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Abstract

This paper aims to explore the growing and deepening trend of politics of repression coupled with prolonged crisis and austerity politics, reflecting on the potentials as well as limitations of progressive politics in such a constrained context. Austerity policies continue pushing for anti-labour and reactionary politics in a variety of forms reflecting the unresolved crisis conditions of contemporary capitalism. While the liberal democratic state-form remains relatively intact in particular contexts, in others, it gradually evolves into repressive forms. The growing repression risks conceiving the anti-authoritarian struggles and the anti-capitalist and labour movements separate and/or mutually exclusive. This review article draws on the recent insights of (de)politicization, labour geography and history and political economy scholarships with specific reference to the case of Turkey while cautioning against the binary thinking of ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in leftist and labour mobilisations. It proposes a historical perspective in order to appreciate the diversity and multiplicity of struggles against the intersecting nodes of austerity, capitalism and repression in the complex geographies of periphery.

Keywords

Austerity crisis politicisation Turkey repression

Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures. Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process … But any future vision which can encompass all of us, by definition, must be complex and expanding, not easy to achieve … By seeing who the we is, we learn to use our energies with greater precision against our enemies rather than against ourselves.

Audre Lorde, Learning from the 1960s, February 1982

Introduction

Austerity policies continue pushing for anti-labour and reactionary politics across Europe in a variety of forms reflecting the unresolved crisis conditions of contemporary capitalism. The liberal democratic state-form remains relatively intact in certain contexts coupled with the prevalence of anti-migrant, racist, sexist politics and political parties (e.g. UK – UKIP/Brexit Party, France – Front National/ the National Rally). In other contexts (e.g. Turkey, Hungary, Ukraine, Bulgaria), it gradually evolves into repressive forms depending on the specific configuration of domestic class forces, dynamics of capital accumulation, and positioning within the hierarchy of global capitalism (Dönmez and Zemandl, 2018; Ishchenko, 2014; Tsoneva, 2017). Therefore, the domestic prospects of progressive politics and fostering solidarity beyond the national vary considerably.

This paper aims to explore the deepening trend of political repression coupled with prolonged crisis and austerity politics, reflecting on the potentials as well as limitations of progressive politics in such a constrained context. Crisis and austerity experiences in the peripheries of capitalism are worthy of exploration since the contradictions of the uneasy coupling of capitalism and the liberal state form become visible, prone to exposure and demystification in these geographies. The article adopts the conceptualization of ‘austerity’ and ‘anti-politics’ as defined in this theme issue. Anti-politics is conceived as the disenchantment with and distancing from conventional modes of political agency and mobilization (Hay, 2007) which simultaneously opens up space for unconventional modes of politicization in reactionary (maintenance of capitalist status quo with liberal or authoritarian characteristics) or progressive form (challenging the capitalist foundations of status quo in its gendered, bordered, class-based and racialised manifestations). These trajectories are largely shaped by the historically specific configuration of social forces in particular nodes of global capitalism as noted earlier (della Porta, 2015; Haiven and Khasnabish, 2014). Austerity refers to the reconfiguration of social relations marked by public sector, wage and government spending cuts and anti-labour policies in response to the systemic crisis of capitalism (Blyth, 2013: 2; Browne and Susen, 2014). Austerity is not conceived here solely as a hegemonic ‘idea’ but an integral part of a continual, material restructuring process of capitalist social relations in line with dynamics of primitive accumulation (Federici, 2004; Streeck, 2013).

Since capitalist states increasingly adopt repressive forms of governing in such a context, the contemporary challenge for leftist politics today is to establish the connection between struggles for democratic rights and liberties and class struggles (Ozden et al., 2018). The mainstream accounts in peripheral contexts, however, often underemphasize the potential in anti-austerity and labour struggles vis a vis the rise of authoritarianism. Gagyi (2015: 30; 2015a), with reference to the East Central European (ECE) social movements, argues that this is in large part connected to the intrinsic Western centrism of the majority of analyses. The purpose of this article is not to deny the visible presence of repressive politics and authoritarianisation of statecraft in these specific nodes of global capitalism today but acknowledge that this is not exclusively an exceptional, deviant quality of ‘peripheral states’ conceived in reified fashion. As Clarke (1991: 13) notes,

… since the primitive accumulation of capital continues to be an element of the movement of capital, in combination with other generally more dominant elements, aspects such as the paternalistic and authoritarian state form, the very national basis of the state and functions such as the privatisation of property continue to be elements of the state form.

Conceived through this global lens within which authoritarianism is treated as an intrinsic element of the state form rather than exception, the urgency of connecting multifarious struggles of labour against capital as well as struggles for civil and political rights can be fully acknowledged. There is plenty of recent evidence that the current repressive trend is not confined to the peripheries of capitalism exclusively.

Against this background, the article reviews existent scholarly research into these struggles which have been historically connected to the contested processes of class formation and increasingly to dynamics of precarisation, informality, fragmentation and spatial dispersion of labour in the contemporary context (Barna et al., 2017; Celik and Erkus-Ozturk, 2016; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010; Dinler, 2016; Gialis and Herod, 2014; Nurol and Unal, 2018; Sen, 2017; Strauss, 2018). With its expansive understanding of capitalism as subjugation of value-form upon social relations at the global scale, the article aims to challenge the narrow conceptualizations of capitalist and class domination as well as the confinement of anti-capitalist politicizations solely to national scale (Ercan and Oguz, 2007; Nowak, 2016; see also Atzeni, 2016; Dinerstein, 2016).

