Müslüm Kabadayı: The postmodern narrative fed by EU and CIA funds is rotting

Author and educator Müslüm Kabadayı recently celebrated his 40th year in literature with friends and a book. Responding to our questions, Kabadayı provided a brief assessment of these years.

- 40 years have passed since you entered Turkish literature. You have also crowned this with a book. So, what kind of Turkish literature did you enter 40 years ago? How do you see the literature you entered when you look at it from today?

MÜSLÜM KABADAYI - The first nucleus that prepared me to exist by writing, to exist with society by sharing, and over time to struggle to end exploitation and our country's dependence on imperialism by mingling with the working class and strata was the Düziçi Primary Teacher Training School, the successor to the Düziçi Village Institute. My poems and essays were published in the school magazine there in the first half of the 1970s. These were, naturally, texts that contained the amateurism and enthusiasm of my early youth. During my university years, political writings were added to these.

Since my essays and stories with real artistic depth were published in the "Art Book of Intensity in All Units of Life" (Yaşamın Tüm Birimlerinde Yoğunluk Sanat Kitabı) released in Ankara in 1986, our friends who closely follow my work declared 2026 as my "40th Art Year." The preparation for the "40th Art Year Gift Book" was completed in January, February, and March. This book met with readers at the celebration program held at the Çankaya Municipality Yılmaz Güney Stage on April 11. First of all, I would like to thank my friends on the organizing committee, Zeki Güldü, Sadık Güvenç, H. Ozan Uyumlu, Zeynel Korkmaz, and Mustafa Akdağ, who contributed to the preparation of the book and the successful realization of the celebration program. I also express my gratitude to the Çankaya Municipality Culture, Art and Social Affairs Directorate, which prepared the celebration program in cooperation, and to the Education Union (Eğitim Sen) Ankara No. 2 Branch Executive Board, of which I am a member. I also wish health to the efforts and hearts of those who contributed to the book "40th Art Year Gift: A Long Run from Education to Writing, Müslüm Kabadayı" with their articles, poems, paintings, caricatures, and photographs.

1986 was a year when the September 12 fascism suppressed society and the trade union and political organizations of workers and laborers were closed. It was known that in such a period, postmodernism was intervening in literature and our literature with a strong social vein was being undermined. We were meeting with our teacher Yalçın Küçük, who declared war on these, while also keeping our bond of citizenship in the forefront. His book "Literature and Science" had turned the wind created by his book "Theses on the Intellectual" into a new storm of debate. Not only socialists who maintained their revolutionary spirit but also the young generation interested in literature and science, who wanted to make progress in these fields, were quite influenced by this work. On one hand, those like Ahmet Altan were being promoted, and those who removed the human from the center of literature and art were being flattered by bourgeois pens, while on the other hand, there were those who struggled despite all difficulties to bring social realist literature and art back to the agenda of our working people.

RESISTANCE THROUGH ART IN A CLIMATE OF FEAR

In such an environment, I met these friends through Mustafa Yavaş, a student from the Theater Department whom I met while studying at the Faculty of Language, History and Geography, and who had previously worked on the "Nitelik" compilation in Ankara. While I was trying to earn a living by learning to draw projects at my electrical engineer friend Şemsettin Dertli's place in Gölbaşı, I started to meet with these friends in Ankara more often and began preparations to enter the literary world with a new social magazine. The work we carried out with our friends Kıvılcım Vafi, Mustafa Yavaş, Murat Koçak, and Mikail Erdil soon grew to twelve people.

If we had taken notes on the topics we discussed and the suggestions we brought to the agenda in the house meetings we held during that period, and if we had published them, we would have made a significant contribution to both our magazine history and the literary world. Due to the atmosphere of pressure and fear created by the September 12 fascist coup, we did not keep any notes other than information regarding the technical preparations of the magazine. This is a dimension that reveals the atmosphere of that period. It was in this environment that we saw Murat Belge and his cronies being promoted both in the rotting of our literature and in the corruption of the young generation's minds by distorting socialism, and against this, we were trying to bring the curious, combative, and solidarity-oriented people of our fertile lands to the agenda with our poems, stories, essays, and critical writings.

