A class analytic approach to the Gezi Park events: Challenging the ‘middle class’ myth

Abstract

On 31 May 2013, what began as a localised demonstration against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul escalated into anti-government protests of unprecedented form and scale in Turkey’s modern history. The class configuration of the Gezi Park events occupied the forefront of discussions within and outside the Turkish left. Mainstream accounts branded the events as an uprising of ‘middle classes’ concerned almost exclusively with secularism. Drawing on a Poulantzasian/Wrightian framework, we argue that the Gezi Park events can be reduced neither to a middle-class nor a secularism-centered uprising. They represent, instead, an initiative of various wage-earning class fractions led by service-sector employees and the educated youth, which rests on socioeconomic grievances of proletarianisation under neoliberalism.

Keywords

AKP class capacities class fractions contradictory class locations Gezi Park Turkey

Introduction

The by now well known Gezi Park protests were sparked on 31 May 2013, as an instance of collective action of an unprecedented intensity in the history of modern Turkey. The events at the park soon turned into a nationwide cycle of protests in reaction to the demolition of a public park (Gezi Park) at the heart of Istanbul. Before first light that Friday morning, the park was raided by the police in order to end the occupation of the space by a few hundred environmentalists, who were objecting to its destruction to make way for a grandiose municipal urban renewal project. As the day came to a close, streets and squares throughout the country were taken over by a spontaneous collectivity that brought together hundreds of thousands of people, comprised of various groups opposing what they identified as the increasing authoritarianism and conservatism of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). A humble urban park was thus elevated into the stronghold and emblem of resistance against the socially interventionist rule of the government, and most of all, to the paternalism of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Gürcan & Peker 2014, 2015).

The sudden and unprompted nature of the protests took specialists on Turkey by surprise, as did its unforeseen scale and resourcefulness. On the morning of 27 May 2013, earthmovers had started demolishing the park, which at that point was just one of the AKP’s many urban renewal projects, undertaken without significant popular reaction. Tweets and Facebook posts on the same day served to raise consciousness and call people to action. The next day, more and more people, mostly young, began to convene in the park with tents, books, musical instruments and protest signs, launching an unlikely festival surrounded by bulldozers and police forces. It was on 28 May that the emblematic image of the ‘lady in red’ being ruthlessly tear-gassed in the face by a police officer gained national and international coverage. On 29 May, the PM spoke at the opening ceremony of Istanbul’s third bridge, yet another urban renewal project imposed in a top-down manner: ‘Do whatever you want in Gezi Park. We have made our decision’ (Sabah News 2013a). Taking their cue from the PM, the police began burning tents in the morning of 30 May. As the weekend approached, police violence triggered higher and higher levels of popular participation to support Gezi Park, causing nationwide anger and agitation. On the evening of 31 May, finally, the streets and public spaces were filled by the masses (Gürcan & Peker 2014, 2015).

In the course of the following few weeks, more than 2.5 million people, who were stigmatised as ‘a handful of marauders’ by Erdoğan, assembled in 79 cities. What came to be known as ‘disproportionate’ police violence inflicted more than 7,500 injuries and 5 deaths (Al Jazeera 2013; Deutsche Welle 2013; Hürriyet Daily News 2013a 2013b; Today’s Zaman 2013). In addition to the deaths, 6 people were severely injured, 106 suffered from head injuries, and 11 people lost an eye (Turkish Medical Association 2013). In total, 3,000 tons of pressurized water were shot at the protesters haphazardly by the police, along with 150,000 gas bombs (Haber7News 2013a). All in all, 13.5 million tweets were shared using some combination of the supportive tags #direngeziparki, #occupygezi, #direnankara, #direntaksim and #direngezi (CNN-TURK 2013) (‘diren’ means ‘resist’ in Turkish).

A class analytic lens to assess the extent of presence and domination of classes and class fractions is particularly illuminating in analysing the nature and orientation of social mobilisation (Borras Jr, Edelman & Kay 2008: 25). This is one of the reasons why the class configuration of the Gezi Park vents occupied the forefront of discussions in both leftist and mainstream media. Mainstream accounts contended to brand the Gezi Park vents as an uprising of ‘middle classes’ concerned almost exclusively with secularism. Paul Mason from the BBC portrayed the Gezi events as the revolt of ‘secular middle classes’, albeit with the participation of a minority of urban poor youth (Mason 2013). The Economist echoed that by stating that ‘the young middle class … chafes against the religious conservatism of the prime minister’ (Economist 2013). In a similar manner, Anthony Faiola and Paula Moura of the Washington Post spoke of ‘the summer of middle-class discontent’ in response to ‘the encroaching power of Islam’ (Faiola & Moura 2013). Bill Keller of the New York Times joined the chorus to call the protesters the ‘educated haves who are in some ways the principal beneficiaries of the regimes they now reject’ (Keller 2013); and Bohn and Bayrasli in the Wall Street Journal depicted the protesters as ‘the ‘white’ secular elite’ that eat ‘gourmet pizza’, and who are against the ‘“Black Turks” a more pious lower class’ (Bohn & Bayrasli 2013).

The ‘middle class’ account was also used as a strategic tool of framing by government circles in Turkey, either to underline the AKP’s political and economic successes in supposedly raising the expectations of middle classes, or to discredit the protesters as a well-off elite (with, it is argued, no respect for religion). The AKP’s deputy chairman Süleyman Soylu, for instance, held that middle-class membership of the party in Turkey supposedly reached 43.5 million (59 per cent of the population) thanks to the economic growth achieved under the AKP government, which explains the middle-class influence in Turkish politics (Erandaç 2013). The pro-government Anadolu Agency, similarly, linked the protests to Turkey’s being an ‘emergent power’ and a ‘regional force’, but unlike Brazil, protests here ‘are not based on social injustices’ given their middle-class character (TGRT News 2013). In order to discredit the protestors as privileged middle classes, the PM Erdoğan himself referred to them as a whisky-sipping, Bosphorus-gazing elite: a minority ‘upper-crust … imposing their ways on the country’ (BBC Turkish 2013; Star News 2013). He also insisted that they ‘drank beer in mosques’ or ‘harassed women with headscarves’ in order to highlight their ‘irreligiousness’, despite a lack of evidence for this (Hürriyet Daily News 2013c). Many pro-government intellectuals followed his lead by framing the protests as the secular ‘white Turks’ reclaiming their privileged status after the AKP had displaced their political domination in the last decade, although still helping them prosper economically (Haber 7 News 2013b; Sabah News 2013b).

