“A life where dreams come true.” With these words, Doğa Grup, a holding company with investments in education, heavy industry, and mining as well as real estate, announced the construction of Pruva 34, ten luxury seafront residential high-rise buildings in Bakırköy, “one of Istanbul’s most desirable locations.”1 The company had bought the lucrative land on the shores of the Marmara Sea in the heart of the city for forty-four million US dollars in 2004. Construction had begun ten years later, after the company secured the zoning permit, which, according to the chair of the Istanbul branch of the Chamber of Architects, increased the value of the land to a billion US dollars.2 Construction was often interrupted by the surfacing of Byzantium ruins dating back to between the sixth and the thirteenth century, such as the Palace of Justice (Hebdomon Tribünalis) and the Summer Palace (Hebdomon lucundianea). At some point, the company, which prides itself on undertaking “successful restoration projects and taking part in social responsibility projects,” placed modular panels around the construction site to close it off to public eyes.3 No trace of these archaeological findings is visible on the site today, except for the marble foundations of a Byzantine church, which was able to avoid destruction because it was located outside the construction site. I tried to visit the site in January 2023 with local historian Turgay Tuna, but security guards refused to let us in. I could only glimpse the church ruins through the high walls and iron bars “protecting” this gated community, where, by 2022, an increasing number of rich migrants from Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan resided. “The refugee invasion” of the luxury building complex, as the mainstream media called it, disturbed the Turkish property owners, who put their houses on the market because they “did not want to live next to such neighbours.”4
In 2003, a year before the sale of the factory site, Bakırköy workers were on perpetuated paid leave because, the government claimed, there was no work. Fearing unemployment, angry workers refused to leave the factory site, pledging to resist its closure. Trade union leaders argued that workers were being kept idle purely to manipulate public opinion, framing state factories as inefficient investments and state workers as lazy people chasing after easy money.5 The propaganda worked. Once regarded as the backbone of Kemalist economic modernisation, the state economic enterprises were now viewed as a hunchback on economic efficiency and development. Privatisation as a major instrument of public enterprise reform had already entered the policy agenda almost two decades earlier in 1986. In January 1980, a mere eight months before the military takeover, the Turkish government joined the Washington Consensus announcing a stabilisation and structural adjustment programme, changing economic policy from import-substitution to export-led growth.6 The ensuing developments would follow the well-known destructive path of neoliberalisation.
In the extremely polarised political atmosphere of present-day Turkey, where past historical experience is a crucial bedrock of contemporary ideological and political debates, the early republican period has become a highly controversial topic with the power to provoke intense interest and passionate opinions. A fierce attack on “the single-party mentality,” as President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan puts it, has gained a special place in the political repertoire of his ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, hereafter the akp). Even if the Kemalist opposition cannot defend the period in its entirety, it does dearly uphold two pillars of early republican state policy: secularism and etatism. The Erdoğanist attack on the former, especially during the last decade, defies elaboration. As for the question as to who bears political responsibility for the end of state industry, this is more complicated than
Today, the desolated, rundown state factories ignite a feeling of waste, a lost opportunity for Turkey to become a self-sufficient modern industrial nation. Sümerbank products, especially textiles, are remembered with a sense of pride for their quality, and with sorrow over the disappearance of democratic consumption opportunities. “Sümerbank, once upon a time” has become a Kemalist yearning for a past where positive nationalism reigned, where a sense of national duty overcame personal interest, and where the state elite could still be trust. And finally, in terms of working conditions, the term “state factory” conjures up a vision of workers working at a leisurely pace enjoying state protections, secure employment, and fringe benefits. The actual working conditions and work relations at state factories find almost no place in this narrative of shining, happy producers toiling for the reconstruction of their homeland.
