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Welcome to the new books network. I'm Caleb Zachron, editor of the new books network. Today I speak with Gorgum Akos about a new book in the shadow of war at empire, industrialization, nation building, and working class politics in Turkey. Gorgum is a postdoc researcher at Humboldt University, an lecturer at Albert Ludwig's University, Freiberg.
The shadow of war at empire examines industrialism in the Ottoman Empire in Turkey from the 1840s to the 1930s, with a focus on the politics of different forms of industrialization and the shifting sands of labor relations. She explores the various facets of economic development and the importance of site-specific versus overly generalized analysis. Gorgum, thank you so much for joining me today on the new books network. Thank you for joining me.
I'm really happy to talk about my book with you. Of course, thank you so much for being a guest. This is a topic I found it really fascinating. I think economic history is such a great subject to approach so many different angles from, and I think that your focus on a site-specific factory really made this study come alive.
Before jumping into the book, I just want to give you a little bit of a little bit of your background. Sure, I'm actually a sociologist by training. I studied sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Then I moved to the United States for my graduate studies.
I attended the State University of New York at Binghamton. The sociology department there has actually a quite strong tradition in historical sociology and global political economy. I then moved to the Netherlands for a year to do archive research at the International Institute of Social History where I met myself on the London, one of the founders of the Global Labor History approach. He was my mentor there.
Things turned out better than predicted in Amsterdam. I transferred my PhD to the University of Amsterdam. With this change, I actually became more of a social historian than a sociologist, but I always kept a strong focus on political economy, something that I paint at Binghamton. I then returned to my home country, Turkey, to work at the Hijatte University, one of the largest public universities in the country.
I worked there until 2017. In 2017, I had to flee due to my political activism. I'm a member of the Peace Academics, a group that's publicly protested President Erdogan's regimes at Saxon, Cardi, and the office spending some months in Belgium and Hungary. I arrived in Germany and I have since worked as a temporary researcher and lecturer here.
At the moment, I'm a lecturer at the University of Freiburg in southern Germany, but that will also end soon. I'm now one of the growing army of Prigari's academics. You've had quite an academic experience. There are different halls of academia.
That's quite remarkable having to flee. I would love to ask more about that, but maybe we could save that for the end because I obviously want to talk about your book. This particular work, it does have the mark of an interdisciplinary scholar. I was wondering how you came to write this book.
What was the genesis of it? Were you decided that this was going to be the topic that you were going to write about? It actually began with a quite simple observation, namely that the social history tradition in my home country has been quite weak. Studies and labor history in particular have taken a state and elite-centered approach.
I wanted to change that like many other people in my generation. The first thing that inspired me was the history from below approach, specifically in EP Thompson's perspective on the making of a working class. Soon enough, I realized that it's really a difficult to do. On its own, it's quite hard.
It's especially hard for the historian of modern Turkey because we have a real big problem of finding archival material, especially for the period that I wrote on the 1930s and 40s. It's actually a very interesting thing when I say this people find it very striking that it's easier to find archival material on, let's say, 19th century or two of an empire than to find archival material on the early republican Turkey. But I learned the way I realized that there were even further challenges waiting for me, both very historiographical and otherwise there was a time not so long ago when it was actually cool to be an industrial labor historian, but it has not been the case since I joined the field of labor history. I joined in mid 2000s and when I became a labor historian, there was already a narrative of crisis in the discipline for more than 20 years and there were mainly two issues at stake there.
Number one was that the forward march of labor had come to an end, so the political power of working class movements was not there anymore. It was claimed. And second, the very idea of work as the cornerstone of society was coming under intense scrutiny. And even though it was not specified the type of work, the idea of work not being the cornerstone of modern society, this type of work at stake was industrial work.
People were talking about the industrial policy, industrial society and what have you. And one prominent approach that developed as a response to the perceived crisis of the discipline of labor history has been that of global labor history and I just told you that I did my PhD at the Internationalist Social History, the birthplace of this approach. And global labor history questioned the focus on male workers, male industrial workers in historiography, labor historiography, and tried to broaden the geographical and the temitic scope of traditional labor history. As a result, research on non-industrial societies outside Western Europe and North America, this kind of research has expanded.
