Contesting Working-Class Politics in Turkey: Social Transformations,Islam,and the Left

Introduction

Social transformations accompanying modernization projects in Turkey—at first heavily state-led but then embracing the imperatives of neoliberal globalization—have provided new social bases of support for Islamic politics. These have developed mainly at the expense of leftist streams of politics. The Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), a party that descends from a long tradition of Islamic politics, has ruled since 2002. Today, it finds many support bases in what used to be bastions of leftist political activity, including militant trade unionism. These involve places like Gebze and Izmit, counties within greater Kocaeli, where large-scale industrialization since the 1960s once provided strong support bases for unions and parties on the left and social democratic side of the political spectrum. It is no coincidence that support for such parties had been greater here than the Turkish average until the mid-1990s, which is the point at which the Islamist Welfare Party (Refah Partisi, RP, the predecessor to the AKP) won its first electoral victories, by dominating country-wide municipal elections in 1994, and then, leading the coalition government formed after the 1996 parliamentary elections.

These developments need to be understood in relation to underlying social transformations accompanying the rise of political Islam in Turkey, and associated with neoliberal consolidation, which have had a profound effect on the working class. Kocaeli, in particular, has been exposed to new waves of migration from the 1990s, including from the Anatolian hinterland, which has changed its demographics and helped to form newer generations of industrial workers. It has been simultaneously affected by the greater push for privatization and integration with global production chains, which vastly altered the region’s industrial structure. Once dominated by large public industrial enterprises with highly unionized work forces, privately-owned enterprises with low levels of union density are now more commonly found. The legacies of the 1980s state repression of organized labor have also ensured that ideas associated with left-wing trade unionism fail to connect with the current generation of workers, who tend to be more pious than their predecessors and disengaged from past labor struggles. With these matters in mind, the article reveals continuities and breaks in hegemonic contests over Turkish industrial workers, utilizing Kocaeli as the key case study.

Empirical research on this subject is quite limited. Even studies on hegemony during the AKP era mostly focus on social policies based on a complex web of social assistance, involving public poverty reduction programs, local municipalities, faith-based charitable organizations, and other private initiatives (Buğra and Keyder, 2006; Koray and Çelik, 2015; Özden, 2014). Few have focused on localities where the working class has undergone transformation during the neoliberal period. This is where the present study makes a distinctive contribution. Yet, our study intersects with the concerns of at least three others. Nichols and Suğur’s (2005) study of workers from four different industrial regions had already shed light on aspects of ongoing proletarianization in Turkey. They found that younger workers were more educated than their predecessors, had higher social and economic expectations, and a more critical stance on workplace relations, as well as on authoritarian and conciliatory kinds of unionism. Tuğal’s (2009) work explained the failure of radical Islamist politics by focusing on trasformismo in the daily practices and social space of Sultanbeyli, a highly conservative county close to Istanbul. Here, growing economic rationality affected the daily practices of subordinated classes and their integration into consumer society—thus ensuring the absorption of Islamic politics into the existing system. Durak (2011) analyzed how industrial relations in the Organized Industrial Zone of Konya, a conservative city in Central Anatolia, are organized in an Islamic habitus. He argued that a neoliberal Islamist bloc built cultural hegemony in the sense of “defining the limits of what is possible.” All these works provided many clues for our research.

By highlighting the dislocations among the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of hegemony, our study focuses on how contestation over the working class in Kocaeli have evolved over time. After presenting our theoretical and methodological concerns, the argument is laid out in four sections. In the first two, where our analysis unfolds over changing social and historical contexts, questions about social and material transformations and the political inclinations of the working class are firstly addressed in historical terms. Thus, we treat changes in working-class attitudes within distinct periods from the 1970s onwards. Throughout, our focus is, first, on the ruptures and continuities in the working-class movement, and second, on the relationship between declining trade union militancy and growing Islamization . In the subsequent two sections, referring to the role of the AKP in the construction of neoliberal hegemony, we focus, first, on the new worker subjectivities forged by greater integration to the neoliberal hegemony, and then on the outcomes of this transformation with reference to the hegemonic capacity of Islamist politics. We grapple with these issues in the context of Turkey’s recent economic and political crisis, fueled by rising foreign debt, dwindling foreign currency reserves, and the plummeting value of the Lira. This has resulted in a new wave of worker protests, particularly in the metal sector, emerging in 2015 with the active participation of conservative, Islamist, and nationalist workers; however, sometimes workers led these protests by joining leftist trade unions (see Çelik, 2015; Taştekin, 2019). We explore how this development presents obstacles for the AKP’s hegemonic project, and ask as a logical corollary, whether such workers could fill the void left by the decline of leftist trade unionism.

