12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup

The four theses of the 12 September dossier — our new guide is out

Our new dossier 12 September: The History, Balance Sheet, and Present of a Class Coup is out. 187 pages, four parts, twenty-three chapters. Free and under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence — as PDF, EPUB and Markdown on our Guides page.

Dear Young Comrades,

Today is 12 September. Forty-six years ago this morning, at four o'clock, the Independence March came over the radio, and then a general's voice. That same morning fifty-three thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight workers were on strike at one hundred and seventy-eight workplaces; that day they were all silenced, and 87 percent of those workers were members of DİSK. No other figure is needed to understand against whom the coup was made.

Three weeks later Vehbi Koç wrote Evren a letter that began "I am at your command." In it he said the workers were "waiting," that because DİSK had been shut down "militant trade unionists" might infiltrate other unions, and that this should be watched. The remark attributed to Halit Narin gathers the spirit of those weeks in a single sentence: "The workers laughed for twenty years, we cried; now it is our turn to laugh."

Three scenes: the general on the radio, the strike tent pulled down, capital's "turn to laugh." The dossier we publish today was written to show that these three are three faces of the same event. And everything it has to say fits in four sentences. The rest is evidence, history, and lesson.

First thesis: 12 September is not an interval; it is a founding

You may have been taught at school that "democracy was interrupted, then it returned." That is not true.

12 September is the armed implementation of the economic programme announced on 24 January 1980. That programme would hold down wages, grow exports, and set prices and interest rates free. It could not be applied in a country with unions and the right to strike. The coup turned this "cannot be applied" into "is applied." It disorganised labour, depoliticised politics, and refounded the state through the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and constitutional tutelage. The frame of the Turkey you live in today was drawn in those three years.

That is why the "civilian–military" dichotomy is misleading. The junta "handed over to civilians" in 1983; Özal continued the same programme; every government after that ruled with the same constitution, the same YÖK, the same Law 2911, the same sectoral threshold. The question is not "military or civilian" but "for which class." The army makes the coup; for whom the coup is made becomes clear when you look at who wins after it.

In the dossier we build this from 1923. In Turkey the bourgeoisie was weak; the state took as its task the creation of a bourgeoisie; the army was that state's backbone. When capital is in danger the backbone moves. The common root of 27 May, 12 March and 12 September is here. 12 September did not fall from the sky; it came out of a country's sixty-year class history.

Second thesis: There has been no reckoning; those who said "we have settled accounts" took the apparatus over

Not in law: Evren and Şahinkaya were tried and died before the verdict became final; not a single torturer, not a single interrogation chief, was convicted in a Turkish court. Not in institutions: the 1982 Constitution is in force, YÖK is in place, the National Security Council is in place, Law 2911 on meetings is in place, the electoral threshold and the sectoral threshold are in place, compulsory religious education is in place. Not in ideology: the coup's official ideology, the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis, is today the official ideology of the state.

The 2010 referendum was presented as "settling accounts with 12 September." Provisional Article 15 was lifted, a case was opened, the conviction never became final. The institutions stayed. After 2016 the same apparatus went back to work through the state of emergency, decree-laws and trustees. Those who said "we have settled accounts" did not liquidate the apparatus; they took it over.

One of the dossier's longest tables gives today's names for 12 September's ten apparatuses. The strike ban became a "postponement": twenty-one postponements between 2003 and 2024, about two hundred thousand workers. The martial-law commander was replaced by the governor. The paper file became a digital trace. Under Law 1402, nine thousand four hundred public employees were dismissed; under decree-laws, one hundred and twenty-five thousand six hundred and seventy-eight. Tanks had entered Fatsa; today an Interior Ministry decree enters the same geography. YÖK was founded in 1981; rector elections were abolished in 2016. The sectoral threshold fell from 10 percent to 1 percent; the authorisation system stayed the same, and union density in the private sector is 5.7 percent. The junta's religious lesson became the Diyanet's 174-billion-lira budget.

The table's one-sentence summary: none of 12 September's ten apparatuses was liquidated; all of them changed their names, and most of them grew. That a generation which has never seen a tank says "there is no coup" is exactly what 12 September wanted: to treat the coup's institutions as normal.

Let us also say this plainly. The thesis is not "today is the same as 12 September"; it is "today is governed with 12 September's institutions." The two are different. The form of violence softened; the apparatus's reach widened.

Third thesis: The only guarantee against a coup is not a good general, but an organised class

This thesis turns toward ourselves. The coup succeeded not only through the power of capital but through the weakness of the left. Fragmentation, armed lines cut off from the masses, the tradition of waiting for a "progressive junta" from inside the army, Türk-İş's collaboration. Not a single general strike was organised against 12 September. The "good generals" inside the army saved no one on 9 March and saved no one on 12 September.