In the Shadow of War and Empire debunks the current nostalgic investment in work under etatism. I started with a simple observation: We knew almost nothing about what went on inside Turkish factories during this formative period of Turkish industrial relations. I took up the challenge and pushed the study of Turkish industrialisation in a new direction, namely, toward an analysis of the nature of the work process and the informal organisation of the shop floor in relation to state policy. I argued that an analysis of the organisation of work in state factories is central to our understanding not only of this specific case of peripheral industrialisation, but also of the many meanings of work and working-class politics in the development of modern Turkey. Workers are at the centre of this book; I portray how they experienced industrial work and attempted to make sense of their lives and the wider forces operating in society throughout this formative period of modern Turkey.
Turkish state-led industrialisation is a case worthy of attention, among other reasons for its timing. Globally, it was a product of the interwar crisis of capitalism, which eventually culminated in a global war. Turkey took economic nationalism, an economic doctrine that gained currency in the post-Depression context, to its extreme with the first industrial planning attempt outside the Soviet Union, and ushered in the widespread import substitution industrialisation policies that followed the Second World War. Over the first half of the twentieth century, Turkish industrialisation was subject to the ravages of a decade of uninterrupted wars and external constraints, followed by the exigencies of the Great Depression, the destructive effects of the Second
If the timing of etatism within the global conjuncture determined the outer boundaries of its achievements and failures, its local timing determined the internal limitations on its pace and scope. Etatism began barely a decade after the country emerged as the last nation-state from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire. The revolution-from-above in the 1920s, with the aggressive cultural modernisation programme as its engine, had created a political crisis involving threats to territorial integrity. Having witnessed the territorial disintegration of the empire throughout their military and political careers, the Kemalist elite invested their hopes in etatism as a way of transforming what was left of the empire into a nationally integrated economic space. However, the ethnic conflicts associated with Turkish nation-building had resulted in a drastic reduction of skills and entrepreneurial capacity, both of which were disproportionately possessed by the non-Muslim minorities. Shortage of industrial skill and know-how bottlenecked state-led industrialisation. Among other things, etatism depended on a process of discursively reshaping a workforce of which the majority were born as Ottoman imperial subjects and would later in life be recategorised as Turkish national citizens.
Combining a long-term political economy approach with a shop-floor-level analysis of industrial relations, this book analyses the emerging industrial order and the labour regime under etatism. As a result of a complex combination of global developments and locally specified systems of class interactions and power structures, etatism developed as a nationally specific regime of accumulation based on the articulation of a new ideology of work that would shape state, employer, and trade union policies in subsequent decades. Building on a set of labour market and shop-floor discourses, this new ideology constituted the basis for a specific industrial labour control regime combining a new set of external labour regulations with older forms of shop-floor labour control.
Through etatism, Kemalist industrial policymakers created and maintained two main sources of accumulation: the high pricing of consumer goods due to protectionism and the transfer of surplus from agriculture to industry through shifting terms of trade in favour of industrial products.7 Peasants and industrial workers shouldered the weight of state-led industrialisation, while private capital benefited from the state-sponsored development of the socioeconomic and institutional infrastructure required for an expansion of the
The production of state and cultural discourses played a central role in the constitution of this labour control regime because they constructed the acceptable social and political vocabularies and imaginations. In Turkish etatism, these strategies mainly took the form of comparisons with a corrupt colonial economy where the Turkish national identity had fallen prey to foreign exploitation. The discursive tropes deployed in this instance ranged from cultural modernity and developmentalism, to economic autarky as part of a prolonged national liberation struggle. The result was a popular understanding of labour’s place in the nation-building effort and the moulding of industrial class politics into nation-building in the 1930s, and into a virulent Cold War anti-communism in the 1940s. Official historiography and public memory remained central to state and employer demands for a labour force with patriotic motivations, effectively silencing workers’ demands for their share of the spoils of national development. The state factory became a metonymy of the homeland within state discourse on industrial labour relations under etatism, implying the fiction of an integrated society where faithfulness to the nation trumps class distinctions.