The recent labour geography scholarship emphasizes the aforementioned nuances in the study of the multiple, diverse yet constrained agency of labour and its dynamic, open-ended spatiality which this article aims to build upon and extend further (e.g. Anderson, 2009; Griffin, 2018; Herod, 2001a cited in Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010; Massey, 2005; Peck, 2018). Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2010: 213, 217, 223) document the gradual evolution of this scholarship towards more agency-focused approaches while acknowledging its limitations in prioritizing traditional trade union activity over a broader understanding of worker agency and separating the economic dimension of labour geographies from and at the expense of their political dimension. Similar oversight has been evident in the studies of working class agency and labour geographies in the specific country case of Turkey which is scrutinized in this article. Therefore, the article aims to contribute to labour geography scholarship while reviewing novel empirical research on the chosen case study that aims to expand beyond these limitations.

The article zooms into the case of Turkey where repressive politics has been visibly and rapidly coupled with crisis and austerity politics in the past decade. This empirical focus is insightful in a number of respects. The historical legacy of prior progressive politicizations connected to the double processes of class and capital formation become the source of diversity in the content and form of contemporary politicizations. It encourages us to move beyond simplistic dichotomies or theoretical generalizations along core-periphery, East-West, North-South axis and binary judgments on the outcomes of struggles in terms of their immediate success and failure. The focus on Turkey is also insightful in order to expose and challenge the hegemonic ‘nationed narratives’ (Featherstone and Karaliotas, 2018: 294) given the presence of an often understudied multi-ethnic working class and left movements connected to its Ottoman past (Kabadayi and Creasey, 2012). The contemporary labour and leftist movements in the country encounter similar challenges given the intersection of class, ethnicity and migration dynamics (e.g. Erdoğdu, 2018; Ozdogan, 2015). It allows us to explore the possibilities and conditions for a progressive politics that can challenge capitalist oppression in both its liberal and repressive forms as well as solidarity-building beyond the national scale.¹

Progressive politicisation as conjoined struggles against capitalism and repressive state form

The dense scholarship into neoliberal depoliticized publics and post-politics is increasingly being challenged in the face of a renewed wave of politicisation of social relations at multiple scales (Bailey et al., 2017; Beveridge 2017; Beveridge and Koch, 2017, 2018; Buller et al., 2018; Roca et al., 2018; Standring, 2018). The urban mobilizations and occupations of the late 2000s have been the focus of this renewed interest. The progression of these mobilizations towards more institutionalized forms and their endurance in articulating a sustained political agenda against crisis and austerity have varied across geographies (della Porta, 2017: 454). Ultimately, this brought to the fore the long-standing debates within the Left in terms of strategy, leadership, organization and scale (Gunes, 2017). The scholars have explained the challenges encountered either due to the external, structural factors or the internal (ideological and organizational) shortcomings of the mobilisations in connecting with the broader segments of society (Akcali and Korkut, 2015: 86–87; Barna et al., 2017; Florea et al., 2018; Gagyi, 2014: 81, 2015, 2015a; Ozden et al., 2018).

Besides the insurgence of far-right, reactionary movements and ideologies in the post-2008 era, in contexts where left politics has experienced visible upsurge through popular mobilization (Indignados, Gezi uprising, Syntagma protests) and later more institutional forms at parliamentary (Spain, Turkey) or governmental scales (Greece), repression has eventually become part and parcel of state and governmental policies and discourses (Al-Jazeera, 2018; BBC, 2017; della Porta, 2017; Losada, 2017).

In the current political juncture, the coupling of repressive governing forms with capitalist austerity presents specific challenges to left politics. One major challenge is the argument that progressive politicization is confined to the domain of anti-authoritarian rights struggles for the reinstatement of liberal democratic politics solely.

The reasons behind such conceptualisations are three-fold. (1) The narrow understanding of class formation and struggle which discounts the historically specific subjugation of non-wage, unpaid, reproductive, precarious, migrant and informal forms of labour to the capitalist value form and neglects the presence of labour and its ‘lived’ and ‘perceived experience’ in diverse modes (Barna et al., 2017; Bieler et al., 2016; Erdoğdu, 2018; Featherstone and Griffin, 2016; Hofmeester and Van der Linden, 2018; Luxemburg 2003 [1913]: 348–50; Wood, 2016 [1982]). (2) The conception of state as a separate entity from social relations which disregards the state-capital-class connections in the reproduction of capitalist domination and its repressive forms in times of crisis (cf Smith, 2015). (3) The assessment of the rise of repressive governing as a peculiar feature of ‘peripheral’, ‘transitioning’, ‘non-Western’ geographies which contributes to making diverse experiences of class formation invisible (Akgoz, 2014; cf Balsoy, 2009; Barna et al., 2017; Gagyi, 2015a; Mello, 2010 ).

Regarding the first point, Wood (2016: 47) emphasizes that capitalist social relations continuously make and remake class (see also Featherstone and Griffin, 2016; Griffin, 2018). In her defense of E. P. Thompson’s account of class formation, which emerges from relations of production and leading to class situations that entail ‘objective antagonisms and conflicts of interest’ and create conditions for class struggle, Wood (2016: 50) notes:

What is needed is a way of demonstrating how the structuration of society “in class ways” actually affects social relations and historical processes. The point, then, is to have a conception of class that invites us to discover how objective class situations actually shape social reality, and not simply to state and restate the tautological proposition that “class= relation to the means of production”.

The empirical focus of the existent scholarship on the mass urban movements in public spaces should be accompanied by the more subtle yet longer term class and agency formation processes as a number of scholars of political economy, social movements and labour geography already articulate (della Porta, 2017; Featherstone and Griffin, 2016; Griffin, 2018: 966; Hastings, 2016; Massey, 2005: 27, 55; Yalman and Topal, 2017). Otherwise, the former’s disappearance or repression risks leading to conclusions that their potential has reached their limit under authoritarian capitalism. Massey (2005: 55, 59) articulates a similar approach in spatial terms:

The argument here is instead to understand space as an open ongoing production. As well as injecting temporality into the spatial this also reinvigorates its aspect of discrete multiplicity; for while the closed system is the foundation for the singular universal, opening that up makes room for a genuine multiplicity of trajectories, and thus potentially of voices … Conceptualising space as open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics.