We had published three issues of the "Art Book of Intensity in All Units of Life" in 1986; that same year, Yalçın Küçük's "Profanity Novels" (Küfür Romanları) was published and created a great echo in the political field as well as in the literary world. Our friend B. Sadık Albayrak had called the first edition of this book, which was published under the name "Profanity Novels Against the Republic" in the 2011 edition, "Profanity Novels Against Socialism." In the 1990s, Orhan Pamuk-style novels began to be written by being flattered, and the products of a policy that truly blunted the productive-creative momentum of society with the narcotic of sects and presented them to workers and laborers as "civil society organizations" began to be reaped in the 2000s. A period was entered where the process of imposing religious publications and mystical literature on children and young people through community publishing houses and schools reached its peak. I think Yalçın Hoca made such a name change to draw attention to the fact that this period was also when the attack on the Republic intensified.

THE BLOCKADE OF "MARKET-ORIENTED LITERARY LEGIONNAIRES"

Many research and analysis articles and books have been published on how the strategy of the Turkish capitalist class to completely remove our people from being "citizens" and re-enslave them is reflected in every area of life. In the field of literature, Cengiz Gündoğdu, Nihat Ateş, Ahmet Yıldız, B. Sadık Albayrak, and Taylan Kara have written very important articles and published books. Those who are curious can research, read, and benefit from them. In these books, there are very important studies that expose the books written to corrupt our realistic literature and the pens that are manipulated.

An event that Taylan Kara also drew attention to and that saddened me the most is that the Orhan Kemal Award was given to Hamdi Koç's anti-Orhan Kemal novel "Naked and Alone" (Çıplak ve Yalnız). The fact that Ahmet Telli, Feyza Hepçilingirler, and Tahsin Yücel were among those who gave the award to this novel, which is against our great writer of social literature Orhan Kemal, is also instructive. Based on our principle that "an art work cannot be competed because of its uniqueness," I have always been, and we have always been, against giving awards to art-literature works through competitions. Therefore, an award to be organized in the name of Orhan Kemal can only be a "labor award." Aside from this, I asked Nâzım Öğütçü, who attended one of our events ten years ago, about the award given to Hamdi Koç. He expressed that he was also against it but could not prevent it because he was not on the jury. I think I have been able to explain why this situation hurt us deeply.

Unfortunately, this event is not a coincidence or an accidental occurrence; it is a phenomenon. The book supplements of newspapers known as left-wing or socialist, the awards organized in the name of social writers and poets, and the mercenaries promoted in cultural centers have made this phenomenon stare us in the face. Without going into detail, let me suffice by concretizing how those who pose as socialists paved the way for this rot, and the disappointment later experienced by those who did not care about us who exposed the actions of Efe Duyan and his cronies, who were praised to the skies by some in Ankara in 2005 and later in Istanbul.

Trojan horses have appeared in every period, and they may appear again. I would like to emphasize that we have encountered more Trojan horses that want to block the initiatives we have taken to enrich the political struggle we have been waging to protect human dignity and reason against the pressures and tortures carried out by the September 12 fascism to enslave our people with literature. This is the fundamental reason why organized unions and associations in the field of literature have no influence in society and no respect among their members today. In other words, it is not possible to ensure that our realistic, social literature becomes effective among workers and laborers without breaking the blockade of the "market-oriented literary legionnaires."

- Where and in what state do you think Turkish literature is today? What are its excesses or deficiencies, and how do they appear to you?

MÜSLÜM KABADAYI - 35 years have passed since the dissolution and collapse of the Soviet Union. In a world where the human species, which struggles for the things it is curious about and risks death for the people it loves and the things it wants to build, has faded away, literature has remained under the influence of postmodernism.

While the Turkish working class and its political-intellectual-artistic vanguards, which received a major blow with the September 12 fascism, continued their struggle as best they could, they faced a major moral blow ten years later with the dissolution and collapse of the existing socialist system. "Hopelessness" was pumped by both the dictatorship of capital and the liquidators. This was directly reflected in the field of literature and art. Even if powerful novels and stories were written that dealt with social problems, the reflections of the labor-capital conflict on life, the destruction of nature, and the dramas and quests of forced migrations caused by war, massacres, and livelihood problems, there were no publishing houses left to print and distribute them.

