Abstract
This article focuses on two ways in which smallholders—rural families, the peasantry—are responding to the contemporary neoliberal environment in Turkey by resisting commodification. This resistance, which takes place both by definition, insofar as smallholders refuse to enter, or properly conform to, the logic of capital, and in terms of its characteristics, values and practices of autonomy and sharing, is located in the context of two sites or structures of social commons. These comprise the maintenance of non-commodity circuits, along with the development of what may be identified as a new, dual-circuit articulation, one that involves financial inputs, particularly through engagement in labour relations, in combination with the non-commodity circuits. The latter emerges through manifold, variegated, and informal linkages structured around kin and community and enabled by mobility and migration. Thus, superseding the rural–urban division of space and going beyond capitalistic relations, these comprise a contemporary form of ‘solidarity-network-based social commons’. Presented in this example from Turkey, therefore, are different ways in which smallholder farming operates as a locus of resilience for extended family and village/locality interconnectivity that offers a distance from markets, even as it utilizes them with novel forms of communally oriented autonomies in a more generalized re-spatialization that extends to the urban and goes beyond capital.
Introduction
The introduction of neoliberalism into the agrarian sector in Turkey, which began in the 1980s and accelerated in the 2000s, has brought unprecedented changes to rural life. As the old, state-led development strategy has been phased out in Turkey, as required and guided by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU) in the globalization of capital, the ongoing neoliberal restructuring has resulted in a squeeze on traditional peasant farming and associated living structures. In addition to the previous entry and more recent penetration of large-scale producers (especially food manufacturers), the withdrawal of government supports (financial and product base) in combination with stagnating product prices and increasing input costs, led to a markedly increased smallholder vulnerability to market fluctuations.
Meanwhile, the diminishing space of the natural commons has been clearly evident in the Anatolian countryside, with a range of ongoing developments and imminent threats. These are both direct, in the case of private, state-sanctioned claims, notably to 13 million hectares of meadowland, and indirect, through state-to-market completion of capitalization, such as, the transfer of forestry (national park) management, as well as combinations of the two, particularly through massive and extensive public–private dam projects. This diminishing space is manifested also as the delineation and restriction of rural knowledge commons, such as through the increasing control by international corporations of seed production, reproduction and trading. And the de-commoning occurs similarly at a more abstract level, in terms of reduced autonomy and communalism—at least, that is what appears to be the case. In this respect, however, we argue for a radically different and altogether more positive interpretation of current realities, one that focuses on small farmers, emerging peasant strategies and their associated living structures (see also Öztürk et al. 2013).
At the level of natural commons, the ongoing privatization drive has led to a growing resistance, with overt, often direct political action. This action has been taken by local residents demonstrating against dam projects and preventing work there, environmental groups, such as Buğday (wheat) campaigning against Monsanto, and farmers, such as the Turkish Confederation of Farmers (Çiftçi Sen), a member of Via Campesina, representing some 40,000 smallholders and enterprises. Here, however, we look in a rather different direction, to the implicit, pro-commons action that may be analyzed as inherently—structurally—political, but is generally unmediated by a political consciousness. This socioeconomic analysis shows that not only are traditional forms of the agriculturally based social commons being maintained in the face of capitalization, but new social commons are also being developed.
This article considers two responses to the new economic environment that enable families to keep their land and their farms. The first is direct resistance to commodification through the maintenance of traditional practices and development of new skills and localized market relations. This can manifest itself in a variety of ways, including the (re-)production of commons through the continuation of age-old farming techniques, organization of food provisioning in traditional, home-made food production and family-based mobilization of independent (unwaged) labour. This response can also manifest itself in the adoption and adaptation of old crafts and new skills for product development. The latter is particularly important, since it indicates a deliberate strategy of maintaining independence by means of novel production strategies. These are based on the development of different (new, non-traditional) social relations of production, which are integral to an approach to resources, consumers and markets that works with, but is not primarily organized by, capital.
The second response is an indirect, strategic resistance to commodification. This moves primarily through income differentiation. Basically, the development of employment strategies outside of agriculture, together with retirement revenues and other social security benefits and transfers, enables families to keep their land and maintain their smallholdings. The desire to maintain family farms, even in the face of pressure and temptations to sell, itself represents an exercise of autonomy against capital. Since rural employment opportunities tend to be limited, this is facilitated by urban migration, along with the formation of extended (rural–urban) settlement structures that involve various types of mobility and novel living structures, or spatial definitions. This implies that we should also look at commons as a geo-social practice, as a form of re-spatialization.
Though the two responses may seem contradictory—the first entails a (partial) non-entry into markets, the second a development of wage–labour relations—in fact, they tend to operate in tandem, combining socially with an integrative synergy premised on movements between the rural and urban. In other words, we argue, through this double strategy, farming households not only mitigate the squeeze on small-scale agriculture and maintain a certain level of autonomy—that is, navigate a course somewhat outside of co-option by capital and independently of the state—but also enable new socioeconomic spatial structures spanning the rural and urban that function as expressions of a new form of social commons. This commoning constitutes a resistance to capital. It is not resistance in the sense of political activism, either overt (like demonstrations, riots and strikes, mostly linked to urban contexts) or covert (false compliance, feigned ignorance and a range of other methods applied in peasant struggles), but a ‘resistance of a third kind’—that is, the ‘direct intervention in, and alteration of, the processes of labour and production’, and ‘a wide range of heterogeneous and increasingly interlinked practices through which the peasantry constitutes itself as distinctively different’ (Ploeg 2007: 2.1).