Theoretical and Methodological Concerns

Our analysis is informed by a Gramscian understanding of struggles over hegemony. This involves recognition of social interests that compete to attain cultural and political dominance, through force and consent. Such dominance is ultimately tied to values and ideas accepted uncritically as the basis of “common sense” under particular sets of conditions, but which are actually tied to prevailing relations of domination-subordination. Gramsci deals with this in relation to the construction of the “collective man” (see Filippini, 2017: 24–42), who is “. . .conceived as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship” (Gramsci, 1971: 360). His approach assumes “the individual’s composition from a series of organic, but also conflicting, interconnected parts” (Filippini, 2017: 24). Common sense is thus seen as a “residue” of human intellectual history that has been embedded in popular consciousness and is manifest “as the incoherent stratification of worldviews, prejudices and beliefs. It contains all and everything, from the most conservative and reactionary elements to the ‘intuitions of a future philosophy’” (Filippini 2017: 110; also see Liguori, 2015: 85–93). But Gramsci refers as well to “the ‘good sense’ elements within common sense, which represent awareness born out of the concrete experience of subalternity” and that “are the seeds from which new political narratives emerge” (Crehan, 2016: 48–49). For him, hegemonic struggles are, therefore, about building a “historical bloc” by articulating new political narratives that can potentially challenge the existing hegemony.

Peripheral capitalistic formations have peculiar conditions and limits for building such a challenge. Conditions of uneven and combined development—such as the fragmented formation of the laboring classes and the simultaneous and conflictual unity of the rural and the urban temporalities—are common features; so are characteristics of state formation involving weak welfare policies, despotic, or unstable democratic regimes, and crisis-prone accumulation regimes (see Braga, 2018). Consequently, the complex and conflictual character of the ideological and cultural structures is accompanied by capital accumulation and political regimes that poorly integrate and absorb the demands of subordinated classes.

In Turkey, Kemalism did not provide a new “social ethos,” especially not for the rural masses who made up 80% of the entire population until the 1960s (see Mardin, 1991). The integration of these masses to the modernization process and capitalist market economy was accomplished by a “nationalist-conservative” hegemonic project in the 1950s driven by the center-right Democrat Party (see Keyder, 1987: 117–140). As an ideology and strategy of power designed by right-wing intellectuals (see Taşkın, 2007; Bora, 2018), it appealed to conservative, nationalist, and Islamist notions embedded in the common sense of the rural masses and articulated them as a political narrative. That nationalist-conservative ethos is defined by commitment to a certain set of national and religious values and symbols, to the state that preserves them against “internal and external enemies,” and to the patriarchal system that protects the family where these values are reproduced.

However, intensifying internal immigration since the 1950s forced the population to adapt to conditions of urbanization and proletarianization. Besides, demographic transformation was accompanied by further developments in Turkey’s modern politics. This meant that the formation of the working class was accompanied by political struggles that made workers particularly susceptible to competing political and ideological inputs.

Thus, the leftist and trade union movements prevailing the in 1960s and 70s and the Islamic movement that advanced toward the end of 1980s have significantly affected the world views of workers. The leftist and trade union movements were the flag carrier of the demands for equality and welfare. Political Islam represented by the RP in 1990s was a reaction of a bloc composed of different segments of the urban laboring classes and the small- and middle-scale entrepreneurs to the exclusionist character of the neoliberal hegemonic project implemented after the 1980 coup (Gülalp, 2001). In 2000s, the AKP represented the overcoming of Islamist opposition to neoliberalism (Tuğal, 2009). The RP’s critique of usurious capitalism was replaced by business rationality, while moral asceticism was replaced by consumerism. In this way, the AKP managed to organize the demands and expectations of both the new urban laboring classes and the rising Islamic bourgeoisie under a revised—and relatively more inclusive project based on neoliberal premises (Akça, 2014; Hadiz, 2019; Özden et al., 2017).

By taking Kocaeli as a case study, we shed light on the ruptures and continuities of different hegemonic articulations prevalent among the working class within such a changing social context. We critique, on the one hand, the prevalent assumption that the 1970s were a period of left-wing hegemony over the labor movement, through which radical politics permeated throughout working-class culture. On the other hand, we also cast doubt on the equally simplistic idea that Islamic forces have come to exercise a hegemonic hold over much of the working-class common sense today, due to the long period of AKP political dominance.

Primary data were largely attained during a period of fieldwork conducted at the end of 2018, involving 18 in-depth semistructured interviews and two focus groups discussions, for a total of 29 respondents. The interviews were conducted with labor activists, current workers, trade union leaders, as well as former workers and trade unionists. Though the group interviews involved current workers, the individual ones included those who were employed from the 1970s to the present day. A follow-up period of interviewing was then conducted at the end of 2019, focusing on younger workers, 17 of whom were interviewed individually or in groups. The interview data are heavily supplemented by archival and statistical material on industrialization and social change collected over many years, forming much of the context through which individual experiences and perceptions of present problems are addressed.

