State and Labour During the AKP Rule in Turkey
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- Published on Sunday, 29 November -0001 16:00
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1523 .... December 11, 2017
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State and Labour During the AKP Rule in Turkey:
A Balance Sheet of 15 Years
Dr. Mehmet Erman Erol
The AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi-Justice and Development Party) is celebrating 15 years in power in Turkey. The party came to power in November 2002, against the backdrop of the major 2001 crisis and amidst a legitimacy crisis of the then mainstream political parties stemming from the crisis-ridden 1990s. The AKP’s policies brought about significant transformations in the state, economy and the society. Conventionally, the first two terms of the AKP government (2002-2011) were identified with democratization, reformism and progressive economic policies. The fact that the government’s authoritarianism reached inconceivable levels post-2011 (especially during and after the Gezi protests of 2013), and the fact that... Turkey is governed under the state of emergency since the failed coup attempt of July 2016 [Ed.: see Bullet No. 1286] which resembles an ‘exceptional state’ form, have made conventional accounts to argue that Turkey is sliding towards ‘authoritarianism’. These accounts simply share the ‘good AKP goes bad’ view, and ‘class’ or ‘labour’ is absent in their analyses.
In distinction, I sustain the argument that, ‘neoliberal authoritarianism’ or ‘authoritarian neoliberalism’ marked the post-1980 military coup which aimed to remove labour as an agency from the political sphere, and in fact the AKP’s general economic and political stance reflected a continuity with this orientation. There is no doubt that there might be some type of a ‘qualitative’ shift in the form of authoritarianism post-2011 or post-coup attempt, however this is not a ‘deviation’ from neoliberalism and should be contextualized within the capitalist social relations of production and restructuring of capital-labour relations.
In this light, this piece attempts to critically review these 15 years from a labour-centred perspective and shed light on developments in labour market and labour movement. The topics are as follows: economic policy-making, the legal context of labour relations, unionism, unemployment, and indebtedness.