After the defeat as well: a narrative of heroism, an inability to build institutions, a generation that "protected" its children from politics, and a culture of remembrance reduced to visiting graves. For young comrades this lesson matters more than testimony.

The real counterpart of 12 September is a date: 15–16 June 1970. That day one hundred and fifty thousand workers stopped Istanbul for two days against a law meant to shut DİSK down, and the law was repealed. 12 September is the revenge of those two days. The 1989 Spring Actions are their continuation: while 12 September's laws were still in force, while strikes were banned, more than six hundred thousand public workers, by reporting sick, growing beards, boycotting the canteen, won a raise of about 140 percent in the first year; the offer had been 40 percent. It was not the confederation that did this; it was the committees in the workplaces.

The best preparation against a coup is not the "good generals" inside the army, but the workplace committee. What was defeated on 12 September was not a class that had remained unorganised; it was a class whose organisation had been broken up. The difference matters: an unorganised class is not defeated, because it has not yet fought; a class whose organisation has been broken up has been defeated and can organise again. Today 82 percent of the young generation are wage-earners and 6 percent are unionised: that is, not defeated, but not yet organised.

That is why we openly rejected one thing in the dossier: grave-worship. To remember Erdal Eren, Necdet Adalı, Kemal Türkler, Fikri Sönmez, Sinan Suner, Ercan Koca is not to gather at the same gate every year, shout the same slogan, and renew the grave. To remember is to tell under what conditions those people became revolutionaries, how they entered the struggle, what they did, and why they matter to us. We also rejected the sentence "they were bright children who sacrificed themselves for a people who did not deserve them": most of them were children of workers, peasants, and provincial students; in a period when no one forced them, they became revolutionaries by their own choice and lived the life they had chosen without regret. Erdal Eren's last message is also the summary of our stance: "Do not mourn me as someone helpless, someone without options. I wish you all a free and happy life."

We dedicated the dossier to Bedahet Tosun: the "smiling revolutionary" who kept silent through three days of torture, spent eight years in prison, came out and practised journalism, founded the Social Research Foundation and kept it standing for thirty years, and went to work every morning for forty years. The measure of a life is not its peak but its average; revolutionary life is not a moment of heroism but a lifetime lived with honour and conscience.

Fourth thesis: 12 September is part of world history

Chile 1973, Britain 1979, Turkey 1980, the United States 1980 are the same wave: the founding violence of neoliberalism. We are not telling a story of a "military tradition" peculiar to Turkey. We are telling how capital managed a crisis on a world scale.

Pinochet's constitution was adopted on 11 September 1980 by a plebiscite held without an electoral roll — one day before our coup. In 2020 the Chilean people said "new constitution" with 78.2 percent; in 2022 and 2023 two texts were rejected, and Pinochet's constitution remained in force. The lesson is clear: a coup constitution does not go by a vote; it goes when the class balance that holds it up changes; and what changes that balance is not a referendum campaign but organisation in the workplace.

The CIA, the counter-guerrilla, Gladio and today's Palantir are links in the same chain. In Turkey the Mobilisation Inspection Board was founded in 1952, the same year as NATO membership. Chapter 10 of the dossier follows this chain from 12 September to the digital panopticon. We read the surveillance order that 11 September 2001 built in the United States in a separate piece; 12 September 1980 is that order's rehearsal in this country forty years earlier.

Why now?

It is not a round anniversary. The answer is not in the calendar; it is in the agenda.

First, the coup's institutions are alive. The constitution written forty-six years ago is still the constitution in force today.

Second, in 2026 a "new constitution" is back on the agenda. The sentence "let us be rid of the 12 September Constitution" is in circulation once more. In 2010 a referendum was held with the same sentence. To be able to read what is coming this time, one has to know what that constitution is and for whom it was written. The dossier's demand package is a measure: if the sectoral threshold, strike postponement, thought crimes, public workers' right to strike and a truth commission are not in it, that constitution erases the name of 12 September, not its stain.

Third, "80s nostalgia". There is a trend on social media: cassettes, arabesque, Yeşilçam, "those beautiful years." In those years one million six hundred and eighty-three thousand people were put on file, six hundred and fifty thousand were detained. Nostalgia is a cloth drawn over the filing cards.

Fourth, the witnesses are going, one by one. Bedahet Tosun, to whom this dossier is dedicated, left us in 2024. If his generation's memory is not held by an institution, it will be lost.

Most of what is written on 12 September falls into three moulds

Testimony books tell the pain but do not show the class interest behind it. The "civilian–military" narrative treats the coup as a caprice of the army and does not see the capital that wanted the coup. The "balance" discourse is the junta's own sentence: "there were dead on the right and on the left; it ended the anarchy."