The primary purpose of this article, therefore, is to present an approach to, and notion of, social commons in the contemporary context of neoliberalism in agriculture, using Turkey as a case study. First, the basic analytical approach and data sources are presented, based mainly on the results of a recent research project (Öztürk and Jongerden 2012). Then, the main features of the resistance to commodification are outlined, focusing specifically on (a) the maintenance and revision of autonomy, and (b) the re-spatialization of the social commons via external sources of income and rural–urban mobility.
Commons as Practice
The concept of the commons has made a comeback in the social and political sciences and the humanities (Hardt and Negri 2008; Harvey 2011; Hess and Ostrom 2006; Ostrom 1990). As Gorz (2011: 29) argues, that which is not part of an exchange, which includes the common wealth or goods held and used in common, has no economic value. By contrast, capital accumulation functions to assign economic value and, thus, to make the commons exchangeable and set artificial obstacles for access. The privatization of access channels transforms the natural wealth and common property to create commodities, while commodification controls accessibility as a means of turning wealth into capital in a privileged way. In short, we may say, de-commoning produces value for the few at the cost of the individual (self-determination) and the group as a whole (community).
Yet, if the issue of the commons entered the agenda as a ‘tragedy’ (Hardin 1968), is its return today anything but a farce? Did Hardin not provide an irrefutable argument for the superiority of private ownership, or at least, centralized management? Without control of the channels of access, we destroy our own common wealth. Harvey (2012: 68), however, convincingly argues otherwise:
This mistaken reading in part derives from Hardin’s appeal to the metaphor of cattle, under the private ownership of several individuals concerned with maximizing their individual utility, pastured on a piece of common land. If the cattle were held in common, of course, the metaphor would not work. It would then be clear that it was private property in cattle and individual utility-maximizing behaviour that lay at the heart of the problem.
Though Hardin’s concern was with population growth and not private ownership of cattle in combination with pastures held in common, what the cattle example shows, in fact, is how individualized property rights fail to realize common interests. The tragedy, Harvey argues, is that ‘[l]eft unregulated, individualized capital accumulation perpetually threats to destroy the two basic common property resources that undergird all forms of production: the laborer and the land’. Thus, he continues, ‘[the] point, rather, is to change all that and to find creative ways to use the powers of collective labor for the common good’ (Harvey 2011: 107). Our focus here is on the creative ways in which people develop resistance to market forces and state policies and fashion collective alternatives to state–market arrangements of social life. Three main issues may be emphasized as characterizing our approach to the commons.
First, we consider commons in terms of social practices. A social practice may be defined as ‘a routinized type of behavior which consist of several elements, interconnected to one other: forms of bodily activities, forms of mental activities, “things and their use”, a background knowledge in the form of understanding, knowhow, states of emotion and motivational knowledge’, and wherein the routinization of practices is not separated from their composition, but recursive: ‘that is to say, they are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors’ (Reckwitz 2010: 249). Thus, ‘[i]n and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible’ (Giddens 1984: 2). This implies that the common is not just a resource external to us, on which we act, but also something (re)created in our actions, the practice by which the resource is produced and reproduced.
Second, we position commons beyond the domains of the private and the public. Produced and reproduced on the basis of autonomy, access, participation, cooperation and caring, the commons should be distinguished from both of these. Combining this with the first point, private, public and commons practices are each regarded as (re)producing resources in their own particular way, namely as private or state entities (such as property, institutions), controlled either by and for private interests, or operated for state-determined purposes, or else as shared entities functioning as a communally controlled resource base. And just as they (re)produce resources, so do these different types of practices (re)produce social relations, that is, relations that are characteristically instrumental—commodified by capital or administratively state-defined—or else autonomous and communal. 2
Third, since the common is defined as a practice, it is more than a remainder of the past or vague hope for the future, but operates among us now, even though we tend only to see the world as polarized between private property claims and authoritarian or paternalistic state intervention, having become intellectually blind to the ‘moral economy of common action’ (Hardt 2010: 352; see also Harvey 2011: 101). Indeed, ‘the common is always present, or potentially so… [since it] concerns our capacity to control and reproduce our means of existence, our being in the world’, meaning, thus, that ‘[i]t is a process, and we are this common, making, producing, participating, moving, sharing, circulating, enriching, inventing, restarting’ (Negri and Revel 2008, emphasis added). Thus, commons as a practice may indeed ‘carry people beyond the limits established by the status quo’ (Bookchin 1991: 3) and ‘perform new economic hopes’ (Gibson-Graham 2008: 4). This is the emancipatory notion of the commons, the idea ‘that through hard work, cooperation, joint actions and/or over struggle, progress might be wrought’ (Ploeg 2008: 274).
Ultimately, therefore, the common is not about holding rights to individual or group access to resources, but about the right to change and reinvent after one’s desires (Harvey 2012: 4). Such a reinvention depends on the cooperation of people and groups for a collective action, and thus crucially also on individual and group, as well as collective rights and responsibilities. This is what we mean by commons as a practice: it is not an entity (resource) in respect of which we act so much as something enacted and (re-)produced in our activities, ideas, ways of approaching the world. This is a notion of the commons as the very condition of an independently produced and controlled resource base in which learning and re-skilling takes place (Ploeg 2008: 26).
