State, capitalism and class

Capitalism has been one of the main preoccupations of most post-18^th century social theory. And perhaps no two other theorists influenced the debate on modernity and capitalism more than Karl Marx and Max Weber did. Witnessing the socio-historical rupture brought about by capitalism in Europe during the 19^th century, both Marx and Weber attempted to uncover the underlying causes of capitalism, offering two distinct, yet at times converging, sociologies of modernity. A debate on Marx and Weber, i.e. their similarities and differences, is simply beyond the scope of this paper.Footnote ¹What I intend to question in this section, however, is the way capitalism and class have been understood by Marx and Weber’s adherents.

Consider the prominent names of Weberian historical sociology. In these accounts, the bourgeoisie, based on the type and level of commerce in a given economy, accumulates wealth and rationalizes profit-seeking action, which in turn leads it to challenge the political/cultural preferences of the aristocracy, the peasantry, the bureaucracy and the associated non-liberal notions of modernity (Moore Reference Moore1966; Tilly Reference Tilly1990). In non-Western societies, say in the Middle East, due to the prevailing nature of political rule, i.e. the “patrimonial” or the “rentier” character of the state, buttressed by sacred law and Islamic understanding of justice, frustrates the potential to generate an independent space where bourgeois classes could flourish. The result is the persistence of tribal forms of life and an impenetrable Islamic folk culture, which prevented the emergence or limited the development of modern economic and political institutions, thereby aggravating the “irrational” fusion of politics and Islam (Turner Reference Turner1984; Springbord Reference Springborg1990; Gellner Reference Gellner1981).

Marxian accounts too utilize a narrative based on the presumed strength/weakness of bourgeois agency to probe the capitalism-modernity relation. Here the emphasis shifts from the non-capitalist obstacles to the bourgeoisie’s rationality to the hierarchies in the world economy. The structure of the “world-system”, argues Wallerstein (Reference Wallerstein1980), allowed the bourgeoisie in the core European countries to develop more liberal forms of labor control than their counterparts in the periphery. The development of the bourgeoisie in the periphery occurred under the auspices of international capital or the colonial state, thus the domestic bourgeoisie was too weak and dependent on foreign centers of accumulation for its own social reproduction. The bourgeoisie in the periphery, consequently, does not seek to transform its own society. It either forms alliance with pre-capitalist social forces for the continuity of the relations of dependence between the core and the periphery as part of an international bourgeoisie or it leaves the leadership of the developmental project to a state bourgeoisie (Alavi Reference Alavi1972; Amin Reference Amin1976; Evans Reference Evans and Deyo1989). In either case, the result is that democratic practices do not take root in the third world, with liberal demands repressed under the conditions given by the requirements of capital accumulation in the core (Cardoso Reference Cardoso and Collier1980; O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell1988; Portes Reference Portes1985).

Weberian and Marxian theories are in agreement in pre-imputing the bourgeoisie as the carrier of economic and socio-cultural development, despite their subsequent disagreement on whether or not the bourgeoisie can lead to a fully-fledged, i.e. liberal, modernity in the late modernizing countries. Consequently, Marxian and Weberian accounts seem to be struck from the same ahistorical mold, both sharing an ahistorical view of social agency that replaces the relational context in which the bourgeoisie derives its logic of operation with presumptions about agency itself, i.e. its location in the world economy, its culture or its degree of rationalization. Underlying this ahistorical notion of class is the lumping together of capitalism and modernity under the same transhistorical process of rationalization of bourgeois agency, the former simply being its economic component while the latter constituting its political/cultural aspect.

What is in need of further elaboration then is the process of state transformation without pre-labeling any single class as conducive to socio-economic development. I suggest that historicizing the socio-temporal processes whereby class interests are defined and articulated overcomes not only the generic conceptualizations of social agency, making it empirically possible to study the historically structured links between the state and dominant social forces, but also leads to a departure from the dominant perception of modernity and capitalism outlined above.

Re-Conceptualizing class: modernity or capitalism?

The bourgeois paradigm imprints capitalism and modernity over each other. What immediately disappears from the resulting palimpsest is the dramatic historical rupture that produced the capitalist market as a specific social form. Capitalism becomes a natural trait of the bourgeoisie, passing from the earliest merchants through the medieval burgher to the national bourgeoisie, and finally to the transnational capitalist. The question how capitalism arose is explained through the circular logic of the bourgeoisie and the market. The expansion of markets becomes the cause of the rise of the bourgeoisie, and vice versa. Evolutionism eventually prevails, with little room left for explanation. With capitalism obscured, the historical distinctiveness of modernity also pales in the mainstream narrative. Modernity is depleted of its social content; merely used to make sense of different phases of an ever-present capitalism, i.e. modernity, “second modernity”, “post-modernity” etc. In short, modernity gets lost in the “non-history of capitalism” (Wood Reference Wood1997).