An academic elaboration of these ideas came from the French sociologist Loïc Wacquant, when he visited Turkey in January 2014 to give a talk on the Gezi Park protests at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul. Wacquant’s argument is summarised in the following quote: ‘In Gezi we saw a fraction of the Istanbul population, the new cultural bourgeoisie of intellectuals, urban professionals, the urban middle class rising to assert the rights of cultural capital … We see bearers of cultural capital, the new cultural bourgeoisie of the city rising, and in a sense protesting this and wanting to propose a different use of the construction of the city’ (cited in Göker 2014). Wacquant’s geographic blindness, which reduces the scope of the Gezi Park protests to Istanbul – and even to the Park itself – neglecting the millions who took the streets across the country, is a central problem that distorts the rest of his analysis. Relatedly, his culturally defined designation of ‘elite middle classes’ remains indifferent to the disruptive nature of the protests. The counter-hegemonic expressions of the movement against neoliberal economic, political, and ideological domination in the country are consequently overlooked. Unsurprisingly, Wacquant’s reasoning leads him to the conclusion that this ‘new bourgeois’ movement was utterly exclusionary vis-à-vis lower classes, to actively prevent their integration into the sphere of collective mobilisation. A quick look at the poor neighborhoods that actively fought the police for weeks, and the modest background of the protesters killed in Istanbul, Ankara, Hatay and Eskişehir suggests a very different empirical reality. Yet the deficiency of Wacquant’s interpretation is theoretical as much as it is empirical. As Saraçoğlu (2014) notes, in addition to equating the Gezi Park protests to the park and to the demands of a ‘cultural elite’, Wacquant’s automatic derivation of the movement’s political scope and meaning from its members’ assumed position in social stratification echoes rational choice determinism. As a result, the evident counter-hegemonic potentialities of the Gezi Park protests against neoliberal forces not only remain unexplained in Wacquant’s perspective, but they are consciously ignored to the extent that they do not fit his culturalist framework.

The common denominator of all these ‘middle class’ references is their taking of the term as given without providing any definition for it, let alone offering tools for its empirical operationalisation. Such lack of elaboration is partly due to the journalistic and politically motivated nature of the abovementioned sources (except for Wacquant’s), yet this makes the constant repetition of the term ‘middle classes’ an even more problematic truism for the analysis of the events. In consideration of the inadequate theoretical and empirical depth of class discussions around the Gezi Park events, this paper seeks to provide a Marxist framework of class analysis to make sense of the events in the context of the neoliberal transformation of class structures and ideologies in Turkey. We argue that instead of the so-called ‘middle classes’, it was an alliance of various wage-earning class fractions that was the catalyst for the Gezi Park events. This alliance was led by service-sector employees and the educated youth, and comprised white- and blue-collar workers.

Neoliberalism here appears as a key process in debunking the myth of middle classes and revealing the class nature of the protests. In its most general terms, we refer to ‘neoliberalism’ as a theory of political economic practices, which holds that ‘human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’ (Harvey 2005: 2). As a response to capitalism’s political and economic crisis of the 1970s, neoliberalism is primarily a political project initiated in the 1980s to reconstitute the circumstances of capital accumulation and to reinstate the power of economic elites (Harvey 2005: 19). Indeed, a rigorous grasp of neoliberal practices requires the taking into account of the particularities of uneven geographies and the varying ways in which states adapt ‘variegated’ policy frameworks shaped by the given balance of class forces and cultural configurations (Peck & Theodore 2012). In this paper, we are particularly concerned with the Turkish case in which neoliberalisation goes hand in hand with a process of proletarianisation and an Islamic reconfiguration of society. In order to show the extent to which Turkish neoliberalism contributes to proletarianisation, we engage with data on unemployment, youth unemployment, part-time work, decreasing levels of unionisation, the informal sector, the expansion of wage labour, micro-debt, life satisfaction, job security, etc. We then deal with how this process of proletarianisation is politically and ideologically maintained so as to reproduce neoliberalism and class incapacities based on Islamic codes.

Going back to the case of the Gezi Park events, there have been two interrelated major factors that explain why specifically wage-earning working-class fractions took the lead in the uprisings against the AKP’s socially-interventionist neoliberal project. First, the economic conditions as well as the structural and organisational capacities of most segments of working classes have been severely undermined under neoliberalisation. Regardless of income levels, working classes share increasingly precarious economic realities, where elevated productivity and exploitation rates are met with heightened job insecurity and consumer debt to maintain a decent life, accompanied by low unionisation and high unemployment levels. Second, although this reflects the situation of working classes nationwide, political and ideological alliances specific to Turkish neoliberalism rendered the relatively more educated and secularly oriented wage-earning fractions more prominent in the uprisings. The AKP-centered Islamic-neoliberal power bloc placed an important segment of the working classes in a politico-ideologically subordinate position through culturally legitimised paternalistic labour relationships, conservative trade unionism, religious-clientelist aid networks, and other ideological state apparatuses. The free articulation of class grievances was thus more likely for the secularly oriented fractions that are relatively free from these influences yet still suffering from exploitation, precariousness and indebtedness. Moreover, AKP’s intensified authoritarianism and conservatism that expanded social interventionism and exclusion based on cultural-ideological standards further threatened the life space and life chances of these latter fractions. A combination of these economic, political, and cultural-ideological grievances culminated in the Gezi Park protests. The Gezi Park events, therefore, cannot be reduced to a ‘middle class’ or a purely ideological ‘secularist’ uprising. It is, however, a mostly secular class reaction against neoliberal authoritarianism and proletarianisation with Islamic politico-ideological characteristics in Turkey.

It must be noted that presenting a comprehensive account of class structures in Turkey or a full-fledged analysis of the Gezi Park events is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, the focus here is on the neoliberal transformation of class structures and ideologies that created the conditions of possibility for the uprisings for certain class fractions. Accordingly, the first section of the paper is devoted to a theoretical discussion of Nicos Poulantzas and Erik Olin Wright’s work on class analysis. This section focuses in particular on Poulantzas’s understanding of ‘class fractions’ and the significance of politico-ideological processes in the ‘extended reproduction of social classes’, adding to Wright’s concepts such as ‘proletarianisation’ and ‘class capacities’. Drawing on these concepts alongside data from TurkStat, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Bank, the second section provides a critique of the ‘middle class’ analyses. Here, it is noted that an alliance of various wage-earning class fractions triggered the uprisings, sharing a fate of exploitation, precariousness, proletarianisation and indebtedness. This section also features an examination of economic factors that undermine the structural capacities of the working class. The third section, finally, expands on the political and ideological specificities of Turkish neoliberalism to explain the centrality of secularly oriented class fractions in the uprisings against the AKP’s authoritarianism.

Class analysis: A theoretical framework

One of the greatest ironies of the literature on historical materialism is that theories of social class constitute one of its least developed areas, despite the centrality of the concept of class. Since the last quarter of the 20th century, two of the most rigorous attempts to define criteria for the operationalisation of social classes were proposed by Nicos Poulanztas and Erik Olin Wright. Therefore, our class analysis of the Gezi Park events will make use of Poulantzas and Wright’s framework.

