Istanbul addendum

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

The Dolmabahce Palace
(http://www.virtualistanbul.com/virtualistanbul/Dolmabahce.htm) was built
between 1825 and 1853 as a replacement for the Topkapi palace. It is a 285
room affair with 4 ton chandeliers, silk curtains, gold dining utensils,
French provincial furniture, etc. appearing so well preserved that you
might expect to see a Sultan walking down the hallway in his pajamas and
slippers.

My Turkish hosts explained to me that it is much more interesting than the
Versailles Palace, to which it is architecturally and spiritually related,
since the furniture had never been taken out and burned by
revolutionary-minded peasants as was the case in France in 1789.

Two thoughts have stuck with me about this Ottoman shrine to conspicuous
consumption. One, could it be possible that Turkey's current intractable
social and economic crisis and, moreover, the failure to develop into a
fully modern state be related to the fact that Turkish counterparts of the
sans-culottes never trashed such a palace in the course of a bloody
bourgeois-democratic revolution? Two, what does it say about the mindset of
the Ottoman rulers that they were attempting to build a palace in the 19th
century that was modeled after 17th century Europe? What this time warp
tells me is that the Turkish ruling class--such as it was--had failed to
keep pace with the changing socio-economic realities of the capitalist
world. Rather than pouring money into gold dinnerware, it should obviously
have been building roads and telegraph lines.

For a useful explanation of how this state of affairs came into existence,
I refer you to chapter 7 of Perry Anderson's "Lineages of the Absolutist
State." Titled "The House of Islam," it focuses on the Ottoman system that
was characterized by a combination of 'ghazi', which signifies a militant,
crusading Islam, and older Islamic principles that stressed accommodation
and trade with the Infidel. Basically, this combination produced a mixture
of territorial expansion and open-minded commercial opportunism.

The economic bedrock of Ottoman despotism was the absence of private
property in land. The Sultan had unlimited right to exploit all wealth in
his realm, from olive orchards in the Balkans, to cotton fields in Egypt
producing raw materials for the world market. The absence of an
intermediate layer of landed gentry meant that property could not be
secured, especially land. To become wealthy and important in the Ottoman
Empire meant becoming a state functionary. In sharp contrast to Europe,
this entailed a kind of upward mobility for Janissary slaves who could
become immensely wealthy and powerful while remaining nominally unfree.

As a corollary of their understanding of property rights, the Ottoman
conquest of the Balkans actually had a positive impact on the peasantry.
Since the landed gentry of places like Serbia and Bulgaria were liquidated,
the peasants would immediately be delivered from the kind of degradation
that was typical of Western Europe and, in Anderson's words, "transferred
to a social condition that was paradoxically in most respects milder and
freer than anywhere else in Eastern Europe at the time."

Yet the elimination of feudal overlords had negative consequences in the
long run, for the absence of such elites reduced the possibility of the
kind of capital accumulation that might prepare the way for a
proto-bourgeoisie. Balkan towns failed to achieve the kind of commercial
and intellectual importance that they had in Western Europe at the same
time since they were transformed into appendages of Istanbul with Turkish
craftsmen and shopkeepers in positions of power.

In the eastern regions of the empire, economic conditions were more
sanguine since there was no need to restructure prosperous trading centers
according to Ottoman precepts. Instead, the Ottoman army and navy offered
protection from piracy on land and sea. This commercial stability led to
population growth and other signs of well-being, especially in the cultural
arena.

However, the ascendancy of the Mideast under Ottoman rule--just as was the
case in the Balkans--had built-in limits. With an absence of a
proto-bourgeoisie in the countryside, rural technology improvement lacked
the sort of impetus it enjoyed in the west. Furthermore, the towns lacked
the kind of autonomy that was the only guarantee of dynamic commercial
growth. Hampered by Sultanate regulation of commodity prices, large-scale
commercial capital would be inhibited at the outset. Anderson writes:

"The characteristic Turkish town eventually came to be dominated by a
stagnant and backward 'menu peuple' that prevented any entrepreneurial
innovation or accumulation. Given the nature of the Ottoman State, there
was no protective space in which a Turkish mercantile bourgeoisie could
develop, and from the 17th century onwards commercial functions devolved
increasingly onto infidel minority communities, Greek, Jewish or Armenian,
which had always anyway dominated the export trade with the West. Muslim
traders or producers were thereafter generally confined to small
shopkeeping and artisanal occupations."

