The Kadro journal on the agrarian question in Turkey in the 1930s

Ismail Hüsrev Tökin, in his preface to Türkiye Köy Iktisadiyati (1990 [1934]), argues that an economist who might travel Turkey from its western to eastern frontiers would face diverse social and economic scenes: remnants from the previous centuries, in both their mature and embryonic forms. A common point of view of the literature related to agrarian question, from Kautsky to Chayanov, was the problem of the co-existence of pre-capitalist and capitalist agricultural structures within the context of a capitalist economic system, and the political implications of this setting. Tökin’s discussion was a part of such literature in general but it was also part of a movement formed around a monthly journal, Kadro, published between 1932 and 1935. This short-lived movement succeeded in producing original ideas with a dependency-like, developmentalist approach. Our paper aims to explain the analysis of Tökin, and also the Kadro journal on “the agrarian question” in Turkey. To this end, it will discuss how their empirical observations on agrarian dynamics in Turkey in the 1930s, and their theoretical background on the agrarian question, interacted to examine the specific aspects of Turkey’s rural economy. It concludes that Kadro authors’ focus in the agrarian question was on the problem of accumulation for industrialization, rather than the problem of democratic or socialist struggle.