The unstable capitalist hegemony: dispossession, proletarianization, and conservatism in Turkey

Abstract

The present study seeks to examine the position of conservative workers between relations of production and daily political practices in the context of hegemony. The study will first touch upon the economic-political character of the mode of capital accumulation in Turkey. In the context of core-periphery dualism, relations in the base forced social classes in Turkey to become a part of the global network of production and neoliberal hegemony of the new world order. Under conditions of dependent semi-peripheral capitalism, the working class is situated in the public sphere, in the habitus of a politically excluded social status in line with efforts for conservatizing daily life. Political tendencies of conservative workers manifest themselves through criticisms targeting modernism rather than the capitalist mode of production. While turning out as a hegemonic ideology bringing along practices of submissiveness on the part of individuals in the process where capitalism reproduces itself, the conservative thought also socializes an epic and pastoral culture sphere that bars the development of class consciousness in wage workers. Hence, while proletarianization in production relations and depreciation of labor expands, there emerges control over daily life in civil society. The subject of this control is the typology of conservative workers conceptualized as the paid believer in the light of a field survey conducted in Ankara, the capital city of Turkey. The significant findings of the research confirm that the category of paid believer adapts to practices of control at the workplace under the influence of hegemonic ideologies. Consequently, in daily life, the category of the paid believer has a pragmatist essence that combines with submissiveness and fatalism.