Re-historicization of capitalism and modernity is firmly tied to re-historicization of the “social class”, one of the most “tormented, transfixed and de-historicized category of social sciences” (Thompson Reference Thompson1995, p. 63). The bourgeois paradigm renders class exclusively an economic phenomenon focused on the moment of production and circulation only. As such, it transhistoricizes the form class takes only in capitalist society (Sayer Reference Sayer1987, pp. 20-21). It is only when social reproduction shifts away from the personal/communal relations of reproduction to economic competition, that class takes on an “economic” character narrowed down to the point of production. Through the establishment of a contractual relation between the dispossessed “free” producers and the propertied classes and the consolidation of the rules of reproduction in a politically-shielded “economic” sphere, capitalism makes “class” thinkable in economic terms. With the historicity of class vanished, the bourgeois paradigm renders utterly unintelligible the non-capitalist history and the transition to capitalism (Godelier Reference Godelier1978; Meillassoux Reference Meillassoux1972).

Class, in this respect, can prove to be a more useful conceptual tool for the historical and comparative analysis of Turkish modernity if it is re-conceptualized as “property relations”, i.e. historically- and contextually-varying surplus extraction relations and patterns of reproduction crystallized in different property regimes (Lacher Reference Lacher2006, p. 37; Wood Reference Wood1995, p. 76). An historical examination of different property forms can restore the centrality of class in the analysis of the Turkish path to state formation and economic development without presuming the existence of capitalist social relations at all times.

Property relations, in this perspective, allow enough room for historicizing the struggles for access to or control over the means of reproducing society. In non-capitalist societies, the economic power of the ruling class is deeply embedded within its political power, therefore property relations can be analyzed only by reference to variations in political power that allocate differential access to the means of social reproduction. Having a share of, investing in, and being recognized by political/cultural authority secures access to the means of reproduction (Anderson Reference Anderson1974). In a capitalist society, by contrast, property relations are structured in such ways that personal/political/moral relations no longer play the dominant role in accessing surplus.Footnote ² Economic compulsion and economic competition become the main determinant of the transfer of surplus among competing classes. What underlies the novelty of the capitalist market, therefore, cannot simply be the “production for market” or the presence of “wage labor” per se, but that human existence in capitalist market is systematically subjected to competitive reproduction based on an overhaul of the pre-existing property relations. In the end, the market no longer remains as a space of “opportunity”, where the surplus product and surplus labor are occasionally sold, but becomes an “imperative” for social reproduction (Wood Reference Wood1994; Polanyi Reference Polanyi2001).

Class as property relations is no longer a meta-explanan but an explanandum; i.e. it requires explanation as its content changes with the reality it seeks to comprehend. This is precisely where one begins to grasp the historical complexity of the relation between modernity and capitalism beyond essentialist assumptions. Class as property relations is able to distinguish between modernity and capitalism as two different modes of socio-spatial structuration, each of which rooted in entirely different class relations. That the struggle over surplus takes the form of “economic” compulsion and competition in the capitalist market requires the restructuration of the prevailing modern conceptions of rule and subjectivity. Put differently, in the course of capitalist transformation, previously-existing conceptions of the political and the cultural lose their centrality in subjects’ social reproduction, which results in a qualitative rupture with the prevailing conceptions of modernity. Confining modern conceptions of nationhood and citizenship to a distinct political sphere abstracted from the relations of exploitation and economic power, capitalism makes thinkable and expandable (but not necessarily realized) a political-cultural space in which all subjects enjoy formal equality. This is what constitutes the very basis of “the separation of the worker into worker and citizen”, which rests on the differentiation of the subject’s relation to the state from his relation to capital (Holloway and Picciotto Reference Holloway, Picciotto and Clark1991, p. 114). Thus construed, once the relations of capitalist market are consolidated, modernity, as it previously existed, becomes almost unrecognizable (Bromley Reference Bromley1994, pp. 100-103; Wood 2012).

The transition to modernity can no longer be equated with the transition to capitalism. The historically specific struggles over the constitution of modern state and modern conceptions of political subjectivity have to be grasped without presuming the existence and necessary arrival of capitalism.Footnote ³ The constitution of the “modern” required the re-construction of the political on a different basis than the hitherto prevailing notions of the “public”, “domestic” and the “religious”. However, this re-organization did not necessarily lead to separation of the political from the economic. Rather, based on the balance of power among contending classes, different “projects of substitution” were adopted that sought to selectively and limitedly generate capitalist forms of sociality without undermining the existing configurations of power (Shilliam Reference Shilliam2009). Classes, organized in and as the state, initiated novel development projects in each social context as a response to and in mediation of the dynamics and contradictions associated with the geographically and temporally uneven development of capitalist social relations. Modernity was not the political/cultural component of an ongoing economic rationalization, but rather, emerged as an alternative project of rationalization that substituted capitalism and the capitalist subject for novel political orders and subjectivities (Lacher Reference Lacher2006).

