The combined and uneven development of working-class capacities in Turkey, 1960–2016

ABSTRACT

How have Turkey’s working-class capacities been evolving since the 1960s? What have been the peculiarities of Turkey’s import-substitutionalist model and later integration into the neoliberal economic landscape, as they pertain to the transformation of the Turkish working class? Our aim here is two-fold: (i) to contribute to a systematic understanding of the historical development of Turkey’s working class; and (ii) to develop a new conceptual lens for class-capacity analysis from a combined and uneven development perspective. By class capacities, we refer to the ability of the working class to develop an awareness of its long-term interests and organize to struggle for these collective interests. We employ theory-guided process tracing as the main methodological guideline to study the historical development of Turkey’s working-class capacities.