Poulantzas defines social classes as ‘groupings of social agents’ identified principally by their place in the ‘production process’, as well as by their location in ‘political and ideological relations’ (Poulantzas 1975a: 14-15). Poulantzas thus contends that economic position is not the sole criterion to assess class structures, but class relations also rely heavily on political and ideological factors. We believe that such emphasis is crucial for the analysis of the Gezi Park events, especially when it comes to the question of why secularly oriented wage earning classes instead of traditional working class movements (i.e. industrial proletariat and manual labourers) played a significant role in the protests. This question will be dealt with in the second section.

Another important merit of Poulantzas’s work is to have pointed to the need to take into account the structural and subjective locations of ‘class fractions’ for a more nuanced class analysis. Accordingly, Poulantzas argues that class structures are made up of a number of fractions or strata. What he calls ‘autonomous fractions’ refers to social ensembles of the same class that are capable of acting as relatively independent units on the basis of their place in the production process and political-ideological relations. Poulantzas distinguishes, for instance, between commercial, industrial and financial fractions of the bourgeoisie (Poulantzas 1975b: 84-85). Other well-known examples of class fractions are ‘working class aristocracy’ and ‘petty bourgeoisie’ (Poulantzas 1975a: 15-16, 270; 1975b: 84). This nuanced framework for the analysis of social classes problematises the utilisation of generic concepts such as ‘middle classes’, which has turned into a truism for the Gezi Park events. As Poulantzas puts it: ‘the transformations which capitalist societies are … undergoing are supposed to have given rise to a vast “intermediate class” which comprises all social groups except the bourgeoisie and proletariat and which, by virtue of its numerical weight, provides the real pillar upholding modern societies. As has been noted, we are here faced with several classes: there is no justification at present for claiming that these intermediate classes are fused into a single class’ (Poulantzas 2008: 194). In the case of Turkey, class fractioning in the economic and political-ideological level is important in understanding, not only the increasing role of the educated and secularly oriented segments of wage earning classes, but also the strong influence of the Islamic segments of Turkish bourgeoisie and different variants of ‘Islamist-capitalist’ ideology over the country’s entire class structure. These questions will be addressed more rigorously in the third section.

Wright proposes a more sophisticated theory of social class based on a critical and expanded reading of Poulanztas’s work. Wright’s main objection to Poulantzas is that the latter offers rigid criteria for distinguishing workers from the bourgeoisie. Poulantzas argues that any labourer who is not in the ‘productive sector’ (i.e. manual labour) belongs to the petty bourgeoisie, and managers are necessarily part of the bourgeoisie regardless of ‘contradictory class locations’ (Wright 1978: 35, 61). On the contrary, depending on the economic, political, and ideological specificities of a social formation, Wright propounds that ‘unproductive’ wage workers such as service-sector and white-colour employees, technicians, supervisors, civil servants etc. may as well be included in the fractions of the working class. This calls for a wider definition of working classes, which also applies to the case of contemporary Turkey. Accordingly, ‘the working class, even if defined narrowly, remains the largest class location in the class structure of … capitalist countries, and, if it is extended to include those contradictory locations closest to it, then it constitutes a substantial majority of the labor force’ (Wright 1997: 54).

We hold that Wright’s critique of Poulantzas’s superficial distinction between productive/unproductive and manual/mental labour is all the more valid in contemporary societies where the service sector dominates as a category of wage employment. The exploitation, precariousness and common life chances of non-blue-collar wage-earners render them as a fraction of working classes. Wright’s larger definition of working classes is relevant to the case of Turkey, where the service and the informal sectors constitute a significant portion of the working force. The shared destiny of such various wage-earning fractions in capitalist societies is captured in the Marxist parlance by the term ‘proletarianiation’. Wright and Singelmann define proletarianisation as an underlying tendency in capitalist societies whereby work is ‘becoming more routinized and degraded, with less autonomy and responsibility for the worker’, which goes hand in hand with ‘the complex process by which non-working-class locations are destroyed or transformed and working-class locations created’ (Wright & Singelmann 1982: 176, 183). As we will discuss in the next section, it has been documented that the Turkish workforce has been going through an intensive process of proletarianisation since the 1980s (Kaya 2008). Kaya holds that, as a long-term phenomenon in the country, ‘proletarianization occurred through a transition from Turkey’s agrarian tradition, a relative decline of the public sector, and an expansion of classes who sell their labor without workplace authority’ (Kaya 2008: 161). Accordingly, Kaya reveals that the share of agricultural employment in the total workforce declined from 53.6 per cent in 1980 to 29 per cent in 2005, whereas the share of service-employment sector rose from 25.9 per cent to 46 per cent in the same interval (Kaya 2008). As far as proletarianisation in Turkey is concerned, our analysis will draw attention to the boosting role of precarious work and unemployment as well as the rise of a working-class segment made up of clerks, service and sales workers and unqualified employees as the core of Turkish working class.

The alliance of class fractions takes on a greater significance when social groups of ‘contradictory class locations’ (Wright 2005: 8-10) are included in the picture, which ‘represents positions which are torn between the basic contradictory class relations of capitalist society’ (Wright 1978: 62). That is to say that are many class fractions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat that share attributes of the class locations above and below them, which would include groups such as managers and supervisors, semi-autonomous employees, and small employers (Wright 1978: 63). This nuanced picture renders politico-ideological struggle crucial in the establishment of various class alliances, given that class positions are not fixed rigidly to particular class ideologies. The active participation of white-collar groups to the Gezi Park events to protest neoliberal practices demonstrates that flexibility. What Wright calls ‘ideological class formations’ highlights this point, which holds that ‘a map of the ways in which class-linked organizations of different ideological and political profiles penetrate different parts of the class structure would provide a basic description of the pattern of class formation’ (Wright 1997: 222). Accordingly, our analysis will elaborate on the political and ideological underpinnings of the Gezi Park protests in the third section, which contributed to the alliance of service-sector, white-collar and blue-collar workers, as well as students and educated youth.

Lastly, Wright’s arguments on class capacities should be briefly addressed. For class consciousness and class formation to emerge, social agents need to establish diverse social relations that link themselves within a common class location. This constitutes the core of ‘class capacities’. Wright identifies two kinds of class capacities, namely structural and organisational capacities. Structural capacities concern the capabilities to ensure the unity of class agents shaped in a particular ensemble of social relations. A classic example to structural (in)capacity would be the evolution of capitalism towards the creation of job hierarchies to undermine the unity of the working class (Wright 1978). In Turkey, structural class capacities are undermined by the precarisation of work, indebtedness, and jobless growth. Organisational capacities simply refer to the conscious organisation of the members of a class, and involve the organisational structure of such spheres as trade unionism, party politics, and neighborhood mobilisation (Wright 1978). The third section reveals that the organisational class capacities of the traditional working class in Turkey are undermined by the dominance of paternalistic labour relations and Islamism, which are consolidated by the pro-government and/or Islamic media and educational institutions. In the absence of a structurally unified traditional working class, the young and relatively educated sectors of the rising wage-earning fractions appear to be more likely to come into prominence thanks to their accumulated social and intellectual resources.