In what follows, I argue that the bourgeois paradigm obscures not only the fact that the post-war project of modern development in Turkey had little to do with capitalism, but also that Turkey’s current transformation signifies more the consolidation of a relatively novel capitalist project than a mere transition to another form of modernity. I provide an historical sketch of the linked processes of capitalist development and state transformation in Turkey, with a special focus on the transformation of property relations in the last ten years. I contend that Turkey has undergone a rapid process of capitalist transformation since the 2000s based on the consolidation of capitalist rules of reproduction in the market. Economic competition, rather than political mobilization, has become the rule in reproducing the means of life, a process founded upon revolutionary changes in the prevalent forms of rule and subjectivity.

Capitalist development, state and the bourgeoisie in Turkey, 1950-1980

The question of how to define the relation between the state and the bourgeoisie in post-1950 Turkey is a contentious one, bearing important consequences on how modernity and capitalism are understood in Turkey. Serif Mardin (Reference Mardin and Mardin2006c, pp. 62-63) describes the post-war Turkish socio-economic system as “late neo-patrimonialism”, a patrimonial system with “an increasing number of characteristics of capitalism”. The political “center”, according to Mardin, fostered the growth of a new class of entrepreneurs, yet the penetration of these new social elements into the “center” was not strong enough to change the balance of forces at the apex of the state. As a consequence, “power”, rather than “economic production”, remained as the defining feature of Turkish political and economic life, hence the underdevelopment of modern conceptions of rule. In like fashion, Heper (1992) and Kazancigil (Reference Kazancigil, Doğan and Kazancigil1994) emphasize the “timidity” of the bourgeois classes vis-à-vis the strength of state cadres, which made impossible the development of an “independent” civil society based on market relationships and economic rationality. Buğra (Reference Buğra1994) and Öniş (Reference Öniş1992) formulate a milder version of the “weak” bourgeoisie argument. Well aware of the role the state played in the industrialization of the East Asian “tigers”, they highlight the lack of a long-term industrial strategy on the part of the state cadres, which in turn led the bourgeois classes to engage in “rent-seeking activity”. Eventually, they contend that what characterized Turkish society and its non-liberal ways of modernity was not the “strength” of the state per se, but a market-repressing state, instead of a “market-augmenting” one, limiting the “self-confidence” of the Turkish bourgeoisie. Keyder (Reference Keyder1987) seems to agree with this view, as he sees bourgeois domination only in the economic sphere, with political and cultural life still shaped by the rather authoritarian practices of the state cadres. This pertains to the “disinterestedness” of the bourgeois classes in enlarging the politico-cultural sphere in Turkey, a consequence of their peripheral integration into the capitalist world economy.

Eventually we find ourselves in a conceptual quagmire. Every attempt at explaining the historical and comparative specificity of the Turkish route to modernity and capitalist development seems to be stuck in some form of essentialism based on the bourgeois paradigm. The presence of non-liberal forms of modernity is linked to the nature of capitalism in Turkey, which is in turn associated with the weakness or the peripheral nature of the bourgeois classes. As Yalman (Reference Yalman2009, p. 349) points out, the relationship between the state and the bourgeoisie is transhistorically defined by these accounts, instead of being grasped with reference to the social and historical context of class interests. Then the issue is to unravel the transhistorical association between the bourgeoisie, capitalism and liberal modernity and to specify the historical and relational context in which the bourgeoisie may support a liberal route to modernity.

After all, the alleged “repression” or “misguidance” of bourgeois elements by the state is hardly tenable from an empirical point of view. Ahmad (Reference Ahmad2002), Boratav (Reference Boratav2004) and Barkey (1987) convincingly argue that the bureaucracy was defeated by the emerging bourgeoisie within the ruling Republican People’s Party as early as the seventh party congress in 1947, which later manifested itself in the Democratic Party’s ten year rule from 1950 and 1960. Even when the bureaucracy attempted to make a comeback through the coup in 1960, it took only a couple of years for the bourgeoisie to fully turn the State Planning Organization, the political center of the new “planned” economy, into an instrument of the private sector (Milor, 1990).Footnote ⁴If the “weakness” of the bourgeoisie does not hold water, how would one understand the domination of bourgeois classes and the seemingly contradictory prevalence of non-liberal forms of modernity in Turkey?

