Turkey-Syria Earthquake: Destruction and Death are our Fate under Capitalism

“What happened happened. These are things that happen in the plan of fate” – Erdoğan

In Islamic literature, fate, which was included among the conditions of faith during the Umayyad period, is roughly defined as the belief that everything that has happened and will happen is from Allah and that nothing can happen outside of Allah’s will and knowledge. According to Sunni Islam, those who do not accept the conditions of faith are not considered Muslims.

Similar words to the above, which Erdoğan said to earthquake victims in one of the tent cities, are used by the Turkish bourgeoisie from time to time. In a country that is 99.8% Muslim on paper, in fact half, maybe more, of the population is secular Muslim or secular. As such, the fate discourse gives the impression that it covers up its own negligence and aims to create religious tension in one half of the society and naturally draws great reaction.

Erdoğan escalates tensions by equating harsh criticism of his opponents in many sources with questioning the concept of fate, while blocking the other half of the society from questioning the destruction and death to such an extent. In short, these tens of thousands of people would have died even without the earthquake because they were destined to die! What will be will be, precautions don’t matter! These days you can watch on Turkish TV the miraculous rescues of children protected by their mother’s ghost!

Yes, the death toll in this earthquake, which is currently around 50,000 and will probably reach 100,000, is fate! If we talk about the unplanned construction, the uncontrolled and poorly financially supported migration process, the racial discrimination and bullying against Kurds and other minorities in the region, the corrupt administration and control mechanisms, we can show that fate has woven its webs without any supernatural intervention. Of course, it is fate that buildings built on fault lines in violation of scientific rules, without inspection and earthquake resistance tests, collapse like playing cards. This fate will not change until these conditions change!

Capitalist and Imperialist Crisis Management

At 4:17 am, the preliminary report of the earthquake centered in Pazarcık district of Kahramanmaraş is claimed to be in the hands of the state at 5 am. The first press release comes 1 and a half hours later and it is stated that rescue teams have been dispatched. There is an army in Malatya, corps in Diyarbakır and Adana, and a brigade in Kahramanmaraş. So if all the troops had been dispatched without delay, together with local AFAD and Red Crescent troops, many lives could have been saved by 6 o’clock. Thousands of soldiers could have started working only in their cities, but 40 hours after the earthquake, 7035 soldiers were directed to work in the region, according to government accounts. It is reported that only in the 57th hour of the earthquake, 16,785 soldiers joined the rescue efforts. By that time, a team of 6 thousand people from other countries and search and rescue dogs were also involved in the rescue efforts.

The government’s rescue teams, which have been targeting relief zones based on the vote in the upcoming elections, arrived in Hatay – a city many volunteers could reach by personal vehicle – two days after the earthquake because the roads were impassable. Many people trapped under the collapse could not be reached and pulled out, even though their location was known. There are thousands of people who have lost their lives because of the days-long wait, despite their loved ones frantically searching for rescue teams. After Erdoğan’s declaration of a state of emergency, there have been reports of people being beaten by law enforcement officers for allegedly looting. These attacks seem to be mostly directed against Syrian earthquake victims. There is even civilian participation in these attacks.

The entire districts of Hassa in Hatay, Islahiye and Nurdağı in Gaziantep are built on faults. There are no restrictions preventing building on the fault. According to geologists’ investigations in the field, liquefaction was observed in the part of the Amik Plain towards Hatay and on the coast of Iskenderun. Structures built on such soils will not survive such an earthquake. Turkey today has 550 active faults and such disasters are no surprise for this country. 66% of the country is in the 1st or 2nd degree earthquake zone. It is obvious that when the ground conditions are well defined, appropriate structures are designed and built in the right places, there will not be such a great loss of life. Of course, this is not an easy thing to implement for Turkey, which is a populous country. Moreover, considering that it has received a large amount of foreign migration in recent years. Turkey’s population has increased to a rate that the infrastructure of the cities cannot handle. Let’s take a look at the conditions that prepared this:

Background to the Disaster: Building Excess and Real Estate Bubble

TOKİ (Housing Development Administration), a bureaucratic institution that Erdoğan took over shortly after he came to power, has turned into a power center since 2004. TOKİ acquired valuable land at nominal or no cost and put it out to tender. In the years that followed, the real estate sector began to develop very rapidly. It had been experienced in other countries that an economy based on the rapid growth of the real estate sector would be plunged into crisis. By 2014, there was a huge surplus of housing units across Turkey, particularly in Istanbul. This was triggered by the fact that purchasing power was not taken into account. When banks raised interest rates, middle- and low-income workers were unable to buy houses. As a solution to this situation, they turned to buyers from abroad.