The qualities and claims of autonomy in such forms of politicisation can then be construed as a ‘site of political struggle’ and a ‘terrain on which both negation and affirmation coexist, interact and unfold’ through this ‘historical situated understanding’ (Bohm et al. 2010: 27–28; see also Featherstone and Karaliotas, 2018; Griffin, 2018).²

Regarding the binary conceptions of state and society and the former’s authoritarianism, it is important to emphasise that:

Against the universalistic claims of the liberal state all other corporate bodies that arise to represent the interests of particular sections of society appear merely as the representatives of particular interests. The contradiction at the heart of the liberal form of the capitalist state is practically resolved as the statesman resolves conflicts of interest within the constitution. However if particular interests pursue their aims outside the constitution they challenge both the authority and the legitimacy of the state. Faced with such a challenge the state has to maintain its authority, if necessary by the use of brute force, repressing competing powers in the name of the general interest embodied in the constitution. The tyranny of the bourgeois state is not a deformation of its liberal form, but is inherent in its need to assert its claim to neutrality and to universality’ (Clarke, 1988: 129 emphasis added).

Against this backdrop, the article builds on a non-Eurocentric, historical materialist understanding of the growing authoritarianism of capitalist states alongside a conception of space and class as a process and relationship at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, race and mobility (Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010: 214; Featherstone and Griffin, 2016; Featherstone and Karaliotas, 2018: 295–296; Massey, 2005: 61; Mezzadra and Nielsen, 2013; Rutherford, 2010). Such a perspective reconstitutes the democracy-capitalism relationship as an intrinsically contested and crisis-ridden one:

In capitalist democracy, the separation between civic status and class position operates in both directions: socio-economic position does not determine the right to citizenship – and that is what is democratic in capitalist democracy – but, since the power of the capitalist to appropriate the surplus labour of workers is not dependent on a privileged juridical or civic status, civic equality does not directly affect or significantly modify class inequality – and that is what limits democracy in capitalism. Class relations between capital and labour can survive even with juridical equality and universal suffrage. In that sense, political equality in capitalist democracy not only coexists with socio-economic inequality but leaves it fundamentally intact. (Wood, 1995: 213)

The following section reviews the antecedents of progressive politicisation under austerity and repression as it relates to, informs and brings legitimacy to the contemporary dynamics of struggle in the form of accumulated lived experience and legacy of left politics in Turkey as emphasised by Basyigit (2017), Coe and Jordhus-Lier (2010), Featherstone (2005), and Mello (2010) among others. The particular focus will be on workers’ agency in the tobacco and education sectors alongside the role of historically diverse and gendered composition of working classes drawing on the struggles of migrant Roma, Armenian and Kurdish workers. Certainly, worker agency within the former Ottoman and contemporary Turkish Republican context is diverse and multi-faceted to be covered in full within the limited scope of the article. Therefore, these specific episodes and cases are chosen since the tobacco and education workers have been among the most politicised and mobilized segments of the working classes with a historically multi-ethnic composition and given the continual presence and legacy of their experiences within contemporary worker struggles.

Austerity, repression and resistance in Turkey: Antecedents of a common struggle

Given the historically specific configuration of social forces, capital accumulation and state transformation, there has been a recurring coupling of austerity, repression, and resistance within the labour struggles and broader progressive politics in Turkey. The invisibility and outright oppression of the ethnic and gendered dimensions of the working class politicisation have also been a prevalent feature of the history of capitalism, left politics (Basyigit, 2017; Gunes, 2017; Yilgur, 2015; Zeydanlioglu, 2008) and labour historiography from the Ottoman to the Republican era (Balsoy, 2009; Dincer, 2013; Kabadayi and Creasey, 2012: 189, 191–192; Nacar, 2014, 2014a; Selen and O’Neill, 2017). Given the insulation between these domains, the existing literature is yet to include the struggles for social and political rights that challenge the hegemonic ‘nationed narratives’ within its scope of analysis fully (Ozdogan, 2015: 105).

Working class formation and connected emancipatory struggles have historically evolved in a contested social and political environment entangled with the changing national accumulation strategies and the bottlenecks of the global circuit of capital. The latter enabled austerity politics which deteriorated the living and subsistence conditions of large parts of the population at the turn of each decade in the post-1945 context. A bird’s eye view into the history of the working class agency in Turkey suggests that it evolved in contestation with employers as well as the state and pro-establishment labour unions in key historical moments (Ahmad, 1993: 142–143; Balkilic, 2015; Mello, 2010).

Class, gender, ethnicity, migration and politicization in the late Ottoman period

One of the earliest politicised forms of such agency can be found in the tobacco industry during the late 19th century (Nacar, 2014: 533–536; Nacar, 2014a; Selen and O’neil, 2017).³ As a rapidly growing export sector serving the world market, major Ottoman cities such as Kavala, Iskece, Salonica, Samsun and Istanbul saw the opening of numerous warehouses where ‘male and female, local and migrant, Muslim and non-Muslim workers laboured and socialised side by side’ (Nacar, 2014: 536).