The Turkish bourgeoisie closed down public institutions that produced paper for the society, especially SEKA. When the import policy was added to the privatization frenzy in every field, publishing houses stopped printing books they could not sell. Thus, the number of copies of books in certain genres and contents, especially poetry books, gradually decreased. In addition, the decline in quality in the literary world accelerated as everyone with money turned to turning everything they wrote, especially poetry, into books and printing them. In recent years, publishing houses, especially bookstores, which are one of the memory centers of cities, have begun to close. Since publishing houses established by bank capital and monopolies dominate the market, the number of publishing houses that do distribution has also decreased.

THE DESTRUCTION OF SOCIAL MEMORY

Today, just as the printing and publishing of literary works is a significant problem, delivering them to large masses has also become difficult. Fortunately, sites that sell books online have come into play in recent years, making it easier for both new and old books to reach the reader. However, just as the bookstores that used to exist in every neighborhood have closed, the large bookstores in city centers have also begun to disappear. We saw very clearly with the closure of the Turhan Bookstore in Kızılay, the heart of Ankara, that Turkish capitalism aims to eliminate the atmosphere created by the Republic period in social culture. This phenomenon provides a snapshot of the capital order that aims to destroy social memory, leaving people without memory and values, and thus turning them into a herd. In such an environment, the majority of the books published are works that describe the inner world of the individual, their loneliness, alienation, identity problems, and the atmosphere created by urban life.

Until the 1990s, poetry books were always at the forefront of our literature. In the last thirty years, except for popular poets, publishing houses have stopped printing poetry books. With the intensification of digitalization, poems began to be published in a frenzy on the internet and social media. There were even many who shared poems belonging to other poets (even by distorting them) on social media as if they were their own. A situation that led to further degeneration and rot in the literary world emerged. As if this were not enough, with the widespread use of artificial intelligence in every field in recent years, many written narratives have been created with artificial intelligence, and literary works have also begun to be written with artificial intelligence.

We are facing serious problems that threaten not only the field of literature and art but the future of humanity, as technology contributes to human development but also creates addiction and blunts neurons and synapses. When we look at the publications and works produced in the field of realistic, social literature and art against this, we see that works dealing with massive problems, events, and phenomena are not produced enough, and those that are produced do not reach their target due to both the high prices of books and the narrowness of channels to reach the reader. In addition to Yazılama, Evrensel (after the capital order forcibly seized it in 2017) and its successor Kor, and Manos publishing houses, publishing houses such as Öteki, Doruk, Ürün, Ekinsanat, İzan, and Klaros are trying to publish realistic, social books. The publications of these also need to be passed through a critical filter in terms of quality. In addition, since there is a serious problem regarding distribution, book fairs no longer produce enough responses to bring books together with readers; although limited, publishing houses, poet-writer communities, and associations organize events in some cafes and cultural centers.

One of the ways to reach the new generation is to organize talks and book signing days in schools. I have been doing this in the schools where I have worked for 30 years. My friends Sadık Güvenç and H. Ozan Uyumlu also do it. We know that such work is done with popular poets and writers in other cities, especially in private schools. When we look at the capacity of the publishing world in the country, these efforts are frankly a drop in the bucket.

- Throughout our Republican history, Turkish literature and the progressive, socialist movement in Turkey have always been intertwined in some way. Does this intertwining seem to have broken in recent years? How do you see it? In your opinion, what problems, traps, or conveniences do the progressive, socialist young generation have within this literature?

MÜSLÜM KABADAYI - Let me try to clarify this through the problems and possibilities I pointed out in my answer to the previous question. I would like to emphasize that although the process we call the "Republican Period" has been wavy within itself, a new stage was entered with the capital accumulation regime implemented with the 2001 crisis, which I call the "Order of Plunder and Destruction," and that the AKP, which was brought to power in 2003, and the "Presidential system" implemented in 2017 turned everything upside down.