Debunking the myth of ‘middle classes’

Returning to the case of Turkey, two immediate objections to mainstream ‘middle class’ perspectives came from Korkut Boratav, a renowned Turkish Marxist economist, and Mustafa Kemal Coskun of Ankara University. Boratav and Coskun caution against the use of the term ‘middle classes’, given its lack of explanatory power (Radikal Daily News 2013b; Sendika News 2013a). Proposing that the Gezi Park events constitute an inherently class-based collective action ‘against predatory capitalism, … the bourgeoisie, and its state’, Boratav provided an alternative explanation:

When we look at the triggering incident, the start of the Taksim project, … there is a matured class reaction: highly qualified and educated workers, together with their future class comrades (students), and with the inclusion of professionals; confronting … a massive urban plundering attempt by the … bourgeoisie and the political power unified with it. (Sendika News 2013a)

According to Boratav, students and the educated youth, who were among the driving forces in the Gezi Park events, cannot be automatically branded as ‘middle class’ actors in consideration of their class roots. Their class character is to be further explored in view of their future class trajectories (Sendika News 2013a). Boratav goes on to assert that the qualified constituents of the service sector are also to be considered in the status of subordinate wageworkers, due to increasing proletarianisation. Many educated wageworkers increasingly find themselves in the ranks of unqualified service-sector jobs as salesclerks, caretakers, secretaries, or more precisely ‘office, sales, security personnel and staff members’:

The productiveness of their branches of activity … does not alter our point of discussion. As wage-laborers, they either create surplus value directly for their employers or engage in a labor activity that enables their employers to … expropriate surplus value … from different business sectors. And, in the broadest sense, they are the elements of real or reserve labor armies. In short, objectively in today’s conditions, their existence … belongs to the working-class to constitute an important proportion of that class. (Sendika News 2013a)

Similarly, Coskun criticises the salience of terms such as ‘youth’ and ‘middle classes’ as the leading agents of the Gezi Park events. He emphasises that ‘youth’ is not an explanatory concept without a close examination of its socioeconomic and political constituents’ (Radikal Daily News 2013b). Coskun went on to hold that the protestors’ ‘efficient use of social media, high cultural capital, and development of new resistance methods are not indicators of their middle class background’ (Radikal Daily News 2013b). Coskun, instead, argued that the protests brought together various fractions of wage-earning classes. This includes the unqualified fractions that work in ‘part-time, temporary, volatile, low-paid’ jobs, as well as upper-level industrial workers and ‘well-educated, foreign language speaking’ fractions that are relatively better-paid (Radikal Daily News 2013b). Students and the unemployed, who were actively involved in the protests, are the class comrades of these groups. Theoretically speaking, Erik Olin Wright clarifies the situation of these groups as follows: ‘The class locations of students … must be defined by the class location into which they will move upon the completion of their studies … It is the fundamental class interests of such trajectories … which defines their class location’, which is also valid for ‘the reserve army of the unemployed’ (Wright 1978: 92-93). It is relevant to note here that according to a survey conducted by GENAR (a research and consultancy agency) in the Taksim region in June 2013 (as the protests were ongoing), 53.8 per cent of the protesters declared themselves to be wage-earners, whereas 24.1 per cent stated that they were students, and 10.8 per cent unemployed (GENAR 2013). These figures were recorded as 52 per cent, 37 per cent, 6 per cent, respectively, in research carried out by KONDA, another research and consultancy agency, around the same days (KONDA 2013).

The commonality of all these working-class fractions that took the lead during the Gezi Park events is their increasingly precarious position under neoliberalism (Aydin 2013; Burkev 2013; Özugurlu 2011). In Turkey, only 9.21 per cent of the work force is unionised, which corresponds to 1,001,671 people (Kılıç 2013). Moreover, the undermining of the organisational capacities of the working classes is closely interlinked with the decline of their structural capacities due to four major factors: unemployment (at 9.2 per cent in 2012, according to ILO), privatisation, sub-contracting, outsourcing and contract manufacturing (ILO 2013; Koç 2009, 2010). These take place against the background of Turkey’s ‘jobless-growth pattern’ in the last decade, where ‘rapid rates of growth were accompanied by high rates of unemployment and low participation rates’ (Yeldan 2009: 3). In this context, a major tendency that contributes to the undermining of the Turkish working class’s decreasing structural capacity is the precarisation of work, to the extent that ‘growing numbers of people are traveling vendors, small retailers, or craftspeople’ occupied with a ‘nomadic activity’ (Yücesan-Ozdemir 2012: 133). The extent to which the precariousness of work is expanding can also be assessed by the drastic increase in part-time employment, from 6.6 per cent in 2002 to 11.7 per cent in 2011(OECD 2013b).

In order to unveil the factors that cause lower levels of structural class capacities for the Turkish working class, it is possible to provide a rough estimation of the size of the informal sector by calculating the sum of self-employed and unpaid family workers. According to the available data, between 2004 and 2012, the average percentage of own account (or self-employed) workers and unpaid family workers are respectively 21.1 per cent and 13.8 per cent, which equals to an average informal sector size of 34.8 per cent of total employment in the same interval (TurkStat 2013b). It goes without saying that such a high level of informality is a major factor that hinders the structural class capacity of the Turkish working class. The figures demonstrate that at least a third of the total workforce in Turkey is informally employed, and stands as disorganised and isolated from the rest of the working population. As the third section will exemplify, the overall precariousness and isolation of the workforce is one of the factors that make it particularly susceptible to – and dependent on – religious-clientelist aid networks, which the AKP uses as a strategic tool of pacification.

It is worth exploring the composition of wageworkers and service-sector employees, since they constitute the main catalyst of the Gezi Park events. TurkStat’s Household Labor Force Survey estimates that 51 per cent of the labour force contributes to the service sector, whilst the contribution of the industrial, construction and agricultural sectors are respectively 19 per cent, 6.3 per cent and 22.4 per cent (TurkStat 2013a). Another set of findings of the same survey indicates that employers constitute only 4.8 per cent of the work force, whilst 19.2 per cent, 64.3 per cent and 11.7 per cent are respectively own account workers, wageworkers and unpaid family workers (TurkStat 2013b). World Bank data on wage labour, moreover, illustrates that wage labour has expanded between 2002 and 2011, from 49.79 per cent to 61.7 per cent (World Bank 2013).

A major grievance of wage labour in Turkey is growing levels of indebtedness, especially through credit cards, housing, other types of microcredit, and personal loans. A study by Karaçimen (2014: 163) showed that:

since 2003, there has been a rapid increase in household sector borrowing from financial institutions. As a proportion of Turkey’s gross domestic product … the total of consumer loans and credit card debt increased sharply from 1.8 per cent in 2002 to 18.7 per cent in 2012 … Strikingly, household debt reached 49 per cent of disposable personal income in 2012, implying around a seven-fold increase since the end of 2003.