The way out of this conundrum rests on treating class as property relations, which recognizes the changing societal context and the logic of reproduction of the bourgeois class over time and link this to the transforming logic of rule and subjectivity in Turkey. Even a perfunctory glance at Turkish political economy of the period demonstrates that the intra-bourgeois struggles took place not in the market only, but almost exclusively in and through the state over the allocation of politically-determined subsidies, import quotas and scarce foreign currencies. Different fractions of the bourgeoisie, organized in various business associations and political parties, did everything to avoid being subjected to the capitalist rules of reproduction in the market. They fiercely reacted against any plan that would increase their competitiveness in international markets, as this could, in the long run, end their formal dependency on the state. The result was that the easy subsidy regime of the 1950s was re-established in the so-called import substitution years: only 17.9 per cent of the total subsidies received by firms between 1968 and 1980 was invested in accordance with developmental directives (Milor Reference Milor1989, pp. 255-256). There was no imperative for economic competition behind high tariff walls and an easy subsidy regime, which caused a surge of investment with very weak backward and forward linkages to the rest of the economy. The resultant lack of “vertical” investments kept the overall domestic content of the allegedly import-substituting industries as low as 23 per cent (Barkey Reference Barkey1990, p. 115), hence the chronic need for and ever-intensifying political competition over the hardly-obtained foreign currencies. Worse still, despite the reluctance of international financial institutions to extend further loans and the draining of worker remittances especially after the second half of the 1970s, the private sector hardly succumbed to the political and international demands to restructure the state-provided economic incentives and to devaluate the over-valued lira (Evrensel Reference Evrensel2004; Kantarci and Karacan, Reference Kantarci and Karacan2008). When the foreign exchange and debt crisis mounted after 1977, they responded simply by decreasing capacity utilization and investment (Barkey Reference Barkey1990, p. 100), which further exacerbated domestic political instability. All this indicates that remaining dependent on the state-generated rents was simply easier and more profitable for the bourgeoisie than becoming dependent on the market. The bourgeoisie prevailed over other social forces throughout the post-war years, yet hardly became a fully capitalist bourgeoisie. Its privileged access to public resources remained the main source of its social reproduction, thereby jeopardizing the differentiation of political processes from economic ones, actively preventing the expansion of civil society and the constitution of a horizontally organized public space. Rather ironically, they were an “infant” capitalist class whose very presence became an impediment to the further development of capitalism in Turkey.Footnote ⁵

As the bourgeoisie sought to reap the benefits of a politically-protected market and politically-provided subsidies, peasants too took advantage of being in the electoral majority to obtain politically-constituted prices for their products.Footnote ⁶ Since 1950, the peasantry had gained access to state-provided cheap and long-term agricultural credits,Footnote ⁷ which gave them the opportunity to buy/rent agricultural machinery without incurring too much debt. In this respect, the intensification of credit relations between the state and the peasantry not only increased peasant production and their relative living standards, but also protected them against relations of usury. Combined with the state provision of floor prices to the peasantry,Footnote ⁸ peasant property was actually strengthened throughout the so-called import-substitution period. Consequently, industrialization in urban areas and mechanization in agriculture did not divorce peasants from their means of production, and the relations of production in the countryside remained by and large unchanged. Indeed, the only transformation prior to the 1960s seems to be one of further consolidation of peasant property: the number of owner occupied farms increased by 30 per cent between 1952 and 1963 while landlessness declined from 16 per cent to 10 per cent of the rural population between 1950 and 1960 (Keyder Reference Keyder1987, p.131). Correlatively, labor productivity in agriculture between 1890 and 1960 did not increase by more than 60 per cent in seventy years (Pamuk Reference Pamuk, Lains and Pinilla2008a, p. 392). Indeed, through the import substitution decades, despite massive increases in the use of fertilizers and machinery, the inter-sectoral linkages between agricultural producers and agriculture-based industries deteriorated (Kazgan Reference Kazgan and Baydar1999, p. 32).Footnote ⁹ Furthermore, even when internal migration began to transform the urban landscape, peasants moved to cities without losing their land. This resulted in an upward pressure on urban wages,Footnote ¹⁰which removed the possibility of a fully capitalist re-organization of society from consideration.

Equally important, given the oligopolistic character of and the lack of “deepening” in manufacturing markets, most of the newly established industries were capital-intensive, which dramatically limited the absorption capacity of the rural masses by urban centers.Footnote ¹¹ One way to siphon off the otherwise educated-yet-unemployed mass was to enlarge the bureaucracy and the state economic enterprises. The expansion of the latter was also linked to the increasing reliance of the private sector on state-produced goods at below-market prices. The immediate result was that the state became the employer of one-third of the working population and 36 per cent of the manufacturing work force throughout the 1960s and 1970s (Güran 2011, p. 30). Besides fiscal consequences, this led to the creation of a “stratum of ‘radical’ government employees”, thereby paving the way for (temporary) alliances between the state cadres and the social forces associated with the left (Mardin 2006c, p. 79; Ahmad Reference Ahmad2002, p. 158).

