The Combined and Uneven Development of Class Capacities in Pre-Neoliberal Turkey

Abstract

This chapter applies the book’s main theoretical framework on the combined and uneven development of class capacities to the historical context of Turkish trade unionism. The combined character of structural class capacities makes itself felt in the crippling effects of the late Ottoman Empire’s integration into world capitalism on its nascent industrial sector. World wars, regional conflicts, and global economic crises restrained structural class capacities in the late Ottoman and early Republican era, which added to Turkey’s alignment with US imperialism. The uneven character of structural class capacities is manifested in Turkey’s late and slow industrialization period without experiencing any revolutionary economic leaps. Economic differentiation between the late Ottoman ethnic groups and the dispersed state of the predominantly small-sized early Republican industries can be seen among other factors that marked the uneven development of Turkey’s structural class capacities. As for the combined character of Turkey’s organizational working class capacities, we discern the political alignment of most labour and socialist forces with capitalist–imperialist invaders against the Anatolian National Liberation Movement and TURK-ISṃ’s alignment with US imperialism in the Cold War. Unevenness in organizational working class capacities includes the late disappearance of centralist guild structures permeated by traditional authority relationships and low levels of differentiation of workers from employers; cultural and ideological fragmentation of labour movements dominated by non-Muslim workers in the late Ottoman era; the mixed effects of Turkey’s military coups starting from 1960; and TURK-ISṃ’s co-opted top bureaucracy versus DISK’s increasing militancy, accompanied by closer alignments with left-wing and student movements.