by Prof. Dr. Özer OZANKAYA

The root cause of the complicated situation to which humanity is exposed today is the insistence on continuing to implement capitalism as the sovereign order, if necessary by force, even though it is outdated.

The years since the weakening and collapse of the Soviet Union have shown that the failure of socialism does not mean the victory of capitalism. In a one-polar world atmosphere, the military and political power of the political West, driven by the monopolist capitalist classes, continues to divide peoples and provoke local and civil conflicts, and even to occupy whole countries in order to seize their natural resources. Nations are scattered, poverty spreads, people are killed en masse or deprived of their homelands. Iraq is the most evident and ugliest example. With the exception of a limited “white” population, four-fifths of humanity is caught up in these whirlpools.

Yet at times when the nations of the Western countries have faced world economic crisis or the competition of the communist block, or have fallen into internal social-justice conflicts resembling internal wars among themselves, the elite statesmen to whom they have turned for salvation have themselves been harshly critical of capitalism, speaking of the necessity to reform it, and bringing about changes that have taken concrete form in the concept of the welfare state.

Churchill’s appeal

By forgetting the past, nobody can be dignified or free, either today or in the future. Nobody can prepare for what is to come by ignoring history. It is therefore very beneficial to remember the words of Winston Churchill – a deeply conservative statesman – when describing the situation into which capitalism dragged England in the 1920s. This article will also recall the words of another highly conservative politician, General De Gaulle, explaining how capitalism channelled France towards the brink of civil war, the observations of the renowned American sociologist Robert L. Heilbroner and the evaluations made by a group of economists from Cambridge University.

Criticising the Conservative Party, from which he temporarily resigned, Churchill argued that:

“The Conservative Party is a party of great vested interests bounded together in a formidable confederation: corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad; the trickery of tariff juggleries, the tyranny of a party machine; sentiment by the basketful, patriotism by the imperial points; dear food for the millions, cheap labor for the millionaire... The greatest damage to the British Empire and the British people are not to be found among the enormous fleets and the Armies of the European continent. Nor in the solemn problems of Hindustan. It is not the yellow peril nor the black peril. No, it is here in our midst, close at home. Close at hand in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of imperial ruin and decay. The unnatural gap between rich and poor; the divorce of the people from the land; the want of proper discipline and training in our youth; the exploitation of our boy-labor; the physical degeneration which seems to follow swiftly on our civilized poverty; the consequent insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the hearts of many a sober, hard-working men; the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers; and at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar and joyless luxury. They are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shutter the foundations of her power.”

De Gaulle: Respect

In the France of the 1950s, General de Gaulle described the deep depression in his country as follows:

“One day the machine was invented and capital married her. And this couple dominated the world. Since then many people - the workers in particular - became dependent upon them. Being dependent upon the machines for their works and upon the bosses for their jobs, they feel morally degraded and materially threatened. And here is the outcome: class warfare! It is everywhere: in the workshops, in the fields, in the offices, in the streets, in the depth of eyes and hearts! It poisons human relations, terrifies governments, destroys unity of nations, causes wars. Because what lies behind the great shocks which the world has been undergoing is indeed this very social problem so often underlined but never solved. What provides the separatists in our country with such hopeless occupations is again this same social problem so often underlined but never solved. However much the free nations may oil their propaganda machine, no matter whether they arm themselves to the point of their own ruin, the sword of Damocles will hang over their heads for as long as each individual is not accorded a due place in society and the portion and dignity due to it!”

To these citations, we should add the following words of President Roosevelt, who accepted the need for the state to take on economic responsibilities in the United States of the 1930s, and gave life to the ‘New Deal’ policy: “I see one third of my nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished!”

Scientific criticism

In the 1980s, Kirk F. Koerner of Cambridge University argued, in the introduction to a book entitled ‘Liberalism and Its Critiques’, that since the time of Machiavelli, the Western world had ceased to be oriented primarily by the endeavour to achieve wisdom and virtue and had instead come to seek after pleasure for the sake of pleasure. Values such as wisdom and virtue had ceased to be ends in themselves and been transformed into mere means at the service of happiness, pleasure and material gains, However, apart from failing to provide happiness and satisfaction, this trend had proved to be demeaning and degrading for mankind. Liberalism was the policy of politically inexperienced groups and, if fully applied, left no room for political compromise.

In the 1960s, in his book, “The Limits of American Capitalism”, American sociologist Robert L. Heilbroner argued that:

“The explosive enlargement and development of organized science and scientific technology at our time is apt to change irreversibly the capitalist social order, for they can render outmoded its basic operation mechanisms. They can cause such social problems that can only be dealt with through extra-market control mechanisms: transport, nuclear energy, drug addiction, traffic regulations, environment issues, the needs of mega-cities ...necessitate increasingly direct interventions in economic sphere through common regulations and constraints. The incursion of technology has pushed the frontiers of work … into a spectrum of jobs whose common denominator is that they require public action and public funds for their initiation and support.

“When we try to imagine the implications of automation, genetic engineering, nuclear energy ... the scale of these actions and controls becomes clearer. With the high welfare level reached in the developed part of the world, material needs are no more efficient stimulants for human behavior: who would wish within such conditions to be the rich man’s servant at any price? Therefore the market stimuli are no longer met readily with obedient responses.

“All efforts to raise money-making to the level of a positive virtue have failed, whereas science and its technical application is the burning idea of the twentieth century.

“The altruism of science, its ‘purity’, the awesome vistas it opens and venerable path it has followed have won from all groups that passionate interest and conviction that is so egregiously lacking to capitalism as a way of life.”

Transcending the West

The above were largely concerned with overcoming the troubles of Western societies alone. In international society, however, the dominant principle should be that “All humanity is a body and all nations are the organs of this body. If there is an illness in one of them, this will affect the whole body and prevent it from functioning in a healthy way.”

The states of the Political West have, in fact, agreed not to make wars among themselves. They have created joint political, economic, monetary, defence and security organisations and are cooperating in jointly exploiting the world and the labour of illegal and foreign workers in their own countries. In this way they have arguably alleviated their own problems. However, the rapid growth of international transportation and interaction - a basic and indispensable element of the new scientific and technologic atmosphere pointed out by Heilbroner – has not stopped. In other words, no state or society can deem itself secure and free to do whatever it wants. As the founder of the Republic of Turkey, Atatürk said: “The structures based on the captivity of the nations are dedicated to destruction everywhere.” Atatürk’s dictum “Peace at home, peace abroad” is still valid.

Atatürk cited many good examples for humanity of both the scientific and artistic dimensions of politics can be fulfilled. One of these is the implementation of the “democratic economy” principle. Thus, he proved that societies can be protected from the destructions of the fiction of the socialist doctrine envisaging a “society abstracted from the individuals” and the fiction of the capitalist doctrine foreseeing an “individual living alone”.

Argentinean Political Scientist Blanco Villalta made the same assessment when he wrote that "Atatürk… contributed a political plan which has wide possibilities for the future of man:... a political system of an economic and social character, in which the direction of the economy is the fundamental responsibility of the state which intervenes as far as is necessary and useful, and no further; and a people which is absolutely free to elect its rulers, free to adopt its own ideas, free in conscious, and possessing the right of choice.”

(DIPLOMAT - November 2005 - Ankara)