The interviews were held with workers who defined themselves as Islamist, nationalist, conservative, and with left-wing trade unionists of the past. Given the importance of trust in conducting fieldwork in Turkey, we obtained our interviewees mainly through activists and trade unionists who have strong relationships with workers. Many, though not all, were associated with the Birleşik Metal-İş Union ¹ of the metal industry. While often perceived as a left-wing union, its membership actually consists of a variety of workers, with nationalist and conservative Islamist ones represented significantly in its Kocaeli branch (Öngel, 2017).

It should be underlined that our interviewees were not selected for considerations of representativeness, as they would have been in a statistical study. The interviews were meant to underpin our analysis with an understanding of the changing experience of working in the Kocaeli region over time. This called for deep exploration of the life experiences of workers who have toiled under, and responded to, different kinds of socioeconomic and political circumstances. What our interviewees provided was information that revealed the richness, complexities—and contradictions —of working-class lives over the course of neoliberal transformation in Turkey, which intensified under the aegis of the AKP.

Historical Context

Before the 1980s, Kocaeli was the second most important industrial center in Turkey after Istanbul. ² Following the first serious steps toward industrialization in the 1930s and 1940s, regarded as a high point of economic statism, state investment in the 1950s and 1960s in cooperation with foreign capital increased the pace of industrialization there. From 1960 to 1980, Kocaeli had the highest level of public investment after Istanbul, creating giant public facilities that drew in the private sector. Industrial complexes in Istanbul were effectively directed to the coastal strip linking Istanbul and Kocaeli. As large enterprises in metal products, foundries, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, automotive supplies, and glass spread from Istanbul toward Izmit, Kocaeli quickly became the second preferred destination, after Istanbul, for foreign investment.

The concentration of industry produced a new social structure dominated by industrial workers. According to a survey conducted in Kocaeli in 1974, 36.4% of households made their living from the industrial sector. Nearly 70% of household members working in industry were employed in the petrochemical and paper sectors. Giant industrial facilities like SEKA (Turkish Pulp and Paper Mills) and Petkim (Petkim Petrochemistry Holding) held a significant share of the employment. Not surprisingly, industrialization triggered significant inward migration. The urban population of Kocaeli was 52,000 in 1927, but it was 104,000 in 1950, 112,000 in 1960, 188,000 in 1970, and 318,000 in 1980. Until the mid-1950s, Gebze and Izmit, where manufacturing was located, experienced migration from rural areas near Kocaeli, but by the 1960s migrants began to arrive from further away. In 1974, only a third of industrial workers were originally from Kocaeli. In 1965, 95% of industrial laborers in Kocaeli worked in the public sector. But private sector investment rapidly increased its share of employment in the region, from 50% in 1972 to 71% in 1979.

The unionization rate grew significantly due to the well-developed petrochemical, metal goods, tire, and paper production sectors in the form of large public sector enterprises close to Istanbul, which was also the center of the trade union movement. Throughout the 1960s, trade union actions spread across the petrochemical and metal sectors in particular. The growing influence of the left-wing labor federation DİSK, founded in 1967, had affected unions linked to the centralist labor federation, Türk-İş. ³ Trade union actions, as a whole, became both more militant and effective. In late 1970s, Kocaeli was third after Istanbul and Ankara in the number of such actions, and second in the number of workers participating in them. Most focused on wage and social rights demands and occurred in workplaces with 500 or more workers.

The political constellation in Kocaeli had also changed by the 1970s. In the 1965 election, the center right Justice Party (Adalet Partisi, AP) gained 55.5% of the popular vote, while the Republican People’s Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), which by that time had developed a new social democratic tendency, attained 29.8%. Thus, Kocaeli was nationalist-conservative and center right-oriented in its profile, not unlike many Anatolian towns. But things changed over the next decade. While the CHP further developed its social democratic identity, the base of the center right fragmented with the founding of the radical right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) and the Islamist National Salvation Party (Milli Selamet Partisi, MSP, the predecessor to the RP). As the first party contesting elections with an overtly Islamist character in 1973, the MSP gained 18.1% of the vote, well above the Turkish average, which was 11.8%. Losing some of its support base to the MSP, the AP’s share of the vote decreased to 32.2%. By contrast, the CHP gained 33.6% of the vote, which increased to 44% in the 1977 elections. With the erosion of the different segments of the right, Kocaeli gained the character of a social democratic dominated workers’ city, which lasted until the early 2000s. ⁴

But the beginnings of an opposite trend were already to be found in the aftermath of the 12 September 1980 military coup, which suppressed leftist politics as well as trade unions and created the groundwork for neoliberal reforms under the auspices of the IMF. With hundreds of its professionals and activists arrested, DİSK did not re-emerge until 1992. After the coup, wages were frozen, collective agreements suspended and strikes banned. If indexed on the basis of wage levels in 1974, the real minimum wage rose to 118 in 1979, fell to 65 in 1980 and remained low until 1989 (Erdoğdu, 2014: 14).

