Efe Peker

Turkey's Gezi Park Demonstrations of 2013: A Marxian Analysis of the Political Moment

On 31 May 2013, a localized demonstration against the destruction of a public park at the heart of Istanbul (Gezi Park) spiraled into a nationwide anti-government protest cycle of unprecedented form and scale in Turkey’s modern history. Before dawn that day, the police stormed into the park to disperse the few hundred protesters who had been occupying the space to prevent its destruction as part of a municipal urban renewal project. By the day’s end, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country were out in the streets in a spontaneous collective response to what they perceived as the rising authoritarianism and conservatism of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi [AKP]). A modest urban park thus turned into a bastion and symbol of resistance against the increasingly authoritarian and interventionist rule of the AKP and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Many observers refer to these events as the “Turkish Summer,” a term we use here interchangeably with the “June uprising” or “Gezi Events.” The abrupt and spontaneous nature of the protests cannot be overemphasized. No specialist on Turkey could envisage a collective mobilization of such magnitude and versatility until the very moment it erupted. As the earthmovers started demolishing Gezi Park at 23:30 on Monday 27 May, nothing was out of the ordinary: it was just another urban redevelopment project with relatively little public concern outside of the Taksim region. The first tweet calling people to action for the cause of Gezi Park was tweeted at 23:47; yet the person who wrote it could not have known that this would be the first of millions to come in the following two weeks. On 28 May, more and more people moved into the park with tents, books, and Socialism and Democracy, 2014 Vol. 28, No. 1, 70–89, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08854300.2013.869872

A Class Analytic Approach to the Gezi Park Events: Challenging the 'Middle Class' Myth

On 31 May 2013, what began as a localised demonstration against the demolition of a public park in Istanbul escalated into anti-government protests of unprecedented form and scale in Turkey’s modern history. The class configuration of the Gezi Park events occupied the forefront of discussions within and outside the Turkish left. Mainstream accounts branded the events as an uprising of ‘middle classes’ concerned almost exclusively with secularism. Drawing on a Poulantzasian/Wrightian framework, we argue that the Gezi Park events can be reduced neither to a middle-class nor a secularism-centered uprising. They represent, instead, an initiative of various wage-earning class fractions led by service-sector employees and the educated youth, which rests on socioeconomic grievances of proletarianisation under neoliberalism.

Introduction: Neoliberal Globalization, State Intervention, and Collective Action

The study of the state and social movements cannot be disassociated from the particular ways in which neoliberal capitalism is organized worldwide, which is ever more true in the face of what the popular buzzword brands as a “globalizing” world. Echoing Lenin’s classical work on capitalist imperialism, Berch Berberoglu rightfully asserts that “globalization is the highest stage of imperialism that has penetrated every corner of the world” (Berberoglu 2003, 125). The association of globalization with imperialism implies that contemporary neoliberalism has resulted not from the so-called spontaneous market forces, but from a class strategy that finds its expression in “economic, political, and military violence” exerted by the capitalist states themselves (Petras and Veltmeyer 2011, 221). With the worldwide expansion of capitalism, the nationally organized capitalist state acts as the repressive-institutional arm of neoliberalism insofar as it intensifies exploitation through the expansion of cheap labor, aggressively commodifies living spaces and social relationships, and depletes natural resources (Berberoglu 2003, 127–128). Under neoliberal globalization, the state is thus of strategic importance to suppress the ever-growing social-economic contradictions of worldwide capitalist expansion at national and international levels (Berberoglu 2003, 136).

New Social Movement Theories and Their Discontents

The rise of neoliberalism as a global political economic project in the 1980s was parallel in time with what Ellen Meiksins Wood (1998) calls a tendency of “retreat from class” as an explanatory concept in social sciences. As she puts it, “the most distinctive feature of this current is the autonomization of ideology and politics from any social basis, and more specifically, from any class foundation”, which leads to a “rejection of the materialist analysis of social and historical processes” (Wood 1998, 2, 5). A significant repercussion of the escape from class in academia has been the outpouring of a post-Marxist literature on the “new social movements” (or the “cultural turn”) with poststructuralist or postmodernist leanings that reject the centrality of class analysis in the name of identity/civil society centrism. Post-Marxist attempts put into question the analytic relevance of social class and condemn any attempt to reclaim its conceptual centrality as an archaic and dogmatic practice of determinism.

