EXTENDED SUMMARY

This article is about the class position of the early Kemalists, who were pivotal in the victory of the National Struggle and the establishment of the Republic in Turkey. The article’s argument is that the early Kemalists were an essential component of the bourgeoisie in modern Turkey, in its formation period.

Early Kemalists were referred to as the “military-civilian intelligentsia,” “revolutionary avant-garde,” “energetic forces,” “revolutionary cadre,” “state class,” “bureaucratic class,” or “modernising elite” by certain authors who wrote about the history of modern Turkey. These authors, despite having divergent viewpoints, considered the first Kemalists as superior to society and the nation; they portrayed them as being independent of classes, not belonging to any class, or constituting a class on their own. The early Kemalists were viewed as a social group with the ability to establish social classes or prevent their formation as a result of this viewpoint assigned to them.

The positioning of the early Kemalists as trans-class by the aforementioned authors stemmed from the fact that they did not see Turkish capitalism as equivalent to Western European capitalism, and they did not see Turkey’s social classes as similar to those in Western Europe. Because Turkish capitalism was not considered equivalent to modern Western capitalism, and Turkey’s social classes were not considered equivalent to modern social classes, the Kemalists, Turkey’s founders, could not be associated with capitalism and the bourgeoisie. In other words, the early Kemalists were positioned in a country without capitalism and the bourgeoisie. In these analyses, the bourgeois who had capital during modern Turkey’s founding period were not considered bourgeois because they were not cultured, and the cultured bourgeois were not considered bourgeois because they did not have capital.

Behind this perspective lie three important problems. The first problem is that the concept of “class” is thought of in terms of sharp schemes and established images. When class is conceived only in terms of economic categories and mentally visualized in fixed images, it is assumed that the bourgeois can only be manufacturers, industrialists, merchants or bankers. Since the early Kemalists did not fit these stereotypes, it was not believed that they could be an essential component of the bourgeoisie. The second important problem is that the writers who placed the early Kemalists in a trans-class position tended to think in a distorted form of Max Weber’s concept of the “ideal type”. As a result, the same types of the bourgeoisie, bourgeois revolution, and capitalism that emerged in Western Europe were sought in Turkey, and when they were not found, it was concluded that none of them existed in Turkey. The linear theory of history, which dominates modern Turkish literature, is the third major problem. This means that the only way for the backward countries to catch up to the developed countries will be to travel along the same path they have. Therefore, it would be incorrect to expect a bourgeoisie and capitalism in a backward country as they exist in a developed country. According to this viewpoint, the bourgeoisie and capitalism can either emerge at a later stage in backward countries or a classless nation can be built by preventing their formation.

The way to overcome these problematic perspectives may be to reinterpret the founding process of modern Turkey, based on the flexibility of Marxism’s theory of social class and the broad perspective of the theory of Uneven and Combined Development.

When his texts are read carefully, it is seen that Karl Marx uses the concept of class flexibly when analysing the economic, political and ideological levels of society. For Marx, class is a dynamic relationship and consists of different internal layers. The bourgeoisie, for instance, consists of different components such as industrialists, traders, intellectuals, bureaucrats and politicians. When analysing class relations in the founding period of modern Turkey, the inadequacy of looking only at industrialists and merchants to locate the bourgeoisie emerges; the components of the bourgeoisie in ideology, culture, politics, and the military should also be focused on.

The Theory of Uneven and Combined Development helps us to understand that capitalism will not emerge in the same way in uneven countries, the bourgeois revolutions that lay the groundwork for this type of society will not occur in the same way in every country, the class-leadership in bourgeois revolutions will not form in the same way in every country, and the roles of the internal layers of the bourgeoisie may differ during the revolution process.

When we examine the formation period of modern Turkey with the aid of a flexible understanding of Marx’s theory of class and the broad perspective of the Theory of Uneven and Combined Development, we can recognise that the early Kemalists were not a classless social stratum, but in fact, they were an essential component of the bourgeoisie. With their worldview, the nature of the revolution they led, their cultural tendencies, and their hostility to the working class and socialist thought, the early Kemalists belonged to the bourgeois class and were a significant part of it. However, neither was Kemalism a fixed idea nor was the class position of the Kemalists eternal. The position of the Kemalists, who formed the essential component of the Turkish bourgeoisie in the Turkish bourgeois revolution, and Kemalism, their ideas, would undergo metamorphoses in time.