According to experts, the Pazarcık fault was expected to break, but it was not predicted that it would break the Amanos fault (Hatay). 9 hours later, it was never expected to break the Sürgü fault. The earthquake, which affected 10 provinces in Turkey and the vicinity of Aleppo and Idlib in Syria, is known as the deadliest earthquake of the recent period after the Haiti earthquake. It is also worth noting that an earthquake is expected in the region west of the Amik Plain leading to the Red Sea within a period of 10 to 30 years, affecting partly Turkey but mostly Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Jordan. One of the two major faults crossing Turkey has been activated. This fault, together with the Dead Sea fault, is one of the most active faults in the Middle East, separating the Arabian peninsula from Africa. The severity of the situation is not hard to understand, but to blame the severity of the natural disaster as the sole cause of the death toll would at best infuriate anyone who has studied the process and consequences of other earthquakes around the world. The data shows that in two different regions with similar population densities and similar types and intensity of earthquakes, mortality rates increase in direct proportion to the material power of the country and the region.

The teams, which were very late in the first days of the earthquake, are in a hurry to remove the rubble left after the earthquake, with thousands of dead underneath, and prepare it for the election period. One of the posts you can often see on social media was this: even though many people in the area have reported to the authorities that there are voices coming from the rubble, the teams say that the rescue process is over and turn to debris removal. While people were still coming out of the rubble alive… As per their orders… Many public buildings such as hospitals, airports and schools are unusable. Damage to roads makes transportation very difficult in many earthquake-affected provinces. There is no access to electricity, water or natural gas.

The process will not end with this, the aftershocks of the earthquake will be as big as the earthquake itself. The aftershocks of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake can be as high as 6.5. It will take time for all cities to assess damage and prepare plans. It is useful for people to stay away from their homes during the process. After the first month, earthquakes will gradually become smaller, but they will make themselves felt for a year. Of course, the buildings with minor damage will also wear out in this process. The survivors of the region’s population, which officially stands at 13 and a half million, and unregistered migrants are now homeless and in need of even basic necessities. The tent cities set up for millions of homeless people do not meet the need.

Not a single one of the 135,000 TOKİ houses built in the 10 cities devastated by the earthquake was damaged in the earthquake. While people are still being pulled from the rubble, TOKİ officials have made new announcements: Thirty thousand houses are planned and construction will be completed within a year. They do not neglect to announce that they will come up with many more new projects. It was known that the tension of this fault line, which had not produced a major earthquake in a long time, was rising, but not by the inhabitants, as AFAD’s report before the earthquake indicated. The need for housing for the rapidly growing population due to out-migration was enough to make construction companies salivate. Low-quality houses were sold or rented at exorbitant prices to migrants fleeing harsh conditions. Many migrants were forced to struggle to survive in conditions of severe poverty in very unhealthy structures. The situation for the local working class was not much better. They were going through a similar process, with wages not increasing despite rising prices. This led to an avalanche of poor masses in the cities. No institutional infrastructure was strong enough to handle this scale of migration. In many cities in Turkey, everything from transportation to health and education is in gridlock. Schools are overcrowded, public transportation is inadequate and crowded, employment opportunities are narrow and there is a backlog. Job queues are endless. There is a need for doctors in hospitals, teachers in schools, janitors, etc. There is a need for too many workers in almost every field. These unhealthy cities make epidemics and natural disasters much more deadly.

On the Syrian side, the Assad government did not specially deliver aid from different parts of the world to the two hardest hit cities. This was because these were areas that the government perceived as terrorist. Hundreds of women and children kidnapped by Islamic extremist groups were also left helpless under the rubble. Assad even made sure to drop bombs on the earthquake victims. The earthquake obviously made Assad happy. People in the area were already in desperate need of humanitarian aid and the UN routinely sent some supplies, just enough to keep them alive. According to local reports, the UN did not send the advertised aid. It sent aid materials that it already routinely sends. Many of these were not even useful under earthquake conditions. Now, after millions of deaths, an estimated 5.3 million people are homeless and in need of aid.

