Macro-politics as the agency-maker: Political formation of Kurdish working class in Turkey

• In Event: Labor and Labor Movements Section Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 8: State Power, Class Formation, and Historical Political Economy

Abstract

This study will constitute one of the peculiarities of the Kurdish working class in Turkey through a political perspective. The Kurdish working class’s socioeconomic journey will be depicted in parallel to the trajectory of migrant labor. However, instead of utilizing ethnic identity or double exploitation, the Kurdish working class will be analyzed within its political formation and capacity.

The way the Kurdish working class is expressed in the research leans more towards status analysis than class analysis. Most of this work is aimed at determining the position of ethnic/migrant workers vis-à-vis the white working class on the socioeconomic scale. Their organization and struggle are shaped suitably. Defining a category that has peculiar layers of oppression requires a struggle closer to lobbying, and migrant workers are defined as status groups and, through their struggle, approximate interest groups. Although the most migrant working class indeed acknowledge themselves through those categories and organize around advancing their material struggle, the politicization process of the Kurdish Working class is entirely different.

Unlike the current migrant workers in the core countries, the Kurdish working class never had a collective political claim around the ‘injustice’ or ‘discrimination’ in the workplace. However, that has been a heavy part of their daily experience. They have always organized around another political claim regarding Turkey's macro politics: they demanded the democratization of Turkey, claiming that establishment of a real democracy would resolve national oppression.

This study will not evaluate whether this was possible- instead, it will evaluate the consequence of this claim: the political agenda proposed by Kurds became a macro-political issue in Turkey, while simultaneously this macro-political issue continuously contributed to the Kurdish working class being ‘organized politically.’

Author

• Busra Ferligul, Binghamton University