Working class formation in Turkey, 1946-1962

Abstract

This study explores the everyday experiences and changing meanings workers attached to their living and working conditions in Turkey between the end of the Second World War and the early 1960s. A primary target of this dissertation is to explore the politics and ideologies of class as important elements of the historical process from big cities and weaving mills to national domains of social regulation, labor law and trade union policy. The working class appears to have been an active force and also a point of contention during the period which witnessed the dislocation of many producers from agrarian economy to industrial work in urban centers and with the visible expansion of wage labor. One of the inspirations of this study is specified as the conception of everydayness as an effort to question large structural generalizations and recover specificity. This outlook guided the discussion on the local and quotidian contexts such as the housing conditions in big cities and the new leisure pursuits of working people in which the possibilities of class solidarity were created. In a similar vein, the changing regimes of industrial discipline and its impact on working class identity and culture in specific industries and individual workplaces are discussed in order to recover the diversity of workers’ experiences, on the one hand, and to detect elements of resistance and collective action, on the other. The study is concluded by the discussion of the rich terrain of conflict between the state and workers’ associations as well as among the latter on the boundaries of class, changing meanings of labor and the role of the associational activity.