In her in-depth archival research on the workers’ livelihoods and struggles in Kavala and Iskece, Nacar (2014: 538) emphasises the ‘gendered hierarchies’ of the warehouse work in these cities where men, women and family members worked together – unlike in the Cibali factory in Istanbul where workplace was sex-segregated (Nacar, 2014a: 209; Selen and O’Neil, 2017: 1170). As many workers were seasonal migrants, they remained destitute and vulnerable to exploitation by export merchants and usurers in the remainder of the year (Nacar, 2014: 537). On the other hand, a pervasive local-migrant divide continued alongside inter-communal tensions which was deepened by the repressive, discriminatory measures of the Ottoman administrations towards the criminalisation of migrant workers. These dynamics, Nacar concludes, yielded a form of labour activism that was both fragmented and unified when decline in the agricultural yield or quality led to high unemployment and fall in wages in the first years of the 20th century (2014: 545). In one of these protests against wage cuts in Kavala, up to 6000 tobacco workers declared a strike and smashed the windows of more than 200 tobacco warehouses which led the company guards open fire to the strikers (Nacar, 2014: 543). Nacar provides strong evidence of effective protest tactics of workers as well as collective learning to push for more comprehensive demands (e.g. fairness in recruitment procedures, provision of benefits, ban on the employment of children under the age of fourteen and limits for those under 18) beyond wages and work hours in subsequent workplace conflicts and strikes in 1908 in Kavala and in 1911 in Istanbul (2014: 543–544; 2014a: 214–215). The responses of the Ottoman officials to the tobacco workers oscillated between being overtly repressive and concessionary intermediating between the workers and the company officials until the factories came under state monopoly in the Republican period (Nacar, 2014: 543-4, 2014a: 211).

Yilgur’s (2015) research on the politicisation of immigrant Roma tobacco workers, who came to Turkey in the Turkish-Greek population exchange in 1924 and remained politically active in the leftist movements and parties (initially as part of the Communist Party of Turkey from 1920 onwards, The Homeland Party in the 1950s and later in the Workers Party of Turkey during the 1960s), further opens up the much neglected intersection of ethnicity, class and mobility in labour history, geography as well as left politics. Drawing on the memoirs of three prominent Roma tobacco workers as well as personal interviews, Yilgur traces the roots of their political activism to the tobacco workers movement in Greece before 1924 which was led by the highly politicised Jewish tobacco workers in Salonica and included Macedonian, Bulgarian as well as Muslim workers (2015: 176–177). Following their migration, Roma tobacco workers were among the first to build on their extensive political experiences and transfer ‘the experiences of the socialist movements of the Balkans, especially Salonica, to the Turkish Republic’ (Yilgur, 2015: 192). They took part in the establishment of trade unions and engaged in socialist and communist party formations during the repressive period of the single party government and increasingly so from 1946 onwards at the onset of the rather short-lived political liberalisation period (Yilgur, 2015: 178, 181–185).⁴ Nevertheless, stigma, segregation and exclusion that the Roma individuals experienced due to the discriminatory discourses and practices mobilised by the Ottoman and the Republican Turkish state which were equally internalised and practised by the members of broader society should also be emphasised strongly here (Ginio, 2004; Gurboga, 2016: 122–124; Yilgur, 2018: 179–180).

The experiences of these men and women workers in the late Ottoman context, as the recent research on labour history documents, are illustrative of the presence of an active and politicised group of ethnically diverse working class members in the country’s history despite systematic violence and repression they encountered on an everyday basis. Therefore, their experiences are particularly relevant for exploring the historical antecedents of an internationalised progressive politics capable of countering capitalist social relations and repression simultaneously.

Cycles of austerity, repression and politicisation in the Republican period

During the etatist policies of the early Republican era, the large-scale employment of working class as public sector workers and civil servants in the state owned enterprises in key industrial sectors such as energy, mining, glassware, manufacturing as well as agriculture, raw materials and reproductive sectors such as education was a major factor in shaping and constraining working class agency. It introduced different wage setting, collective bargaining and unionising procedures between private and public sector workers (Koc, 2010: 112, 132), while also linking the crisis of capital to the crisis of the state since the large share of these enterprises in the state budget made the public spending and debt a key crisis dynamic as an unintended consequence.

While the etatist policies were initially shelved by an economic and political liberalization agenda in the immediate post-WW2 period, it shortly paved way to import-substitution industrialization (ISI) in the 1950s-60s (Gurcan and Mete, 2019: 274; Pamuk, 2009: 249–251). The crisis and austerity cycles of ISI strategy have coupled with repressive politics that was mobilized initially by the elected governments (Democratic Party government from the mid to late 1950s onwards and Justice Party government from the mid to late 1960s onwards) and subsequently by two military interventions.⁵ However, this process also contributed to the development of a rapidly politicised working class agency beyond economic-corporate claims during the 1960s and 1970s due to direct encounters with both the pro-government union administrations and the repressive arms of the state whenever workplace conflicts escalated (Alper, 2010; Gurcan and Mete, 2019; Mello, 2010). Subsequently, the global crisis of the late 1970s affected the violent shift to export-oriented industrialization with the third and the most brutal military intervention in 1980.

The mainstream labour history literature on the early republican era notes that the labour movement was not politicised around class-based politics given the absence of right to unionise and strike for public sector workers (Akgoz, 2014: 146; Koc, 2010: 168–169, 173; Zurcher, 1994: 238). One of the underlying reasons for such assessments was the prioritisation of union-based and institutional forms of labour agency as the benchmark of the extent of politicisation. As a result, the politicisation that the workers experienced themselves in their interactions with and against the employers and the state officials in this period remained less visible and unaccounted for (Akgoz, 2014: 137, 139, 146; Akgoz, 2017). Recent scholarship from a bottom-up perspective, however, challenges these statist, capital-centric and Western-centric readings of working class politicisation (Akgoz, 2014: 147–8; Akgoz, 2017). Akgoz (2014: 139–145) highlights various forms of government and union-led overt and subtle repression that workers faced while articulating and voicing their interests. What is striking was the presence of an emerging political subjectivity in this repressive context.⁶

Waves of austerity and military interventions (1960–1980)

The subsequent decade of the 1960s, which started and ended with two IMF-led and government-endorsed austerity programmes (in 1958 and 1970) and military interventions (in 1960 and 1971 respectively), witnessed large scale mobilisation by diverse segments of society as noted earlier. While it is not possible to review all forms of worker agency in this vibrant period,⁷ a number of crucial developments will be highlighted with respect to the core focus of the article: The establishment of the Workers Party of Turkey in 1961 as an attempt to acknowledge the class and ethnic dimensions of progressive politicisation, the establishment of the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions in 1967 as the outcome of sustained attempts to challenge the pro-establishment union administrations through grassroots mobilisation and finally the politicisation of teachers in the public sector as an antecedent of the public sector workers’ mobilisation in the 1980s and 1990s (Egitim Sen, 1999).

