Between Anti-Capitalism and Anti-Authoritarianism: The Roots, the Significance and the Ambivalence of the Gezi Park Protests

• In Event: 440 - Section on Marxist Sociology Paper Session. From the Arab Uprisings to Occupy and Beyond: Marxist Perspectives

Abstract

This paper analyzes the roots and prospects of the Gezi Park protests in Turkey. The main significance of the protests have been the introduction of horizontalism and radical democracy into radical politics in Turkey. However, the emergence of this new politics owes itself to the agency of a politically inactive generation, whose discontent with the AKP government emanates from the latter's attempts to appropriate culture as an ideological state apparatus and therefore remains ambivalent with regard to its anti-capitalist demands. Based on this argument, the paper concludes with an assessment of radical politics in Turkey in comparison to similar horizontal and radically democratic struggles from the Occupy to the Arab Spring.

Author

• Onur Kapdan, University of California-Santa Barbara