This article focuses on the development of the commons, thus, analyzed in the context of a smallholder—or peasant (Hilton 2012: 13–16)—mode of production, and among rural migrants and urban dwellers with linkages to village and agricultural households. The primary locus lies in practices that connect, as indicated, the rural and the urban (and transnational), and a sense of the communal grounded in but no longer limited to one place. Thus, we refer loosely to social ties and networks in the context of commons (non-capital defined social relations) as a ‘communalism’. The specific information for the case of Turkey is based on two main sources: official statistics and the results of an original research project. The former are drawn from data compiled by the Turkish Statistical Institute (TSI or TURKSTAT, TÜİK in Turkish, previously DİE). The latter are based on a research project for which data collection took place in two phases during 2010–11 (Öztürk 2012b). The first phase consisted of focus groups with villagers (in 25 villages, nationwide) and in-depth interviews with Ministry of Agriculture district office managers and agricultural input sellers and product traders (in 18 of the country’s 81 provincial districts); the second comprised interviews with village households (436) and a village-based questionnaire (74).
The Maintenance and Revision of Autonomies
Since the 1950s, the historical 3:1 rural-to-urban population ratio in Turkey has inverted to today’s 1:4. This marks the ‘success’ of a state policy initially aimed at an urban-based economic growth led by services and industry. At first, the demographic change was slow and gradual: the urban population simply increased more quickly than the rural. Then, with the initial introduction of market-oriented reforms in the 1980s, the absolute rural population started to fall, a trend that accelerated sharply after the turn of the millennium, when neoliberal policies were introduced into the agrarian sector involving the removal of the centralized system of structural supports constructed over the previous half-century.
The 2001–06 Agricultural Reform Implementation Project (ARIP), sponsored by the World Bank, saw huge cuts in and/or the ending of a range of state production facilities, price control mechanisms (including fixed price purchases and high import duties) and input subsidies (such as subsidized fertilizers and cheap credit through the state Agriculture Bank), combined with the facilitation of land transfer and international capital entry (Aydın 2010; Öztürk 2012a). Thus, during this period, while the total population of Turkey rose by 4 per cent, its rural population dropped by 12 per cent, from around 24 to 21 million, approximately half a million people per year. That is, in less than a decade, one in eight of all rural dwellers departed, and the village population returned to a level last seen 40 years ago (TÜİK 2000, 2008).
In simple terms, the main narrative is of a massive assault on peasant agriculture, leading to urban migration and a demographic earthquake: as the young and healthy moved to the cities to find work and start new families—especially young women, for whom education and employment in the service sector offered liberating opportunities—the ageing and elderly stayed in the village (Figure 1).
The agrarian base of the old Turkish economy, it was understood, needed to be changed to a secondary/tertiary economy in order to increase value addition and, thus, economic growth. In this new model, agrarian-related value was to be added by the processing industry, and farmers were supposed to deliver higher yields for relatively lower costs. Since most farms had been small-scale, family operations, it followed that the recent huge change should lead to a similarly massive reduction in the number of smallholdings. Indeed, the smallholder share of farming lands has fallen quickly, as agribusiness has consolidated its holdings. Yet, intriguingly, only the number of the very smallest holdings, up to 2 hectares, has declined. Thus, while in 2001, half of all holdings were plots of 2 to 10 hectares, by 2006 this figure had actually increased a little (Table 1). In fact, this follows the historical trends of the last half-century, suggesting, perhaps, that although simple subsistence farming has been dealt a massive blow, small-scale enterprise has not, and that although the relative importance of small-scale enterprise in the food production system as a whole may be diminishing upon the entry of capital, the effect of this on rural social life in general has been significantly mitigated.
Proportions of Agricultural Enterprises by Size (Number and Land), 1963–2006
By 2006, when the bulk of the most recent rural-urban migration wave had occurred (it continues still, but much more slowly), around four in five holdings were still less than 10 hectares in size. Since the total number of holdings was similar to that of a half-century ago (around three million), this means that, overall, there has not been a great change in the number of smallholdings of less than 10 hectares (the definition used henceforth). 3 Nearly all of these small farms were inherited (around 95 per cent were on family land) and a majority (around 60 per cent) engaged in mixed agriculture (Gürsel and Karakoç 2009, citing TÜİK 2008), suggesting low-level capitalization—market-oriented perhaps, but supported by self-sufficiency and including arable farming for winter livestock feed. This is broadly the situation that we find today, based on data for commodification (farm/home production) of rural household foods, with over half of staple foods and dairy products still being produced at home, on the farm (Table 2).
Commodification of Rural Household Food Supply (%, n = 436)
Self-produced food may be regarded as one of the commons of rural life. First, the basic material inputs, such as grain and milk, are mainly uncommodified, created outside of the market economy. Farmers use corn and cows raised from the previous generation of corn and cows with few or no external (state or private) inputs. Second, production skills, both on the land (raising animals, growing plants) and in the kitchen (making cheese, preparing soups), are maintained in village life, passed down through the generations. Food-making knowledge is acquired and shared, not purchased. Home-made foods are, therefore, produced for daily or seasonal consumption within village and family structures, essentially outside of the social relations of the market and its producer/consumer and employer/employee relations. The peasant mode of production is essentially autonomous and communal, representing a social common.
