Kostas Paloukis,
"The formation of the working class in the Ottoman Empire"
Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda İşçi Sınıfının Oluşumu, (Formation of the working class in the Ottoman Empire) on 17-18 October 2015. Istanbul
Following the tradition of the wider Greek historiography, the Ottoman Empire has been seldom, apart from the pure Ottoman studies, studied as a single social formation by the Greek historians. On the contrary, the researchers mainly focused on the Greek-Christian communities within the Empire and the formation or continuity of the Greek national consciousness in them. An exception to this rule to a certain degree was the case of the labour movement in Thessaloniki and the Jewish community of the city. The interest taken by the Greek historical community on the question of the making of working class began rather lately compared to the international trends. However, even in the case of the belated attention given to the workers’ movement in Thessaloniki and the prominent role of the Jewish workers in it, Macedonia and the Ottoman Balkans have been too rarely treated as a separate entity.
Essays, in particular written during the interwar period, the first postwar decades or even nowadays, exclusively stress the importance of Greek-Christian guilds in Ottoman Macedonia in the process of “rebirth of the Greek nation". Practically, they aim to trace the continuity of the Greek nation back to the Byzantine period and, even earlier, to the prehistoric antiquity if possible. In effect, this historiographical trend has been virtually isolated from any modern international academic tradition and stands as an obsolete derivative of the idealistic school of the 19th century, a form of nationalist positivist historiography long abandoned by professional historians.
The contemporary Marxist left and wider progressive historiography dealt with the history of the formation of working class and the history of the labour movement in Ottoman Thessaloniki and Macedonia in a contradictory way. First of all, they were late in studying the Ottoman labour movement and the Ottoman corporatist tradition with the criteria of modern historiography. This happened mainly because the perception identifying the rise of the working class movement with the development of modern industry widely dominated the Greek historiography for many years and, therefore, the emphasized by EP Thompson and his followers, key role of artisans had been undervalued. For example, Kostis Moskov in his book Introduction to the history of the working class movement: The formation of national and social consciousness in Greece notes in a negative manner that "trade unions before 1908 had a corporatistic, feudal even form" and, while he subsequently observes that the change occurs due to the influence of various socialist and revolutionary groups, however he is not interested to explore the character of these artisans’ strata. Therefore, a number of modern studies outside Greece on the history and character of the guilds and the Ottoman labour movement in the 19th century remain almost unknown until today, such as the work of Donald Quataert and his disciples. Several left-wing historians who dealt with the guilds discovered in them an authentic anti-rationalist and anti-western origin of the democratic and rebellious character of the Greek nation. Georgios Papageorgiou, although he is the first historian who integrates the new historiographical approaches in his 1982 study Guilds at Ioannina in the 19th and early 20th century, contains his research within the limits set by this perception of the inherent democratic character of Greek trade unions.
Secondly, the contemporary Marxist left and wider progressive historiography followed the nationalist historiography by essentially overturning the nationalist idealism on its feet, therefore they had difficulty in overcoming the nation-centrism and the Greece-centrism in consequence. Kostis Moskov dealt with the labour movement in Ottoman Thesaloniki to the extent to which it was related to the subsequent history of the labour movement in the Greek state later. That is why Moskov, even though he observes that "the process of social awareness of the popular, particularly labour strata occurs within the broadest Macedonian area", he merely outlines the strike movement in the Macedonian cities of the early 20th century and since Moskov’s pioneering work there has never been another more specialised study, article or research. Instead, only this book of Moskov, along with the much earlier work of Giannis Kordatos History of the Greek Labour Movement and a series on Greek socialist thought and labour movement from the 1980s, attributed a highly crucial role to the multinational composition of the labour movement in Thessaloniki, its Marxist and internationalist character, the special place of the Jewish Federation and they usually devoted a separate chapter of their books to them.
An important role in this progress has been played by the publication of memories of Avraam Benaroya entitled as The First Period of the Greek Proletariat. Benaroya was the most important Jewish leader of the Federacion, contributed to its foundation and then played a leading role in the Greek labour movement. As it can be equally seen from the title and the content of the book, he emphasizes the particular role of the Jewish working class in the formation of Greek trade union movement in the 1920s and highlights the continuity between the labour movement before and after the annexation of Thessaloniki into the Greek state. Thus, he shows how the Jewish community referred to itself as a part of the reality of the Greek state. As Effie Avdela notes, “central recurring theme in the narrative of Benaroya is the low level of class consciousness in the workers’ strata of his time and the rise of nationalisms which favour national vertical and not horizontal class differentiations and organization.”
