by Onurcan Ülker
Over the past few weeks, Turkey has witnessed the most massive protest movement since the Gezi Park Uprising in 2013. On March 19, Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and his colleagues were arrested on trumped-up charges of ‘corruption’ and ‘terrorism’. İmamoğlu would have been current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s main rival in the upcoming presidential elections. His arrest brought millions of people onto the streets across the country. Protests, large and small, were organized even in the most conservative towns and cities, traditionally known for their support of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). On March 23, in an unofficial nomination vote organized by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), nearly 15 million people, almost a quarter of the total electorate in Turkey, overcame many obstacles and went to the polls to show their support for İmamoğlu as the presidential candidate.
Especially in the big cities, university students and urban youth, long accused by older generations of being apolitical and indifferent to social issues, have taken the lead in the struggle. They have boycotted classes and exams, organized meetings and forums, mobilized their professors and even parents, broken through barricades and resolutely resisted the wanton use of force by the police. Indeed, it is these young people who have been subjected to the most violent attacks by the government to date. At the time of writing, more than fifty young people were still in prison. There are grave allegations of torture, ill-treatment and sexual harassment, particularly of young women, in custody.
Turkey is certainly no stranger to political arrests and ill-treatment of detainees. What is new, however, is that arbitrary detentions have become mass, and abuses that were covered up in the past are now being carried out openly. It seems that the ‘special treatment’ in detention, which in the past was reserved exclusively for socialists and Kurds, has now spread and is applied indiscriminately to everyone.
After almost two weeks of militant and mass demonstrations, there seems to be a lull for the time being. Although demonstrations continue in some universities, the wider public is waiting for the government’s next move. At the moment, relatively passive methods of resistance are coming to the fore, such as petitions and mass consumer boycotts of companies owned particularly by the nouveau-riche entrepreneurial class that has flourished under Erdoğan’s rule.
But Turkey is no longer the same country it was before March 19. Street politics could be back on the agenda of the popular masses at any time, for any reason. Erdoğan’s Islamist AKP, hand in hand with the neo-fascist Nationalist Action Party (MHP), had built a reign of fear over the past decade or so, based on the criminalization and delegitimization of any mass movement and protest. That reign of fear has now been thrown off, at least for the time being. The people have reclaimed the streets as a political space. A large mass of young people between the ages of 15 and 25, who knew only as much about street politics as their elders had told them, experienced for the first time the enormous power of political mobilization and its role in building a collective identity —and apparently, they have enjoyed this very much. Erdoğan and his allies sense that any further step towards an oppressive regime will be met with the resistance from the people. That’s why the rulers are more disturbed and angry than they have been in a long time.
A ‘Color Revolution’?
The government is trying to respond to the massive protest movement not only with police measures, but also with a comprehensive ideological counter-offensive. One of the most frequent arguments voiced by pro-government figures, especially a few renegades from the ‘left’ who have taken it upon themselves to update the ideological arsenal of the Erdoğan’s government, is that the current popular democratic upsurge is nothing more than an attempt at a ‘color revolution’. (The term ‘color revolutions’ refers to engineered uprisings in countries that are under regimes unfavorable to the interests of US imperialism. Typically, pro-US opposition forces in these countries dispute election results, stage internet-savvy protests using trendy symbols – often based on specific colors or images, such as Rose, Orange, Tulip and Velvet – and bring about the installation of US-friendly regimes. The entire protest movement is carefully orchestrated by US agencies.)
Erdoğan’s chief advisor Mehmet Uçum, who claims to have been close to the left in his youth, disparaged the protests that brought together millions of people as “nihilistic acts of civil disobedience” aimed at “creating chaos” and “changing the government to serve imperialism”. Doğu Perinçek, an ultra-nationalist Erdoğan ally with similar dubious claims to past (and present) leftism, claimed that those who took to the streets were “foot soldiers of US imperialism and Israel” seeking an “orange uprising”. State-sponsored social media trolls (‘Aktrolls’, as they are known in Turkey), allegedly controlled by the Directorate of Communications, a centralized propaganda apparatus tasked with “protecting the law of Erdoğan, his precious family and his blessed cause” (!), have also enthusiastically spread similar claims.