And labor historians began to transcend the old dichotomies between free and unfree labor, paid and unpaid work, and formerly and informally organized workers. These were of course all great improvements, very well received, but as I became more familiar with this new perspective, I began to wonder what had happened to the study of the industrial workplace and industrial workers. To balance out the over-emphasis on these topics, labor historians pushed industrial work to the edges of the field by the time I joined the discipline. And they took the focus of the workplace as a site of value production and exploitation and as a site of class.
And I felt like nobody believed in the potential of the study of the industrial workplace for understanding the workings and logic of capitalism. So I felt a little bit of loneliness, epistemological loneliness, if you will. And in time I came to understand that I had to do something about my old understanding of this history from the global political economy and this new insight into global labor history. And I think in the book I managed to combine these new ideas with traditional approaches to study in industrial workplaces such as industrial anthropology, labor process theory and the micro history.
I then examined a 19th century industrial workplace in Ottoman factory that survived the fall of the empire and became the focal point of state-led industrialization in republican Turkey a century later. So one of the book's main themes is the study of industrial work in industrial workplaces in global labor history. That's how I would describe it. You referred to the book as a site-specific history of Ottoman and Turkish industrialization.
Can you talk about the methodological perspectives you employed? Sure. So my aim was to trace the historical continuities in what I call peripheral post-em-imperial industrial development. Continuities from the empire to the republic, also discontinuities as well.
And I think there could hardly be a better starting point than a factory that was central to two rounds of state-led industrialization, one Ottoman and one Turkish republican. And these two rounds were separated as I said by almost a century. So this vantage point also gave me a long-term perspective. And I chose to look at this history through the lens of an industrial workplace which I conceptualized as a geographically specific and locally integrated place and also situated in the intersection of local, national and global connections.
And I treat it as a site where class happens and capital as a social relationship is produced and reproduced. And I think when conceptualized as such, the industrial workplace offers great potential for an integrated interdisciplinarity of all encompassing history of capitalism. So I'm glad that you mentioned that my background reflects an interdisciplinary perspective. And I think that's also what I try to do in the book.
So throughout the book, what I tried to do was holding the place constant and looking at the wider societal structures through the lens of this place. And this workplace in my conceptualization is not a closed one and not an in-war-looking unit behind the scenes. So things happen and then this workplace is just there, static at the background. That's not how I saw it.
It's more than that. I treat this workplace as a contact zone, which means it's like seemingly aesthetic locality, but it's made up of circulations of capital labor and also technology and industrial expertise. Just to give you a small example of these circulations, maybe, from the beginning, the factory has been a site where we see American agricultural experts, for example, they are freed slaves transported from the southern United States to plant cotton for the factory in Istanbul. We see European engineers and foremen dominating whatever ultimate manufacturing existed at the time.
We also see intensifying transfer of technology and expertise that continued into the Republican era. So in the 1930s, we saw all of that in the Ottoman period, but in the 1930s, we also see new actors emerging, particularly Soviet industrial experts and excellent German engineers. We even find pictures of Lenin and Adattuk on factory walls. So when discussing global labor history, one of the concerns that often arise is that it's the scale of analysis.
What does the term global mean in the context of global labor history? Is it merely a measure of how many square meters of land we examine? Can a site specific history, for example, qualify as global labor history? What makes it global?
And here I was guided by Marcel van Nalen, and as I said, he wrote basically that global labor history perspective is defined by the analysis of the various historical forms of labor and labor control, the intensifying or weakening interactions and transfers between the different regions of the world. So this is the defining features of the perspective. And one of the critical points in this operation is that doing global history does not simply mean analysis on a large geographical scale. And Marcel writes, it's possible to write the history of a village and workplace or even a family from a global perspective, for example.
And then you do that, we aim to analyze the seemingly small scale, local settings or structures and relate them to the large scale global mechanisms that underpin them. And we try to identify the macro processes that underlie the micro-acronises. And the global labor history in my case meant linking localized centers of industrial production with wider global relationships and forces and in keeping the place constant and looking at the wider world around it. This actually meant doing micro-history in motion for me.
So these are the two things that inspired the global labor history and micro-history. So this micro-history in motion also brought me to an interesting analogy that I wrote in my introduction. In writing my book, I often visualized myself holding a camera and zooming in and out at the image that appeared before me. And shortly before I finished writing the book, I read an interview with Carmel Ginsburg, the prominent name of the Italian micro-history tradition.