The peasant way centres on the maintenance of a non-commodity circuit (Ploeg 2008: 29) in the production process, through which smallholders assert control over the reproduction of their own farms independently of markets. Contrary to what is referred to as subsistence farming, however, the (contemporary) peasant way of production also involves a commodity circuit (the non-commodity circuit thus becomes dual circuit). When this starts to dominate, the farm becomes structured by the logic of capital (Figure 2, relation a), a development indicated, perhaps, by the importance of relation of inputs to outputs in the farm as a whole (Figure 2, relation b). Peasant struggles, as, for example, in Via Campesina, are characterized by the fight to maintain and develop autonomy through the non-commodity circuit. Furthermore, and in contradistinction to the anonymous markets of abstract exchange that mark the modern consumer society, a product becomes valued not only in terms of price, but also in the way the product is produced. Consumer relations in the contemporary peasant way are not governed by low price but by fair price, and the economy of exchange is turned into a moral economy.
It should be noted that, from this perspective, even the agricultural marketing strategies of smallholders to maintain their farms should not necessarily be evaluated in terms of individual decision-making processes of market actors, but may be more relevantly considered in terms of the development of different social relations of production. Thus, in contrast to the process of increased external control constituted by heightened dependency on markets, many smallholdings in Turkey have survived not simply because they are topographically unsuited to the extension of capital through economies of scale—important though this is in the mountainous lands of Anatolia—but also through strategies that in some way support the non-commodity circuit.
The entry of capital into village life generally may be regarded very much as a glass half-full as well as half-empty—and, as we suggest below, one that, even as it leaks, provides the conditions for a type of replenishment: commodification and autonomy are constantly under negotiation on the farm through countless decisions regarding how to organize the circuits of commodities and non-commodities. Certainly, a creeping commodification does manifest itself, for example, in rural consumption. Table 3 shows the penetration of some popular (mass marketed) consumer durables into village households. For farming families to buy these things obviously requires their access to cash or credit. This is enabled through borrowing or sales, primarily of agricultural produce (access to the market), but also of assets (essentially, as a temporary strategy) and labour power (perhaps locally, but mostly through out-migration with remittances), as well as through transfers (in which some of the wealth produced by the operation of capital generally is moved to smallholdings through personal entitlements). Yet, it is precisely the access to such goods that enables the survival of the village and, thus, the maintenance of traditional social commons, and which also characterizes the role of the village in the expression of what might be dubbed a post-modern common.
Rural Household Penetration of Selected Consumer Durables (%, n = 436)
Essentially, a peasant-mode production remains a transforming reference point in the rural social landscape (Ploeg 2009), where social commons not only endure, but through which new modes can emerge. Thus, a dialectical relationship manifests itself, as the very commodification that slowly eats into the social commons of village life enables its revival in altered form. Indeed, given the rapid rise in GNP in Turkey and associated urban migration, the number of village farmers would surely have already been decimated had they not gained sufficient entry into the market to compete well enough in order to survive— one way or another. A few, brief examples of how commodification has entered traditional rural practices and how commons have both declined and reformulated can serve to illustrate some of the complex socioeconomic dynamics at play here.
The vehicle count shown in Table 3 includes only non-specialized working vehicles, but ownership of tractors and other farming equipment, such as for ploughing and harvesting, is also widespread now. In one mountain village in the northeastern (Black Sea) region, for example—one of the five villages and hamlets in the district (ilçe) regarded as thriving (canlı), from over 70—we observed around half of the 90 resident households to possess their own tractors (a proportion, in fact, in line with the official national average). Sometimes these tractors were shared with the non-tractor-owning families, but mostly their use was paid for, either in kind or, most commonly, by a daily rent (which we found to be the case in two-thirds of villages). Even in the latter cases, however, the traditional independence and communal structuring of rural social relations means that the financialization of sharing is, as it were, autonomized, with neighbours making their own payment arrangements, or, decisions about how to work with capital. This includes capital acquisition, insofar as (typically longstanding) human relationships contribute to ensure that profiteering is not practised.
This entry of financial transfers (cash payments), in particular, represents a commodification of daily life that manifests itself in many ways. Indeed, older villagers do complain, for example, that ‘people don’t share anymore’. Again, though, lest it be too easily overlooked, the social commons continue to be enacted. For example, in the mountain village referred to above, it used to be a traditional practice for the whole village to move its animals together for summertime pasture to higher land, where some villagers would stay in a mountain settlement (yayla) to look after the animals, while the rest returned to harvest the corn and scythe the grass for hay, which involved a range of communal social activities (the timing of the move would be decided by informal consensus, people would look after one another’s animals, etc.). This still occurs, with modernizing developments: the traditional water buffalo have been substituted by private vehicles and daily minibus trips up and down the mountain added, so that the villagers can cut their grass for winter feed during the day, between dawn/dusk herding and milking in the yayla.