The establishment of the Workers Party of Turkey (TIP) and its entry into parliament with 15 representatives in the 1965 elections, 3 of whom came from the Kurdish-majority areas, was a key development in the politicisation of large segments of ethnically diverse working classes, peasants, students and public intellectuals. It was also the first time in the republican period that workers’ rights and interests were formally recognised and represented in the parliament (Gunes, 2017: 10; Koc, 2010: 212–217; on land occupations and peasant mobilisations in general, see Alper, 2010: 52–73; in the context of Kurdish peasant actions, see Yadirgi, 2017: 204). The Roma tobacco workers, now employed as public sector workers in the state tobacco monopoly, remained active in TIP as members, branch officials and administrators in Istanbul and Kocaeli branches among others, election campaign leaders, and prominent militants and activists during the 1960s (Yilgur, 2015: 169–170, 187–189, 193). Much of the decade witnessed growing politicisation and organic linkages between leftist party politics and radical union movements vis a vis governing strategies of repression. The latter included disciplining legislative measures against unionisation, collective agreements and strikes as well as overtly coercive methods such as clashes with the police, gendarmerie and mass arrests (Koc, 2010: 187, 195–197, 238; Mello, 2010: 11; Tastan, 2016).

The workers’ agency developed autonomously and in opposition to the pro-government position of the Turkish Trade Union Confederation (Turk-Is) in this period. Koc (2010: 206) reports that 658 civil servant unions were established between 1965 and 1971. This process eventually led the formation of the Confederation of Revolutionary Trade Unions (DISK) in 1967 uniting these more radical and politicised unions under a platform alternative to Turk-Is (Koc, 2010: 205–206; Zurcher, 1994: 286). One of the major sources of politicisation as well as unrest and violence was the continual departure of workers and unions from Turk-Is to DISK.

It is important to highlight the politicisation of teachers who were the first and most organised group of civil servants which mobilised and pushed the boundaries of the legislative framework of 1961 constitution. Their legacy carried forward to the 1980s and 1990s as well as the AKP era. Trade Union of Teachers of Turkey (TOS) was established in 1965 as an openly political union (Buyruk, 2015: 165). From the outset, teachers unionising under TOS met with state repression in the form of salary cuts, relocation and suspension charges (Buyruk, 2015: 165). Despite systematic repression, TOS became the union that organised the first and the largest ‘illegal’ general strike of the working class in 15–18 December 1969 (Koc, 2010: 235). This four-day long strike, which was officially dubbed as a ‘boycott’ given the legal prohibition to strike in the case of civil servants at the time, aimed to construct the teachers’ identity as ‘workers’ first and foremost in their claim making towards gaining access to various labour and workplace rights (Egitim Sen, 1999: 101). The boycott/strike articulated explicitly political demands which included, among other demands, the right to strike and the re-appointment of politicised, activist teachers who were dismissed or relocated because of their unionist activities (Alper, 2010: 74; Egitim Sen, 1999: 112).

The climax of this period’s politicisation was the “15–16 June incidents” during which hundreds of thousands of workers within the state and private sector mobilised in over 168 workplaces in 1970. The aim was to oppose a draft labour legislation, endorsed by both the government and opposition parties, which planned to suppress the growing influence of the left-leaning DISK vis a vis Turk-Is and contain labour movement at the onset of unfolding austerity (Alper, 2010: 75; Gurcan and Mete, 2019: 272; Koc, 2010: 233–235; Mello, 2010: 14–15). There were street occupations in key industrial cities met by police and military repression and ultimately declaration of martial law (Mello, 2010: 15). The continual presence of repression as well as differences in the unionising and strike rights granted to private sector workers and civil servants in this period demonstrate that the political domain was not emancipated unequivocally with the relatively progressive stance of the 1961 Constitution (Buyruk, 2015: 164). The process evolved through struggles and reconfigurations of social forces and the positioning of the state within them.

From a binary understanding of success and failure, these politicisation experiences could be cast off as failures since factionalism in the labour movement weakened resistance (Samim, 1987 cited in Mello, 2010: 19) and a new military intervention came to the rescue of the implementation of new austerity measures adopted in August 1970 by the elected government. The intervention in March 1971 was followed by declaration of martial law in major cities and provinces that arrested activist workers, politicians and intellectuals, closed down TIP and, among other similar measures, removed the civil servants’ and teachers’ right to unionise with an amendment to the Constitution (Koc, 2010: 199; Zurcher, 1994: 272). A more nuanced analysis can be entailed, however, if the lasting influence and legacy of these politicisation instances for contemporary leftist politics in Turkey are traced from a longer term perspective. In this light, Mello (2010: 15) describes this period as one ‘in which a commitment to political unionism persisted despite state repression and social counter-mobilization, and despite limited success in achieving policy goals’.