Given the persistence of peasant property – the peasantry still constituted 55 per cent of the Turkish population in 1980 – combined with working class radicalism organized in the Confederation of Revolutionary Labor Unions (disk) and bureaucratic cleavages which found further voice in the political arena through the Republican People’s Party of the 1970s (Mello Reference Mello2010), Turkey appears to have transformed only partially throughout the alleged state-led economy period. It is true that especially after the 1940s the state and society, through the Republican era, started to emerge as two distinct spheres,Footnote ¹² with private property no longer under the threat of public confiscation or arbitrary taxation (Boratav Reference Boratav2004, p. 95). Also, the institutional foundations of a capitalist society were to a certain extent set in place, for example: the introduction of Civil Code, special privileges facilitating the private accumulation of wealth, the political regulation of workers’ rights to organize and strike, and the modernization and dissemination of the institutions of education and measurement of time (Ahmad Reference Ahmad and Ahmad2009, p. 188; Timur Reference Timur2001, p. 93). Nevertheless, it is equally true that social reproduction was only partially dependent on the market throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The peasantry, the bourgeoisie and the working class used the state as an instrument of income equalization. A capitalist market was under construction but social reproduction remained, by and large, a matter of political mobilization rather than economic competition. The resultant lack of competitiveness in international markets was mitigated only through the availability of cheap external finance, which further postponed the restructuring of the ruling coalition in a fully capitalist fashion. Turkish society was neither a non-capitalist, nor a capitalist society, i.e. a society only partially subjected to the “economic” rules of reproduction.

Such a society where the intra- and inter-class struggles took place primarily within and through the state could hardly be a breeding ground for horizontally-articulated relations and could hardly give birth to liberal interpretations of modernity. Every attempt from below at obtaining greater tutelage over the political apparatus endangered the social reproduction of this largely non-capitalist bourgeois class and the higher echelons of the bureaucracy. And this was further complicated by the fact that critiques of the existing order could only be raised through the re-inventing of the ruling ideology, Kemalism. Kemalism’s “solidaristic” and “non-class” vision of society (Parla and Davison, Reference Parla and Davison2004) turned into an outcry for “equality” in the hands of the under-privileged who were forcing the gates of the state in the 1960 and 1970s. The irony is that the Republican People’s Party, originally established to protect the bureaucratic/Kemalist privileges, became the catalyst for the expansion of political society by invoking the universality of Kemalist principles. Especially after the closure of the Turkish Workers’ Party in 1971, a series of attempts was made to include the previously marginalized segments of society, such as the radical working class, the peasantry, leftist university youth as well as Alevis, into the RPP constituency. This was part of a project of “bureaucratic universalism” as opposed to the “bourgeois universalism” of the ruling Justice Party.Footnote ¹³Each project had its limits, attentive of the dominant bureaucratic and bourgeois interests, yet they mobilized and gathered different social groups around their struggle for greater access to the state. The widening of the political space alongside the tightening of the “economic” sphere provided the inflammatory, fragile and radical texture of modernity of the 1960s and the 1970s.

The cultural and ideological underpinnings of post-war Turkish modernity were firmly grounded in this partially non-capitalist society. The early Republican notions of citizenship, nation and religion were being re-defined in the post-war period, selectively inculcating/incorporating liberal elements into the existing political institutions and culture. The 1961 constitution, in particular, strengthened the rights of citizens as well as re-formulated their duties towards the state and the “nation”. A broadly and apolitically defined public space (vatan) together with a strongly communitarian understanding of nation (ulus), began to replace the ethno-culturally defined early Republican mode of public space and nationhood (Yeğen, Reference Yeğen2009). “Turkishness” was reformulated so as to mobilize and accommodate the new social forces generated by industrialization and the relative expansion of the political space.Footnote ¹⁴ The public was no longer the space of the ethno-culturally defined Turks, but of the territorially-defined Turkish “nation” (Üstel 2004, p. 327). This unleashed a project of “impersonalization” of ulus that partially substituted and complemented the process of “impersonalization” of the capitalist subject, i.e. the “individual” unfettered from wider political and social duties.Footnote ¹⁵ The political freedom and equality of the individual were affirmed, but those rights were defined in friction with a duty of protecting the general welfare of ulus and the indivisibility of the fatherland, vatan. Crucially, ulus and vatan became extremely politicized in the course of capitalist industrialization, as the social forces from below radicalized these two concepts to raise their demands for greater equality around an anti-imperialist nationalist struggle. The response from above came in 1980, when the military regime re-formulated the dominant ethos of sovereignty, perceiving almost everything as a threat to the security of the state and the territorial/cultural integrity of the “nation”. Given the continuing centrality of the state in the social reproduction of the dominant power bloc, any political/cultural issue was at the same time an economic one, endangering the foundations of this partially-capitalist bourgeois modernity. The political space and subjectivity were to be re-defined once more in order to meet new material realities.

