The prescription the West is looking for was written in Ankara

In my previous article, drawing from my dear friend Dr. Serdar Şahinkaya's book "The Kadro Movement's View on Social Events and the Relationship Between Statism and Planning," I explained that the ticket out of the semi-colonial trap we have been pushed into today lies hidden in that magnificent founding philosophy of the 1930s. 

I stated that the economic policies of the Atatürk era and the intellectual world of the Kadro movement would be inspiring not only for today's Turkey but also for escaping the global inequality caused by the neoliberal order. 

I added a caveat in the article, noting that the West, particularly with the document "The London Agreement: Economic Principles for the 21st Century" penned by 52 economists under the London School of Economics (LSE), has begun to talk about the "Entrepreneurial State" model as if they were reinventing the wheel. Perhaps as the world searches for a new economic order today, it is rediscovering the answers Turkey provided a century ago.

So, is this "new statism" currently being hotly debated by Western intellectual circles the same as the "Turkish Statism" that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk proved in practice and for which the Kadro movement built the theoretical backbone?

Let us look closer at the philosophical genetics of these two models. Because no matter how much the Western world dresses it up, the coordinates of the harbor they are taking refuge in today were drawn in Ankara a century ago. However, there are vital, structural differences between them.

The first difference lies in the reasons for their birth and the mission assigned to the state.

The "Entrepreneurial State" proposed today by the London Agreement and one of its theorists, Mariana Mazzucato, is a search for a breathing tube for Western capitalism, which has matured and reached a ceiling in capital accumulation but is clogged due to structural crises. The state here is an actor that takes the initial risk in areas where the private sector avoids due to high risks and uncertainties—such as the green energy transition, artificial intelligence, or space technologies—meaning it is an actor that guides the market and opens up space.

Yet, what was the state of Turkey in the 1930s? It was a poor agrarian society that had missed the industrial revolution, lacked capital accumulation, had no bourgeoisie or working class, and had its veins drained by capitulations. Atatürk's statism was not born to regulate or guide existing actors in the market; it was born to create the market and industry from scratch, out of nothing. Since there were no capital owners to invest, the state itself became the manufacturer, the banker, and the miner. In other words, while the state the West is searching for is "guiding," the young Republic of Turkey was a "founder." 

The second and most fundamental distinction emerges in the class perspective and social order.

The London Agreement accepts the existing capitalist class structure and property relations as they are. Its goal is to trim the massive wealth inequality created by neoliberalism slightly through taxes and public investments so that it does not lead to social explosions. In essence, it aims to repair the system by making capitalism fairer and greener. It does not exclude private capital; on the contrary, it involves it in new areas of profitability opened by the state through public-private partnerships.

As I emphasized last week, faced with the pathetic scene in the 1915 Industrial Census inherited from the Ottoman Empire (a total of 288 primitive enterprises and 14 thousand workers), the Kadro movement correctly saw that a Western-style class struggle could not be sought in Turkey. Their goal, and that of the Turkish Revolution, was to liquidate class contradiction before it even began by establishing a society without privileges, without classes, and integrated within.

That is why the statism theorized by Kadro carried a public-oriented and communal character that was as anti-imperialist against the outside as it was against the concentration of capital accumulation in the hands of specific classes on the inside. It advocated that old imperialist profits and industry should not be left to the interests of a single class, but should be gathered directly in the hands of the state (that is, the nation).

In short...

The Western world, upon the bankruptcy of free-market fairy tales in the face of global warming, pandemics, and deep poverty, has finally understood that the state is not just a "bandage applier" (the Keynesian model) that pumps money into the market only during times of crisis, but rather that it should be the main conductor of the economic game.

However, they are doing this to save the capitalist system; Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the Kadro movement in his intellectual kitchen did it so that an oppressed nation could win its full independence, that is, its economic sovereignty.

We do not need to import prescriptions from the IMF or from abroad today. We need to interpret this original "Third Way" development model, which was successfully implemented in these lands 100 years ago and served as an inspiration to all oppressed nations, in the conditions of the 21st century and tell it with a much louder voice in the global economic literature.

Of course, there are structural differences between the conditions of the 1930s and today's Turkey. We are no longer at the beginning of a classless society as we were then; we have a working class, even if it has not reached full consciousness, and a private sector and bourgeoisie that, even if not sufficiently developed, compete with the world in many sectors. Today's '21st Century Statism' is not limited to just building industry from scratch. 

Planning is the surrender of the society's future not to the blind forces of the market, but to knowledge and will. The plan is the dominance of knowledge and will over coincidences and fate. 

"21st Century Statism is not a model that pits the state against the private sector; it is a mixed economic model that brings the state, the private sector, and cooperatives together under a common development goal on the axis of planning."

The state being an investor in all strategic sectors, from agriculture to mining and energy, and from defense to high-tech industries, seems to be the most effective way against today's neoliberal destruction. 

The state that organized production in the 1930s is obligated to manage 'distribution' with justice today. One of the most important conditions for this is the addition of the right to public property, which all citizens will benefit from equally, alongside fundamental rights such as living, housing, health, education, and social security. We can briefly explain the right to public property as follows: The owners of all public investments you can think of, from highways to bridges, from dams to telecommunications, and from airports to universities, are the citizens. Furthermore, the public ownership of all natural assets, from forests to seas, from pastures to water resources, and to mines, belongs to the citizens. 

Public property is the property of the nation, not the state. The wealth arising from those resources should belong to all citizens, not to a handful of privileged segments. The ultimate goal of 21st Century Statism is to ensure justice in distribution as much as efficiency in production.