Following the austerity policies implemented by the military-technocratic governments until 1974,⁸ politicisation of the labour and socialist movement resumed and intensified with the growing influence of the Communist Party of Turkey (TKP) over DISK from 1975 onwards. Numerous nationalist unions and right-wing organisations also flourished under the “National Front” governments (Koc, 2010: 255–261).⁹

From the vantage point of the Kurdish workers and peasants, the relatively progressive and developmentalist era of the 1960s had not translated into material changes in their everyday lives. Yadirgi (2017: 201–206) documents in detail that the 1960 military government and subsequent elected governments adopted suppressive cultural and social policies towards the ‘Kurdish question’ and did not deliver on the progressive economic policies such as land reform. Instead the landed elites’ hegemony remained in the Kurdish provinces and translated into militaristic state repression of peasant mobilisations (Yadirgi, 2017: 204). The bottom-up struggles of the 1960s and 1970s had accelerated the politicisation of the Kurdish workers, students and activists in the urban contexts and their involvement in TIP and the Revolutionary Eastern Cultural Hearths (DDKO) (Akkaya, 2013; Casier and Jongerden, 2012; Yadirgi, 2017: 205; Yegen, 2016a). Nevertheless, Gunes (2017: 10–12) emphasises the presence of nationed thinking in socialist movements in Turkey in the post-1971 context, ‘making it harder to develop a programme that could appeal to the country’s minorities, especially the Kurds’ (see also Yegen, 2010: 237–239; for the experiences of Armenian socialists and activists, Basyigit, 2017). Yilgur (2015: 191) similarly notes that the political engagement of the Roma tobacco workers in labour movements declined and became invisible following the 1971 intervention. The majority of them lost their connection with the leftist groups and intellectuals and the ability of the worker families to transfer their political knowledge to the next generation diminished, while the large-scale social segregation took root for Roma individuals more generally (Yilgur, 2015).

The neoliberal austerity, 1980 military coup and its aftermath

The decade closed with the third military intervention in 1980 which violently crushed the left movement in the country with large scale arrests, torture and disappearances of militants and union activists with many fleeing the country (Gunes, 2017: 10). Unsurprisingly, it was coupled with the adoption of neoliberal austerity policies that eliminated the organised power of unions in an environment of repression and prohibition to all political activities while restructuring the capital-labour relation (Mello, 2010: 17).

However, these developments led to the emergence of political agency in the newly constrained environment which introduced new actors as well as strategies. As Mello (2010: 18) emphasises ‘some of the largest and most contentious collective action in the Turkish labour movement took place after these moments of repression’. Kurdish people and workers’ politicisation intensified from the mid-1980s onwards despite, and for some because of, the double oppression they experienced. It distinctively delinked itself from the Turkish left in terms of both organisation and strategy (Gunes, 2017: 12; Yegen, 2016).

This period coincided with the emergence of a new wave of bottom-up mobilisation of workers from 1986 onwards despite the continual implementation of austerity and privatisation policies through repressive means.¹⁰ This renewed politicisation contributed to the emergence of three-month long Spring Protests (Bahar Eylemleri) in 1989, which mobilised about 600,000 public sector workers autonomously (Gurcan and Mete, 2019: 275; Ozdogan, 2015: 104). Similar to the politicisation of workers in the 1960s, this mobilisation also emerged in reaction to the highly bureaucratic and pro-government union establishment, Turk-Is in particular, and its mishandling of an ongoing collective bargaining process (Gurcan and Mete, 2019: 275). Nevertheless, it was under a much stricter and unfavourable political and legislative context compared to the 1960s. The workers used novel, creative forms of symbolic and workplace resistance in these protests.¹¹ As a result, the public sector workers tore off a 142% wage increase in the pre-1991 election collective agreements followed by wage hikes for civil servants and to a lesser extent for private sector workers with the help of effective collective agreements (Boratav, 2008: 177).¹² The Spring Protests revitalised the unionising efforts of civil servants once again leading to the establishment of The Confederation of the Public Sector Workers’ Trade Unions (KESK). KESK became the most active and politicised public sector union confederation organising mass demonstrations and successfully preventing the enactment of a number of anti-labour legislations in the 1995–2001 period (Koc, 2010: 396, 409). First the public sector workers obtained the right to establish and become members of unions (without collective agreement and strike rights) and in 1995 civil servants were granted the same rights. KESK was influential in organising the march of nearly a hundred thousand workers and civil servants toward the Parliament building in order to protest the austerity measures following the 1994 financial crisis and organising large-scale strikes in the public sector (Koc, 2010: 414–415, 420–422).

This revival of worker agency led primarily by the Kurdish and Turkish public sector workers (Koc, 2010: 342–343; Ozdogan, 2015: 103–104) alongside the persistent (extra-) parliamentary politicisation of the Kurdish movement despite relentless state repression initiated the crisis-borne decade of the 1990s. It coupled the repressive militaristic policies (though more exclusively targeted at the Kurdish political movement this time) with austerity politics once again. Ozdogan (2015) traces the establishment of ‘Patriotic Labourers’ (Yurtsever Emekciler) by Kurdish workers in 1992 which became a crucial constituent of KESK. In parallel to the guerrilla warfare waged against the Turkish state from the early 1990s onwards, Ozdogan (2015: 101) reports that the state intensified its repression of Kurdish activists organising in urban centres and legal settings which led to forced disappearances, executions and arrests of large numbers of leading Kurdish union activists and workers. This process, together with the absence of solidarity they experienced in the labour movement, contributed to the overall invisibility if not negligence of their constitutive role in the revitalisation of labour movement in the post-1980 context (Ozdogan, 2015: 105).