It seems that the works of J. Opt and Paul Dumont had an influence on young historians while they were confronted with the work of Moskov and Kordatos. This historiography is a kind of political history of the Macedonian socialist and labour movement and mainly explores the political facts, the viewpoints held by various socialist groups and the confrontations within their organizations. However, hellenocentrism characterizes the paper of Alkiviades Panayotopoulos titled The Hellenic Contribution to the Ottoman Labour and Socialist Movement after 1908. It was published in English in 1980 in the journal Études Balkaniques and it had not significant influence in Greek historiography. A short paper in Greek on the working class in the regions of Thessaloniki, Monastiri (Bitola) and Adrianople during the period 1908-1918 by Alexandros Daggas and Akis Apostolidis published in 1986 proved less hellenocentric. They argue that the number of unionized workers in Ottoman Macedonia was considerable and that the labour movement should not be underestimated because despite its failure to develop a distinct political discourse, the working class was largely aware of the situation. Alexandros Daggas presents much more clearly this aspect in his study on economic and social development of Thessaloniki during the period 1912-1940 (published in 1998) arguing even that Macedonia was in revolutionary ferment.
The research of Alexandros Daggas and Akis Apostolidis lead to the publication of the The socialist organization Federacion: Thessaloniki, 1909-1918 by the Marxist Studies Centre (1989). According to the two authors “The working class in the Ottoman Empire has a small in number industrial proletariat in its core but with blurred boundaries between itself and other social strata. It is formed as a class "in itself", but its contours progressively become wider [...] The class consciousness grows and the ferment is inevitable.” The writers underestimate the ethnic dimension of the conflicts overemphasizing their social dimension by arguing that ethnic differences were caused by the bourgeois classes’ intervention. The book is subdivided into two parts. The first part explores the labour and trade union movement in Thessaloniki as a part of the Ottoman Empire, as a part of the Balkans and within the Socialist International. The authors deal with the Federation as an integral part of the past of the Greek communist movement and therefore they feel the need to defend its political choices against other currents from this period. For example, they defend the Federacion against the criticism coming from the Bulgarian communist party of the so-called “Narrow Socialists". The second part presents the hellenization of the Federacion or better its decisive role in the evolution of the Greek labour movement. The authors defend the internationalist and class character of Federacion against the Greek nationalist unions of the city. Prosecutions of Jewish socialists are presented not as a result of Jewish identity, but of class action. In short, the two authors closely follow the Marxist historiographical tradition set by the works of Kordatos, Moskov and Benaroya before them. The only difference lies in the certainty of Daggas and Apostolidis about the fact that the consciousness of working class was developed.
The change of paradigm in Greek historiography of the labour movement and the emergence of the first Marxist or post-modern anti-nationalist historians bring the labour movement of Macedonia and, above all, the Jewish labour movement in Thessaloniki into focus through a different perspective. Firstly, the research on the Jewish identity and the subordinate position of the Jews in Greek Thessaloniki replaces the hellenocentric approach. However, most recent approaches adopt a rather strong jewcentricity. Secondly, the transition from the guild to the trade union, the forms of workers' demands, the expression of social protest, the creation and the activity of socialist groups, movements and parties concern much more the historians now. So the case of Federacion has become the first outstanding example of research. Essentially, we could argue that the contemporary historiographical discussion about the formation of the working class in Greece and about the relationship of national identity to the workers’ consciousness starts with the study of Thessaloniki labour movement.
The book by Antonis Liakos The Socialist Labour Federation of Thessaloniki (Federacion) and the Socialist Youth (1986) is the first study that explicitly focuses not on politics but on the culture of the Federacion, on those that are normally omitted in the histories of conferences and of alternating leaderships. Also, for the first time, the antinationalist character of Federacion’s action is disconnected from the revolutionary internationalism and is associated with the conflict of nationalities. As Effie Avdela notes, the particular social consciousness of the labour world is a central element of Liakos’ approach.
The paper by Effie Avdela titled Socialism of the “others”: class struggles, ethnic conflicts and gender identities in post-Ottoman Thessaloniki perhaps is the most significant contribution to this paradigm shift, as she develops Liakos approach. Although Avdela focuses in Thessaloniki after the Great War, she totally reverses the perspective, as the city is not regarded as Greek but as post-Ottoman. The Venizelist party organizes the city's hellenization plan and promotes against the internationalist socialism of the Jews the “patriotic” or “true” socialism of the Greeks. Therefore, Avdela using evenly the tools of ethnicity, class and gender concludes that in the post-Ottoman Thessaloniki different kinds of socialism clash, the internationalist socialism of the Ottoman period and the patriotic socialism of Greek socialist tradition. The Jews of the Federacion are not considered as part of the Greek working class, but the opposite, i.e. they are shown to react to the Greek citizenship using their internationalist socialist identity.