Capitalist modernity a la Turca: from Ulus to Commonwealth, from Vatan to Empire

The 2000s have witnessed perhaps the most revolutionary political, institutional and cultural changes ever made in the history of Turkish Republic. The dominance of the Kemalist bureaucracy in key state institutions has been eliminated, as have the economic privileges enjoyed by oyak.Footnote ¹⁶ The main parameters of Kemalist modernity have been opened to public debate, while the exclusionary political and cultural practices effective since the 1980s have begun to be reversed. Secular nationalism, associated with the dominance of military cadres, has been largely overhauled, following significant changes in civil-military relations.Footnote ¹⁷ The state has adopted a more tolerant approach to religious and cultural freedoms, taking important steps towards resolving the most recurrent problems in Turkish political life such as the Kurdish resurgence and Political Islam.Footnote ¹⁸ The “revolutionary fervor” of Islam has since declined, shifting from political/collective to cultural/individual manifestations of religion (Göle Reference Göle, Göle and Ammann2006, p. 5). The state-civil society dichotomy seems to be mitigated, with the previously-excluded social groups beginning to be “absorbed” into political society (Tuğal Reference Tuğal2009).

Emerging is a form of Islamic multi-culturalism, inspired by a romanticized Ottoman imperial pluralism and encouraged by the accession process to the European Union. Islamic values and old imperial forms of rule have been reformulated to prepare the ground for a conservative liberalism, which seeks to promote new forms of political community, subjectivity and space. This involves the creation of a new citizenship ethic largely derived from narratives based on Prophet Muhammed’s life (the Sunna), especially with regards to his “tolerance” for non-Muslims (Türkmen Reference Türkmen2009) and the fact that he was a merchant. Meanwhile, Qur’anic verses have been transformed into slogans that provide the moral basis of “economic competition” and “fairness” of market outcomes (Yavuz Reference Yavuz2003, p. 95). “Tolerance”, “fairness” and “economic competition” relate to a community where the subjects internalize their rights and duties through an unofficial yet religiously-sanctioned network of social responsibility and trust (Atasoy Reference Atasoy2009), and are thereby no longer in need of political mediation. Entailed in this re-organization of sociality, thus, is the emergence of a religiously-represented and politically-empowered individuality based on self-discipline and a distinctive ethos of conduct, by and large unencumbered by a ulus-oriented organization of social reproduction. It is precisely this “abstract individual” that makes realizable the long-imagined, yet never materialized, rejuvenation of the old Ottoman mode of rule and political community. It is this ground on which a shift has occurred from the monolithically-understood ulus towards a new collective subjectivity based on the peaceful coexistence of different ethno-religious and cultural groups, indeed as some commentators like to call it, an Ottoman commonwealth.Footnote ¹⁹

The following is to be asked precisely at this juncture. Where are the principles of so-called Ottoman commonwealth coming from? What has permitted the formulation of new conceptions of subjectivity and political space? Indeed, the bourgeois paradigm, i.e. the emergence of a new religious bourgeois class, holds true for the period especially after the 1990s. A new bourgeois class, previously excluded from the official credit channels and political privileges enjoyed by the old bourgeois class, has emerged with a politically/religiously distinct project of societal transformation. Its previous exclusion from state-generated rents forced it to envision a society in which economic competition and competitive allocation of resources becomes the rule. In this sense, it represents a capitalist bourgeois class par excellence which has become the prime agent of change (Buğra Reference Buğra1998; Atasoy Reference Atasoy2009; Yavuz Reference Yavuz2003).

And yet, the question still remains. Can all this be reduced to the “rise” of a conservative bourgeois class buttressed by globalization, a neo-liberal restructuring of the world economy, or the EU accession process, as many commentators would have us believe? Would the Islamic bourgeoisie ever “rise” if the underlying organization of society remained the same? Would the bourgeoisie ever seek to make political and cultural life more liberal if the economic policy-making was not “depoliticized”– that is “liberalized” from popular pressures? The argument based on the “rise” of bourgeoisie alone not only extends the rationalist logic of the bourgeois paradigm, but also obscures the wholesale transformation that Turkish society has undergone since the end of the 1990s.