According to the author, these numbers speak to a historically unique tendency in Turkey caused by extreme neoliberal financialisation in the last decade. Likewise, according to Carol Matlack and Steve Bryant of Bloomberg Businessweek, more than 30 per cent of Turkish people’s daily expenses are paid for using credit cards, with interest rates as high as 29 per cent, which explains the alarming increase in credit-card debt, recorded as 23 per cent in 2010 and 20 per cent in 2011 (Matlack & Bryant 2011). There are ‘an estimated 3.7 million delinquent cardholders, and 2.5 million others who make only their required minimum monthly payments, which are generally less than half the balance’ (Matlack & Bryant 2011). Accordingly, the Bank revenue coming from commission on credit fees and transactions increased by 332 per cent between 2003 and 2013 (Vatan Daily News 2013). The number of credit cards under scrutiny reached more than 1.5 million, with a debt of around 3.6 billion liras (Vatan Daily News 2013). These figures of skyrocketing indebtedness are an indicator that wage-earning classes depend more and more on a vicious circle of debt mechanisms to maintain a decent livelihood.

Moreover, according to the OECD’s Better Life Index, which seeks to measure wellbeing rates in OECD countries, Turkish society’s living conditions have considerably low rankings in almost every field, which undermines the validity of the affluent middle-class thesis in Turkey. Life satisfaction rate in Turkey, for instance, is 5.3 out of 10, which is below the OECD average of 6.6, ranking Turkey 33rd among 36 countries. It ranks last among 36 countries in the ratings for job security and employment, work-life balance, and housing. With regard to employment, the Index mentions that ‘people in Turkey work 1,877 hours a year, more than the OECD average of 1,776 hours’, and that ‘around 46% of employees work very long hours, much higher than the OECD average of 9%’. Lastly, Turkey is among the last five countries in terms of income levels, education quality, and environment; and ranks 30th for social inequality (OECD 2013a). These statistics speak directly to the grievances of wage-earning classes.

For descriptive purposes, which would facilitate the portrayal of wage-earning class fractions, it is worth briefly discussing the data about the percentage distribution of employees and their average monthly gross wage. Professionals represent the highest monthly average gross earning (2683 liras) next to legislators, senior officials and managers (3710 liras). According to the latest figures of TurkStat, the annual average gross earning of technicians and associate professionals, clerks, service sales workers, and elementary (unqualified) occupations is respectively 1873, 1596, 1099 and 1015 liras (TurkStat 2010). The same figures also indicate that clerks, service and sales workers and unqualified employees constitute the core of the Turkish working class (43.1 per cent of total employees), with a representation of 13.4 per cent, 14.3 per cent and 15.4 per cent, respectively. The ratio of clerks, service and sales workers and unqualified employees was recorded at 35.9 per cent in 2006, suggesting a gradual rise in this segment of the working class in Turkey. Among technicians and associate professionals, only 1.4 per cent has a privileged position in terms of both authority and wage disparity, which amounts to a difference of 668 liras. Greater disparity of authority and wage is however observed in clerks (TurkStat 2010). Overall, a majority of clerks, service and sales workers constitute various fractions of the working class, as opposed to the so-called ‘middle classes’, a term that is used to denote any group that is between the uppermost and lowermost segments of society.

Considering the role of students in the Gezi Park events, it would also be worth taking a glance at the composition of Turkish youth. Turkey has one of the highest youth populations in the world, with a rate of 16.8 per cent, exceeding the USA (14.1 per cent) and exceeded by Brazil (17.2 per cent) and Mexico (18.3 per cent) (TurkStat 2012). However, the schooling rate in higher education for youth between the age of 18 and 22 is only 35 per cent. It is striking to note that, according to TurkStat data, youth unemployment between the years 2004 and 2012 was at an average of 20.3 per cent (suggesting that in the youth population, 1 in every 5 is unemployed), and was recorded as 17.5 per cent for the year 2012 (TurkStat 2013c). An assessment of World Bank data between 1991 and 2008 makes possible the assumption that nowadays unemployment of those with ‘tertiary education’, a category that was active during the Gezi Park events, is an important aspect of unemployment. Accordingly, in the last two decades, the share of tertiary education unemployment among the total unemployed population in Turkey rose from 4.9 per cent in 1991 to 9.6 per cent in 2000, and to 13.9 per cent in 2008 (World Bank 2013).

If one takes into account Boratav’s previously discussed argument that Turkey’s educated youth feels uneasy about high levels of unemployment and being confined to unqualified jobs, one could understand the reasons behind its leading the Gezi Park events. That such economic grievances were not openly addressed by the youth in the protest wave does not contradict the class character of the movement, and nor does it justify approaching the Gezi Park protests in purely culturalist terms. Burkev mentions that Turkish youth ‘can hardly go on with their daily lives without depending on the support of their parents. Yet they don’t accept themselves as a member of the proletarian class. They mostly do not think and behave with respect to classical proletarian patterns’ (Burkev 2013); which was a factor that strengthened the myth of the ‘middle classes’ in mainstream analyses. However, as Eken (2014: 431) puts it, ‘from the perspective of the question of agency, this must be called a “proletarian” movement: it is the revolt of those for whom life has become an oppressive term of survival’.

Overall, the statistics discussed in this section speak to the invalidity of the mainstream arguments that categorise myriad working-class fractions as a so-called ‘middle class’. Moreover, the data points to a long-term tendency of proletarianisation of the Turkish labour force, rather than the growth of an affluent class. Although the structural capacity of the Turkish working class to act in unity is undermined by several factors, the young and relatively educated segments of wage-earning fractions had the advantage of mobilising against the government thanks to their politico-ideological and organisational resources critical toward the AKP’s hegemony. This, nevertheless, does not in any way make them the ‘cultural bourgeoisie/elite’. The next section will carry this analysis one level further and reveal how structural class (in)capacities find their counterpart in organisational ones in consideration of the political and ideological dispositions of working class fractions.

Political and ideological dispositions of working-class fractions under Turkish neoliberalism

The assessments so far serve as an answer to how people are objectively located in terms of production processes. The analysis of fractions reveals that a loose portrayal of wageworkers and service-sector employees as ‘middle classes’ cannot deliver an accurate explanation of class structures. Instead, an alliance of wage-earning fractions is visible in the Gezi Park events, which was led by service-sector employees, educated youth and white- and blue-collar groups. That the relatively qualified wageworkers contributed largely to the protests should not come as a surprise. As Poulantzas writes, when it comes to social services, precarious working conditions and job security, ‘middle-level-salaried workers are, by their nature, particularly sensitive to the objectives of a struggle in these domains; the base of their alliance with the working class is therefore considerably extended’ (Poulantzas 2008: 318). In Turkey, white-collar groups such as Plaza Eylem Platformu and Uyanma Saati have been addressing concerns of routinisation, alienation and precariousness of work, which can be viewed as being among the constituents of proletarianisation (Plaza Eylem Platformu 2013; Uyanma Saati 2013).

