Another good recent example is the deal made by German capital in Asiatic Turkey. European capital, British capital in particular, had already at an early date attempted to gain possession of this area which marches with the ancient trade route between Europe and Asia.[410]
In the fifties and sixties, British capital built the railway lines Smyrna-Aydin-Diner and Smyrna-Kassaba-Alasehir, obtained the concession to extend the line to Afyon Karahisar and also leased the first tract for the Anatolian railway Ada-Bazar-Izmid. French capital gradually came to acquire influence over part of the railway building during this time. In 1888, German capital appeared on the scene. It took up 60 per cent of the shares in the new merger of international interests, negotiated principally with the French capitalist group represented by the Banque Ottomane. International capital took up the remaining 40 per cent.[411] The Anatolian Railway Company, a Turkish company, was founded on the 14th Redsheb of the year 1306 (March 4, 1889) with the Deutsche Bank for principal backer, to take over the railway lines between Ada-Bazar and Izmid, running since the early seventies, as also the concession for the Izmid-Eskisehir-Angora line (525 miles). It was further entitled to complete the Ada-Bazar-Scutari line and branch lines to Brussa, in addition to building the supplementary network Eskisehir-Konya (278 miles) on the basis of the 1893 concession, and finally to run a service from Angora to Kaisari (264 miles). The Turkish government gave the company a state guarantee of annual gross earnings amounting to £412 per km. on the Ada-Bazar line and of £600 per km. on the Izmid-Angora lines. For this purpose it wrote over to the Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane the revenue from tithes in the sandshaks of Izmid, Ertoghrul, Kutalia and Angora, with which to make up the gross earnings guaranteed by the government. For the Angora-Kaisari line the government guaranteed annual gross earnings of 775 Turkish pounds, i.e. £712 per km., and 604 Turkish pounds, i.e. approximately £550, provided, in the latter case, that the supplementary grant per km. did not exceed 219 Turkish pounds (£200 a year). The government was to receive a quarter of the eventual surplus of gross earnings over the guaranteed amount. The Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane as executor of the government guarantee collected the tithes of the sandshaks Trebizonde and Gumuchhane direct and paid the railway company out of a common fund which was formed of all the tithes set aside for this purpose. In 1898, the Eskisehir-Konya maximum grant was raised from 218 to 296 Turkish pounds.
In 1899, the company obtained concessions to build and run a dockyard at Ada-Bazar, to issue writs, to build corn-elevators and storerooms for goods of every description, further the right to employ its own staff for loading and unloading and, finally, in the sphere of customs policy, the creation of a kind of free port.
In 1901, the company acquired a concession for the Baghdad railway Konya-Baghdad-Bazra-Gulf of Persia (1,500 miles) which connects with the Anatolian line by the Konya-Aregli-Bulgurlu line. For taking up this concession, a new limited company was founded which placed the order of constructing the line, at first to Bulgurlu, with a Building Company registered in Frankfort-on-the-Main.
Between 1893 and 1910, the Turkish government gave additional grants—£1,948,000 for the Ada-Bazar-Angora line and 1,800,000 Turkish pounds for the Eskisehir-Konya line—a total of £3,632,000.[412] Finally, by the concession of 1907, the company was empowered to drain the Karavirar Lake and to irrigate the Konya plain, these works to be executed within six years at government expense. In this instance, the company advanced the government the necessary capital up to £780,000 at 5 per cent interest, repayable within thirty-six years. In return the Turkish government pledged as securities: (1) an annual sum of 25,000 Turkish pounds, payable from the surplus of the tithes’ fund assigned to the Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane to cover the railway grants and other obligations; (2) the residual tithes over the last 5 years in the newly irrigated regions; (3) the net proceeds from the working of the irrigation systems, and (4) the price of all reclaimed or irrigated land that was sold. For the execution of this work, the Frankfort company had formed a subsidiary company ‘for the irrigation of the Konya plain’ with a capital of £m. 5·4 to take this work in hand.
In 1908 the company obtained the concession for extending the Konya railway as far as Baghdad and the Gulf of Persia, again with inclusion of a guaranteed revenue.