And Ginsburg wonderfully articulated the constructive tension between the micro-andam macro and he used the analogy of cinema to explain it. He said in quotes, both in history and in cinema, the global perspective in any close-up is implicit and of course. The close-ups in my book focus on workers everyday practices. Everyday practices are replete with agency I try to show.
And I build on these close-ups to reconnect worker agency to the wider societal structures. It is a meditant. And the structure of the book reflects this multi-scale long-term perspective as well, I think. Across Canada in Evolvo.
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You begin the book in the mid-19th century, which obviously was a time globally of the Nissan industrialization coming out from the UK. But moving and seeing other places too, like in the United States and elsewhere, you look at the Ottoman Empire's economy and how the empire was trying to compete with these rapidly industrializing economies in the west. Can you talk about how the Ottoman Empire, what the Ottoman Empire's economy looked like at this time and what they were trying to develop towards? Yeah, probably you saw that the title of the first main chapter of the book is the Turkish Manchester, Turkish Manchester in quotation marks.
So it's interesting that you asked this question referring to the effect of the English manufacturing of the Ottoman economy. We should start from the second half of the 18th century. I mean the book starts from 1840s, but we have to go a little bit back in time and look at the second part of the 18th century when the Ottoman economy began to face challenges both from both European competition and also from military reads. And from that point on, the empire's military reforms and industrialization were closely intertwined.
So when we talk about industrialization or industrial production in the Ottoman Empire, we are talking about inevitably a military-industrial complex. So it's a consequence, the industrialization policy prioritized military reform. Now the manufacturing was made first and foremost for the army and for the war needs of the empire. So the focus was on gunpowder mills, cannon factories and small textile workshops that predominantly produced the textiles for the army.
So we have few establishments that resemble modern industrial workplaces in terms of size and organization. Most of these establishments remained small and they resembled artisan shops with low technology and few employees. And the establishment of machine-operated factories, worthy of the name factory, would have to wait until the advent of the modern army. When we talk about textiles, and we should talk about textiles when we talk about the manufacturing, we see that cotton was the second most important sector of the Ottoman economy after rain's production.
The empire remained self-sufficient in cotton textiles until the 1820s, partly thanks to the French Revolutionary and the Polygonic Wars because these provided some relief for the region. But following that, competition with Europe increased significantly and initially the small manufacturers in the empire's urban centers suffered. But one production continued with difficulty, but it did continue and it even expanded some point in the 19th century. But by the mid-19th century, the crisis had spread across multiple regions of the empire and also it was multiple sectors.
And the empire gradually became a supplier of raw materials and a market for European products. So the trade deficit was getting worse and worse and the military budget was expanding for various reasons. In the end, we're talking about the last century of the empire, so you can imagine how many war campaigns were going on. Military parity with Europe remained the primary goal, but there was also a growing recognition of the need of industrialization for economic development.
And Ottoman modernizers in the end felt that traditional manufacturing methods couldn't compete with European manufacturing, so they began to advocate for large modern factories. And in 1838, the Anglo-Ottoman commercial treaty, the Baltony Manthriti forced the Ottomans to surrender their monopolies and tariff authority to foreign powers. So this basically marked the opening of the Ottoman market completely. And it is perhaps ironic that the largest and broadest Ottoman industrial effort came shortly after this treaty.
And it is here that the story of my book starts with the Ottomans building an industrial complex on the northern coast of the Marmera Sea. They call this complex, now we come to the Turkish Manchester, the Turkish Manchester, a name that symbolized their ambition to match European manufacturing capabilities. They failed, and I had to qualify this this word failed because the Ottomans don't like it often. They failed in establishing a factory-style manufacturing.
I mean, as I said, like home-based production continued. So they failed in that and nearly a century later in the 1930s, a well-known Marxist scholar in Turkey for scholars of Turkey, maybe I should name his name, Ichmeht Kabljumla. He claimed that a cut-and-mill in the Turkish Manchester, this was an industrial complex and there was a cut-and-mill in this industrial complex, he claimed that this cut-and-mill was the secret to and the foundation of Turkish capitalism in 1930s. So my book follows the story of these two raids of industrialization, one in Peril and the other one in the Republican, which took place under two distinct political economies and two very distinct moments in the history of global capitalism.
Yeah, thank you for that and thank you for giving the context also, the longer in context of the establishment of Turkish Manchester. In chapter two, you skip ahead to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the struggle for Turkish independence. If you talk a little about some of the transformations that occurred in Turkish society and economy throughout the 1920s. Yeah, Turkey, as you know, was the last nation state to emerge from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire in 1923.