POSTMODERN ROT HAS ACCELERATED

In the last 25 years, intense attacks have been made to eliminate the situation of "Turkish literature and the progressive, socialist movement in Turkey always being intertwined in some way throughout our Republican history," which was highlighted in the question. Those who struggle to form a resistance front against these attacks, which range from collapsing the feeding channels of the socialist movement economically to destroying the consciousness of social solidarity and its material foundations, have prevented the social weight of left-socialist culture from losing its weight to a certain extent until today. However, thanks to those who are fed by EU and CIA funds and who have moved away from class culture and entered the influence of postmodern narrative, especially those who confuse minds within and in the sphere of influence of left-socialist circles, the rot has accelerated greatly. It is enough to look at the reflections in the public eye of the events in the publishing policies and practices of publishing houses such as Can, Everest, etc., that ignore human labor. Injustices regarding copyrights, the surveillance of editors with cameras, and making them work in dingy places flooded with sewage water...

Works that reveal social forms, scientific and technological developments, and the political economy of periods as a whole with a dialectical and historical method through literary narrative have not been published in recent years. It is enough to look at how many novels have been published that deal with the nature and labor exploitation caused by the privatization of resources in our country in the last 45 years, the transfer of resources to imperialist states and international companies as seen in the looting of the gold mine in Kazdağları and İliç, and why the September 12 Military Coup was carried out, like Sadri Ertem's novel "When the Spinning Wheels Stop" (Çıkrıklar Durunca), which deals with how the imperialist-capitalist system entered Anatolia, how it collapsed social solidarity, and the search for practices that aim for equality in production and distribution by pooling their spinning wheels against this, to show the regression of our socialist literature. Stories, novels, and epic poems need to be written that reveal the political economy of the resistance put forward for 17 days under the leadership of the Independent Mining Union (Bağımsız Maden-İş) by the workers who worked at the recently closed Doruk Mining and have not been able to receive their salaries and severance pay for months. By rapidly publishing these and bringing them to the agenda of the Turkish working class and laborers, the literature-politics relationship will be re-established in a socialist sense, and thus a social dynamism will be gained. Otherwise, as we saw on May 1, 2026, the fragmentation of workers and laborers through unions, chambers, associations, and political parties will not turn into a joint struggle that will shake the hegemony of the capitalist class and destroy the order of exploitation. Revolutionary, socialist art and literature is one of the most effective tools that ensures that ideological-political struggle finds a response in large masses.

DIGITALIZATION, COMMERCIALIZATION, AND RELIGIOUSIZATION

Although the power created in the field of literature by socialist poets and writers such as Nâzım Hikmet, Sabahattin Ali, Orhan Kemal, Ahmed Arif, Enver Gökçe, etc., still continues its influence, it is not enough to win over the new generation, which is very intensely under the influence of digitalization. Therefore, it makes it necessary to carry out literature and art studies that appeal to the digital environment that will ensure this generation is won over to social awakening, class struggle, and a revolutionary stance. Since we know that some socialist youth organizations and revolutionary groups resort to moving narratives to spread their ideas and announce their actions, and that they establish bonds with young people, the possibilities for this to be realized in terms of literary genres should be pushed.

The school environment has been very effective in making the young generation interested in literature and their world. Unfortunately, we were the only structure that filed a lawsuit with the Council of State with the legal support of Attorney Esmani Kırmızı, who is also an educator himself, as the Patriotic Education Workers Initiative against the capitalist class, which turned the strategy of commercializing and religiousizing education into an attack with the 2005 Curriculum Program. The unions and associations related to the subject were under the influence of the EU wind; they were not aware of what such a vital attack aimed at or did not want to struggle. In 2006, the Council of State canceled a significant part of this curriculum, but the Ministry of National Education (MEB) implemented it again with minor changes.

I state with regret again that those who dominated the unions, chambers, associations, and even political parties of that time left us alone in the struggle we started because they were not aware of the gravity of the practice. Looking at the state of education in Turkey 20 years later, I think it shows very clearly what I mean.

Today, the sects and communities that dominate schools are surrounding the youth. Therefore, let alone influencing their students in terms of political and scientific knowledge, progressive, revolutionary, socialist teachers are even having difficulty in that. Works like the "Secularism Assembly" (Laiklik Meclisi) should have been started 20 years ago in the face of this great danger. Unfortunately, missing the train is a picture we frequently encounter in our camp.

Despite all these negatives, since the dynamism, quest, and stance of the youth against oppression and exploitation cannot be prevented, we must ensure that working youth, especially MESEM students, are brought together with literature and art. Communities to be formed with young people who are most interested in music, in addition to literary works, will be path-breaking.

QUESTIONS: OSMAN ÇUTSAY