We contend that a political-ideologically informed class analysis is required to further explain the prominence of these class fractions, and particularly the largely secular orientation of the protests. This section thus focuses more on how people subjectively locate themselves in relation to extra-economic factors. As previously mentioned, Poulantzas holds that politics and ideology play an important role in understanding the class dynamics of a given social formation. He suggests that ‘we are not faced, … on the one hand with an economic “structure” that alone defines class places, and on the other hand with a class struggle extending to the political and ideological domain … From the start structural class determination involves economic, political and ideological class struggle, and these struggles are all expressed in the form of class positions in the conjuncture’ (Poulantzas 1975a: 16). The rise of the aforementioned class fractions, therefore, cannot be reduced to mere economic concerns caused by intensive neoliberalisation and proletarianisation. It is also related to the reproduction of the relations of political and ideological domination and subordination via various state apparatuses under the AKP government (Poulantzas 1975a: 17, 21, 25).

In the case of Turkish neoliberalism, the authoritarian social and spatial interventionism of the government along Islamist lines was a central politico-ideological element that further agitated class grievances (Gürcan & Peker 2014, 2015). Gezi Park, therefore, was not simply an ideologically motivated ‘secularist’ movement, but a secularly oriented class reaction to neoliberalism’s alliance with Islamism in the particularity of Turkey. Slavoj Žižek touched upon this aspect of the protest:

It is crucial that we don’t see the Turkish protests merely as a secular civil society rising up against an authoritarian Islamist regime supported by a silent Muslim majority. What complicates the picture is the protests’ anti-capitalist thrust: protesters intuitively sense that free-market fundamentalism and fundamentalist Islam are not mutually exclusive. The privatisation of public space by an Islamist government shows that the two forms of fundamentalism can work hand in hand. (Žižek 2013)

Therefore, the AKP’s Islamic neoliberalism can be understood ‘as an example of how … political Islam adjusted to neoliberal restructuring project within the process of globalization’ marked by a strong ‘articulation of identity-based feelings of exclusion for different political projects’ (Bedirhanoğlu & Yalman 2010: 110, 112). The bourgeois-Islamic reorganisation of political and civil society under the AKP government served to refashion Turkish society in line with market logic by legitimising neoliberalism through Islamic-conservative codes (Blad & Koçer 2012; Tuğal 2011). One of the underlying objectives of the Turkish neoliberal project under the AKP era has been to veil class-based politics by atomising working classes along politico-ideological lines (Bağımsız Sosyal Bilimciler 2009: 28-29, 33; Koç 2010: 432). Accordingly, the organisational capacities of the Turkish working class have been severely undermined by the politics of identity, which are ‘putting an end to class-based politics’ (Yalman 2012: 23). Within this rhetoric, ‘the abolition of class distinctions and the emergence of an Islamic type of solidarity … guarantee social “peace and tranquility” and in this way incorporate the masses in the neoliberal program’ (Moudouros 2014: 185).

The expansion of culturally legitimised paternalistic labour practices, conservative trade unions, and Islamic social aid networks have been crucial components of the AKP’s Islamic neoliberalism. In parallel with the rise of political Islam and what can be loosely conceptualised as ‘Muslim bourgeoisies’ since the 1980s, sentiments of gratitude and paternalistic relationships between capitalists and workers have been promoted to erode class antagonisms (Buğra 1998, 2002). The concept ‘Islamic/Muslim bourgeoisies’ is used here not as a geographically distinct class fraction located in Anatolia (as opposed to Istanbul), but it rather refers to those class fractions that are politically and ideologically engaged, in an organic fashion, ‘to the project of Islamic society’ spearheaded by the AKP government (Sönmez 2010: 180). This is to imply neither the existence of inherently monolithic ‘Muslim’ and ‘secular’ class fractions, nor a necessary antagonism between them, especially given that both the ‘secular’ circles of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen Association (TÜSIAD) and ‘Islamic’ business organisations such as MÜSIAD (Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen) and TUSKON (Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists) have largely supported, and prospered under, the AKP government (Sönmez 2010: 181). For our purposes, the antagonising internal divisions among the neoliberal-Islamic power bloc in Turkey, particularly between the AKP government and the Gülen movement, will not be the central concern. Instead, we deem the conceptualisation of ‘Muslim bourgeoisies’ as significant in indicating those class fractions that are actively involved in the AKP’s transformation of society along conservative-Islamic lines, as well as the relevant ideological strategies they utilise vis-à-vis labour, which have had consequences for the structure and capacities of the Turkish working classes.

The Islamic ideological component to the expansion of flexible, non-unionised, informal, and paternalistic work relations in Turkey has been well documented (Durak 2011). ‘In this Islamic context of industrial relations, mutual trust replaces the need for a formal labor code and labor unions’, where strikes, for instance ‘clearly, do not form a part of Islamic labor market’ (Buğra 2002: 195). Given that ‘harmony and peace as opposed to conflict and controversy is what Islam preaches’, class struggle is despised in this mentality, and must be replaced by ‘feelings of solidarity … in a cultural frame of reference where Islam significantly contributes to the establishment of a shared understanding’ (Buğra 1998: 529, 533). These ideals are echoed in the articulations of Fethullah Gülen, one of the most influential religious leaders in Turkey, who exerts considerable influence over conservative capital and labour organisations: ‘The boss is on the side of the worker. … Like a family member, he provides the worker with food when he eats himself; … with clothing when he dresses himself up; and he does not impose on the worker a task that is beyond his own capacity’ (as quoted in Yıldırım 2010).

The predominance of paternalistic labour relations is heavily felt also in the growing strength of conservative and pro-AKP trade unionism. The most organised trade union in the public sector is the conservative Confederation of Public Servants’ Trade Unions (MEMUR-SEN), with 707,652 members, as compared to its leftward counterpart the Confederation of Public Workers’ Unions (KESK) with 237,180 members (Haberler News 2013). Similarly, the religious/conservative and pro-AKP trade unions of the private sector represent the largest trade unions in the country, with Türk-İş (around 702,000 members) and Hak-İş (around 166,000 members), outweighing the leftward DİSK (around 100,000) (Sendika News 2013b). According to Selma Senol and Esengül Metin of the mainstream Milliyet Daily Newspaper, the rising strength of such conservative/religious trade unions as Hak-İş and MEMUR-SEN is closely linked to the power of the AKP government, under which MEMUR-SEN, Hak-İş and Türk-İş’s membership base boosted in the last decade by 650 per cent, 40 per cent and 16 per cent, respectively; in comparison with a 14 per cent rise at DİSK and a 14 per cent decline at KESK (Senol & Metin 2013).