During the 1920s, the Turkish cases are very interesting, almost like a perfect example of a dependent economy with minimal state intervention and in that the 1923 Lozaan conference played a very big role because the new regime, the Republican regime, agreed to a free trade regime in exchange for paying off roughly two thirds of the Ottoman deaths. And like the Ottoman economy, the Turkish economy remained primarily agricultural, with agriculture accounting for almost half of the country's GDP and it employed 80% of the population. So as you can expect, urbanization rate was very low. In 1927, for example, only 16% of the 13 million population lived in urban areas in Turkey.
And again, similar to the Ottoman case, we should underline that there's a lot of, I mean, there is like a regime change at all, but there's a lot of continuities in the socioeconomic structure of the empire and Turkey. So foreign capital, like in 19th century, Ottoman economy, foreign capital in the 1920s Turkey played an important role in the organization of export area oriented agriculture. Foreign direct investment also increased in 1920s with the liberalization of the conditions of property ownership in 1924. For example, between 1923 and 1929, foreign capital investment in manufacturing corporations doubled the contributions of Turkish capital.
Industrial production overall remained quite limited and it accounted for about only 10% of national income in the 1920s. Then came the Great Depression, which had a devastating effect on the Turkish economy because of the plummeting prices of agricultural products, the main export of Turkish 30. But there was also silver lining to the Great Depression, as we see in some other countries as well. That was the advanced economy is momentarily losing control of the periphery and thus giving them a chance to reverse the strength.
And by the early 1930s, Turkey joined a number of other countries on the wagon of national economy. And the Communist ruling class had decided that rapid industrialization was the best response to centuries of underdevelopment. And it's very interesting and it's not very widely known, but Turkey made the first industrial planning attempt outside the Soviet Union and adopted a five year industrial plan. And we should underline the timing here, I think, because this happens three decades before land and direct industrialization became prevalent in global development agendas.
And from then on, the large factory acquired both on social imagery in Turkey and that imagery was cast in both economic and cultural terms. In this time period, you also look at the state of labor relations. So what was the state of labor relations like in the 20s and 30s? During the 1920s, the government focused mainly on implementing superstructural reformism and also eliminating threats to its territorial integrity.
And in this, we have to treat 1925 as the pivotal year because of the Kurdish rebellion. This was a full-scale interaction with religious and separatist overtones, still a very highly contentious event in Turkish history and Kurdish history, of course. So the revolt provided the government with the opportunity to get rid of its political opponents once and for all. And the government violently repressed the revolt and enacted the law for the maintenance of order, which effectively eliminated all possible channels of opposition until the second half of the 1940s.
In fact, Turkey actually had a single party regime until the end of the Second World War. So it was like a party state. The Kurdish revolt gave the opportunity to the government a chance to crack down and not only the Kurds, but also the press and the labor movement. The government shut down the communist newspapers and part of the propaganda activities and basically just ended the legal phase of communism in Turkey in 1925.
In the book, I cited an American academic who talked to the trading units in the 1950s, the Turkish trading units in the 1950s. And one of the trading units claimed 1925 was a turning point for the labor movement. He said that the labor movement had actually enjoyed more freedom and more popular support prior to 1925 than later on in the 1930s and 1940s, so things went bad for the labor movement after 1925. And the reason was that because before the labor movement was identified with the nationalist struggle, but this identification was broken after 1925.
And from then on the legal scope of worker organizations was restricted to mutual aid to welfare and associated activities. And actually later on, trading units also became illegal until 1946. So here, the Turkish case diverges from the 20th century post-colonial nation states, I would argue, because in these nation states, the labor movement gained some form or some degree of legitimacy from its affiliation with anti-colonial nationalism. But the alliance between the labor movement and the nationalist party was quite short lived in Turkey.
By the time the founding party, the Republican People's Party, made a move to incorporate the working class, for example, as we saw in certain Latin American countries, by the time it tried to make that move, it was too late. That came in the second half of the 1940s, but yeah, it was too late. So if we summarize during the 1920s and 30s, industrial relations were quite oppressive. However, particularly after state that industrialization began in 1930s, there was a noticeable glorification of industrial workers as patriotic citizens who helped to rebuild their country.