Of course, as a ruling class party, the CHP cannot be expected to oppose the imperialist-capitalist system categorically and in principle. The CHP is a party that presents itself as ‘center-left’. Its ideology is an eclectic mishmash of Kemalist populism and nationalism, social democracy, and pro-marketism that has dominated the entire spectrum of bourgeois politics in Turkey from right to ‘left’ in the post-Cold War era. The party’s programme is full of contradictions: It advocates strengthening relations with NATO, but opposes the occupations by the US; it calls for greater integration with the Western bloc, but also for rapid development of relations with the BRICS and Third World countries; it criticizes privatizations that “disregard national interests”, but declares it will carry out “principled” privatizations to promote a “productive Turkey”; it promises to create a favorable investment climate for domestic and foreign investors, but at the same time defends the right of workers to safe, secure and healthy work (i.e. the so-called ‘social market economy’).
As such, CHP is no anti-imperialist force. But that does not make the present movement a color revolution. Firstly, it was not the CHP that aroused the popular masses. On the contrary, the social explosion dragged the CHP along with it. The popular masses, especially the youth, rose up not merely out of a reflex to defend the CHP or İmamoğlu, a typical bourgeois politician who is a building contractor by profession. They rose up also out of the urge to defend their own fundamental rights and freedoms against the increasing unlawful attacks on civil rights, especially the right to vote and to be elected; and in protest against economic devastation and despair about the future. A popular slogan written by young people on walls, posters and placards sums up the reason for their revolt: “They thought we were slaves to a miserable future!” (“Bizi rezil bir geleceğin kölesi sandılar!”) The masses of youth are now demonstrating through their actions that they do not accept such a future.
The CHP mainly wants to transform the mass movement into an instrument of electoral politics and thus keep it under its control. While the masses, united under the slogan “Tayyip, resign!” (“Tayyip istifa!”), demand Erdoğan’s removal from power once and for all, the CHP continues to propose electoral formulas that would include Erdoğan. While it would be an overstatement to say that large sections of Turkish society have overcome their illusions about the CHP or İmamoğlu, the present popular movement definitely has a radicalism that goes far beyond any ruling class party.
Secondly, as is well known, the ‘color revolutions’ are a means to shape various countries in accordance with the economic and geopolitical interests of the monopoly capital of the dominant imperialist bloc led by the US. So, is there really a need for a ‘color revolution’ in Turkey today? Trump thinks otherwise. Speaking alongside Israeli PM Netanyahu, the US President recently said he had “a very good relationship” with Erdoğan, whom he described as “a tough guy” and a “smart” leader. He praised the Turkish government for orchestrating the overthrow of Assad, and offered to mediate between Israel and Turkey in the context of regional power struggles over war-torn Syria.
It is true that Erdoğan likes to portray himself as a regional overlord and a maverick on the international scene. Yet, in reality, Erdoğan’s Turkey has always been a good partner for Western imperialism with the US at its head, even if its neo-Ottomanist, Sunni Islamist, expansionist and hegemonic ambitions have occasionally caused headaches for the imperialists. Trump’s statement about the role of Erdoğan’s Turkey in toppling Assad is correct, but there is much more. The AKP came to power on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, promising full support for the occupation. At the time, it was the anti-war opposition inside and outside the Turkish parliament that prevented Turkey from being used as a platform for a US land attack on Iraq. For many years, Erdoğan boasted that he was the “co-chair of the Greater Middle East Project”. When foreign military intervention in Libya loomed, Erdoğan first asked “What has NATO got to do with Libya?”, but soon he involved Turkey in the operation. Even after the solidly pro-US Gülen cult, which had previously supported the AKP for many years, attempted a failed military coup (using its followers’ infiltration into the Turkish army), Erdoğan refrained from taking an openly critical stance towards the US.