Conservative trade unionism greatly contributes to the reproduction of paternalistic labor relationships through the emphasis of ‘social cohesion … rather than class conflict … in full conformity with Islam’ (Buğra 2002: 199). In addition to the rise of conservative trade unionism, it must be added that Turkish trade unionism as a whole suffers from a loss of legitimacy due to severe corruption and political defeats, which further undermine the organisational capacities of the working classes (Koç 2009, 2010).

To further clarify the Islamic characteristics of neoliberalism in Turkey, the rise of ‘Muslim bourgeoisies’ should also be elaborated upon. Islamist capitalist class fractions, although clear-cut distinctions may be misleading, can be understood as ‘newly growing domestic capital groups engaged in aggressive strategies of accumulation and looking for state support in their vigorous project of further growth and integration with the world market’ (Ercan & Oğuz 2006: 652). In this regard, the Association of Independent Industrialists and Businessmen (MÜSİAD, founded in 1990, 6,500 members) and the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists (TUSKON founded in 2005, 33,260 members) must be highlighted. Establishing an organic relationship with the AKP government, MÜSİAD mobilises its financial and human resources to support the former, while the former provides the latter with state support (Baskan 2010). Such organic relationships with the state are also evident in the case of TUSKON, despite recently emerging frictions between the government and the US-headquartered Fethullah Gülen movement that controls TUSKON. ‘Although not formed by the state, [TUSKON] works closely with state institutions, sharing many functions with DEİK [Foreign Economic Relations Board of Turkey] regarding Turkey’s foreign business relations’ (Tuğal 2011: 592). It is interesting to note that in June 2013, during the Gezi Park events, conservative trade union confederations Hak-İş, Türk-İş and Memur-Sen joined the conservative business associations MÜSİAD and TUSKON (along with others) to publish a full-page message in several newspapers, calling on protesters to end the Gezi Park events. The message argued that the government ‘responded positively to the … concerns of citizens’, and that anybody protesting after this would be contributing to harming ‘Turkey’s power and image’, as well as ‘stability and economic growth’ (Anadolu Ajans 2013). The unification of Islamic business and labour against Gezi Park demonstrates their shared allegiance to the AKP government at the time.

Relatedly, another contributor to the incapacitation of a segment of Turkish working classes is the AKP’s multilayered populist/clientelist social aid networks, which function through the combined efforts of the central government, local-municipal authorities and religious brotherhoods. Karaman (2013: 3421-2) notes that ‘these aids are organized in such a way to empower the Islamic communities and the AKP as a whole,’ and they ‘cannot be thought separate from the Islamic moral philosophy of the AKP itself.’ Consequently, ‘state-administered social assistance delivered in the appearance of alms creates a relationship of indebtedness’ that prevent the development of critical perspectives toward the government and/or the market, where Islam plays a passivising cultural-ideological role in preaching docility, obedience, and gratitude. Through the AKP’s sustained and socially entrenched Islamic-patronage networks, a significant portion of the working classes in Turkey are made ultimately reliant on the government for subsistence, as they are locked in a mechanism of dependence that would prove extremely risky and costly to abandon. Combined with culturally legitimised paternalistic relations of labour exploitation and conservative trade unions, therefore, these aid networks further constrain the emergence of progressive politics of citizenship based on claiming ‘rights’.

In terms of cultural life, moreover, the growing economic and hegemonic strength of ‘Muslim bourgeoisies’ came to generate distinct tastes and consumer choices (Gümüscü 2010), which was accompanied by their significantly increased hegemonic control of various segments of civil society through the establishment of mosques, schools, universities, training centers, and student residences (Doğan 2010: 297). The development of Islamic capitalist fractions’ organic ties with the state expanded the Islamist hegemony via the proliferation of the media power, private high schools, and universities:

Excluding the Islamist television and radio stations, newspapers such as Zaman, Sabah, Yeni Safak, Türkiye, Star, Bugün, Vakit, and Taraf all have AKP and/or Gülen-affiliated ownership. By circulation, such papers represent at least 40 percent of all newspaper sales in Turkey. (Sharon-Krespin 2009)

More particularly, the domination of the media becomes all the more threatening with the self-censorship of the non-AKP media due to political and economic pressures by the government (Index on Censorship 2013). As for the field of education, the Islamist-capitalist ideology owes its expansion to a great extent to the efforts of the Gülenist movement:

some 75 percent of Turkey’s two million preparatory school students are enrolled in Gülen institutions … [Gülen] controls thousands of top-tier secondary schools, colleges, and student dormitories throughout Turkey, as well as private universities, the largest being Fatih University in Istanbul. Outside Turkey, his movement runs hundreds of secondary schools and dozens of universities in 110 countries worldwide. (Sharon-Krespin 2009)

Therefore, it is no coincidence that the Gezi protesters constantly targeted the pro-government media in their slogans and placards, the most popular of which are: ‘And they ask me why I don’t read newspapers’; Sellout media’; ‘Coward media’; ‘Our consciousness is silent due to technical issues’, and so on (Gürcan & Peker 2014, 2015).

Hand in hand with the rise of Muslim bourgeoisies went the AKP’s increasing monopolisation of the state apparatus and reshaping of civil society via state repression, which rendered Islamic-neoliberal authoritarianism an all the more central issue in the eyes of secularly oriented class fractions. At the time the AKP government came to power, the freedom, civil liberties and political rights ratings were respectively 4.5, 5 and 4 (Freedom House 2001), declining to 3.5, 4 and 3 in 2013 (Freedom House 2013). According to Freedom House, this decline was mainly due to the lack of independent judiciary, freedom of self-expression and academic freedom, censorship, and the ‘pretrial detention of thousands of individuals … in campaigns that many believe to be politically motivated’ (Freedom House 2013). Increasing authoritarianism is also reflected in skyrocketing imprisonment rates. When the AKP ‘came to power in 2002, there were 59,429 prisoners in Turkey. In just six years, the AKP nearly doubled the prison population to 103,000, which rose to 132,000 in 2012, breaking a record in Turkey’ (Buğlalılar 2012). In their second term of office after the 2007 elections, AKP initiated massive court cases such as Ergenekon, Balyoz, and KCK, launching a full-scale war against various groups of opposition. Thousands of politicians, activists, businessmen, journalists and intellectuals were arrested in the process without regard to evidence; their only commonality was their critical stance toward AKP (Freedom House 2012a 2012b; Hürriyet Daily News 2013d). Such political arbitrariness served to intimidate the opposition, and threatened the basic rights and freedoms of non-AKP supporters in the country, including the wage-earning class fractions.

