Variegated Privatisation: Class, Capital Accumulation and State in Turkey’s Privatisation Process in the 1980s and 1990s

Abstract

This article seeks to illustrate a problematic aspect of dominant-contemporary Marxian literature on privatisation: an overgeneralised explanation that shifting structural imperatives of contemporary capitalism, global powers and international financial institutions externally imposed privatisation downwards on all national-domestic political spaces. I suggest an alternative approach that emphasises the complex interplay of three internal factors – class agency, capital accumulation strategies, and state institutions – in mediating and shaping external pressures towards privatisation. Through a study of the Turkish privatisation process in the 1980s and 1990s, I illustrate that even though privatisation was thrust on Turkey by the structural dynamics, the World Bank, the IMF and global capital, its implementation has been contested inside and outside of the state apparatus by the Turkish power bloc (i.e. fractions of capital) within the constitutive context of the prevailing strategies of the domestic capital accumulation regime of Turkey at the time.