Although Erdoğan has verbally criticized the genocide in Gaza, his actions speak otherwise. There are serious allegations that, under the guise of trade with Palestine, the Turkish government has in fact resumed trade with Israel (that was officially halted), and that even shipments of military equipment to Israel through Turkish territorial waters and ports have continued. It is no secret that Azerbaijani oil is transported to Turkey via the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, before being shipped to Israel by tankers from the Ceyhan port. Despite occasional frictions over regional hegemony, Turkey and Israel, as two strategic junior partners of US imperialism, take care not to tread on each other’s toes.
In the second Trump era, US imperialism seems to prioritize encircling China in East Asia and working with Israel to bring Iran to its knees in West Asia. Over the past two years, with the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance having faced a severe setback, a channel of intervention has emerged from Israel through eastern Syria and northern Iraq into Iran. This channel has two characteristics: militarily it is an American zone of influence, and demographically it is home to a large Kurdish population. (The Kurds are a nationality that is divided over adjacent regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, that have been struggling for their self-determination for over a century. In the course of this, they have faced heavy repression from different state powers, to the point where even speaking Kurdish was banned by Turkey, let alone obtaining an education in it.)
It is precisely against this backdrop that the AKP-MHP coalition’s sudden retreat from the rigid anti-Kurdish policy it has pursued for a decade, and the unexpected launch of a new ‘solution process’ at the urging of MHP leader Devlet Bahçeli make sense. The pillars of this new solution process seem to be (1) the so-called ‘historic statement’ by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Öcalan, who has been imprisoned for a quarter of a century, calling on his organization to disarm and disband, and (2) the agreement reached between Syria’s new rulers, Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), with the full backing of the Turkish government, and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), accused by Turkey of being the Syrian offshoot of the PKK, at a time when HTS was involved in mass killings of members of the Alawite religious minority, and was facing a serious crisis of legitimacy.
Erdoğan, of course, wants to be recognized as the leader who solved the long-standing Kurdish question of Turkey. He wants to use Öcalan’s call to neutralize and pacify the Kurdish political movement, which has a strong social base in Turkey and beyond. But despite this primary objective, as a political survivor he also has short-term political goals. Above all, Erdoğan aims to break the de facto alliance between the CHP and the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party (DEM Party), and dismantle the opposition front. The success of the ‘urban consensus’ electoral cooperation between the CHP and the DEM Party in the last municipal elections – on the basis of which the DEM Party did not nominate any candidates for the mayor in some districts, while the CHP nominated DEM Party members or persons approved by the DEM Party for the local councils – has greatly disturbed the AKP. Erdoğan’s accusations of terrorism during the operations against CHP municipalities stem from the CHP-DEM Party cooperation. The Erdoğan government, with its usual double-dealing, both considers the CHP’s electoral cooperation with the DEM Party as proof of terrorism, and at the same time negotiates with Öcalan through the same ‘terrorist’ DEM Party.
Erdoğan’s strategy of dismantling the opposition front coincides with his goal of drafting a new constitution to legitimize his autocratic rule. Most likely, the AKP-MHP coalition plans to create a legal cover for its repressive and anti-democratic governance by throwing a bone to the Kurdish political movement, such as the recognition of the Kurdish reality in the new constitution. Internationally, the new solution process is in line with the project to undermine Iran’s Shia geopolitics. Erdoğan, who argues that the “cement that holds Turks, Kurds and Arabs together” is religion, is clearly aiming for a Turkish-Kurdish(-Sunni Arab) rapprochement based on Sunni Islam. Such a Sunni front is intended to counter Iran-backed groups regaining recently lost ground, and would help to isolate Iran through sectarian ideological consolidation in the region. And for this reason, the Sunni Islamist AKP government would be more useful in a possible US imperialist operation against Iran than any secular government in Turkey would.
