ILPC 2026

 This paper aims to refresh class analysis in order to develop a better understanding of different modalities of reproduction of labour quite often without economic and social security in different historically specific contexts, as this also pertains to workers’ diverse ways of living as well as to their experiences at work. It also aims to draw attention to the pertinence of exploring the ways in which the individuals comprising a particular movement experience specific moments of collective will formation within an authoritarian state form.

Putting an end to class-based politics could be described as the core of the new hegemonic strategy which accompanied the restructuring of the state in Turkey since the military coup in 1980. A key component of this ‘hegemonic’ strategy was to discredit the trade unions by turning them into inept structures which fail to deliver the expected goods to their constituencies. In fact, neoliberalism in the Turkish case was ushered by an authoritarian state form which has remained in effect until the present. The shift in the balance of class forces has disabled the reintroduction of class considerations into the political agenda. Thereby, appealing to the people, workers in particular, as individuals, while trying to discredit the trade union movement by labelling it as a vested interest became the hallmarks of the day. The new labour containment strategy opted for the market as a mechanism to control and weaken the unions as much as possible so as to push forward the neoliberal policy agenda of financial liberalization and privatization. Championing the vigorous virtues of the individuals, while strengthening the authoritarian prerogatives of the state was in line with the New Right thinking that a strong state would be necessary as the political guarantor of economic individualism. Moreover, the neoliberal transformation process would not allow different segments of the working class to transcend their economic-corporate moments on the basis of the solidarity of interests, albeit in the purely economic field.

This paper aims to illustrate the limitations of challenging the neoliberal hegemony by focusing a particular episode of workers’ resistance to the privatization of TEKEL (a major SEE established in the 1930s), pondering why such a moment of collective will formation failed to pave the ground for the development of a counter-hegemonic strategy. On the basis of a field research conducted with more than 100 ex-workers who were made redundant, deprived of their social rights and offered precarious employment status, it will contend that the particular employment policy did not simply introduce informalisation into public sector, but functioned as a labour containment strategy at the same time.  This gains saliency in preventing the emergence of an ‘antagonistic subject’, as it entails the reconstitution of the former workers as stratified, contradictory subjects. The transformation of individual subjectivity in the context of the Tekel privatisation and consequent resistance process underlines what Gramsci noted, people’s consciousness is inevitably contradictory, as the individuals are the object of different competing temporalities.