Maybe it's interesting to note here that the government enacted a labor code only in 1936 in Turkey. So there was no labor code prior to that. And that's interesting because this big project of state-led industrialization began without a labor code. And in the book, I write this in detail, the parliament took 15 years of deliberations to make a labor code and a lot of in- foreign-led struggles.
And this itself, I think, says a lot about the contentious class politics of state-building and industrialization in early Republican Turkey. You've also examined the role of women in the labor force and their experience in broader society. So could you talk a little about the state of gender dynamics in this period? Yeah, of course, then there is an important analytical component in my book, for two reasons, basically.
The first one is that two traditionally female-dominated industries grew in the 1930s and 40s, textiles and tobacco. The second reason is that there were two important markers of visible modernity in early Republican Turkey. The first one I already told you, the light factory. And the second one was women in public life.
The secular republic made women's legal and social status the focal point of humanist development narratives. And the government undertook a series of legal reforms concerning women's legal and civil status in the 1920s and 1930s. And in this, the mixed gender industrial work spaces and recreational facilities, factory girls playing the piano in factory cafeteria, that kind of stuff, these were very strong visual support materials for these developmentalist narratives. We should, I think, talk about two sets of these courses on women's industrial labor that have influenced popular thinking and that have been encoded into state politics in this period.
The first one of these sets of these courses was women's rights to work, which the feminist elite claims women gained only after the republic, thanks to the republic. Although this is not true, we know that women worked in factories in the Ottoman Empire, but this was a very prevalent discourse of the time. The second discourse was women's duty to work. And this was also presented as an opportunity for women to engage in patriotic service.
So it's mainly the second one, women's duty to work that I deconstructed in the book. And I looked behind it to understand why both state elite industrial policymakers and middle class elite men were so obsessed with women coming to the factories. And I found out that behind all these celebratory stories of women on the shop floor, there actually existed a constant demand for women's industrial labor. And the supply of female industrial labor is critical to the development of light manufacturing industries, such as textile and tobacco.
And I already told you that these were the expanding sectors. And this supply was limited in Turkey. And what supply did exist was mainly concentrated in and around Istanbul and Western Anatolia, because these regions were the Ottoman Empire's historical manufacturing centers. They already had a tradition of manufacturing, but for the newly built state factories in Central Anatolia, for example, there was no such labor market already existing.
So I looked at state documents, industrial expert reports, inspection reports and the print media. And they all showed that the government and the employers were trying to get more women to work in factories in 1930s and 40s. And there are times to mostly failed until the middle of the 1950s, when private industrial investment and rural urban migration gained momentum. So until at least the end of the 1950s, the share of women in the industrial workforce remained under 30% in Turkey.
And this dual discourses of Turkish women's right to work and they're due to the work, I believe effectively concealed the working conditions of Turkish women on and off the shop floor. We know very little. I mean, in general, we know very little about working conditions on the shop floor and the social life of the workers, but like when it comes to women, we know even less. So what I found out is that in the absence of pressure from an autonomous feminist moment, and also a trading in moment, there were some protective legislation for women workers, but this legislation was less concerned with the public debate about women's labor than the state keeping up appearances.
And the government managed to present a minimal and health enforced protective legislation as a gift to factory women. And in the end, I argue that a new ideology of women's work was articulated in the 1930s and in the 1940s. And this new ideology of women's work shaped state employer and trading in policies in the following decades in Turkey. I'm actually now, I'm currently writing a series of articles on that because the book finishes in 1950s, but now I'm going beyond that.
And this new ideology of women's labor was constructed through the combination of a set of labor market and shop floor discourses. And it's constituted the basis I argue for a particular female industrial labor control regime, which combines external labor discourses like protective legislation, women as the cultural modernizers and whatnot, with all the forms of shop floor labor control, which was basically the iron fist of the foreman, which exerted more pressure when it came to women, obviously. And in its unwillingness to address women's problems at work, or its unwillingness to enhance protections for women's work-based rights, I argue that this new ideology failed to bring women to the shop floor as much as the industrial policymakers and employers desired. It touched on the foreman and the relationship between the management and labor, both women and male workers.
What were some of the changes that occurred in the 1940s? You talked about the institution of a labor code prior, but in the 40s, you also look at the changing nature of labor management relations. So what do you see there? Yeah, we have a number of key developments in the 1940s.
And as you would expect, they're all related to the Second World War, of course. And the first is that the outbreak of the war slowed down the industrialization program. And a second five-year industrial plan was supposed to start in 1939, but obviously it would not be the outbreak of the war. What happened instead was that in 1940, the government enacted the National Defense Act.