However, it still remains to be seen to what extent the Kurdish political movement will heed Öcalan’s call. At present, the new ‘solution process’ is full of fragilities and uncertainties. The DEM Party, the legal representative of the Kurdish political movement, has kept a relative distance from the recent popular democratic upsurge and showed very limited, even insignificant, solidarity in order not to damage the new ‘solution process’. Tuncer Bakırhan, the DEM Party’s co-chair, responded to criticisms of his party’s relative silence in the face of the state’s crackdown on the demonstrators, saying: “We are not the CHP’s activist group … we will not take to the streets for this”. (Nevertheless, it should be noted that some DEM Party youth joined the protests, especially at universities in big cities.) For the Turkish government, however, the DEM Party’s easygoing and conciliatory attitude is not enough. According to Erdoğan and Bahçeli, the Kurdish question at this stage is not a national question or even a question of democracy; it is simply a question of terrorism. While they are pushing the PKK to liquidate itself immediately and even warning its leaders that the “iron fist of the state” will strike again if they hesitate, it seems that the PKK is in no hurry at the moment. On the one hand, PKK executives assure that they will follow Öcalan’s instructions on the dissolution of the PKK and the termination of the armed struggle, on the other hand, they demand Öcalan’s ‘direct supervision’ (i.e. his release) for the convening of the PKK’s dissolution congress. It is still unclear when (or if) the PKK would hold its self-dissolution congress. There were only unconfirmed claims that it would be convened in early May. As the Kurdish question is not only an internal issue of Turkey, it is certain that the future of the so-called ‘new solution process’ will be determined not only by the Turkey’s domestic political dynamics but by the interventions of the imperialists as well, above all the US, and the hegemonic powers in the region such as Israel.
Denied even the most basic democratic and national rights and freedoms for decades, the Kurds are one of the most oppressed peoples in the region, if not the most oppressed. For many years, the AKP-MHP coalition ruled the Kurdish-majority provinces under a prolonged state of emergency (‘OHAL’) regime. The broad masses of the Kurdish people will never forget that this means nothing but oppression, persecution and war. But imperialism is a past master in manipulating the grievances of aggrieved peoples. Today, the US, with the support of the reactionary regimes in the region, is imposing a new Pax Americana, and it seems that the ‘new solution process’ is very much a part of it. The Kurdish political movement, with pragmatic reflexes and attitudes, may see the existing imperialist and reactionary restructuring of the region as an opportunity for the Kurds to achieve at least a status. However, as Lenin wrote, “not only the right of nations to self-determination, but all the fundamental demands of political democracy are ‘possible of achievement’ under imperialism, only in an incomplete, in a mutilated form and as a rare exception”.
One cannot blame the Kurds for this situation; it is the making of long years of their oppression and desperation.1 But the seeming indifference of the Kurdish political movement to the present upsurge, and the possibility of its compromise with reactionary regimes and imperialism, may have tragic consequences for this brave and conscious people with a long tradition of struggle.
At the same time, there is a danger that socialists in Turkey might unwittingly adopt a social-chauvinist attitude towards the Kurds, in the course of criticizing the erroneous policies of the Kurdish political movement. Of course, no one and no organization is exempt from criticism. However, this criticism should not lead to the denial of the legitimate demands for national and democratic rights of an oppressed nationality.
In some recent street demonstrations, there have been lumpen expressions of anti-Kurdish sentiments, which can exacerbate the rift between the Turkish and Kurdish masses. Much will depend on whether socialists can dispel the fears of the Kurdish masses about the rising street politics in Turkey, and instead develop an anti-imperialist, internationalist fraternity. That in turn will depend on whether socialists are able to emerge as an independent centre of power of the laboring classes.
A Cry for ‘Liberal Democracy’?
There are some certain Turkish intellectuals who are consulted by the Western mainstream media on even the most trivial public events in Turkey, although they have almost no intellectual influence on the practical struggles of the people in Turkey. Many of them were open supporters of Erdoğan in the early years of his rule, when he was masquerading as a conservative democrat, and now they are trying to become mentors to the bourgeois opposition. They use events in their beloved motherland as merely a lever for their international careers.