Since the latter half of the 1990s, Turkey has witnessed an immensely rapid period of dissolution of peasant property driven both by neoliberal market reforms and non-market means. Starting from the 5^th of April decisions taken in the aftermath of the 1994 financial crisis, and accelerated by a series of standby agreements with the IMF after 1999, the state ceased to provide support for buying at floor prices, input subsidies and subsidized credits to agricultural producers. It totally withdrew its support from the production of widely cultivated crops such as sugar and tobacco. Instead of buying agricultural products at politically-constituted prices, the state provides only temporary income support to peasants, expecting them to produce highly-demanded goods in the world market at competitive rates (Aydın Reference Aydın2005, pp. 158-159). Besides the erosion of the amount of state support,Footnote ²⁰ the income support took a temporary and “depoliticized” character; increasingly exposing peasants to the imperatives of market competition, thereby precipitating the divorce of peasants from their means of production-land. Equally to the point, long-lasting guerilla warfare in Eastern Turkey is estimated to have forced 3,500 Kurdish villages to migrate to large cities throughout the 1990s. Yoked together, from the end of the 1980s through 2010, the share of employment in the agrarian sector decreased from 51 per cent to 24 per cent, 15 percentage points of which were recorded in the last ten years alone.Footnote ²¹ Similarly, Aydın notes that the peasantry has exhausted traditional survival strategies in the face of neoliberal policies since the 2000s and the dissolution of small peasant family farms, which came to constitute the backbone of Turkish rural society, is almost completed (Aydın Reference Aydın2010, p. 152).

Besides the elimination of the political forms of state support, two key institutional and legal changes put in place since 2000 are worth special emphasis. The first one is the law concerning the Unions of Agricultural Sales Cooperatives (uascs), which provides the legal basis for the privatization of factories and production units belonging to farmers’ organizations. With state support withdrawn and such income-generating institutions privatized, the ability of farmers’ organizations to extend credit, provide facilities and organize their members is substantially diminished. Given the increasing inability of peasants to organize against neoliberal policies, the Agrarian and Seeds Laws passed in April and October 2006 respectively have further contributed to the commodification of land and labor in the Turkish countryside. Recognizing intellectual property rights in agricultural crops and seeds, these two complementary laws have not only deprived the peasantry of the traditional seed varieties used for centuries, but also precipitated the dissolution of peasant property without peasants losing access to their own land. That is, in the midst of the insecurities created by the impact of liberalization policies, the independent-looking farmers turn into “contract farmers”, increasingly producing crops demanded by agro-industrial corporations in exchange for information, credits, seeds and other inputs. This “contract farming” has put agribusiness firms in a position to determine the conditions of production and impose the type, quality and quantity of production over the remaining segments of rural population. All combined, the subsistence-based, communal and political regulation of production has rapidly faded away in the Turkish countryside, with the consequence that even the remaining independent-looking peasant farmers have lost their autonomy, becoming increasingly subjected to the imperatives of capital accumulation (Aydın 2010; Keyder and Yenal Reference Keyder and Yenal2011). With large portions of the peasantry dispossessed and the remainder subordinated to market discipline on their own land, the rapid dissolution and subjection of one of the main politically reactionary classes – peasants – to the “depoliticized”, that is “economic”, ways of ordering society are underway.

The bourgeoisie also, by and large, relied on the state for its immediate social reproduction until the late 1990s. As a response to declining export competitiveness and rising real wages, the state liberalized the capital account in 1989 to finance its deficits. The holding banks became the central benefactor of state borrowing practices. Lured by high interest rates, these banks, almost all of which were parts of holding companies with industrial bases, made profits by purchasing government securities and exploiting the difference between the exchange rate and the interest rate. That is, they first obtained funds on international markets as credit denominated in dollars, converted this into Turkish lira, and then lent to the government at high interest rates. It does not require great foresight to predict that an increasingly high proportion of profits were obtained in the non-productive – that is financial – activities associated with the holding of government securities. There was eventually only little need for re-investment in the absence of market competition – an indicator of the stagnation of investment levels throughout the 1990s.Footnote ²² Indeed, prior to 1994, Turkey did not have an anti-trust legislation at all that could induce competition against cartelization and monopolization.Footnote ²³Furthermore, the privatization of state economic enterprises took place only very slowly until the 2000s.Footnote ²⁴

This continued until the conclusion of the standby agreement with the IMF in 1999. The reform program was based on the reorganization of holding companies in such a way as to promote a “productive capital-based accumulation” through increasing competitiveness in the international market. As Oğuz (2008, p. 118) notes, this signaled a departure from the previous pattern of accumulation based on the redistribution of profits through the state towards a mode of accumulation based on production through higher technology and increasing labor productivity.Footnote ²⁵ The introduction of a series of reforms and institutions, especially after the 2001 crisis with banking reformFootnote ²⁶and the deregulation of the energy and telecommunication sectors, further reinforced the tendency towards subjecting the private sector to the rules of competition in an increasingly internationalizing market. Concomitantly, the same period witnessed the centralization of the decision-making power in the executive branch of the state together with the creation of “independent” economic institutions such as the Central Bank, the Competition Board and the Privatization Administration. All this pushed economic decision making beyond popular pressures, rendering the market the immediate means to the bourgeoisie’s social reproduction.Footnote ²⁷

The result is the consolidation of capitalist property relations for the first time in Turkish history. In addition to the violent crush of the militant working class movement after 1980, the relations of production and reproduction have been further sealed off from popular pressures and the peasantry has been by and large dispossessed since the 2000s. An “economic society” which the bourgeoisie can manage through “economic” compulsion eventually looms in the horizon. With private property secured and reproduced competitively, the bourgeoisie has finally become a fully capitalist class which seeks to shape the form and function of the state apparatus in a liberal fashion.

