the founders of the Socialist Women’s Association in 1970, Derviş conducted numerous interviews with children and women between 1935 and 1937. These, Bozyer writes, offer an ‘excellent opportunity’ to understand this period. Published in newspapers such as Cumhuriyet, Son Posta, Tan, Haber Akşam Postası, Derviş’s work allowed the ‘street itself to speak’.

These interviews ‘reveal the plight of the orphaned, sick, school bound, neglected and abandoned children of the young republic,’ according to Bozyer. ‘While reading, a very familiar feeling overwhelms you: ‘Some things don’t change…’

 Review by Kaya Genç