The well-known novelist Elif Shafak (Turkish surname: ‘Şafak’, Americanized for the Western literary market) is one of the most prominent of these intellectuals and Turkey experts. At present, Shafak poses as a political exile in the West (her exile is self-imposed). In fact, she and Turkey’s liberal intelligentsia, to which she belongs, helped the AKP to gradually consolidate their oppressive regime over many years.2 Shafak recently published an opinion piece in the Financial Times about the ongoing protest movement in Turkey, projecting it as a struggle for ‘democracy’ (in the narrow liberal sense) against ‘authoritarianism’. According to Shafak, Turkey’s new generation “wants to live in dignity, freedom and democracy”. The author chose to focus on a few individuals: a protester costumed as Pikachu (a character in the video game Nintendo), another dressed as a gas-masked whirling dervish, the third a female student reading Rousseau in front of police tanks. All these persons were indeed prominent during the protests, and one may appreciate their courage and sense of humor. But in the same protests, there were also young people carrying posters of Robespierre and Marx, as well as flags of militant revolutionaries like Mahir Çayan and İbrahim Kaypakkaya, all of which would be abhorred by petite-bourgeois intellectuals like Shafak. These radical youth were probably more numerous, better organized and at the forefront of the clashes at the police barricades. As what Erdoğan terms “marginal leftists”, many of these youth had their homes raided and were arrested in the now-commonplace dawn raids.
Certainly, young people in Turkey, like their peers elsewhere, want freedom and democracy. With the recent operations targeting elected mayors, the right to vote and to stand for election has been effectively suspended throughout Turkey. These rights had already been suspended for many years in Kurdish-majority provinces and districts, where the State governs through ‘trustees’ (kayyım) by dismissing, and often arresting, mayors. Erdoğan can no longer tolerate even the current electoral system, which is nothing but a competition between the parties of the ruling class, and completely excludes the oppressed classes and strata. There is almost no academic freedom or autonomy for Turkish universities. Freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, freedom of association and freedom of expression are under serious threat. Women’s rights are under assault. No one, not even the government’s staunchest supporters, believes that the judiciary is independent of Erdoğan’s will and desires. Under these conditions, there is nothing more natural than for the people, and especially the youth, to demand freedom and democracy, albeit in a strictly bourgeois sense.
But these may not be the only reasons why many young people take to the streets and fight back, despite the prospect of imprisonment and blacklisting. Most importantly, young people appear to have lost hope in the future. The neoliberal offensive, which has accelerated as never before under the AKP, has left behind a great social destruction. The militant participation of masses of young people in the present movement reflects their discontent at the suppression of not only their democratic rights, but also their social and economic rights. This is the truth that is ignored by many liberals who present the ‘market economy’ and ‘democracy’ as complementary. Indeed, they keep complaining that Erdoğan’s autocratic tendencies and manoeuvres are “driving foreign investors away from Turkey”. As if foreign investors care more for democratic rights than for the profits from the sweatshops producing for them!
Erdoğan’s motto has always been “running the country like a joint-stock company”. Although he finally institutionalized and legally codified his dream of a ‘Turkey, Inc.’ by replacing the parliamentary system with a ‘Turkish-style presidency’ in 2018, Erdoğan has actually been running the country like a private business since 2002, when the AKP first came to power.
The neoliberal transformation in Turkey began in the 1980s with the violent purge of the socialist left and broad-based, left-leaning trade unions following the military coup of September 12, 1980. But until the AKP came to power, no government had been able to implement a market-oriented programme as radical as the AKP’s which completely liquidated public enterprises. Between 1986 and 2024, a total of USD 71.6 billion worth of privatization took place, of which USD 63.5 billion was during the Erdoğan’s period. The AKP government effectively used privatization and public tenders to transfer enormous wealth from the people to the already entrenched domestic and foreign capital, and to create a new group of oligarchs who have a symbiotic relationship with the Erdoğan family and the Turkish State. Companies such as Cengiz, Limak, Kolin, Kalyon and MNG – often referred to as the ‘Gang of Five’ (‘Beşli Çete’) in Turkey – are among the world’s top ten recipients of government infrastructure contracts, and are often accused of large-scale corruption, bid rigging and tax evasion. The total value of Public-Private Partnership (PPP) infrastructure investments between 1986 to 2003 was less than USD 35 billion, but it soared under AKP rule to USD 145.4 billion between 2003 and 2021, making Turkey the fourth-largest source of PPP in the world (after Brazil, India and China).