Even at its height, there was a radical disjunction between Ottoman
military prowess and the underlying economy. Although Anderson does not
mention it specifically, one would be reminded of his explanation of the
collapse of the Roman Empire. Based as it was on a slave economy, it could
only expand through the acquisition of new chattel. Once expansion had met
natural geographical and political-military limits, decay was inevitable in
both cases. Reading this description in Anderson, one is reminded not only
of the Roman Empire, but the future possible collapse of the American
empire, if one considers the kind of servitude to which it is reducing most
of the world:

"The privileges of an extraneous slave corps, deprived of its military
functions, gradually became intolerable to the bulk of the dominant class
of the Empire, which eventually exerted its inert weight to normalize and
recover command of the political apparatus of the Ruling Institution. The
surplus rural population that had been enlisted as auxiliaries or
freebooters in the armies of the Porte, turned to social revolt or
brigandage once the military machine could no longer absorb it. Moreover,
the stoppage of extensive acquisition of lands and treasure was inevitably
to lead to much more intensive forms of exploitation within the bounds of
Turkish power, at the expense of the subject rayah class. The history of
the Ottoman Empire from the late 16th to the early 19th century is thus
essentially that of the disintegration of the central imperial State, the
consolidation of a provincial landowning class, and the degradation of the
peasantry. This long drawn-out process, which was not without transient
political and military recoveries, did not occur in Balkan isolation from
the rest of the European continent. It was, on the contrary, deepened and
aggravated by the international impact of West European economic supremacy,
under whose sway the Ottoman Empire - stagnating in technological
parasitism and theological obscurantism - increasingly fell."

                                * * * *

Turkish television is heavily tilted toward musical performance, either
from their own version of MTV, with local rock-and-roll favorites like
Tarkan, or much more traditional sounds from the Black Sea region (laz)
or--my favorite--Arabesk, which, as the name implies, is Turkish lyrics
superimposed on an essentially Mideast sound.

For my European-looking hosts, Arabesk is something of an embarrassment,
like a country cousin. From what I have been able to glean from various
websites and a superb article from the Jstor database, Arabesk is a
typically plebian music that is consciously adopts the values and
aspirations of those at the fringes of society. In this aspect, it has a
lot in common with tango in its infancy, a music that was bred in the
whorehouses of Buenos Aires. Or rap music, for that matter.

It is clear that at one time the Mideast had much more of a direct cultural
impact on Turkey than it has today. My host Hassan informed me that
Egyptian films were very common in Turkey when he was a youth. One can only
surmise that Arabesk performers would have been strongly influenced by
films that included the Egyptian megastar Umm Kulthum, who by some
reckonings sold more records than any performer in history, including
Elvis. Go to http://almashriq.hiof.no/egypt/700.arts/780.music/umKoulthoum/
for information on her life and to hear her songs.

Appearing in the Middle East Report of Sept-Oct 1989, Martin Stokes's
"Music, Fate and State: Turkey's Arabesk Debate" is a fascinating account
of how this music has posed problems to the Turkish government and the
urban intelligentsia, as well. Stokes writes:

"It is, firstly, a music inextricably linked with the culture of the
gecekondu, literally the 'night settlements' which mushroomed around
Turkey's large industrial cities after the Menderes government program of
rural regeneration in the 1950s produced a large rural labor surplus. By
the 1970s these squatter towns accounted for up to 60 percent of the
population of cities such as Istanbul.

"Sociological research projects celebrated the beneficial effects of life
in the squatter towns. The gecekondular not only provided an environment in
which the migrant was able to retain his links with his home village, but
was able to participate increasingly in national cultural life, spending
more time reading the newspapers, attending the cinemas, participating in
elections, getting an education and so on. Politicians promised title deeds
to gecekondu dwellers [this would explain the removal-resistant slum I saw
near the soccer stadium] in return for their votes at national and, more
recently, municipal elections, thus accelerating the process of
assimilation and extending public transport, water and refuse collecting
services. 'Aside from low income, drab looking houses, and the lack of
normal city facilities,' Kemal Karpat wrote in 1976, 'few squatter towns
show any symptoms of social or psychological disintegration, moral
depravity and crime.'"

As Turkey's political and economic collapse took shape in the 1980s, the
sense of optimism disappeared from the gecekondu--hence the rise of the
Arabesk, a kind of Turkish blues that would evoke the feeling of
dislocation and loss of a recent black internal immigrant to Chicago in the
1940s expressed in a tune like Muddy Waters's "Train Fare Home Blues".

The Arabesk is closely linked with "dolmus" culture, the word for stuffed
as in stuffed grape leaves--in this instance it refers to the
privately-owned and overcrowded cabs that connect the city proper to the
outlying gecekondu. (There's an accent under the s, so it is pronounced
dolmush.) Stokes writes:

"Istanbul's central dolmus station, Topkapi garage, is at a point midway
between the gecekondu and the old city. Close to the famous brothels of
Sulukule and surrounded by graveyards conspicuous with their tall cypress
trees, this area occupies a prominent place in the urban Turkish
imagination. It is a twilight zone spatially, socially and morally. Within
the walls lie monuments to Ottoman Turkish civilization; without lies the
ephemeral junk of modern Turkey's trash culture. Within, the palaces and
mosques; without, the beer houses and brothels. Within, order and the
living; without, chaos and the dead."

For the intelligentsia, the Arabesk is a symptom of the country's
socio-economic illness and have referred to it as a "cancer" or "epidemic".
According to Stokes, Emre Kongar, one of Turkey's leading sociologists,
locates Arabesk in the interstices between a 'feudal-urban' and
'industrial' culture. "By implication, the industrial transformation of
Turkish society will eventually solve the Arabesk problem." Given Turkey's
precarious situation today, one would not be surprised to see every last
citizen going to sleep with the words of an Arabesk on their lips.

For the sounds of Arabesk and other modern Turkish music, go to:
http://www.turkishmusic.org/


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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