Organizational-Strategic Aspects of the GPPs: Leadership and Resistance Repertoires

The main objective of this chapter is to shed light on the leadership formation processes and resistance strategies/tactics (repertoires) that were acted out in the GPPs. We understand leadership as a collective construction as opposed to being individually driven, which also allows us to transcend the dichotomy between “spontaneity” and “leadership”—one of the central discussions regarding the nature of the GPPs. Rather than being a “real person” or “concrete individual,” leadership is of a collective character as an “organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will … begins to take concrete form” (Gramsci 2000, 240). We go on to argue that spontaneity is a matter of degree rather than a mere state of “leaderslessness” (Gramsci 2012, 196). As Gramsci clarifies, spontaneous collective action tends to contain “multiple elements of ‘conscious leadership’” although “no one of them is predominant” (Gramsci 2012, 196–197). Leadership can thus be defined as an organized collection of institutional bodies and collective activities that determine organizational forms and the formulation of strategies and tactics, or simply the deployment of resistance repertoires. As such, it can be traced to the modes of “within-movement participation,” “decision-making,” and “alliance-building” (Otero 1999).

Debunking the Myth of “Middle Classes”: The Class-Structural Background of the GPPs

Since the eruption of the protests on May 31, 2013, the class configuration of the GPPs occupied the forefront of discussions in both leftist and mainstream media. The debate revolved around whether the GPPs could be reduced to an instinctual and fast-waning reaction of the educated/secularist elite/middle classes, or if t hey represent an instance of persisting/foundational mobilization of wage-earning classes. In reference to this debate, we hold that a class-analytic lens to assess the involvement of classes and class fractions is particularly useful in illuminating the nature and orientation of social mobilization (Borras Jr, Edelman, and Kay 2008, 25). This chapter thus opens with a theoretical discussion on Marxist class theory as developed in the works of Poulantzas and Wright. Based on that framework, the second section of the chapter develops a critique of mainstream middle-class accounts of the GPPs through a political economic analysis of Turkish wage-earning classes in light of empirical data. In turn, the last section shifts the focus from the objective locations of wage-earning classes and takes on an analysis of their ideological-political location in relation to “neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics” in the specificity of Turkey, which interrelates closely with their organizational class capacities.

Looking Ahead: “Gezi Spirit” and Its Aftermath

Neoliberal globalization as a class project is based on dynamics of unequal and combined development that not only present themselves in distinct geographical patterns of capital accumulation, but also in dissimilar configurations of political power and cultural/ideological transformations (Peck and Theodore 2012). Correspondingly, a fuller understanding of the sociospatial struggles against different manifestations of the neoliberal offensive requires a detailed knowledge of the geographical specificities in question. Despite their differences, in such processes of anti-neoliberal mobilization around the world, “the most obvious tangible struggles are over access to land and living space,” which go hand in hand with “struggles over dignity, recognition, self-expression, and acknowledgement of… rights” (Harvey 2005b, 84). As a nationwide, spontaneous, and disruptive protest cycle facing “neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics” in the particularity of Turkey, the Gezi Park Protests constitute a rich, diverse, and versatile example of an extra-parliamentary uprising, carried out by an alliance of wage-earning class fractions for the preservation of communal space and social rights.

“Neoliberalism with Islamic Characteristics”: Political, Economic, and Cultural Conjuncture of the GPPs

Having discussed the structural class foundations of the GPPs, we now build on the previous chapter by providing a systematic understanding of the conjunctural “opportunities” that triggered the events (Petras and Veltmeyer 2013, 216). Political-economic and cultural-ideological opportunities can be broadly understood as the more immediate material/objective factors that implicitly or explicitly lead to collective action, or in more precise terms, to the process by which private discontents of social actors start escalating into social mobilization. It is important to stress that “cultural factors” constitute an underlying component of political-economic-ideological opportunities of class action insofar as they filter the ways in which neoliberal policies are implemented. Neoliberal restructuration policies are not adopted as they are prescribed by hegemonic international institutions in a top-down fashion (Gill 2011). There is no “one size fits all” formula, because of the need to adjust neoliberalism to the geographical and cultural peculiarities of a given location for a more successful political legitimation (Peck and Theodore 2012). We thus use the term “neoliberalism with Islamic characteristics” to refer to its particular political, economic, and cultural-ideological manifestations in the geography of Turkey (Karaman 2013).

Forging Political Consciousness at Gezi: The Case of “Disproportionate Intelligence”

A final factor in the emergence and spread of extra-parliamentary/disruptive collective action is political consciousness. In Chapter 1, we discussed the inadequacy of culturalist perspectives that place the emphasis on a vaguely defined and shallowly operationalized concept of “identities” to explain political consciousness. In this chapter, we rather propose to elaborate on political consciousness from a Marxist standpoint, which brings us to Doug McAdam’s notion of “cognitive liberation” as a transformative agent of social mobilization.