The AKP is a pro-capital, anti-labor party. Its Islamist ideological discourse is nothing but a means to pacify the broad masses of working people with religiously fatalistic consolations. During the AKP years, an effective policy of deunionization (in the form of dismissing union members, forcing workers to become members of pro-AKP and employer-friendly ‘yellow unions’, routinizing union-busting practices, etc.) was implemented, and the right to strike was effectively suppressed. As a study by the Research Center of Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions of Turkey (DİSK-AR) shows, under Erdoğan’s rule, especially after the transition to the ‘Turkish-style presidency’, income distribution in Turkey has worsened significantly.
While the share of labor in national income decreased from 35.3 per cent before the presidential regime to 25.2 per cent in 2022, the share of capital in national income increased from 48 per cent before the presidential regime to 56.7 per cent in 2022. Real wage growth, especially in recent years, has lagged far behind soaring inflation, which is deliberately understated in official statistics. By the end of 2024, the wages of almost half of all private sector workers in Turkey were around the minimum wage, which was below the the hunger line and less than a quarter of the poverty line for a family of four members.
According to ILO data, informal employment accounts for about 28 per cent of total employment in Turkey, and a significant proportion of informal workers earn below the minimum wage. The broadly defined unemployment rate (taking into account unemployment, time-related underemployment and potential labor force) stood at 28.2 per cent at the end of 2024, a level close to the COVID-19 peak. Turkey leads OECD countries with 31.1 per cent of its young people aged 18-24 not in education, employment or training (NEET), more than double the OECD average of 13.7 per cent. Although the number of tertiary graduates is increasing, one in four people with this level of education is unemployed.
In addition to the prospect of unemployment, low wages and precarious work, growing inequalities and social injustice also increase young people’s anxiety about the future. The AKP controls a vast network of nepotism, patronage and favoritism. Being close to the AKP or MHP (whose fascistic youth front is known as ‘Grey Wolves’), having relatives and acquaintances in the government hierarchy, or belonging to certain religious orders, above all the Menzil cult, play an important role in hiring and promotions, especially in the public sector, bureaucracy and academia. Many young people, despite having a good educational background and high scores in written exams, are eliminated in oral interviews (mülakat) for public sector recruitment due to lack of influential contacts. The press often reports that some of these young people later develop mental health problems and even commit suicide. One hour’s expenditure on the presidential palace alone is equivalent to more than 112 minimum wages. And Erdoğan urges people to “be patient” in the face of the economic crisis and growing poverty. The Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the official Islamist ideological indoctrination apparatus with a bigger budget than many ministries, issues fatwas such as that poverty is a divine test and that people should not rebel. Yet the knowledge that people close to the government are employed in the public sector without the necessary qualifications, and that they receive very high – and sometimes multiple – salaries and live luxurious lives, is giving rise to disgust and anger among young people.
Given the above, some liberals might argue that the problem is not with capitalism, but with its ‘crony’ variant. But as Amin once wrote, by force of the logic of accumulation, contemporary capitalism as a whole has become crony capitalism. To reserve the term crony capitalism only for the “underdeveloped and corrupt” forms of it peculiar to the ‘developing’ world obscures the fact that crony capitalism now applies to capitalism in general, including in the US and Europe. In particular, the phenomenon of the global rise of the ‘populist/alt-right’ justifies Amin’s observation that the “ruling class’s current behaviour is quite close to that of a mafia”. Even if one grants that a liberal form of capitalism is possible in the present-day world, its viability in a dependent capitalist country such as Turkey is questionable. After all, capitalism is a global system that constantly produces and reproduces inequality and makes independent, indigenous development impossible in semi-/neo-colonies and dependent capitalist nations. What emerges is crony capitalism based in comprador states.
In this context, the return of street politics in Turkey indicates that the discontent of the youth is not limited to a wish for a more bourgeois-democratic political model; rather, their militant, large-scale participation objectively expresses their alienation from the existing social order, and their yearning for a more just and egalitarian model of social and economic development. It remains to be seen how far the conscious, organized political forces, who have a coherent vision of an alternative social and economic order, can introduce and consolidate this element in the current protest movement. That would involve not only mobilizing the students but the broad laboring sections as well.