As a nationalist historiography of development and a patriotic motive for work underlined the external regulation of labour, a drive system based on the iron fist of the foreman ruled on the shop floor of state factories. A closer look at the everyday practices on the shop floor dims the bright colours in which state factories have been painted, by both contemporaries and the present-day nostalgics. Though they were presented and celebrated as model institutions of national modernity, serious and chronic problems of inefficiency and low productivity characterised the operations of state factories. Industrial managers sought productivity mainly through intensifying work and maintaining worker effort through close supervision and pressure. The strictly authoritarian world of labour on the shop floor diverged from bureaucratised protections and procedures, such as standardisation of job requirements, adoption of promotion ladders and merit-rating systems, and rules concerning discipline and dismissal.
Finally, repressive industrial relations gave the etatist labour regime its most defining colours. Turkey implemented the first five-year plan without a labour code because fears over the radicalisation of working-class politics had blocked legislative attempts for fifteen years. When the internal affairs minister proudly announced the 1936 Labour Code, which was modelled after the 1927 fascist Italian legislation, he described it as a “law of regime” that would “wipe out the erroneous roads leading to class consciousness.”9 Although the labour code brought a certain degree of individual protection to workers, the ban on strikes and collective bargaining crippled working-class political agency. Furthermore, workers complained of the poor enforcement of the already limited protection it afforded even in state factories. The state had effectively subordinated labour laws to rapid industrialisation goals, and resorted to comparisons with “colonial” industrial relations under the Ottoman Empire to present the protective legislation as a bestowal to the workers. State factories were central to these labour discourses because they presented an alternative to the conflict-laden Western industrial workplaces. Celebrated as industrial workplaces where Turkish workers used Turkish state capital to produce for the Turkish homeland, state factories offered up a solution to one of the central tensions of Kemalist modernism: the desire to catch up with Western industrial capitalism without having to deal with its accompanying social turmoil or even class divisions.
Starting in the 1950s and intensifying in the following decade, the demographic landscape of Turkey changed as rural-urban migration and urbanisation gained momentum. By 1950, the industrial workforce, including the construction sector, made up 7.4 per cent of the total workforce. This figure increased to 12.2 per cent by 1970.12 But, although the country underwent profound social, economic, and political transformation, the labour regime remained intact until the 1960s. Neither the political crisis with the ensuing power change by the end of the 1940s nor the economic liberalisation of the 1950s altered the labour regime. But the following decade completely transformed industrial relations.
Planning and import substitution industrialisation returned with a vengeance after the 1960 coup d’état. The National Unity Committee, a military committee formed after the 1960 coup d’état and which subsequently ruled the country until November 1961, set up a State Planning Organisation in September 1960, even before the adoption of the new constitution. Its first five-year development plan came into effect in March 1963. Between 1948 and 1967, industrial production had grown at an average annual rate of about ten per cent, with private enterprise taking the lead. Still, by the early 1970s, approximately forty per cent of manufacturing remained state-owned, with Sümerbank responsible for almost half of all cotton manufacturing.13 Planning
Under the import substitution industrialisation of the 1960s, working-class politics expanded on the back of increasing trade union strength in industrial relations. Industrial workers became central to electoral politics, and even established their own political party, the Labour Party of Turkey in 1961. On the last day of 1961, more than one hundred thousand workers gathered in Saraçhane Square in Istanbul to demand the long-overdue legislation on the right to strike and collective agreements.14 The protest took even the socialists aback; the prominent socialist leader Mehmet Ali Aybar described it in awe: “It was as if workers had suddenly woken up from a century-long sleep.”15
My analysis of the relationships and bargaining at the point of employment, however, portrays a far from deep, uninterrupted sleep. The narrative of a passive, helpless working class has been compelling beyond the sphere of professional historiography. It has become the hegemonic pattern of historical remembrance with regard to etatism, reducing the complexity of the historical moment of early republican Turkey. But from the level of the shop floor, etatism was clearly not a supra-class nationalistic development plan. Behind the façade of the celebratory narratives on etatism, factories, including state-owned ones, simmered with tensions as workers were increasingly contesting industrial relations on the shop floor to bargain not only for economic gains, but also for respect.