Another aspect of commodification is observed in the ways in which agricultural inputs are obtained. In addition to mechanical hardware and the necessary fuel and maintenance, farmers not only purchase inputs such as fertilizers (74 per cent of smallholders) and pesticides (67 per cent)—for which state subsidies have now been significantly reduced—but also certified seed (47 per cent) and seedlings (20 per cent). With regard to the latter, state restrictions, albeit loosely applied, limit farmers’ rights to produce and sell their own seeds, subject to legislation introduced by ARIP in accordance with EU regulations. The multinational operations of agribusiness are thus now legally enabled to introduce patented seed products and related biotechnologies—millions of tons of genetically modified seed (corn, rape/oilseed and cotton) now enter Turkey, where they are converted into the constituents of several hundred food products. Here, though, the legislated construction of dependency meets with a relatively politicized resistance in the form of seed barter festivals, especially in the western (Aegean) region. At these festivals, farmers exchange seed in non-financial transactions, thus circumventing not only the new legislation but also the capitalized market. Even though the room for manoeuvre in the practice of independent farming is reduced and with it the social commons restricted, therefore, it is re-engaged by an independent, communal response.
The purchase of tractors, fertilizers, seeds and the like obviously requires smallholders to enter the market with cash or credit. Traditionally, when farmers/villagers needed access to goods, they would seek them in communal solidarity (without financial payment) or, if money was required, by localized, personal borrowing (from family, neighbours and friends). This grounding in communal social relations is also changing to one of capitalist commodity relations, as traditional methods decrease and credit relations grow. Thus financialization constitutes another dimension of the commodification process, one in which farmers are integrated more closely into market relations through economic surplus transfers made as interest payments and assets transformed into capital for investment. Yet, again, there is a crucial caveat: bank loans are difficult for smallholders to secure, and family and neighbours remain the preferred option for financial support. Around a fifth of the households and villages we questioned borrow on the basis of human rather than capital relations, while another fifth would not, or do not, take loans, opting instead for other, belt-tightening and asset realization approaches, such as by reducing consumption and/or farming activities and renting out land (Table 4).
In the quest for solvency, farmers may indeed attempt to transform assets into capital or make savings rather than raise money. Our research shows that around half of villagers draw on their savings in times of need, and certainly hold out against selling land, the preferred option of only 3 per cent. At the same time, in another expression of the dialectic referred to above, the departure of people from the farms for jobs in the city, thereby entering into full capital relations, also has the effect of releasing the pressure on smallholding production capacity by reducing household consumption demand, indefinitely. Whereas in the past, the loss of labour supply, of young people in particular, would have outweighed the gain for the farm of lower consumption, now, with the entry of capital, when labour needs are so reduced by mechanization, this even becomes a positive factor, contributing to the survival of family smallholdings and the traditions they maintain.
Preferred Credit/Barrowing Sources (Household, n = 171)
Another interesting contemporary strategy is investment in solar power. Very popular among smallholders now, this longer term investment option not only enables savings in electricity costs but also contributes to rural development, reducing the pressure on environmentally damaging energy sources. Taking farmers away from national grid dependency, it also, of course, contributes to their autonomy. Indeed, making savings—reducing farming expenses and cutting consumption generally—is practiced, as necessary, by 50 to 60 per cent of farmers, according to our research. Inevitably, however, smallholders cannot endure indefinitely with just scale-down and stop-gap measures, such as belt-tightening and borrowing, and even long-lasting efficiencies, such as the departure of family members and introduction of cheaper energy supplies, will stem the relentless tide of capital.
External Income and Rural–Urban Mobility
Eventually, if family farms and the associated social commons are to survive the vicissitudes of the market, they must either capitalize more fully for market efficiency, or develop other relations with markets such as though value addition (‘deepening’), engaging in on-farm but non-agricultural activities (‘broadening’) or reducing costs and finding non-farm, non-agricultural sources of income (‘re-grounding’) (Ploeg 2003).
Among the positive market relations related to value addition (deepening) and the moral economy aspect of the peasant way is the adoption, by whole villages even, of a single, high-value product, which assumes two forms. One is general, the application of generic terms and techniques, such as ‘organic’, which are increasingly attractive to the urban middle class. The other is specifically related to quality definition via the branding of produce by locality, such as for honey (Turkey is ecologically rich in native flower varieties for pollen sources for bees) and cheese made from unpasteurized milk (such as in the Kars region of northeast Turkey). In the latter case, of a product that has both intrinsic quality value and a localized production structure, an initiative from 2000 is now striving for recognition and protection under the geographical indication regulation of the EU to promote and protect quality agricultural products and food.
These examples of the emergence of embedded or ‘nested’ markets (Aguglia et al. 2009) represent informal and localized farmer-based developments, rather than determinations by distant and anonymous enterprises ordered by the logic of agribusiness. Although they are integrated into capital and dependent on markets, this is much more on their own terms than, for example, the medium-size entrepreneurs of central Anatolia who produce potatoes to order for supermarkets to be converted to crisps, where the varieties, quantities and prices are all fixed by the industry and where it is this that gains the added value through the secondary production process. On the one hand, these nested markets valorize community through their need for and, thus, support of regional skills and knowledge sharing; on the other hand, they buttress independence through the development of what tend to be individually articulated markets with highly tailored, yet flexible, infrastructures that are inherently resistant to takeover.
Another development that contributes to rural development by enhancing the value of the common as a locality-based resource (broadening) involves the turn to tourism. The contemporary phenomenon of yayla tourism, essentially by urbanites touring the countryside as an alternative summer holiday, offers opportunities for income generation in various spheres, such as hotel and restaurant provision, in which localized entrepreneurial activities are currently expanding quite quickly. Again, within the general context of commodification, this also combines with smallholder practices to provide a combination of subsistence/livelihood inputs that afford families relatively high levels of control—to organize, for example, the particular mix of incomes received according to a range of factors that are self-determined (by individual preference and family changes), as well as market driven.