Opportunities and Challenges
Today, Western imperialism, with the US at its head, has taken off its mask of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’. In a world that is rapidly being dragged into a new imperialist struggle for re-division, Washington no longer cares whether its allies claim the so-called liberal democratic values, even as a cover for exploitative relations on a national and international scale. The supposed liberal international order, which was established after the Second World War, is now dead and waiting to be buried. As Gramsci wrote in his Prison Notebooks, we are in a state of crisis where “the old is dying and the new cannot be born”. This situation enables rulers like Erdoğan to fully unleash their autocratic, despotic and fascistic tendencies. Neoliberal authoritarian regimes are thus evolving, as some argue, into “late fascisms”.
The context of the current protest movement is distinct from that of the Gezi Park Uprising of 2013, which was largely a spontaneous expression of social anger against the lifestyle imposed by the AKP and its predatory, rent-based capital accumulation model based on the plunder of public assets. At the time of the 2013 uprising, Turkey was not in the midst of a serious economic crisis. Until around the mid-2010s, Turkey under Erdoğan was still in a period of economic boom, thanks to a speculation-led and construction-oriented growth model based on massive foreign capital (hot money) inflows and an unprecedented credit expansion.
However, due to the accumulation of fundamental imbalances and financial vulnerabilities, this model reached its structural limits by the second half of the 2010s and collapsed. The AKP has no alternative model, and so its periodic ham-handed attempts at unorthodox measures get quickly hammered by capital movements. As such, this reveals that, for all the neo-Ottoman talk of making Turkey a great power, in fact the Turkish economy has remained subordinated to imperialist capital, and is buffeted by the volatile flows of that capital in and out of the country.
Today, Turkey is going through a severe economic crisis under a government mired in corruption. The popular masses are getting poorer and poorer as their purchasing power decreases. The youth are worried about their social and economic future. Under these conditions, it is possible and necessary to extend the street politics to the demands for social justice and equality of large segments of the laboring classes.
Yet, both the socialist left and the trade union movement in Turkey are perhaps at the weakest moment in their history to lead the current popular democratic upsurge forward. True, the socialist student and youth organizations have played a leading role, especially in mobilizing university youth and breaking down police barricades. However, many socialist and communist organizations at present do not have any organizational or political work among the broad oppressed and laboring masses. Socialists, especially in the last decade, have not been successful in developing alternative means and strategies of struggle against the attacks of the increasingly repressive regime. Most forces on the left recognize that there is a serious problem, but they are still searching for a correct tactical approach to overcome the present impasse.
The same is true of the left-leaning trade union movement. During the protests, young people in particular took to social media to call for a general strike. But these calls did not lead to anything. In recent years, independent trade unions, often led by socialists, have developed successful practices of organizing and collective action at the local and workplace level. But at present there are no large, national trade unions in Turkey capable of organizing a call for a general or at least a sectoral strike. So far, the traditional trade union movement is not an integral part of the growing popular democratic upsurge.
The breakthrough in the current popular democratic upsurge, beyond bourgeois-democratic limits and towards demands of social liberation, depends on the increase of the weight and influence of the socialists within the movement. What is urgently needed for socialists is an ideological/programmatic renewal, interaction with the new elements of the burgeoning democratic popular upsurge, and the development of new means of communication, discourse and methods, drawing of course on the achievements of past socialist experiences. Street politics has returned to the Turkish political scene and the reign of fear created by the AKP-MHP coalition has been shaken. Much will depend on whether the socialist left is able to rebuild and restructure itself, base itself in the laboring classes, and influence the popular movement while maintaining its organizational and ideological independence.
Onurcan Ülker studied political science and China studies in Ankara and Beijing. He has been living in a small town in Turkey and doing both mental and manual work. He supports every right of the Palestinians to resist the genocidal war imposed on them and firmly believes that one day, from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. For comments, criticisms and suggestions, please contact him at onurcanulker[at]gmail.com. Other pieces by Onurcan on this blog can be read here and here.