Despite rising factory consciousness, however, worker resistance remained individualistic, isolated, and largely ineffective, even after the development of the trade union movement. The fragmented structure of unions, the ambivalent and highly exploited ban on union involvement in politics, and the prohibition of strikes and thus effective collective bargaining severely crippled the development of trade unionism. The combination of these three factors rendered wage and employment bargaining particularistic and private. The individual contract remained the sole mechanism determining wages, leaving workers completely alone in their grievances. By the end of the 1940s, a Turkish state factory was as much a contested terrain as any other industrial workplace
With this book, I situate the unique Turkish politico-economic experience of the interwar and immediate postwar period in a global framework and write this history, as it happened, over the course of empire and global capitalism. I chose to look at the history of postimperial late-late industrialisation through the lens of an industrial workplace as a geographically specific, locally integrated place that is situated at the intersection of local, national, and global connections. As the site where class happens and capital, as a social relationship, is produced and reproduced, the industrial workplace offers great potential for the integrated interdisciplinarity of an all-encompassing history of capitalism. At a time when a number of major lines of research are developing in almost complete isolation from one another, this book offers a modest attempt at explanatory integration to understand the interactions between social structures and the material production process on the one hand, and between the processes of nation-building and industrialisation, on the other. I hope that it goes some way toward breaking the shattering silence of the working classes during one of the most formative periods in the history of Turkey.
“Pruva34,” accessed 20 July 2022,
“Pruva 34 Bakırköy Sümerbank Arazisinde Yükseliyor!” accessed 20 July 2022,
Special thanks to local historian Turgay Tuna for sharing this information with me.
“İlyas Ayvacı’nın Sahibi Olduğu Pruva 34’e Göçmen İstilasi,” accessed 20 July 2022,
“Sümerbank İşçisi Nöbette,” Evrensel, 21 April 2003.
Metin R. Ercan and Ziya Öniş, “Turkish Privatisation: Institutions and Dilemmas,” Turkish Studies 2, no. 1 (2001); Ziya Öniş, “Power, Interests and Coalitions: The Political Economy of Mass Privatisation in Turkey,” Third World Quarterly 32, no. 4 (2011).
Korkut Boratav, “Kemalist Economic Policies and Étatism,” in Atatürk: Founder of a Modern State, eds. Ali Kazancıgil and Ergun Özbudun (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1981), 183.
Çağlar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey: A Study in Capitalist Development (London: Verso, 1987), 104–5; Faruk Birtek, “The Rise and Fall of Etatism in Turkey, 1932–1950: The Uncertain Road in the Restructuring of a Semiperipheral Economy,” Review Fernand Braudel Center 8, no. 1 (1985), 419.
Cited in Kurthan Fişek, Türkiye’de Kapitalizmin Gelişimi ve İşçi Sınıfı (Istanbul: Doğan Yayınevi, 1969), 72.
Alec Alexander, “Turkey,” in Economic Development: Analysis and Case Studies, eds. A. Pepelasis, L. Mears, and I. Adelman (New York, Harper, 1961), 493.
Gülten Kazgan, “Structural Changes in Turkish National Income: 1950–1960,” in Middle Eastern Studies in Income and Wealth, ed. Taufiq M. Khan (New Haven: International Association for Research in Income and Wealth, 1965), 154.
William Hale, “Labour Unions in Turkey: Progress and Problems,” in Aspects of Modern Turkey, ed. William Hale (Essex: Bowker, 1976), 62.
Jane Perry Clark Carey and Andrew Galbraith Carey, “Turkish Industry and the Five-Year Plans,” Middle East Journal 25, no. 3 (1971), 341–6.
Türkiye Sendikacılık Ansiklopedisi, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı, 1998), 566–568.
Cited in Hakan Koçak, “İşçi Hareketinin Örgütsel Kapasitesi ve Ölçeksel Strateji Bağlamında İstanbul İşçi Sendikaları Birliği Örneği (1948–1962),” Çalışma ve Toplum 4 (2014), 83.