Investment activities require external income sources, just like inputs into the commodification process to develop smallholdings in the market, or, for that matter, the mere maintenance (survival) of ‘inefficient’ family farming enterprises. Other than credit, by formal (bank) or informal (fellow villager) means, there are two main sources (for re-grounding): pensions and employment. The relatively high proportion of elderly people living in villages and their increased coverage by state pension schemes nowadays means that this is a major contribution to the rural economy as a whole and certainly supports farming families—the contribution is typically pooled if they live in a single household and otherwise informally shared according to need across households. Employment, however, is obviously a more lucrative source of income, and preferred in almost half (46 per cent) of the villages we surveyed.
Like borrowing, wage labour results in commodification and financialization. It also effects an eradication of collective work, inter-work, loan-work and solidarity via labour support, especially to the elderly: simply, if someone sells her/his labour s/he has less time for kinship/communal work. This is a de-commoning effected by the commodification of human relations at the level of agriculturally based social practice. Inevitably, though, the picture is more complex. Farmers cannot maintain their farms for any length of time simply through the addition of income from their paid employment, since their farms also demand their labour. Rather, families organize in ways that enable the maintenance of their smallholdings through the external financial inputs of some members and the on-farm labour of others. Official figures thus show rural employment outside of farming to have constantly increased, by over 50 per cent since 2004, and now standing at nearly 40 per cent of all paid labour in the countryside (Table 5).
Economic Activity (Rural Employment) (000s, age 15+)
Although the wage labour that enables inputs into smallholder farms may be local, in the nearest town, it is more often in a large city or metropolis, or abroad, and involves a rural-to-urban, or transnational, change of residence. In terms of time period, this move may be on a temporary (e.g., seasonal, semi-annual) or permanent basis, followed by a return to the village or not, for temporary periods or longer. Return to the village is also a function of overall economic activity: during a downturn, people in the city become unemployed and a proportion head back to the village. Table 4 shows agricultural employment falling during the introduction of state reforms, by nearly 15 per cent in just three years prior the recent international economic crisis, after which it rose by some 25 per cent. During periods of reduced employment, when capital— the market—fails, agriculture offers an alternative, fall-back means of sustenance, an escape route for the urban marginalized.
Obviously, it is usually younger people who tend to engage in such wage labour, impelled not only by family needs and local economic capacity limitations, but also individual, life-course-associated desires to engage with the cosmopolitan, the wider world. Essentially, this is a function of modern mobility, enabled by local road and highway construction, in tandem with the car and a massive nationwide network of bus services, as well as, now, affordable, nationwide flights. Socially, it is organized around kinship, although it also involves lineage more broadly, especially clans (in Turkey especially in the southeast, the Kurdish region) and ties of place (villages, districts and beyond).
Kinship (and lineage/locality) may be regarded as an alternative mode of order. Although it is very much tied in with capital (e.g., in respect of inherited wealth) and tends to function for the social organization of private property, it is also historically pre-capitalist and stands outside the market, from a social relations perspective. In terms of social practices, kinship thus works as a common, on the basis of shared resources. Of course, we should not idealize kinship networks, since they operate, traditionally and to this day, in ways that privilege some, typically males and elders, over others, thus giving these groups greater access to the common wealth of the kinship. Indeed, insofar as kinship is bound to the private (as family wealth), we may also analyze it from an external perspective as structurally operating in ways defined by capital. Nevertheless, from an internal perspective (within families), kinship organizes social practices on a communal basis. Its resources are fundamentally inaccessible to outsiders, but intrinsically open to those within. Kinship constitutes community in a way that, importantly, is not defined by capital, or, for that matter, the state, and thus persists autonomously.
Kinship is an important socioeconomic and cultural configuration. Practices of residence and resource mobilization are, partly at least, kinship-based or mediated, particularly in the generally traditional, rural contexts of agriculture. As Belge (2011) showed in reference to the Kurdish situation in Turkey and the continuing contemporary efficacy of its clan structures, kinship networks may function as an important reservoir of resistance against a repressive and interventionist state—and from the perspective of the commons and social practice, the state is routinely repressive and interventionist, denying autonomy and the communal, first through appropriation (of the commons, for the public) and then through its own capitalization (the neoliberal turn, privatization).
The advance of capital may be considered to undermine and diminish kinship relations, as evidenced in the contraction of the primary family unit (from extended to nuclear). Essentially, this consists in the reduction of the over-arching patrilineal unit as a multiple household—a hierarchical structure strongly related to the pre-modern, agricultural era of human development, generally organized around a male head, in which women are part of the extended family of their father, or an older brother, until their transfer upon marriage to the newly-formed extended family of the husband (Kovanci 2005). This societal system not only continues to form the bedrock of social relations in rural areas and heavily informs urban living patterns, but also, as indicated, takes new forms of expression through resistance rooted in agriculture, the efforts of people and groups to maintain autonomy and their communal basis of human connectivity oriented to farming. Crucially, moreover, an extended family can develop an extended settlement pattern. Today, in addition to the weakening of traditional gender practices (as well as age deference), this extended settlement pattern implies the development of communal living structures spanning both rural and urban environments, as out-migration causes families to spread from home village to towns and cities and maintain ties of solidarity to hold this social fabric together, in the form of extended networks.