To pay for this railway grant, a German Baghdad railway loan was taken up in three instalments of £m. 2·16, £m. 4·32 and £m. 4·76 respectively, on the security of the aggregate tithes for the vilayets Aydin, Baghdad, Mossul, Diarbekir, Ursa and Aleppo, and the sheep-tax in the vilayets Konya, Adana, Aleppo, etc.[413]
The foundation of accumulation here becomes quite clear. German capital builds railways, ports and irrigation works in Asiatic Turkey; in all these enterprises it extorts new surplus value from the Asiatics whom it employs as labour power. But this surplus value must be realised together with the means of production from Germany (railway materials, machinery, etc.). How is it done? In part by commodity exchange which is brought about by the railways, the dockyards, etc., and nurtured in Asia Minor under conditions of natural economy. In part, i.e. in so far as commodity exchange does not grow quickly enough for the needs of capital, by using force, the machinery of the state, to convert the national real income into commodities; these are turned into cash in order to realise capital plus surplus value. That is the true object of the revenue grants for independent enterprises run by foreign capital, and of the collateral in the case of loans. In both instances so-called tithes (ueshur), pledged in different ways, are paid in kind by the Turkish peasant and these were gradually increased from about 12 to 121⁄2 per cent. The peasant in the Asiatic vilayet must pay up or else his tithe would simply be confiscated by the police and the central and local authorities. These tithes, themselves a manifestation of ancient Asiatic despotism based on natural economy, are not collected by the Turkish government direct, but by tax-farmers not unlike the tax-collectors of the ancien régime; that is to say the expected returns from the levy in each vilayet are separately auctioned by the state to tax-farmers. They are bought by individual speculators or syndicates who sell the tithes of each sandshak (district) to other speculators and these resell their shares to a whole number of smaller agents. All these middlemen want to cover their expenses and make the greatest possible profit, and thus, by the time they are actually collected, the peasants’ contributions have swollen to enormous dimensions. The tax-farmer will try to recoup himself for any mistake in his calculations at the expense of the peasant, and the latter, nearly always in debt, is impatient for the moment when he can sell his harvest. But often, after cutting his corn, he cannot start threshing for weeks, until indeed the tax-farmer deigns to take his due. His entire harvest is about to rot in the fields, and the tax-farmer, usually a grain merchant himself, takes advantage of this fact and compels him to sell at a low price. These tax-collectors know how to enlist the support of the officials, especially the Muktars, the local headmen, against complaining malcontents.[414]
Along with the taxes on salt, tobacco, spirits, the excise on silk, the fishing dues, etc., the tithes are pledged with the Conseil de l’Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane to serve as security for the railway grant and the loans. In every case the Conseil reserves to itself the right to vet the tax-farmers’ contracts and stipulates for the proceeds of the tithe to be paid directly into the coffers of its regional offices. If no tax-farmer can be found, the tithes are stored in kind by the Turkish government; the warehouse keys are deposited with the Conseil which then can sell the tithes on its own account.
Thus the economic metabolism between the peasants of Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia on the one hand and German capital on the other proceeds in the following way: in the vilayets Konya, Baghdad, Bazra, etc., the grain comes into being as a simple use-product of primitive peasant economy. It immediately falls to the tithe-farmer as a state levy. Only then, in the hands of this latter, does it become a commodity, and, as such, money which falls to the state. This money is nothing but converted peasant grain; it was not even produced as a commodity. But now, as a state guarantee, it serves towards paying for the construction and operation of railways, i.e. to realise both the value of the means of production and the surplus value extorted from the Asiatic peasants and proletariat in the building and running of the railway. In this process further means of production of German origin are used, and so the peasant grain of Asia, converted into money, also serves to turn into cash the surplus value that has been extorted from the German workers. In the performance of these functions, the money rolls from the hands of the Turkish government into the coffers of the Deutsche Bank, and here it accumulates, as capitalist surplus value, in the form of promoters’ profits, royalties, dividends and interests in the accounts of Messrs. Gwinner, Siemens, Stinnes and their fellow directors, of the shareholders and clients of the Deutsche Bank and the whole intricate system of its subsidiary companies. If there is no tax-farmer, as provided in the concessions, then the complicated metamorphoses are reduced to their most simple and obvious terms: the peasant grain passes immediately to the Administration de la Dette Publique Ottomane, i.e. to the representatives of European capital, and becomes already in its natural form a revenue for German and other foreign capital: it realises capitalist surplus value even before it has shed its use-form for the Asiatic peasant, even before it has become a commodity and its own value has been realised. This is a coarse and straightforward metabolism between European capital and Asiatic peasant economy, with the Turkish state reduced to its real rôle, that of a political machinery for exploiting peasant economy for capitalist purposes,—the real function, this, of all Oriental states in the period of capitalist imperialism. This business of paying for German goods with German capital in Asia is not the absurd circle it seems at first, with the kind Germans allowing the shrewd Turks merely the ‘use’ of their great works of civilisation—it is at bottom an exchange between German capital and Asiatic peasant economy, an exchange performed under state compulsion. On the one hand it makes for progressive accumulation and expanding ‘spheres of interest’ as a pretext for further political and economic expansion of German capital in Turkey. Railroad building and commodity exchange, on the other hand, are fostered by the state on the basis of a rapid disintegration, ruin and exploitation of Asiatic peasant economy in the course of which the Turkish state becomes more and more dependent on European capital, politically as well as financially.[415]