And with this act, the government actually overturned the limited protective legislation of 1936, the labor code provisions. For example, it repealed the regulations on working hours, permitted compulsory work, and overtime prohibited workers from leaving their place of employment. And thus, for example, in Northern Anatolia in the Zongaldak coal basin, basically institutionalized a forced labor regime. And part of these regulations also continued even after the end of the war.
The end of the war marked yet another turning point in Turkish politics in general, and also in labor relations. To begin with, it marked the end of the single party regime. So from 1923 until the war, 1945, we had one party with some short-lived exceptions. We had one party in Turkey.
And this came to an end with the end of the war. The ruling party's legitimacy was already shakled during the war years. It was now more exposed to democratic pressures within the country, and thus was in need of legitimizing its authority. Because simple repression was not working anymore, it had to be supplemented by active efforts to secure the concerns of the masses.
And with the end of the single party era, labor became a political category. And political leaders began to pursue the option of mobilizing workers as a political base, far more extensively than before. At the same time, this was what was happening at the national level, but at the same time at the global level, the broader transnational social politics of the immediate post-war years dictated the handling of the labor question in more hegemonic terms. For example, the debates on industrial welfare emerged as a political issue in the context of the post-war crisis at the global level.
So a number of changes, quite rapid changes happened in Turkey in the field of industry relations, and at the heart of these changes was the establishment of the Ministry of Labor in 1945. So again, maybe we should underline, I mean Turkey was the first country outside of soyetrion to have a planned industrialization policy without a labor code, without a ministry of labor. So, and immediately after the establishment of the ministry in 1945, the government ran on to build an employment-based social insurance system for the urban working population, quite limited, but still it came to existence. And it also repealed the prohibition of associations and alliances based on social costs in 1946, basically made an amendment to an existing law and made the trade unions legal in 1946, until 1946 we don't have trade unions.
But it was not only the narrative of this good example that energized these changes, Turkey trying to be, trying to integrate into this new international order and following the good example of the global level of transnational social politics, that was part of the story. The other part of the story was that the Turkish ruling and it was occupied with industrial progress, but they were quite distrustful of the potential destructive power of organized labor from the very beginning. And this is actually also one of the reasons why it took them forever to make a labor code. So they turned to an expansion of social intervention and labor regulation, basically expanding the external regulation of labor in order to increase industrial productivity on the one hand, because that was also a big problem, and also secure working-class cooperation.
For example, one of the first speeches of the Minister of Labor, he talks about what was happening in France and Italy in 1946-47 and how they were so afraid that something like that would happen in Turkey. So there is this fear of subversive ideologies and they were of course communism. And they had to do something before these subversive ideologies mobilized the working-class that was very evident in their narratives. So this, I mean on the one hand they are searching for industrial productivity, on the other hand they are anxious and fearful of working-class politics, taking a subversive turn, and they are fearing of the radicalization of industrial workers.
And social policy then came at an instrument to avoid the incontation marks the mistakes made in the rest. So they want to westernize, but they don't want to repeat the mistakes which they define as caste struggle. So state factor is an ideological function in this effort, I think, in this very delicate balance, because in terms of working conditions, the term state factory conjured up regional workers working at a leisurely pace, enjoying state protections, secure employment, and fringe benefits. But the actual working conditions and work relations at state factories found almost no place in this narrative of shining happy producers, toiling for the reconstruction of their homeland.
And contrary to their public image, the shop floor climate in state factories in the 1940s was actually one of tension and at times problem hostility. So I did a close reading of the historical social vocabulary that was available to workers in 1940s, and especially before the beginning of the trading in Womans, because I think that's very important to look at what happened at the shop level level level, sorry shop floor level, when you don't have formal labor organizations. And it showed me this close reading showed me that the workers, the state workers were not the docile content labor force that they were often portrayed to be in the contemporary print media all the time, but also in the scholarly literature afterwards, they actually closely followed developments in the external regulation of labor. They utilized any leverage these changes created to bargain not only for economic gain, but also for respect on the shop floor.
