Ekrem Ekici / Ceren Türkmen
Berlin – February 2010
While the workers’ movement that had remained marginalised from Turkey’s political stage for nearly 30 years following the 1980 military coup that brutally repressed the political left, today we are witnessing an astonishing political awakening of the working class in Turkey.
The social picture in Turkey and North Kurdistan is now distant from class compromises, just as they are known to us in the former class compromises of the Fordist Global North. The official unemployment rate in Turkey stood at the level of 15.6 per cent. However, the actual rate is at a point far higher, as a vast amount of people still practicing subsistence agriculture or are undocumented urban residents.
The increasing labour fights of recent times seem to mark a new conjuncture of labour movements. Since 2000, eight strikes have been “suspended” due to the fact that they had seemingly posed “threats to national security” – meaning a military-forced systematic strike ban, regarding to the article in the constitution which has taken effect in 1982 by the enforcement of the junta that realised the 1980 vicious military coup. The current resistance of the workers of TEKEL (public enterprise which produces tobacco, alcoholic drinks and spirits), succeeded to set an example. (more…)
Lecture Symptomale 