Capitalism does not shy away from the loss of life in the pursuit of profit, and so the same fate befalls many cities and the workers who inhabit their worst and most flimsy housing. Scientists have been warning for a long time that a very strong earthquake is coming for Istanbul, just like the earthquake in Turkey and Syria. In Istanbul, as in the 10 other cities where the earthquake occurred, zoning amnesties keep being issued to register illegal buildings that are not scientifically compatible with the conditions of the region. By 2023, Istanbul’s population is expected to reach 18 million, and the city hosts around 15 million tourists every year. Overpopulation is making this gigantic city increasingly decrepit and knotted. Now we are waiting for an earthquake in a huge city where 90% of its buildings are said to be unstable in 2018. You can deduce how the next earthquake is managed from the management of this earthquake. As we can see, the fate of Istanbul has already been written, it is only left to be realized.

Spontaneous Mobilization Led by the Working Class

If a great class solidarity had not been established from the first moments of the earthquake, the situation today could have been even worse. From the moment they learned about the earthquake, people tried to reach out to people they knew in the area. Many people asked for help from anyone they could contact from under the rubble. Cries for help spread rapidly through social media. Reports poured in to state institutions. When the institutions did not show up for duty, civilians gathered in gathering places such as schools and gymnasiums through social media and immediately started collecting aid. They tried to reach the region in teams. Workers from many sectors, from health workers to miners, flocked to the region. They not only participated in search and rescue operations but also made the voices of the earthquake victims heard.

Workers pressured their bosses to send them to the earthquake zone, but the bosses prevented them. Workers who had annual leave went and carried out search and rescue operations; those who stayed behind were on duty to deliver truckloads of aid to the region, to identify the places where there were sounds in the rubble and to convey them to the aid teams. Especially in regions with low vote potential for the current government, a large segment of the working class, which already distrusted the state, immediately realized that the state was leaving people to die.

While the working class shared their pennies, the owners of capital started to donate sums that would not burden them at all due to the pressure of social media and the high advertising potential. Donations were also pouring into the Turkish state from other countries and organizations. But the vast majority of the Turkish working class found it safer to donate to a charity founded by an alternative music artist than to the state’s organizations set up to deal with such disasters.

The Attitude of the Combative Trade Unions

While the rank and file of leftist trade union confederations such as DISK and KESK were actively involved in the mobilization, with KESK’s Health Workers Union drawing attention to the health conditions of the earthquake victims and DISK’s Gıda-İş opposing racist attacks on refugees, in general the interventions of the opportunist leaders of these confederations and their member unions did not go beyond visits to the region.

Umut-Sen, an organization of struggling grassroots unions, declared a state of emergency and went to the earthquake zone with the workers it could organize. Umut-Sen listed the following demands:

“All relations and possibilities must be organized to ensure that the debris work is carried out correctly and quickly and that every one of the citizens under the rubble is rescued without losing any time. Transparent information should be shared with the public about the situation and activities in the earthquake zone. Neither manipulations that would lead the public to panic and fear nor steps to deceive and mislead the public should be resorted to. All communication companies must ensure that all lines closed due to unpaid bills are activated. The solidarity and work of the government and municipalities, all kinds of institutions, structures and individuals must never be based on competition; as in previous examples, provocation must not be resorted to by law enforcement. Public resources created with the taxes of the people must be used without limit to meet all the needs of the people, to establish disaster assembly areas and for all kinds of work. Those who call on people in the earthquake zone to leave their homes should never “impose work” on laborers. Workers from all branches of labor in the earthquake zone should be put on administrative leave during this period. No worker should be forced to work under the risk of earthquake and such anxiety”.

Millions of migrants who entered Turkey legally and illegally, who are used as cheap labor and live in very unhealthy conditions in the countries they came from fleeing war, also experienced the earthquake disaster. According to the posts circulating on social media, the atmosphere in the region is appalling, from people coming from other provinces and attacking migrants in groups on the streets, to law enforcement officers beating migrants on the pretext of so-called looting. On the one hand, they are chased out of their tent areas and beaten up even by earthquake victims who are going through the same process as them, and on the other hand, they cannot even benefit from the basic aid that the state delivers too little and too late. When we add the deaths of unregistered migrants who will not even be mentioned, who knows how many thousands the total number of deaths will reach? If anyone has access to the data, we will find out. Formed in 2021, the Migrant Trade Union Initiative’s text titled “Our Call Against Increasing Discrimination and Verbal-Physical Violence Against Migrants in the Earthquake Region” explains the situation of earthquake-stricken migrants quite well:

“According to the information we have received from the field since the first hours of the earthquake, migrants are often excluded from the food, shelter and medicine aid reaching the area and face serious problems in evacuating the area. Although a circular has been issued to allow earthquake-affected migrants to leave the area without a travel permit, they are not able to benefit from the services and assistance provided by buses, planes and accommodation companies, and only those who are able to leave by their own means are able to leave the area.