I did a close reading of their petitions, for example, and I showed that they were showing increasing commitment to the defense of their shop floor earnings and conditions, and they questioned the legitimacy of managerial discourses by raising notions of fairness and legitimizing principles that are central to the process of real making. And by the late 1940s, I showed that a 30 state factory was as much a contested terrain as any other industrial workplace, despite the seemingly broke radically organized structures and the populist ideology that was in circulation. And a factory consciousness developed during these years in the 1940s, which then played an important role in the privileging of the industrial workplace as a site of class struggle in the following decades. To continue on this, the theme of the rise of trade unions, you look at two trade unions in particular to get a sense of what working class politics was like I think that's part of what you're referring to.
When you look at how the propaganda, maybe let's say what the factories were like versus their reality was quite different. My mind of course isn't making a more familiar with the United States' trade union, rise of unions, and it's just fascinating that the similarities, I'm sure there's reasons for that, but could you talk a little about the trade unionist that you profile and what you learned by looking at their lives? Yeah, it's interesting that you said that actually, because currently I'm working on an article about a sort of like a transnational labor solidarity between the American trade unions and the Turkish trade unions in 1970s and I did a lot of reading on American trading in movement history, and I think I see what you mean there. But as I just mentioned, going back to Turkish history in the 1940s, the government repealed the prohibition of associations based on social class in 1946.
I already told you as part of this broader post-war democratization process. However, something unexpected happened immediately afterwards. Trade unions with connections to the newly founded socialist party is mushroomed, and the government, like within six months after allowing their establishment, proclaimed a state of emergency in December 1946 and liquidated the socialist parties as well as the trade unions. So they became illegal.
And then it enacted a new trading in law in February 1947, and this trading law remained in effect with minimum amendments for the next 16 years until 1963. It only underwent radical changes after the military takeover of governmental power in 1960. And I focused on three structural determinants of union bargaining power in the first years of the trading in Morlands after this 1947 law. So the first one was the fragmented union structure, it's created with limited union finances and also leadership problems.
The second one was that the trade unions were banned from political activity, very loosely defined, and they were also banned from international levelations. And third was that the law prohibited the right to strike and thus actually effectively crippled collective bargaining structures. So the combination of these three factors severely hampered the development of the union movements and left workers to their own devices on the shop floor basically, especially in the first few years of the trading movement, that would change slowly in the 1950s. But as I said, the big change came in 1963.
So in the literature, there is a rather monolithic view on the early development of the trading and movements. But I figured early on that these early years are actually a rich site for exploring the individual dynamics that challenge and complicate from below again, this monolithic view. So I decided to use micro-historical lens. And as you mentioned, I followed two unionists on and beyond the shop floor and focused on the interactions between shop floor politics and the wider trading in politics.
And I traced these two workers' footsteps from the factory to the union club and political marketing meetings. I pieced together their writings and talked to their family members. And I found out that their life stories are so interesting. They reflect the turmoil of the 1940s and 50s in a very rich way.
And they gave human form to these micro-structural developments. And they just portrayed a political atmosphere that was at once chaotic and very dangerous and also exciting and thoughtful. We have to understand. And their life stories demonstrate the dynamic and processional nature of working class political identity.
So I had a very simple starting point related to that. And that point was that workplace experience is central to worker politicization. Political subjectivity does not automatically derive from an objective class position. And this we know from, among others, EP Thompson, of course.
And the formation of political subjectivity is an open-ended and contingent process. And within that process, the workplace experience plays a very important role. So I built on this promise. And I asked a number of questions to the archival material I could find.
How does a worker decide to unionize? Why does he, and in this case, unfortunately, he, because I couldn't do the same for women unionists because of the archival problems, why does he join or resign from a political party? How does his shop floor experience affect these decisions? What role do personal relations play?
And how are contestations on the shop floor over the labor process and the mechanisms of labor control linked to workers political and organizational behavior? I think these are relevant questions for whatever time period we are working at, and also to understand the current politics of labor in Turkey and global. So I was very excited to find out the answers to these questions. And your question was what I learned about working-class politics from following their experiences.
I recovered the organizational and political like alternatives within the labor moment, within the trading moment, that have largely been depicted as static monolithic and passive, but I recovered this organizational and political alternatives. And also the ways how these alternatives were suppressed. And I found out that no matter how precarious, subordinated, and controlled, the trade-ins were not the mouthpiece of the states. They were much more than that.
And conflicting class interests and organizational alternatives did exist, but they were kind of frozen until the mid 1960s within the labor moment. And by the end of the 1940s, there was a strong existence of the category of worker as a social and a political force. And the existence of that category of worker deeply influenced the politics. And indeed, the whole of society in the following decades.