The “Spring Protests” of 1989 (Çelik, 1996; Doğan, 2010a, 2010b), which saw waves of labor action throughout Turkey, marked another turning point. While they were led by Türk-İş and independent unions, grassroots initiatives were important. Spurred by economic hardships, workers frequently coerced reluctant union bureaucracies into action. The first wave of protests mainly occurred in public enterprises, but had spread to the private sector by 1990–1991; with one out of every four workers under the scope of collective agreements going on strike. Strikes, in addition to factory occupations, ‘collective medical visits’, protest marches and lunch boycotts, continued at full speed. In these years, the number of workers on strike and lost labor days reached the highest points in Turkish history. In Kocaeli, strikes and protests took place in public enterprises such as the Gölcük Shipyard, SEKA, TÜPRAŞ and Petkim refineries (Petrol-İş, 1992: 201–232).

Continuities and Ruptures

It would be simplistic to suggest that there was a linear relationship between the expansion of trade union activity and the development of leftist ideological tendencies among workers. Thus, veteran unionists have stated that workers before 1980 had sensibilities that could be described as being nationalist-conservative, rather than that of the stereotypical militant proletarian, contradicting any notion that the values and ideas of the left had molded the character of the working class. Murat Özveri, who worked as a labor lawyer and legal consultant for Selüloz-İş—the trade union active in the paper sector—states:

There’s been a type of conservatism among SEKA workers since the 1950s, the left-wing was always between 10 and 20% [of workers]. . . In fact, even in the period when the left-wing rose most, there was always an effect of conservatism, religiosity and Islam. But in spite of this effect, the workers adopted qualified trade union cadres and made a tacit agreement with them.

The nationalist-conservatism commonly understood as combining religious and nationalist sentiments was, however, flexible enough to allow for mitigation by class interest. Özveri views the result as a sort of pragmatic attitude, which he illustrated through direct experiences with metal workers in Kayseri, a central Anatolian conservative city where he spent his youth. Here, workers in the 1970s did not flinch from linking up with DİSK when it came to demanding wage increases and improved collective agreements. This was so even if the militantly leftist rhetoric of the union was often at odds with workers’ anti-left cultural baggage.

Thus, a trade unionist, active in SEKA in the late 1970s, who was known as “Necati the Communist,” states that workers were both tolerant and pragmatic; even Islamists and ultranationalists voted for him as their workplace representative because they trusted his “moral stance.” Ali Buğdacı, a socialist trade unionist linked to DİSK in the 1970s, states that religion was always important, but didn’t polarize workers. He recalls that many workers who voted for right-wing parties participated in activities organized by left-wing trade unions.

Yet, the 1970s were a period of peak polarization between left and right-wing politics (Schick and Tonak, 1986). The conflict between their radical sections even escalated into armed conflict. That many workers who saw themselves as Islamist, nationalist or conservative supported left-wing trade unionists and participated in their actions suggests that they were well-acquainted with combative trade union practices, in spite of the broader political developments.

It would be equally simplistic though to suggest that a great rupture occurred following the military coup of 1980, after which there was large-scale suppression of the Turkish left. On the contrary, workers retained the capacity for self-mobilizations as shown in the 1989 Spring Protests. Veteran trade unionists suggest that many workers had gained valuable practical experience from the period of working-class militancy in the 1970s and influenced the new generation of rank-and-file worker. In fact, some even led trade union branches linked to the central Türk-İş confederation in Kocaeli either immediately before or after the Spring Protests, as a result of the pressure created by these actions. Such individuals included Bekir Yurdagül and Ali Buğdacı, who would become, respectively, the Kocaeli branch chairmen of Harb-İş ⁵ and Petrol-İş. ⁶ For them, the 1980 military coup only represented an interruption of the labor movement, not its cessation.

The serious rupture only began from the middle of the 1990s due to demographic transformations in Turkey in general. ⁷ In 1990, the population of Kocaeli was 936,000, which rose to 1,206,000 by 2000 and 1,906,000 in 2018—in other words, doubling within just three decades, partly due to incoming migration. A significant proportion of migration was from culturally conservative regions like Eastern Anatolia and the Black Sea and especially from North-eastern Anatolia where they intersect. ⁸ However, this is not sufficient alone to explain the transformation because migration was not a new phenomenon. What distinguished the new wave of migration and proletarianization in the 1990s was the context in which they took place, transformed by working conditions linked to changes in the industrial structure of the region and the elevation of political Islamism, locally as well as in the whole of Turkey.