In addition to not being able to leave the area and not being able to access the aid, a perception is created that they are looting the aid parcels and houses. Clearly, the inadequacy of state institutions in search and rescue and aid delivery is being covered up with hatred of migrants, and some establishment politicians and their media outlets are consciously serving this purpose”.

Natural Disasters and Capitalism

In the 24th issue of our newspaper at the time, Battaglia Comunista, published in 1951, in an article entitled “Slaughter of the Dead”, we explained how natural disasters provide a renewal for capitalism:

“When disaster destroys houses, fields and factories and leaves the active population unemployed, it undoubtedly destroys wealth. But this cannot be remedied by transferring wealth from elsewhere, as in the miserable operation of rummaging through old things, where advertising, collecting and transportation cost far more than the value of the worn-out clothes.

The wealth that disappeared was the wealth of the past, the wealth of centuries of labor. A huge mass of present, living labor is needed to undo the impact of the catastrophe. Therefore, if we use a concrete social definition of wealth, not an abstract one, we can see it as the right of certain individuals of the ruling class to benefit from living contemporary labor. New incomes and new privileged fortunes are generated by the mobilization of new labour, and the capitalist economy offers no way to close the gap by “shifting” wealth accumulated elsewhere…

This is why taxing the ownership of the fields, houses and factories that remain intact to rebuild those affected is a stupid idea.

At the heart of capitalism is not the ownership of such investments, but a type of economy that allows to exploit and profit from what human labor creates in endless cycles, subordinating the employment of that labor to this withdrawal…

The basis of Marxist economic analysis is the distinction between dead and living labor. We define capitalism not as the ownership of past, crystallized masses of labor, but as the right to extract from living and active labor. Therefore the present economy cannot lead to a good solution with a minimum expenditure of present labor, which realizes a rational preservation of what past labor has passed on to us and better foundations for the performance of future labor. What concerns bourgeois economics is the frenzy of the contemporary rhythm of work, which, without regard for welfare, promotes the destruction of the still useful masses of past labor”.

Both Sides of the Border share a Common Destiny

The crisis management of capitalism, where political ambitions and competition of interests are prioritized above all else, is always planned in a way that is most profitable for capital. It was clear on both sides of the border that the effort to save millions of people was kept to a minimum. In the first days of the earthquake, when the maximum number of rescue operations could have been carried out, the states hosting the earthquake, and even other states promising to help, slowed down their efforts. While Turkey was trying to cope by dragging unemployed young people to university education, internships and wars at home and abroad, it rejoiced when thousands of people died due to ’fate’. The Turkish government would have shown its joy more openly if its chances in the elections had not been so slim. In Syria, the Assad regime would be most grateful for an earthquake hitting the groups it is already fighting. International aid and support on top of a massacre that he can carry out without wasting bombs…

The only strength the working class can count on is the solidarity of its classmates, as such disasters show. There are many lessons to be learned from this earthquake: It would have been possible to save many more lives, especially in disaster conditions, if workers who could offer professional help (miners, workers with search and rescue training, medics, lawyers, social workers…) had come out of their workplaces en masse and shown reflexes very early. But organizing through real class unions, both across different sectors and across different unions in the same sector, makes it possible to prepare in advance for what can be done in emergencies and to mobilize quickly. In fact, making it possible to expand the trade union network also helps the working class to raise awareness of regional problems and work together to overcome them. Against racism, against unhealthy living conditions, against the housing crisis caused by massive population growth, workers must join arms with those they trust most, their classmates. The answer of the working class of Turkey and Syria, which is being crushed day by day by the conditions of life, to the rulers who disregard their own lives, can be a powerful class struggle born out of acting together.

Only under the power of the proletarian state can this trade union activity fulfill its social goals. The Communist Party International, having learned the lessons of history in the light of Marxist doctrine, is the guide the working class needs to exist as a class and win as a class.