This section has demonstrated that the coupling of austerity and repression in specific crisis nodes in Turkey contributed to the co-emergence of anti-austerity and anti-authoritarian struggles in response (Mello, 2010). This is, however, not to argue that this outcome has always been intended or predicated by the movements or that there has been deliberate merging, overlap or co-development of diverse struggles in solidarity with each other. In certain periods, the struggles bred tension across different constituents of working class since the impact of repression was not experienced equally as the experience of the 1980s and 1990s demonstrated. In other times, repressive state policies against militant worker organization took root before austerity measures were introduced as in the case of the 1960s and 1970s. Nevertheless, what is significant is that the particular configuration of social forces has historically opened up political space within which diverse forms of progressive politicization flourished side by side.

In the following section, the article connects the experiences of the class formation processes of the previous decades to some of the key contemporary anti-austerity and anti-authoritarian politicisation processes in Turkey today.

Against austerity and repression under AKP¹³

The 1990s, marked by multiple political, financial and legitimacy crises of the state and social relations, did not close with yet another military intervention but a comprehensive shift to a depoliticized governing strategy in the aftermath of the 2000–2001 financial crisis. In an attempt to address the previous decades’ crisis dynamics in high inflation, wage and rights-based struggles, the AKP government adopted a neoliberal capitalist restructuring agenda through arm’s length control over key economic and social processes (Dönmez and Zemandl, 2018), a populist distributive politics through social assistance programs, and adoption of the EU pro-democracy agenda (Bozkurt, 2013; Gunes, 2017: 16–17). As an unintended consequence of these policies, and similar to the historical episodes highlighted in the previous section, the space for articulations of counter-hegemonic and progressive politics has also widened temporarily.¹⁴

Two of the main politicization experiences in the post-2008 context will be highlighted here: TEKEL tobacco workers’ struggle in 2009–2010 and the emergence of a broad movement for peace in 2016. Both of these mobilisations brought the economic and political dimensions of politicization together without sidelining the multi-faceted character of working classes. TEKEL resistance flourished in the post-2008 crisis and restructuring context which targeted workers’ livelihoods and the peace movement emerged at the height of a renewed wave of political repression targeting Kurdish citizens.

The AKP period (2002-present) witnessed a serious assault against the hard won rights of working classes through increasing informalisation, precarity as well as novel forms of control over labour processes inclusive of the actions of co-opted trade unions (Bozkurt-Gungen, 2018; Celik, 2012: 110; Celik and Erkus-Ozturk, 2016; Ministry of Labour and Social Security, Strikes, Lock-outs and Collective Agreements Concluded, 1984–2015; Ozugurlu, 2011; Tastan, 2015). The majority of the trade unions’ activities remained within the confines of the labour rights framework drawn as part of the EU accession process and did not problematise the key pillars of the new economic policies as a union representative emphasised. However, interviewees also highlighted the cases of unorganised worker resistance which have been on the rise during the 2000s. The informants emphasised that ‘the institutional body of trade unions remained unresponsive or slow in its reaction’ but that ‘it does not mean that there has been “no working class reaction” ‘(see also Celik, 2012: 114–124; Emek Calismalari Toplulugu, 2015, 2016, 2017).

An important experience of ‘making’ the working class in Turkey in this respect which was emphasized by the interviewed public and private sector union representatives was the 78-day long occupation of the TEKEL tobacco workers in one of the central squares of the capital city, Ankara. The workers lived in the makeshift tents for the whole duration of the occupation from December 2009 to March 2010 (Yalman and Topal, 2017). Their aim was to protest the the precarious, short term contracts that they were imposed on by the state following the acquisition of the tobacco factories by the British-American Tobacco and their eventual closure. (Ozugurlu, 2011: 180; Yalman and Topal, 2017: 8).¹⁵ It demonstrates that the structural changes in the workplace organization and labour processes since the 1980s as highlighted in the previous section did not simply reproduce fragmentation and preclude resistance in absolute terms. Even though the majority of them used to be AKP voters, Ozugurlu (2011: 181) describes the qualities of the worker resisters who were part of this creative, autonomous action as follows:

[T]hey took decisions very rapidly, and the resistance movement was part of the trade union organization, but it did not stop at that point- it also developed the organization. The workers took their decisions based on grassroots initiatives within the movement; and although they maintained the formal organizational hierarchy of the trade union (Tek Gida Is- the Turkish Trade Union of Tobacco and Food Workers), all the resisters potentially became both the spokespersons, activists and mass of resistance.

This common politicisation experience of Kurdish, Alevi and Turkish workers, men and women, on the basis of the capital-labour conflict yielded the coming together of the multiple and sometimes confrontational identities of the workers which produced a working-class culture and identity within its diversity (Ozugurlu, 2011: 185). The core tenet of the politicisation, Ozugurlu (2011: 182) notes, was a rights-based struggle that became the contemporary pattern of class conflict. This particular case of autonomous, grassroots and rapidly politicized movement of the precarious workers emerged at the onset of the immediate effects of the 2008 global crisis. These forms of action, often led by non-unionised workers or in direct opposition to their respective union administrations, marked the specific characteristics of progressive politicisation of this period to date (e.g. Evrensel, 2017; Gazete Duvar, 2017; Industriall Global Union, 2018; Ozbay, 2016; Sendika.org, 2018; 2018a; Tastan, 2015, 2016).

