ILPC 2027

In this paper, I examine labour containment strategies and working class struggles within a Turkish city, called Kayseri, which has been celebrated as one of the rising industrial centers in inner Anatolia in the last decades. It is based upon my long-term field work that was carried out in the years of 2012 and 2013 mainly through semi-structured interviews with industrial managers, workers and representatives of business associations and labour unions in the city. It basically aims to reveal the ways in which capitalist class relations at different spatial levels have developed towards a remarkable level of industrial accumulation in the city of Kayseri. To this end, a particular historical-geographical materialist approach which considers capital-labour relation primarily as involving a set of locally effective social structures among labour market, production and reproduction processes in their wider relations is adopted. This paper then investigates such industrial accumulation in Kayseri by searching out these locally effective social structures that make it up and give certain coherence as a particular labour regime. In this line, it argues that while flows of rural migrant workforce into local labour market, labour intensive production within small- and medium-sized workplace level relations and some complementary policies for social reproduction within a relatively medium-sized urban-daily life have constituted a certain local socialisation towards industrial development in Kayseri, the ideology of Islamic brotherhood was distinctively employed into the capital-labour relation to cover up class tensions embedded in this relation. Thus, industrial accumulation in Kayseri has been accompanied with a particular local labour regime containing class tensions in religious and paternalistic socialisations. However, in relation with the crisis-ridden development of neoliberal accumulation at national and supra-national levels, internal contradictions of local labour regime have erupted particularly since the 2008 economic crisis, leading workers increasingly to develop individual and collective struggles against their employers. This paper concludes that local labour regime in Kayseri has been shaped in and through these struggles challenging existing religious and paternalistic socialisations.  Furthermore, as the city of Kayseri is widely referred as one of the prominent places of political Islamist hegemony in Turkey, tensions of local labour regime hint at some prospective developments in economy and politics at the national level.