And yet, this is no way to argue that extra-economic means are no longer utilized, a statement that would insult thousands of political activists and journalists who faced police brutality and imprisonment in the last ten years. The resultant separation between the political and the economic does not refer to total freedom of capitalist property from political control/support. Instead, it should be thought of in the context of the restructuring of state power, cultural values and human subjectivities in such ways as to guarantee and promote capital accumulation, rather than constituting a buffer against commodification.Footnote ²⁸This involves the emergence of a state dedicated solely to the maintenance of the economic rules of reproduction, envisioning a trans-culturally and trans-nationally defined space of accumulation, unbounded by the hitherto prevailing conceptions of nationhood and public space, and formulation of an “abstract individual” conducive to the changing rules of reproduction and contestation in the consolidating economic space. Indeed, that the bourgeoisie seeks to establish the “independence” of the market in such a competitive global context and based on the political and cultural resources of an authoritarian past not only hints at the reasons behind the limited democratic texture of recent political attempts in Turkey, but also shows once more the inherent incompatibility of capitalism with democracy and human emancipation.Footnote ²⁹

Coming full circle, is all this only another stage of “modernity” marked by the maturation of bourgeois classes? Is this just a shift from Kemalist modernity to Islamist modernity based on new markets, new technologies, new ideologies etc.? Is the Ottoman commonwealth just a natural culmination of the eruption of the Kemalist straitjackets, ulus and vatan? Or are we talking about two fundamentally distinct societal projects, modernity and capitalism, transition from one to another requiring nothing less than an epochal transformation? Ulus and vatan had less to do with capitalism and much more to do with substituting capitalist forms of appropriation with novel conceptions of space and subjectivity. By contrast, the Ottoman commonwealth and Neo-Ottomanism have less to do with modernity and much more to do with the universalization of capitalism, its social relations and its contradictions, and the subjection of all human existence and values to its commodifying logic. An historically distinct space of exploitation looms on the horizon, which not only marks a rupture in the socio-spatial organization of Turkish society, but also makes thinkable for the first time in Turkish history a new subjectivity and a political community inspired by the Ottoman imperial past and deeply embedded in the “empire of civil society” (Rosenberg, Reference Rosenberg1994). Approaching is neither a “second modernity” nor “full of possibilities” as some enthusiastic critics of Kemalism argued (Atasoy Reference Atasoy2009; Kasaba Reference Kasaba, Bozdogan and Kasaba1997), but a capitalist modernity a la Turca.

Conclusion

Last year in a meeting with foreign investors, the president of the largest business association in Turkey, gladly proclaimed that “fortunately, our economy is not as much affected by politics as before”. She further added that the parliament had to work studiously on a new constitution in order to fully resolve Turkey’s political and cultural problems, which, she thinks, would much ease the negotiation process with the European Union.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, once the staunch defenders of privilege and authoritarianism, the big bourgeoisie today sees democratization of the political space as the key to securing the transparency of market competition and economic rivalry (Ozel, Reference Ozel2012).

This article has sought to make sense of the transformation of Turkey’s bourgeoisie through an analysis of the “great transformation” that Turkish society has gone through in the last fifty years. It has argued that reading a half century of political experimentation in Turkey through the “bourgeois paradigm” produced essentialist/stagist histories based on a pre-given duality between the state and the bourgeois classes. Reconstructing the concept of “class”, the article sought to illuminate the transforming social-temporal context in which the Turkish bourgeoisie defined and articulated its interests.

Re-conceptualizing “class” as property relations has also paved the way for a debate on capitalism and modernity, which has allowed us to approach the post-war modernization and capitalist transformation of Turkey from a novel perspective. I contended that neither Weberian “neo-patrimonialism” nor Marxian “underdeveloped capitalism” is able to explain the historical specificity of the dominant mode of social organization in the post-war period in Turkey due to their ahistorical take on bourgeois agency. Instead, I have suggested that the post-war project of modern development in Turkey had much to do with a strong bourgeois class and less to do with capitalism. And by the same reasoning, I concluded that Turkey’s current transformation denotes more the consolidation of a relatively novel capitalist project than a mere transition to another form of modernity, a process that has brought about a radical transformation in the meanings of work, accumulation, political space and subjectivity.