So these are some of the findings that I arrived at. It's quite an interesting study. You look at different moments. It's all sort of held together by this focus on factory life.
And I think to sort of ring at home, if you could talk a little about some of your reflections on the study and what you think its relevance is for understanding present day Turkish economics and politics. Turkey, I feel like, as a person based in the US, I frequently see Turkey in the news. Obviously, there's the geopolitical reasons, but frequently in the news because Turkey seems to be always exploring some interesting monetary policy. So I would love to hear a little bit about how your study can help us understand Turkish economics and politics.
I'm afraid I can't tell you much about the monetary policy part, but I can try to tell you a little bit more about the general industry relations atmosphere in political economy in Turkey. As you mentioned, we are often in the news for different reasons. And maybe one of the reasons is that there's an extremely polarized political atmosphere in Turkey for some years now. And in this polarized atmosphere, past historical experience is a crucial bedrock of contemporary political and ideological debates.
And the early Republican period, which I studied in my book, has become a highly controversial topic. It has the power to provoke intense, interests and passionate opinions. And for example, President Erdogan fiercely attacks the period and what he calls its single party mentality. Even if the communist opposition cannot defend the period in its entirety, it still nearly upholds two pillars of early Republican state policy.
One is secularism, and the other one is ettitism. Ettitism is the Turkish name that was given to state-led industrialization in Turkey. The question of who bears the political responsibility for the end of state industries is more complicated than the communist opposition makes out, because privatization in Turkey began long before Erdogan's rule. It actually began after the 1980 coup d'etat.
But today, the desolated rundown state factories ignite a feeling of waste, a lost opportunity for Turkey to become a self-sufficient modern industrial nation. The products of state factories, especially textiles, they are remembered with a sense of pride for their quality and with sorrow over the disappearance of democratic consumption opportunities. I, for example, follow a number of social media accounts that do only this. They are all good all days and then they share, you know, like visuals of these products and factories and what have you.
So state factories, once upon a time, has become a chemist yearning for a past where positive nationalism rained and a sense of national duty overcame personal interest. And the state elite could still be trusted all in comparison with today's 13 people's minds. And finally, in terms of working conditions, the term state factory, as I said, conjures up this vision of happily working people, people who got what they deserved for a good day's work, you know. But the actual working conditions and work relations at state factories find almost no place in this narrative of shining and happy producers for boiling for their homeland.
So the title of the conclusion of my book is Shat ring silence and deafening nostalgia. So there's a Shat ring silence over what the workers went through. And there's this deafening nostalgia that actually doesn't let us understand what sort of political economy environment this was. And my book debunks this current nostalgic investment in work under state led industrialization.
I started the book with a very simple observation as I told you in the beginning that we didn't know enough. And I didn't know enough about what went on inside state factories during this formative period of industrial relations in Turkey. And I took up this challenge and pushed the study of Turkish industrial civilization in a new direction, namely toward the analysis of the nature of the work process and the informal organization of the shop floor in relation to state narratives and state policy. And I believe that I managed to show that the analysis of the organization of work in state factories and the formation of working class political subject in peace is in this period is central to our understanding not only of the specific case of peripheral industrialization, but it's also central to our understanding of the many meanings of work and working class politics in development of modern Turkey.
Now the idea is to follow this up and bring it all the way up to present day developments in industrial relations in Turkey. Yeah. I love that term deafening nostalgia because I think that there is there's a lot of that today in terms of sort of a nostalgia for nationalism pre-globalization. And I think that it's a there's a lot of misremembering and it's good to go and actually find it and see that our labor conditions, labor relations have not been great for a lot of time.
I always say labor has this magical power once you've got to center of your analysis, like everything just sort of collapses and becomes a little bit like more pessimistic in our nation. Because we need to know these things if you want to change things and for political organization as well, not only for like academic knowledge, but for political organization as well. We have to know these things and we have to go back to the basics I think. Yeah.
Absolutely. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for being a guest on the new books network. You know, the book is in the shadow of Warren Empire industrialization, nation building and working class politics in Turkey.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much for the invitation as well. And maybe we should remind the audience that the listeners that the book was published with open access so they can go to the publishers website and just download it for free. Absolutely.
I'll make sure to put that in the show now. So I'll put a link to that. Okay. Thank you so much.
This was really, this was really wonderful to talk to you. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
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