Composed of an indeterminate number of households, an extended family commonly forms a small number of households in the village, and divides into several in the town or city—thus incorporating, one might argue, rather than being defined by, the paradigmatically capitalist, nuclear form. In addition to its constrictive (external) definition in terms of the private, such a structuring may function on the basis of shared resources, without necessarily pooling all resources. We may, thus, understand these in terms of material commonalities, of accessible goods, finances and labour, rather than a simple commons. Male members of an extended family sometimes decide to cultivate together the land to which they are entitled and share the revenues, while household income generated from other work, like wage labour in the city, or income from entrepreneurial farming activities, is not shared, or only partly (Jongerden 2007: 28–29). Indeed, bonds of blood and locality have been reformulated rather than dissolved as a result of the entry of capital.
What has emerged in Turkey today is an extended settlement pattern based on traditional, agrarian social relations of kinship and community that, linking the rural to the urban, serves to support village smallholders through diversified income generating strategies. This we may refer to as a solidarity-network-based common. As a result of mobility and migration, this solidarity, or sharing, does not take place in a context of the village and agriculture, but in the context of mobilizing resources across the rural–urban divide. From the village perspective, as a smallholder strategy of having household members working in the city, it is partly a response to decreasing incomes and insecurity in the countryside. Therefore, we can comprehend smallholder families engaging with wage labour in the city as a strategy to gain or maintain autonomy through communal social practices. This enables the small family farm both to survive and to withstand pressure to organize it according to a purely capitalist logic; in other words, it supports the dual-circuit economy of the contemporary peasant way. Thus, are traditional commons maintained and new ones created, not only despite but also in tandem with the development of capital.
For the several million people who have been pouring into Turkey’s cities, access to housing and work in cities is mainly organized on the basis of relations of kinship and locality (hemşehrilik), in which those born in the same village or region help each other; the urban migrants usually move to the part of the city where their home district hemşeri is located. Through family and community-rooted relations, housing is found, credit obtained and jobs sought (Karpat 1976: 85, Kovanci 2005). This constitutes a grouping together for networks of support that is even visible at the level of apartment blocks, in which members of the same lineage rent or buy flats on different floors of the same building, or even join together to build it.
The importance of these solidarity networks–or communalism–has not diminished in Turkey over the last decade; on the contrary, it has increased, for two main reasons. First, compared to earlier migrants, recent arrivals have fewer housing opportunities due to de-commoning practices. Until the 1980s, migrants could occupy land relatively easily, create their own housing and add value. That changed during the 1990s, as the urban periphery morphed into the commuter belt, so land now has become a scarce commodity that the state, municipalities and private construction and investment companies want to develop, mostly for profit and associated infrastructure provision. Today’s city newcomers usually cannot find land on which to build their own dwelling and instead become dependent on the private housing market.
After accommodation, the second important problem awaiting newcomers is employment. Previously, the urban poor worked for the state or local authority in official jobs with low salaries but job security; these have decreased in number, and markedly so. Under neoliberalism, the downsizing of the state since the 1980s has restricted employment in the public sector, contributing to an excess supply of labour that has depressed real wages, sporadically acting as a causal factor in general economic slowdowns and crises and resulting in unemployment. The impairment of the labour unions, again in line with the basic tenets of neoliberalism, has further depressed wages. In 2006, just 13.3 per cent of the Turkish workforce was employed on the basis of collective labour agreements, as compared with over 70 per cent in most EU countries (Candaş et al. 2010: 70).
Obviously, this mostly affects the least powerful in the labour market, who are disproportionately urban migrants. Research on migrants to 20 large cities in Turkey over the last 20 years shows that slightly over a quarter (28 per cent) are in casual or temporary employment, and slightly under a quarter (22 per cent) are ‘self-employed’, which tends to mean engagement in a low-level (insecure, poorly paid) enterprise or street-hawking. Approximately half of these city migrants, therefore, are in marginal forms of employment; and some two thirds of them come from villages. Their employment conditions do mean, however, that they are relatively free to move between city and village, as economic circumstances dictate, which offers at least a minimal level of autonomy. Indeed, white-collar workers and even professionals are also observed to be engaged in village farming and dual-residence living patterns, suggesting that factors like independence and maintenance of close contact with the land may be actively valued and not just the result of economic necessity (Öztürk and Topaloğlu 2013).
For the less fortunate, the increased difficulties of leaving their villages for the city means that, rather than sending remittances to their families in the village, it is they who need support to get established. This comes in both financial and other material forms (food, bedding) and through different avenues (produced at home, sent by bus). The net result is a complex picture of a two-way interaction (Table 6).
Migrant Solidarity Forms (n = 436)
Further compounding this blurring of urban and rural space is the incidence of urban agricultural practices. State (TSI) figures show that a small but increasing proportion of agricultural labourers live in towns and cities (up 1 per cent annually since 2004, to over three-quarters of a million people), while we observed the existence of urban–rural farmers, who either work their land from a town or city, or who make land-use or sharecropping arrangements with those in the village and return to manage the planting and harvesting. Another tendency, related to the lack of village schools, is that of students living with relatives, or for parents/guardians to move into towns/cities to look after the youth—arrangements which are, of course, intrinsically temporary and, thus, subject to a variety of social patterning dynamics.