Workers in large public enterprises previously made up the bulk of those unionized. Due to privatization policies, today Kocaeli has a fragmented industrial structure consisting of large capital-intensive private enterprises integrated in diverse ways to global value chains and their suppliers (Öngel, 2012). Thanks to this transformation, the trade union movement has weakened. According to data from January 2019, the unionization rate in Kocaeli stands at 19%, while only 5.7% of workers are public sector workers. ⁹ And there has been a decrease in workers included in the scope of collective agreements: from 28.6% in 1987, to 13.3% in 1999, to 5.4% in 2012. ¹⁰

The rise of political Islam also altered Kocaeli from a working-class region dominated by the CHP from the 1970s, into one where all local councils were controlled by the Islamist RP by the early 2000s. This was accompanied by a transformation in social life as new arrivals created new solidarity networks to adapt to urban circumstances and fulfil basic needs like employment and housing. To the “classic” solidarity networks based on kinship and town of origin, Islamist networks were therefore added (Tezcan, 2011). A variety of Islamic sects—tarikat—seriously began to enter organizational life, while the National Youth Foundation (Milli Gençlik Vakfı, MGV), with a close relationship to the RP, became influential especially among youths. Thus, new cultural and political identities were strengthened to the disadvantage of class identity, resulting in a proletarianization process within an increasingly Islamized habitus (Öngel, 2014).

One should also mention the retreat of a pivotal generation of workers, and with it, the removal of left-wing cadres from the scene, as older workers began to retire in the 1990s. Thus, the worker profile underwent change in favor of new migrants without prior organizational experience and who did not inherit the cultural and organizational propensities of their predecessors. Left-wing cadres became less influential due to new barriers created by different life experiences:

We created a revolution in the shipyards with the old workers. But from 1992 on the new workers had become the majority. . . These workers had no opportunity to compare with earlier conditions; they thought that the shipyard had always operated like that: wages were always good, working conditions were good, etc. They didn’t see these as achievements of the union. All of these gains were ready made for them; so they drew a political boundary for themselves. ‘We’re right-wing, they’re left-wing, let’s change this management’, they said. Before our period, before the 1989 Spring Protests, there were hard and degrading working conditions in the shipyard. These conditions changed due to what we gained, but the new workers didn’t see that. ¹¹

These barriers persist to this day. Older unionists see that the majority of today’s workers do not possess a collective memory about the 1989 Spring Protests and the gains obtained. Some suggest that this disconnect is attributable to a “wage gap” that emerged between the old and new workers in the 1990s. The older workers had enjoyed significant wage increases after the Spring Protests whereas the new generation started with lower wages. Throughout the 1990s, the elimination of this wage gap, based on seniority, was a contentious issue. That trade unions neglected this gave rise to right-wing criticism of left-wing trade union managements in Kocaeli. As one worker claims, “one of the greatest reasons for the opposition against the left and for the coming of the right [into the unions] was this ‘closing up the wage gap’ issue.”

Members of the new generation thus drew a political line between themselves and the left-wing trade unionists seen as representatives of more advantaged senior workers. Consequently, the effectiveness of left-wing trade unions began to decrease in the second half of the 1990s and the initiative passed to unionists linked to conservative political tendencies. Metin Karaçam, a self-described socialist worker fired due to union activities, claimed that “they spread propaganda like, ‘leftists, in fact, are communists, they are irreligious people with no faith. Muslims who pray faithfully always act rightfully since they fear Allah’.”

But it was not just propaganda. Karaçam added that right-wing unions started to manage the collective bargaining processes better than the socialists, thus strengthening their position. By the 2000s, there was nearly no remnant of the left-wing legacy among the working class. Arzu Erkan, a labor activist in Kocaeli for two decades, mentioned her surprise when she first arrived:

In a town where the CHP held the municipality you would expect to encounter a more social democratic worker base. But the tableau I encountered was tremendously nationalist and conservative. This was a very great shock. [. . .] It was like this in all sectors: tire, automotive, metal. This was understandable for the younger workers; in fact, their eyes opened to politics with the AKP. But when I met seniors, workers with a certain level of maturity, I felt we were completely mistaken about this town.

Pragmatism, Consumption, and New Worker Subjectivities

The daily lives of workers have now become more intertwined with a variety of Islamic practices, from religious rituals to the strict requirements of specific tarikat. To some workers, the tarikat provide an environment to produce a “decent man.”