The AKP government responded with what Yalman and Topal (2017) call ‘labour containment strategies’ against the TEKEL resistance. This process was harbinger of a wave of anti-labour and austerity policies initiated by the government coupled with repression which deepened further following the mass politicisation during the Gezi Park protests in the summer of 2013 (Dönmez, 2018). June 2015 elections and the emergence of a strong, pro-Kurdish leftist opposition in the parliament challenging the hegemony of AKP became a turning point in repressive politics in Turkey. The period following June and November in the same year witnessed unprecedented violence, bloodshed and repression in an effort on the part of the government to hold onto power and its parliamentary majority.¹⁶

The second important form of progressive politicization, related to the dynamics outlined above, is the emergence of a broad movement for peace in Turkey from early 2016 onwards led by the university communities. In January 2016, 1128 academics signed a petition to call for an end to the politics of violence and resulting rights violations of citizens in the Kurdish provinces. Even though Academics for Peace initiative had existed since 2012, this was the first time a substantial group of Kurdish and non-Kurdish academics came together in solidarity to take a stand on the long-standing issue of state repression against Kurdish citizens (Ozdemir et al., 2019: 235). Shortly afterwards the signatories found themselves in direct target of the President, government as well as their own university administrations. After being framed as ‘enemies of the state’ and ‘so-called intellectuals’, a series of disciplinary investigations, dismissals, forced resignations, suspensions from duty, police custody and pre-trial detentions followed (Baris icin Akademisyenler, 2018; Erdem and Akin, 2019; Toren and Kutun, 2018). Speaking out against the rights’ violations of fellow citizens had yielded further violations of academics’ political as well as employment rights. The coup attempt in July 2016 further exacerbated the coupling of economic and political forms of violence which led to the mass dismissals and bans of all alleged and suspected ‘enemies’ from public service inclusive of the police, military, schools, state institutions through the use of governmental decree-laws over the course of two years. While this process led to expropriation of large segments of the civil servants and public sector workers, it also led to the emergence of novel forms of struggle and solidarity within the country such as the financial solidarity fund organized by the Education and Science Workers’ Union (Egitim-Sen) supporting dismissed education workers (Baris icin Akademisyenler Solidarity Fund, 2017) and the Solidarity Academies movement (Erdem and Akin, 2019). It equally fostered strong international solidarity to the plight of academics in the form of declarations of support and petitions from higher education communities across the globe,¹⁷ fellowship support to scholars at risk and in exile in Europe and North America (Ozdemir et al., 2019; Scholars at Risk, 2016).

One of the most significant resistance forms in this respect was led by a woman university lecturer and petition signatory, Nuriye Gulmen, who was expelled from her university with a governmental decree law (Alyanak, 2017). She occupied one of the central squares in Ankara every day from November 2016 onwards to protest the decree-law that terminated her employment and demand her job back. She later was joined by a school teacher, Semih Ozakca, who was similarly laid off during the post-coup purges. Both were at the same time members of the Education and Science Workers Union in Turkey. They were arrested on a daily basis when they turned up to the square in front of the human rights statue. Their protest evolved into a hunger strike from March 2017 onwards and lasted until 26 January 2018. It garnered support and solidarity nationally and internationally.¹⁸ The significance of their resistance rests on its ability to connect the employment rights violations and insecurity of academic and public sector workers and the infringements on political freedoms, right to assembly and protest.¹⁹

Conclusion

This review article highlighted the importance of rethinking the history of class struggles and leftist politics along the austerity, repression and anti-politics axis. Moving beyond nationally and ethnically demarcated clusters towards an interconnected and inclusive history of progressive politicizations is deemed vital. The article acknowledged the multiple structural dynamics such as informalisation, precarisation and expropriation which ‘make’ working class in its diversity in global capitalism. In doing so, it built on the recent advances in labour geography and history research as well as critical political economy in order to assess the economic and political dimensions of progressive politicization in an interrelated manner and challenge the traditional, binary and exclusionary interpretations.

Assessing politicisation nodes in this historical, longue-duree perspective opens up ways of interlinking democratic struggles with labour struggles which has implications for political strategy, internationalism and solidarity building beyond the ‘nationed narratives’ (Featherstone and Karaliotas, 2018: 295). It highlights (dis)continuities as well as adaptations and overall perseverance of struggles within austere and repressive contexts. This perseverance has the potential to further contribute to the emergence and sustenance of radical culture and sensibilities that help ground and flourish contemporary movements and struggles. The case of Turkey provides empirical insights which reveal that left history is not one of retreats and defeats but endurance and collective learning when the scales of politicisation are expanded from the national to the transnational as well as local, community and workplace levels (e.g. Basyigit, 2017; Coe and Jordhus-Lier, 2010: 220; Karakatsanis and Papadogiannis, 2017). It demonstrates the need to acknowledge and challenge the nationed practices openly in order to learn from prior experiences fully and address their limitations. At the same time, it reminds us that the repressive mode of governance is not a novel phenomenon but that the labouring classes and marginalized communities have a long collective experience and knowledge of resistance to build on in advancing contemporary struggles.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented in a workshop and later as part of the Socialist Theory and Movement Seminar Series organised at the University of Glasgow in April 2017 and November 2018 respectively. I would like to thank the theme issue editors, Alex Sutton and two anonymous reviewers for their comprehensive engagement and insightful comments on the paper. All errors and omissions are my own.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: I would like to thank for the travel funding provided by the Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow as part of the ISRF funded Anti-Politics of Austerity project.

Notes

Pınar E Dönmez is a senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations in the University of the West of England. Her research interests include (de)politicisation in governance and social relations, political economy of crisis and restructuring, theories of state, Marx and Marxism(s), and academic labour and freedom.

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Against austerity and repression: Historical and contemporary manifestations of progressive politicisation in Turkey

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Progressive politicisation as conjoined struggles against capitalism and repressive state form

Austerity, repression and resistance in Turkey: Antecedents of a common struggle

Class, gender, ethnicity, migration and politicization in the late Ottoman period

Cycles of austerity, repression and politicisation in the Republican period

Waves of austerity and military interventions (1960–1980)

The neoliberal austerity, 1980 military coup and its aftermath

Against austerity and repression under AKP 13

Conclusion

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

Notes

References

Against austerity and repression under AKP¹³