Spyros Marketos in his article The “Federacion”and the consolidation of Greek socialism unites in some way the different perspectives. He believes that the pre-form of a mass party was created in Ottoman Thessaloniki having great local influence and a generally conscious program – a program socialist and internationalist and ultimately going against the programs of all national states and bourgeois classes which were in conflict in the region. After Greek annexation of Thessaloni, the Federacion having a clear Jewish character clashed with Venizelist nationalism and managed to form an influential all over the country pole to the left of Venizelism which evolved into the labour class pole. The key element was the antithesis of the principle of class struggle to the principle of national question.
In the 1990s and 2000s, a series of studies on the Jewish question in Thessaloniki disconnects any labour and class perspective from the ethnic confrontation between Greek state and the Jews or the Greeks and Jews, mainly during the interwar period. According to Maria Vassilikos in her work Politics of the Jewish community of Salonika in the inter-war years: party ideologies and party competition “during the inter-war years Jewish Communists, who were no longer members of a multi-ethnic milieu but citizens of a rather homogeneous nation-state, rediscovered their Jewishness, adopted the popular national-based discourse of the Zionists and adapted it to their own political programme”.
The shift of Greek historiography in the cultural history of labour and the labour movement represented mainly by Kostas Fountanopoulos who is after Antonis Liakos the main proponent in Greece of the views held by E.P. Thompson on moral economy. Therefore, his book Work and working class in Thessaloniki, labour and working class in Thessaloniki, moral economy and collective action (2005) is, despite certain objections I have, one of the most important works in Greek historiography on working class and the labour movement. Once again, the history of the trade unions movement in Thessaloniki offers itself as a field of the most important and pioneering research in Greek historiography. But if the older Marxists treated that condition they characterized as preservation of corporatist traditions as a negative element and as a backwardness in the development of capitalist relations and, therefore, as an obstacle in the formation of the Greek working class, Fountanopoulos uses the theory of moral economy and other concepts of the thompsian tradition to explain the radicalization of the workers in the interwar period.
The work of Marina Angelopoulou - the only Greek historian in Ottoman Studies which has dealt so far with the labour issue - on the strike of the Greek waiters in 1908 in Thessaloniki diverged from Fountanopoulos’ perspective. She is largely based on the economic analysis of Alexandros Daggas. She agrees that industrialization and capitalization of Ottoman economy were the key factors in the formation of the Ottoman working class in the early 20th century with a clear class consciousness and a strong militant character. Angelopoulou presents the cultural and social traits of the waiters’ profession in Thessaloniki and challenges the dominant viewpoint about the national meaning of the political strike maintaining that it was the result of intense political radicalization among the waiters. The work of Angelopoulou was drafted in 2001 but it was issued in 2004 including a paper written by Turkish historian Sukru Ilitzak for the Jewish socialism in Ottoman Thessaloniki under the general title Greek and Jewish workers in Thessaloniki of the Young Turks.
The same atmosphere of a revolutionary upheaval is described in the book of Yannis Megas The boatmen of Thessaloniki, the Bulgarian anarchist group and the bombings of 1903, published in 1994. In 2010 a collective reissued this publication with extensive excerpts from the book The Balkan Trail. Inspired by the same story a book of fiction titled Selanik released in 2012 by the writer Vassilis Tsirakis. In this story and for the first time, the Bulgarian, and not the Jewish or Greek, element is emerging as a protagonist in the socialist movement of Thessaloni. This was a necessary complement to narratives involving the two other elements.
In conclusion, we must stress that the process of the making of the working class in Ottoman Thessaloniki - and not in the whole of Macedonia - was the ground for the development of modern historiography of labour and the labour movement. For this reason, our historical approach followed throughout this course the contradictions of Greek historiography. The nationalist approach initially gave way to a hellenocentric class approach which was then followed by a cultural approach of various shades. The interest of the left historians in the working class of Thessaloniki, either Ottoman or interwar, has many analogies with the parallel interest in the 1821 revolution. As the revolution is viewed as the milestone in the formation of modern Greek nation, in an analogous way, the annexation of Thessaloniki and Macedonia into the Greek state acquire the meaning of a decisive milestone in the further development of Greek nation. In particular, the Marxist theoretical discourse in Greece emerged in the early 20th century through a discussion of the nation re-interpreting the character of the Greek revolution. Therefore, the Marxist historians feel the need to deal with the case of Thessaloniki and the Jewish working class in order to confront this particular historical weight that is attributed to this city.
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