They [the workers] don’t wear robes, but regularly attend sect meetings, participate in reading groups and halaqas. One of the things you can hear frequently from them is; ‘Allah bless them [the sect], I repented because of them!’ They used to drink alcohol but they quit after joining the tarikat, for instance. ¹²

Yet the lives of these workers are clearly not governed merely by the values and ideas associated with Islamic morality. There is also a pragmatic dimension to the relationship between workers and tarikat. As Emrullah Dursun, a local executive of the New Welfare Party, founded by Erbakan’s son, and a worker for many years in the region, claimed, “tarikat work like İşkur ¹³ . . . Let’s go and register with İşkur. Then I’ll go to any of the tarikat later, and for sure my chance of getting a job will be better than yours.” Today, the Islamist wave of mobilization appears to have waned. Thus, almost all our interviewees referred to nationalist-conservatism or pragmatic and utilitarian choices, rather than Islamism, to describe workers’ predominant political attitudes:

The average worker has no aims. Very few are in the tarikat. Very few have left-wing ideas. Some are ülkücü. ¹⁴ Let’s say you have 10 workers, you can collect 5 around an aim or a thought and the remaining half are mostly influenced by them. ¹⁵

There were Islamist workers at the time, they are now eliminated. ¹⁶

If only they had become devout. At least that way, they could have held a place in the culture. It is not devotion but pragmatism, limited to everyday interests. ¹⁷

These “everyday” interests actually surpass workers’ basic needs, so much such so that it is now the consumption economy that integrates the social base of political Islam with capitalist markets. To a considerable extent, the AKP’s project has enabled a culture of “sustained consumption” that exceeds income constraints and relies on debt accumulation. In a way this is not surprising. Even if there have been significant increases in the minimum wage during the AKP era, in real terms the average wage remains behind that in 2000. ¹⁸ Hence, the rise of the debt economy, where household indebtedness increased from 1.8% of GDP in 2002 to 19.6% in 2013 (Akçay, 2018: 13). Credit cards, consumer credits, and instalments became financial instruments extensively used by households to sustain consumerist lifestyles (Bahçe and Köse, 2016; Güngen, 2018).

The workers interviewed were aware of this consumption and debt cycle. Although they uniformly criticized extravagant consumption, they accepted it as part of normal life today:

On one hand, the system burdens you with debt. But on the other, you have to adapt to life. You buy your child a phone, yourself a car. Your income doesn’t meet these expenses, so you get indebted to the system. You don’t have a chance to speak up, because you’re afraid of losing the minimum wage.

In fact, today the money we make is good, but the spending environment has changed, it is not anymore like it was 10–15 years ago. There were no shopping malls, for example. In the past we ate the same meal for a week, now after two days you begin to complain. ¹⁹

In this way, increasing debt can be a problem for trade unionism because indebted workers refrain from organizing activities for fear of dismissal. Debt has become an effective instrument of gaining consent among workers and exercising coercion on them. According to a former worker:

Earlier, the union organizers warned us like that: ‘Collective agreements are made every two years, so do what you want in the first year, buy what you need; but in the second year don’t go into debt as we can go on strike.’ ²⁰

These words indicate that consumption was not “privatized” in the 1990s as it is today. More precisely, the sustainability of private consumption was linked to the capacity for collective action. Today, consumption is linked to privatized financial debt.

Though consumerism can be detected generally in the working class, it is a particularly prominent aspect of the lifestyle of younger workers, for whom debt-ridden lives have become normal. In fact, one clear result from the interviews was that young workers are very different from the previous generation of workers not just with regard to the level of integration to the consumption economy but also in their commitment to the workplace, satisfaction with working conditions, ideological indifference, and addiction to the social media. Thus, almost all interviewees, regardless of background, had unflattering opinions of younger workers:

A new generation came in the 2010s. This generation is not that susceptible to Islamic organizations. They are after meeting a range of needs by working for shorter terms; and interested too much in technology. ²¹

There is a big difference between mature and experienced workers and young workers. I also hear this from the experienced workers. They say that these young workers did not obey everything the way they did. ‘They object to everything; they are not like us’ they say. Young people don’t do anything apart from their job description. ‘This is my job, you told me to do that, I did it, I won’t do one bit more’ they say. The older workers, due to their age and experience, think like ‘let’s not object, let’s hold on here’. . . After the resistance in the metal sector MESS ²² conducted a research which says: ‘Young generation doesn’t feel a sense of belonging to their workplaces and that makes them a dangerous generation which can do anything.’ ²³

In our period, workers were more patient, they felt they belonged to a workplace, they believed they could improve the conditions of the workplace and increase wages; they had a character that could cope with deficiencies. . . The new ones are not like that. They want everything immediately; they don’t feel any sense of belonging to the workplace. ²⁴

They don’t have an idealistic character, not in the religious sense as well. I can say that among the young workers joining the workforce in the last 4–5 years, I haven’t met anyone who I considered related to a tarikat. . . The consumption cycle is fast and they have difficulty to meet their needs. They are aware of the inequality of income. Their family being religious or left-wing has no importance for them. For them, the only thing that matters is money. ²⁵

The new generation immediately rebel, buy iPhones, buy new cars, and use private hospitals. In the past people didn’t see the good, they thought life would always go like that. The generation today has seen the good, they want better. ²⁶

Ideologically they are completely empty. They have no sense of belonging; their only sense of belonging is cash. ²⁷

Today, [young workers] are Reisçi, ²⁸ tomorrow they may be something else. ²⁹

For the interviewees who compared older and newer worker generations, certain stereotypes freely emerged. The older worker is invariably portrayed as one who had a cause—a commitment to the workplace but also the patience required for trade union organization and struggle. In equally broad sweeps, the young worker is depicted as being without ideals, caring only about material things. Today’s young worker is also seen as impatient about working conditions while lacking a genuine relationship or commitment to the workplace. In addition, he is short-sighted and addicted to social media. ³⁰ While these views may betray some uncritical stereotyping, they do suggest that an environment has emerged that makes young workers particularly anxious about meeting their more complex material expectations.

