Kurds, Labour, and the Left in Turkey
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- Published on Tuesday, 16 June 2015 23:30
- Written by editor
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1129 .... June 17, 2015
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Kurds, Labour, and the Left in Turkey
Interview with Erdem Yörük
After Turkey's parliamentary elections last week, all eyes are on the Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) after its successes in contesting its first ever election as a party, rather than a coalition of nominally independent candidates: a momentous decision on the part of the party leadership, which stands to gain clout in parliament and solidify its position as the electoral standard-bearer of the radical Left. At issue is whether the party has succeeded at building a leftist coalition including, but not limited to, its base of support in the Kurdish national movement. At stake is whether or not the party will play a key role in a successful effort to block Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Justice... and Development Party (AKP) from gaining the number of seats necessary to rewrite the constitution and transform Turkey into an executive republic with Erdoğan as its quasi-omnipotent head.
The importance of the relatively new left-wing party in the election had not gone unnoticed by those whose tactic is violence. In the last days assaults on HDP activists and others working for the party mounted, with four people killed in a party rally in Diyarbakir, most likely by far-right forces, in an apparent attempt to assassinate party co-chairman Selahattin Demirtas, who was standing about thirty meters from where the bomb exploded.
Over the last few decades violence both physical and structural has played a major part in the creation of a sociopolitical terrain in which, in proletarian sections of many major cities, the AKP and the HDP are now the two parties fighting over votes.
Recently LeftEast editors sat down with Erdem Yörük, sociologist at Koç University in Istanbul and expert on the recent history of the working class in Turkey, to discuss these historical developments and assess the HDP's chances of making history in this critical election. This interview was conducted prior to the election and first published on the LeftEast website.
LeftEast (LE): Your work provides some perspectives on the changing face of the labour movement in Turkey in relation to the plight of Kurdish workers displaced by the state's war with the PKK (Kurdistan Workers' Party) in the 1980s and 90s. Could you briefly sketch for us the direction that your work takes in this regard?
Erdem Yörük (EY): It was in the aftermath of the shift in economic planning that happened around 1980, that the whole face of the working class in Turkey changed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the developmentalist economy featuring tariff protections, state-owned enterprises and an emphasis on agricultural self-sufficiency gave way to an export-economy fueled by low-wage labour by a new class: the informal proletariat. The plans for this shift were laid early in 1980 and solidified under the military regime and in its immediate aftermath. These reforms weakened the position of small farmers in the overall economy, necessitating internal immigration to the cities in search of wage-labour – and other forces augmented this trend.