The Institute for Social Studies’ report titled “Who Are These Young People? – Participant Analysis of the İmamoğlu Protests (Ankara Case)” provides, in my view, highly significant data for understanding both the present and the future of Turkish politics. I believe the protesting young people whom the Institute had the opportunity to interview represent an important segment in Turkey; naturally, this segment is worth examining and needs its voice to be heard…
Not only in our country but worldwide, it is possible to classify and categorize societies according to the economic, social, and cultural capital they possess. As consumption habits around the globe change and become more capitalist—especially with the commodification of cultural domains such as education and art—it can also be observed that having economic capital makes it easier for individuals to gain access to cultural and social capital. If we analyze the increasingly common process—both in the United States, which sits at the very core of capitalism, and in our own country—whereby the children of wealthy businesspeople purchase educations equivalent to those offered by the best institutions in the world and at home, along with the privatization of education, I think we will find evidence supporting this observation. In social life today, we no longer see the uneducated yet rich, coarse fathers and their good-for-nothing sons who cannot study despite their fathers’ wishes, as portrayed in old Yeşilçam films. We live in a world where the uneducated and rough rich can buy diplomas one way or another, and with those diplomas they can also acquire cultural and social capital.
People who manage to accumulate economic, social, and cultural capital—or at least persuade society that they have—can readily be observed to have no real anxiety about the future and to pay little heed to current developments or the country’s overall condition. In my view, the fact that only 1 percent of the young respondents in the Institute’s survey placed themselves in the 9-to-10 bracket on a 10-point socioeconomic scale illustrates this very point.
So, to what extent are the most economically disadvantaged segments of society taking part in these protests? After all, in the socialist imagination—where intellectuals and labor unions call for a general strike—the idea that the weakest strata in capitalist societies might spark a revolution has enjoyed a firm foothold for centuries. Does participation in Turkey’s protests contain the seeds of such a revolution? In Marx’s words, is there also “a specter of communism haunting” Turkey? The report suggests we should answer no: only 18.8 percent of respondents rated their socioeconomic status at 1 or 2 on the same 10-point scale, and merely 12.5 percent located themselves at the far left of the political spectrum. In a society that has rapidly capitalist-ized and undergone major economic transformations in recent years, it is hardly surprising that those most harmed by this shift come from classes unable to adapt and whose consumption habits have not fully changed. In an era when everything is commodified, bought and sold, and increasingly expensive, is it not natural that a class wanting access to these consumer goods but whose income has not risen accordingly should react more sharply and vehemently to the course of events?
Of course, because these responses were gathered specifically in Ankara—and considering that urban poverty and economic inequality may well be more acute in İstanbul—it is wise to approach their analysis with caution. Even so, the Ankara example reveals a clear reality: the protests arose and swelled out of objections in which Ekrem İmamoğlu and other opposition figures remained in the background, and in fact there are weightier issues at hand.
Although the protests are labeled “the İmamoğlu protests”—a designation used even within the study itself—when the young protesters are asked about potential presidential candidates, İmamoğlu secures only half of their votes. Without delving too deeply into the demonstrators’ political preferences and keeping to the socioeconomic backdrop presented, we are compelled to ask once again: Who are these young people?
From the answers given by the young respondents, we understand that 80.2 percent of them belong to lower-middle, middle, or upper-middle socioeconomic strata. From any angle, it is easy to identify them as the children of middle-class families. The combined share of those who described themselves as students or as private-sector employees is almost the same: 80.8 percent. If we exclude the extreme left (1 and 2) and the extreme right (9 and 10) on the political scale, we see that 75 percent of the protesters hold world-views that can be described as centrist, center-left, or center-right. I cannot recall having encountered another survey or public-opinion study in which the middle class is represented so densely.
In short, it seems to me that the middle class—said to have been weakening in Turkey since the 1980s—has finally decided to make its voice heard. This is a class that, although educated, finds it increasingly difficult to obtain economic capital; that knows it will have to deploy all the skills it has learned merely to cover basic needs such as housing, education, and food; that long ago bade farewell to the dream—promised by Tansu Çiller in the 1990s—of holding two keys, one to a house and one to a car; and that sees its future as darker than its present. If class politics is to be practiced in Turkey, these findings reinforce my conviction that it must be politics centered on the middle class.
A remarkably high proportion of the dissenting representatives of this class identify themselves by Kemalist and nationalist markers, which in fact constitutes a call to what we in Turkey label nationalist politics. The duty to speak for educated young people living in large cities who know that material worries will forever pull at their necks… Who knows—perhaps the time has come, not only in Turkey but worldwide, for nationalist politics to hear the voices not of the generations who lived in years when accumulating capital was relatively easy—most of whom have already bought a house, a summer place, and a car—but of cohorts far better educated, far more qualified, and forced to endure much harsher living conditions. The street’s summons and the street-dwellers’ identity are plain for all to see. It now seems clearer than ever that a discourse simultaneously nationalist and anti-capital must be devised and propagated.