We did a fourth thing. We take the testimony; beside every testimony we put the question "who, from which class, why targeted." We tell the coup not as a caprice of the army but as the armed implementation of a capital programme. We answer the balance discourse with a box in every chapter. With evidence, figures, sources; without dirge; in every chapter a "tie to today" and "has there been a reckoning?"

There is one thing we did not do in this dossier: we did not weep. Not because we hid the pain; the torture chapter is one of the frankest accounts written in this country. But we left no pain without saying by which class interest it was produced and by which organised force it can be prevented.

Question	Answer
What was 12 September?	Not an interval but a founding: the armed implementation of the 24 January programme
For whom was it made?	For capital — the Koç letter, TÜSİAD, the IMF, US aid
Against whom was it made?	Against the worker on strike, DİSK, Kurdish and Alevi labourers, organised youth
What did it found?	The constitution, YÖK, the National Security Council, Law 2911, the thresholds, compulsory religious education — all still in force
Has there been a reckoning?	No. Those who said "we have settled accounts" took it over
Why was the left defeated?	The power of capital and the weakness of the left
What is to be done?	Read, record, remember, demand, go, organise

What is inside?

Four parts, twenty-three chapters, eleven appendices. It begins as if you knew nothing; it defines every concept where it first appears. It was written so that a shipyard worker, a courier, a call-centre worker would understand it on a first reading.

Part I is the road from 1923 to 12 September: the founding of the army–capital–labour relation, 27 May and Menderes's "two deaths," the working class taking the stage in the 1960s and 15–16 June, the 12 March rehearsal, and how crisis, massacres and 24 January prepared the coup between 1974 and 1980.

Part II is the coup itself: the National Security Council regime, a class reading of the numbers, a torture chapter that tells with testimony what was endured at Mamak, in Diyarbakır, at Metris and in the interrogation rooms, the answer to "for whom the coup" with real-wage and labour-share data, the line from the CIA and the counter-guerrilla to Gladio, the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis and YÖK, from the junta's religion to Gülen's fattening, and how the world looked at 12 September.

Part III is the present of 12 September: Netaş, the Spring Actions, Zonguldak; the 2026 inventory of institutions; whether the AKP settled accounts or inherited, and the tie between "not enough but yes" and today's "new constitution" agenda; labour's forty-six-year balance sheet; class unionism from DİSK to rank-and-file unions; the İHD reports and the record of the unsettled account.

Part IV is the most important for you: the left's self-criticism; the class anatomy of three generations — the '78 generation, those who were children in the coup, and the "sheltered" children; symbols and remembering; concrete tasks.

The last chapter leaves six jobs: to read (with a six-week reading-group programme), to record, to remember in the right way, to demand (a twelve-point liquidation package), to go to sites of memory, and to organise. None is enough on its own; without the sixth the first five are incomplete.

There is also an open call. In Appendix J we address, first of all, the '78 Foundation and the Revolutionary '78 Federation, and with them SAV, İHD, TİHV, DİSK, KESK, the Diyarbakır Prison commission, the Memory Museum and the families: let every commemoration and every testimony be put on record by a shared five-question method; let them become a written, online, openly licensed, searchable commons. We put in the infrastructure and the labour; ownership stays with a joint board. This is where young comrades will be of most use: to be the hand that gathers the testimonies, records them, and keeps the institution standing.

Nearly seventy photographs in the dossier are all openly licensed. But we could not find openly licensed photographs for 1 May 1977, Kemal Türkler, Tariş, Fatsa, the Spring Actions and Zonguldak; we are waiting for everyone whose archive holds photographs that can be used with permission. The same holds for every figure that is wrong or missing: this is a living document; we will write the next version with you.

What do we ask of you?

Not that you read it, but that you use it. A reading group of three to seven people, a testimony recording, a workplace committee. When you have done one of these, the reason this dossier was written will have been fulfilled.

Reckoning is the work of the class, not of governments. Argentina teaches this: the junta was tried because there was a social movement that did not give up for thirty years, beginning with the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. In Turkey the Evren case fell before it became final; because the coup's capital partners are still partners in power today. This is not a complaint; it is a diagnosis. Diagnosis shows the treatment: turn the demand for reckoning not toward the government, but toward the class.

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Dear Young Comrades, only organised labour can take down what was founded. Read, discuss, record, organise.

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Version 1.0.4 · Knowledge Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0. This dossier is built on our pieces remembering Bedahet Tosun, the İHD 2025 report, Yılmaz Güney, September 11, KVKK and the "80s trend", and the Computing Worker's Handbook.

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