The Decline of the Islamic Rank-and-File Politics

The AKP’s preference for maintaining economic growth and consumption based on global loans, which were abundant and cheap until the 2008–2009 global financial crisis, has resulted in mounting foreign debt, including in the private sector. Consequently, the Turkish debt-driven model of economic growth has come into trouble. The ensuing crisis has reduced confidence in the AKP, once considered infallible by workers who support it. These workers state that their reason for still supporting the AKP is their trust in Erdoğan:

We were patient until now, but for the next generation, the AKP can’t go further with these policies. They have to change. They have to give more to the workers. ³¹

Up to two years ago, our pro-AKP friends could oppose us. But in the last two years there is no opposition to us. When we were criticizing the government, their voices were louder than ours. In the last two years they have been saying nothing. They are very quiet. ³²

AKP is finished. I still only love Erdoğan! ³³

I am a pro-AKP person. I also talk with my pro-AKP friends. If Erdoğan left the AKP today they wouldn’t have more than 5% of votes. ³⁴

Though Erdoğan has always been its undisputed leader, the AKP is now more of a “one-man party” than ever due to infighting that reached its peak with the attempted coup of 2016. As the presidential system with limited checks and balances was adopted, Erdoğan began to sidestep his own party. In a work that compares the political Islamist traditions of Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Tunisia, Tuğal (2016) states that political Islamism in Turkey was distinctively about the dominance of the party. Yet, the new Erdoğan-centered politics gives rise to contradictions at the rank-and-file level.

Some of our interviewees state that the cadres and supporters of political Islam in factories in the 1990s were highly qualified and had their own opinions. Hami Baltacı, a worker before 2000 and currently an executive of the Birleşik Metal-İş Union, explained that Islamist workers then were “very different from today’s. Apart from their religious sympathies, there were no great differences from the socialist line. They laid claims to the worker’s problems at least as much as socialists did.” This was the case even if they developed their own political discourse. Ali Buğdacı, a worker and trade unionist from the 1990s, stated that in that period “the number of the workers with gowns and beards increased. Praying protests were organized in factories. With their own identity, discourses, and with the concept of ‘just order’, ³⁵ they had become a centre of attraction.” Today, on the contrary, the pro-AKP worker is described as wanting in a number of matters:

Pro-AKP conservative workers are empty and ignorant, their religiosity is not powerful. Whatever the [Erdoğan] says, they just repeat it to you. There is no political awareness, ideology, belief, idealism. . . Talking with an AKP person always ends in a fight. . . As soon as you remove Erdoğan from the debate, all their ideas fail. There aren’t any political traditions like in other parties, it’s like a building without a foundation. ³⁶

These statements suggest that Islamist discourse reproduced by pious factory workers containing statements about justice has been replaced by the leader’s calls to the masses. Additionally, an underlying political identity problem among pro-AKP workers surfaced when they compared their party with the CHP, which they consider leftist:

Though the CHP people don’t defend their chairperson, they go and vote for their party, but the AKP doesn’t have such a history or roots. People vote completely for the love of Erdoğan. Look at left-wing parties, they have no respect for my customs and traditions, but they defend the right thing at many points. ³⁷

What is interesting is the description of AKP supporters as being a mass without historical roots, considering the party evolved out of a political Islamist tradition going back to the 1960s. However, as Erdoğan himself has become the focal point of devotion, a future crisis not just for the AKP but for the Islamist movement in general may beckon.

Signs of this coming crisis can be seen in the huge wave of protests occurring in 2015–2016 in the metal sector in Kocaeli, led by right-wing workers. The conservative, nationalist, and Islamist workers wanted to see concrete improvements in living and working conditions and were aware that this was obstructed by their own right-wing Türk Metal Union. ³⁸ Discontent with that union brought many to the leftist Birleşik Metal-İş, linked to DİSK. Traditional stereotypes about the behavior of Islamist workers cannot account for such a development.

