Emerging Forms of Social-Union Organizing Under the New Conditions of Turkish Capitalism: A Class-Capacity Analysis

Abstract

How has Turkey’s working-class movement adapted to the new conditions of capitalism? What alternative forms of struggle have emerged to address precarization under neoliberalism? Providing a bottom-up account of social-union activism based on interviews with union activists, we argue that neoliberal capitalism structurally incapacitates working-class organizing in Turkey through a process of precarization, strongly expressed in the flexibilization of labor and further amplified by sociogeographical unevenness and cultural identities. These challenges are addressed through innovatory methods of bottomup organizing such as white-collar forums of exchange, internet activism, the accentuation of the emotional and gendered dynamics of class struggle, solidarity actions with blue collars, and various forms of street activism.