The elimination of political opposition and increased censorship were accompanied by the government’s advances on social life and social space based on Islamist and neoliberal lines. The authoritarian figure of Erdoğan himself, who was then prime minister, has been central to this process. In line with Erdoğan’s remark that they ‘want to raise a religious youth’ as opposed to an ‘atheist’ one (National Post 2012), the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) has been revitalised as an ideological state apparatus in the last decade to promote the expansion of Sunni Islam in the structures of everyday life. Diyanet’s annual budget increased from 0.55 billion liras in 2002 to 1.3 billion in 2006 and 4.6 billion in 2013, which is more than the budget of many ministries; and the institution began playing a central role in the matters of family, health, and social services (Peker 2013). Diyanet also serves as an organ of religious legitimation for AKP’s socially interventionist policies. When the government sought to ban abortion in 2012, for instance, Diyanet declared that ‘abortion is murder’ (Radikal Daily News 2013a). Moreover, 17,000 new mosques have been built during the AKP rule (Independent 2013), severe alcohol restrictions have been gradually encircling secular social life (Guardian 2013), and public displays of affection are admonished (Huffington Post 2013). The government’s overhauling of the education system along religious lines in 2012 was another major concern, which, according to one AKP deputy, creates the occasion ‘to turn all schools into Imam Hatip schools’ based on Islamised curricula (VOA News 2012).

Examples of increasing Islamic social interventionism such as these further threatened the life chances and living space of secularly oriented educated youth, wage workers and social-sector employees, and are viewed as the consolidation of the neoliberal-Islamist power bloc at the expense of their lifestyles and cultural choices. Gezi Park thus represents the culmination of these economic, political, and ideological grievances, which we have discussed in the second and third sections of this paper. Demolishing a public park through urban restructuring to build yet another shopping mall, and the PM’s vow to construct another mosque in Taksim were symbolic of the neoliberal-Islamic transformation of society and space under the AKP government, which added to the augmented economic grievances of proletarianisation and precariousness experienced by various wage-earning class fractions.

We thus argue that the Islamic character of neoliberalism in Turkey increased the likelihood of secularly oriented educated youth, wageworkers and service sector employees taking the lead in the protests. Relatively free from the AKP’s politico-ideological subordination of labour (namely through paternalistic work relations, conservative trade unionism and Islamic aid networks), these groups were able to openly react against neoliberal practices as well as their political and ideological manifestations in the AKP-led power bloc. Secondly, another factor that aggravated the grievances of secular wage-earning class fractions was the AKP’s increasing social and spatial interventionism, personified in the authoritarianism of PM Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (Gürcan & Peker 2014, 2015). As we have discussed elsewhere, it is no surprise that the underlying slogans of the Gezi movement explicitly critiqued both the AKP’s neoliberal urban policies and Islamist interventionism (Gürcan & Peker 2014, 2015). The slogans opposed the AKP’s neoliberal urban renewal projects as follows: ‘Don’t touch my neighborhood’; ‘Rentier Tayyip’; ‘The squares are ours; we will not give them up to capital’; ‘Capitalism will cut down the tree whose shadow it cannot sell’; ‘Let’s demolish the government and build a shopping mall instead’, etc. As for the critique of social interventionism, the protesters relied on slogans such as ‘You banned alcohol and sobered up the nation’; ‘We the drunkards gathered here’; ‘We resisted and aborted the dead citizen within ourselves’; ‘We don’t want a prime minister who is fascist day and night’; ‘We are all kissing incessantly, Tayyip’; ‘What if we were all gay!’; ‘Don’t make war, make love with me, Tayyip’, and so on. Therefore, the secularly oriented wage-earning fractions felt their life chances and living spaces aggressively encircled by Islamic neoliberalism, which significantly contributed to the Gezi Park demonstrations. In a nutshell, ‘peoples’ reaction to the general process of proletarianisation in Turkey turns out to be a secular reaction because the associated neoliberal policies have been carried out by “the … Islamic AKP”’ (Burkev 2013).

Conclusion

This paper has sought to demonstrate that the class background of the Gezi Park events cannnot be simply reduced to an amorphous category of ‘middle classes’, or to a purely ideological ‘secularism-centered’ uprising. A heavy reliance on the term ‘middle classes’ in attempting to understand the Gezi Park events serves to blur the intensification of class struggles under the social-interventionist neoliberal project imposed by the AKP government. Instead, resting on the works of Poulantzas and Wright, we have argued that Gezi Park brings together an alliance of various wage-earning class fractions sharing the common destiny of decreased class capacities and life-chances, and increased precariousness, exploitation and proletarianisation. Keeping in mind that class relations are as much political and ideological as they are economic, we put further stress on these aspects of the class struggle. Accordingly, shifting the focus to ‘class capacities’, we have advanced the theory that the subordination of large segments of working classes through paternalistic work relations, conservative trade unionism and Islamic-clientelist networks created a supportive environment for the free articulation of class grievances for secularly oriented educated youth, relatively qualified wage workers and service-sector employees. Also, the AKP’s authoritarian social and spatial interventionism based on Islamic characteristics made these secular class fractions more sensitive to the perils of neoliberalism, and mobilised their class capacities. The co-existence of slogans against neoliberalism and Islamism during the Gezi Park protests is a clear indication of the centrality of class grievances of wage-earning fractions. This is the main reason why the Gezi Park events may appear to be a ‘secularist middle class revolt’ on the surface, while its deeper roots lie in a combination of economic, political, and ideological factors to tackle ‘neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics’ (Karaman 2013) in Turkey. As for the immediate impacts of the Gezi Park protests, they greatly contributed to exposing and intensifying the internal power struggles within the Islamic-neoliberal power bloc. Only months after the massive June uprising, which continued in smaller-scale and intermittent organisational forms in the fall, the decade-long alliance between the AKP government and the Gülen movement came to a spectacular end by the end of 2013. Although Gezi was not the only factor in this divorce, which reached a point of no return in December with the exposure of major corruption scandals, its destabilising influence against the modus operandi of ‘neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics’ cannot be overemphasised. As a result, Gezi represents a social force to reckon with in Turkish politics today.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article won the 2013 Graduate Student Paper Award, in the Marxist Section, from the American Sociological Association (Albert Szymanski-T.R. Young/Critical Sociology Marxist Sociology Graduate Student Paper Award). It is part of a more comprehensive research project undertaken by the authors on Turkey’s 2013 Gezi Park protests (Gürcan & Peker 2014, ).

Author biography

Efe Can Gürcan is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Simon Fraser University, Canada, having previously completed an M.Sc. in international studies at the University of Montréal. His research interests lie in the areas of political sociology, development and food studies, Latin America and the Middle East. His work has been published in journals such as Rural Sociology, Dialectical Anthropology, Latin American Perspectives, Review of Radical Political Economics and Socialism and Democracy. His recent book is entitled Challenging Neoliberalism at Turkey’s Gezi Park (co-authored with Efe Peker, Palgrave Macmillan 2015).

Efe Peker is a joint-Ph.D. candidate in sociology at Simon Fraser University and in history at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and has a M.A. in international relations from Linköping University, Sweden. His research interests focus on the political/historical sociology of social movements and state building since the 19th century, the sociology of religion/ideology, modernity and secularism, urban sociology, and labour studies. His upcoming publications are on republican state-building and the politics of secularism in France and Turkey in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

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