Thus, we encountered nationalist conservative or Islamist workers who were not just Birleşik Metal-İş members but also leaders and/or organizers of workplace resistance in the name of this left-wing union. They include nationalist worker Osman Yavuz Özdemir, who organizes workplace actions on behalf of the Birleşik Metal-İş and whose mother asked him to repent after he joined the union; the tarikat member Nuri Fidan who was insulted by members of his religious community—“be ashamed of your beard”—while distributing Birleşik Metal-İş flyers outside a mosque; Metin Bezirci who—though describing himself as not a right-wing but Islamist worker—decided to disprove comments like “you can’t make a trade unionist out of a right-wing person”; Emrullah Dursun, who had been active in right-wing parties (first MHP, then the Islamist Felicty Party and now a new Islamist party founded by Erbakan’s son), became an active Birleşik Metal-İş organizer in his workplace, believing that “the right-wing unionists ain’t worth shit”; and Talat Çelik, the Kocaeli branch chair of the Birleşik Metal-İş Union, who sees himself as an Islamist socialist.

What do their stories tell us? Arzu Erkan, a long-time labor activist in the region, is of the opinion that the nationalist conservative worker identity has started to fracture because workers know which union is more resilient and which one easily “sells out workers,” despite having no historical memory of previous struggles. Osman Yavuz Özdemir, who was an MHP member, consulted his father, a former worker, before joining DİSK. His father’s response resonates with Arzu Erkan’s account: “DİSK people are left-wing but they stand beside the workers. Once we went to Türk Metal just because they were nationalists, they sold us out for three cents.” In a group interview with workers (Group Interview I), the oldest participant, who remembered the left-wing unionism of the 1990s—but described himself as being in love with Erdoğan—opined that “trade unionism is done well by the left-wing, not the right-wing” in spite of negative reactions from other workers.

There are undoubtedly significant differences between these recent trends and the experiences of nationalist-conservative workers in contact with DİSK during the 1970s. Then, one should take into account the counter-hegemonic potential of left-wing politics. Today, it is evident that Islamist and conservative workers have not become left-wing through their work with leftist unions. The workers who became members of Birleşik Metal-İş during the wave of protests in 2015 do not understand trade unionism on a right-wing versus left-wing axis, but on a “selling out or not selling out workers” axis. They see no contradiction in being right-wing, Islamist or conservative and a member of the left-wing DİSK. In fact, within the current political balance of power, it is more likely that the emerging relationship between conservative workers and leftist trade unionism may affect and transform the latter. The head of the Birleşik Metal-İş Union Adnan Serdaroğlu admits that:

Workers are not linked to us ideologically, they just believe we protect their rights, and defend their freedom. Their connection to the union is in this line. DİSK is not strong enough in terms of membership and its ideology definitely cannot be accepted and adopted widely. . . DİSK has not swayed ideologically, but we are not in an effective position against new ideologies, especially religious ones.

Conclusion

An empirical study conducted in Istanbul and Anatolia in the early 1990s concluded that leftist tendencies were prevalent among blue collar workers on economic and social matters, while conservative tendencies were widespread regarding religion, secularism, and the status of women. Politically, they oscillated between populist leftist politics and political Islamism. (Boratav, 1995: 93–110). Like our study, which also confirms the transitional character of the 1990s, it emphasized the precariousness of hegemony over the Turkish working class.

Our findings show that neither the left—even during its celebrated peak in the 1970s—nor Islamic forces has ever achieved hegemony over the working class in its evolution over the last half century. This is perhaps of little surprise if one accepts the Gramscian view that hegemony is never completely achieved. Thus, rather than taking the social ethos of conservative workers as the sum of unchanging national and conservative values, we emphasized how it has evolved through hegemonic contestations. Workers who were organized under radical trade unions in the 1970s and attended the Spring Protests of early 1990s have had life experiences different from the nationalist-conservative workers of 1950s, even if they both espouse values considered nationalist and conservative.

Besides, it should be recalled that the rise of left-wing politics and political Islam were impeded by military interventions in 1980 and 1998, respectively. After the 1980 coup, the left in Turkey lost its organizational capacity, whereas the 1998 military intervention forced the Islamic movement to accommodate itself to the secular and neoliberal order. Hegemonic contestations took place within the severe limits present in peripheral formations.

As Tuğal (2009) asserted, the AKP’s hegemonic project of integrating Islamic politics with neoliberalism was based on a strategy of passive revolution, which adapted conservative subordinated classes into the culture of consumerism and business through transformismo. Today, under economic crisis conditions, workers, especially the young generation, have a strong material interest to sustain lifestyles spurred by a growing consumerist culture. Though alienated from the tradition of leftist struggles, culturally Islamic or conservative workers are open to work with and join leftist trade unions. This is so even if leftist trade unions continue to find it difficult to develop a new political narrative that resonates with youthful workers for whom the experiences of the past mean very little.

The new worker subjectivity that revealed itself most clearly among the younger generation now constitutes the new terrain of hegemonic contestations. Yet, these are being provisionally subdued by the charismatic appeal of an authoritarian leader, whose regime is temporarily suspending contestation over the working class by variations of carrot and stick approaches (see Adaman et al., 2019).