The reorganization of labour and residence through urban migration enables accrued wealth not only to be sent in the form of rural remittances to support farming and aging relatives and maintain family properties, but also to rebuild and extend these, by means of investment, or else create entirely new ones as people engage in various forms of rural-directed movements. These include retirement, with reverse (sometimes transnational), counter-urban (urban-to-rural) and even ‘transrural’ (rural-to-urban-to-rural) migration, along with dual-place residence, oscillating between city and village, typically escaping village winters (for the elderly) or city summers (as a return ‘home’ for family holidays, perhaps, or to help out on the farm). Generally, the phenomenon of village return is particularly productive of a rich variety of village-residence oriented dual- and multi-place (hybrid) living structures (Öztürk et al. 2013).
Premised on mobility, this hybrid fudges the dichotomy of rural/urban in the realization of social spaces that eschew the distinction between village and city. These may be dubbed ‘rurban’, to borrow a term from the Turkish socialist Nusret Kemal Köymen (1940), whose novel conceptualization of spatial settlement attempted to synthesize agriculture and industry. This idea is used here to refer to the spatial living structures and the social relations by which they are defined, including a significant determination by smallholder farming. Insofar as these are specified by communal ties of kinship and locality primarily activated outside of the state or capital—or rather, structurally inside yet importantly ungrounded within these, fundamentally a-statist and a-capitalist—they invoke a social praxis that valorizes commonalities. Thus, they may be deemed to fall under the original category of rurban mobility as an agriculturally based social common—or an importantly rural—and agriculturally oriented form of re-spatialization.
Conclusion
Despite the ancient history of property and its control, the massive encroachment of both state and market to become pervasive in everyday life is a relatively new phenomenon. Neither public nor private capital was the centre from which order radiated across much of the world for most of its history. Social relations and the daily practices riding on them were not generally based on these, but were rather organized around and through rural locality and family, on the basis, that is, of kith and kinship. Related to this communal arrangement was a human or moral economy rather than a command or market economy. Now, however, family networks, the community and moral economy have been transformed worldwide by the drive for ‘development’, with neoliberal state policies and the commodification of agriculture both causing and being facilitated by migration and rural–urban mobility. Technological restructuring along with the financial advances of globalization have produced socio-political expressions of capital that have profound implications for the commons—with de-commoning as an aim, indeed, an instrumental necessity, rather than just operative.
Regarding the present state of social commons in the countryside, the snapshot presented here is a mixed one. The massive and ongoing outflow of population, market pressures on farmers, and partial collapse of traditional village life may all be cited in support of an arguably depressing thesis. Against that, however, the surprising resilience of smallholder subsistence enterprises—with, on the one hand, both the maintenance of old and development of new autonomous practices and strategies and, on the other, the extension of family- and also community-based ‘rurban’ space and its material commonalities—suggest an alternative reading, one that valorizes a very contemporary notion of the peasant way. On the capitalist accumulation side, the commodification imperative operates as a function of the demand for profit; on the side of the common, ordinary human intent leads us to try to control our own social relations and values and survive under the sometimes oppressive conditions of our lived environments. The balance of these contradictory vectors emerges as a synthesis, whereby even as commodification appears to overcome the commons and convert everything to a value for exchange, the commons are enabled, both through the continuation of the ‘natural’ order based on communalism and autonomy and also as a constant rescuing of relations from the hegemony of accumulation and capitalist logic.
Despite so many signs to the contrary, therefore, the analysis presented here suggests that the force of the latter is not just a romantic nostalgia projected as a fanciful ideal for a future never to be realized. On the contrary, it represents a way in which the human spirit, the drive for autonomy and need for community, inevitably emerges, like weeds ever growing through the concrete of external, divisive, dehumanizing controls, and thus in an unending dialectic with capital. Indeed, this is what Ploeg (2005) describes as ‘the struggle for autonomy (and for survival, dignity, prospects for a better life) in a society that rather condemns people to submission, dependency, [and] deprivation’ which becomes ‘central to the “peasant condition”’. In addition to the deployment of natural resources and a ‘co-production’ enabled by ‘social resources’ such as ‘local knowledge, social networks, [and] specific institutions’, the contemporary peasant engages through a ‘certain distantiation from the markets’, in which the peasant unit of production is precisely the institutional form that distantiates farming in ‘a specific, strategically ordered way’ (ibid.). The example from Turkey describes ways in which smallholder farming may operate as a locus of resilience for kinship and village/locality networks that resist in a multitude of ways and, thus, offer a distance from markets, even as they utilize them so as to enable novel forms of communal autonomies in a more generalized re-spatialization that extends to the urban.
Not only have families managed not to sell their land to capitalist entrepreneurs and agribusiness companies, but as a result of the squeeze of the market and the underlying migratory pull of the urban sourced by capital through the terms of trade, their desire to farm has contributed to the extension of kinship and other communal ties across socio-geographical space in the production of new social forms. The networks of support interconnecting cityscape and countryside are, thus, in an important way and to a large extent, directly produced by the present neoliberal thrust. And even as they operate in the context of the village deteriorating from a hinterland of support to a shelter for the weak, the aged and infirm unable or unwilling to compete in the urban labour market, so, equally, do they inject reverse movements of people and other material and immaterial resources from the city that help to sustain small-scale agriculture and rural life, including the (relative) maintenance of non-commodified practices and human relations. In the present development and evolution of the social commons, therefore, previously disparate spheres of human activity now span and integrate the rural–urban divide to produce re-spatialization as a contemporary, novel form of social re-commoning.