ILPC 2027

 One of the salient features of capital-labour relations in Turkey since the country’s major 2001 crisis has been the ever increasing indebtedness of the working class, in line with the general trend in ‘developing economies’ in the 2000s. Although financial liberalisation and ‘financialisation of the state’ were not new and had been part and parcel of Turkey’s neoliberal experiment since the 1980s, the ‘financialisation of everyday life’ and theextension of indebtedness from state to citizens is a recent phenomenon in Turkey, due to the major restructuring of the state and economy, and banking sector in particular in the aftermath of the 2001 crisis. Austerity policies following the 2001 crisis envisaged a radical decline in the Public Sector Borrowing Requirement (PSBR) of the state, whose funding in earlier periods was a very lucrative practice for the banks. With this radical decline, the banks had to find new areas to keep profitable, and extending creditto large sections of thepopulation through aggressive campaigns, consumer credits and credit cards were part of the ‘financialisation of everyday life’. This process was supported by the favourible global liquidity conditions and availability of ‘cheap money’ prior to the 2008 crisis, and with continuing relatively favorable conditions for the ‘emerging economies’ following the global financial crash.

This process ofthe ‘making of the indebted man’ (Lazzarato, 2012) in Turkey in the 2000s added new dimensions to state-capital-labour relations. It necessitated further marketisation and further imposition of the rule of money and ‘violence of capital’on social relations, as capital needs to secure the future exploitation of labour for profits for the repayment of the debt. Politically, this process was preferable for the incumbent Islamist-rooted AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi - Justice and Development Party, whocame to power in 2002) as access to credit by wider segments of the working class ‘compensated’ for low/stagnant wages, created an ‘illusionary’ consumption power and thus, alongside a ‘neoliberal social policy regime’ in the 2000s, led to the legitimacy of wider restructuring of the economy in the eyes of the working class. Furthermore, debt is a very handy disciplining tool for capital and the state, and played an important role in further deradicalisation of labour in Turkey in the 2000s, forcing labourers to pursue ‘individualised struggles to maintain existing positions of employment, income and conditions’ rather than ‘social resistance against austerity’ (Bonefeld, 1995) or against massive workplace ‘accidents’ like the Soma massacre in 2014. Also, facing the fear of unemployment and financial ruin in case of political instability, wider segments of working class have tended not to punish the AKP at the ballot box, as partly seen in the elections on 1st November 2015. The paper discusses these processes; i.e. financialisation of labouring classes’ life and thepolitics of debt in the context of thewider restructuring of Turkish state and economy and holds the argument that it is one of the main social sources of the absorbtion of discontent and thus the continuing AKP rule.