Re-direction of public capital and the Doğan-Erdoğan row

There is certainly a very profound contradiction between the ideological climate that nurtures the government and the ideological climate that dominates the Doğan group. To make a claim to the contrary would mean closing our eyes to reality. In a sense, the ideological confrontation may give the impression that the attempt to weaken the government is a noble cause. However, we all know that what the fight against the government lacks in the first place is such a noble aspect. Then, as I said above, we must seek assistance from different parameters to make sense of this row.

A recent article by Hasan Bülent Kahraman, a columnist for Sabah, offers us a different perspective. Kahraman notes that Turkey is passing through a period of transformation. "In Turkey, the change we call modernization was experienced in the hierarchy in previous years. This hierarchy required social divisions such as those who know and those who don't know, or the rulers and the ruled, and the elites and the people. On the other hand, there was another wave of political movement in the making. This political movement that started after 1991 reached its peak in the post-2002 period and headed for another channel. The movement was growing stronger as a pole against the bourgeoisie-government relations of politics that used tradition, Islam and conservatism gradually and in different syntheses. This politics assumed office first in local administrations in 1994, and then in the central administration with coalitions after 1995, and finally, with absolute power after 2002," he says.

Kahraman adds: "Today's government is confronting the established bourgeoisie for the first time in the history of the republic. This is not purely a row between Doğan and Erdoğan. In my opinion, it is a conflict between the Justice and Development Party [AK Party] and the bourgeoisie. The AK Party, which relies on Anatolia, favors a different sort of capital and is attempting to create new socio-political dynamics, has finally given a start to its great war against the bourgeoisie. Erdoğan wants to save the rentier economy from the domination of the İstanbul bourgeoisie and transfer the income to Anatolia through the economies of distribution."

Kahraman seems to have hit at the heart of the problem. His approach sheds light on the question of why all business circles that bear the stamp of the Turkish Industrialists and Businessmen' Association (TÜSİAD), which is synonymous with İstanbul capital, have sided with Doğan media in this row. This may seem to contradict my previous articles, but this is not the case. The real contradiction is that the social class that calls itself leftists or social democrats, whether they support the Republican People's Party (CHP) or not, is the bourgeoisie. The fact that the CHP derives its strongest support from the districts of İstanbul, Ankara and İzmir, where the wealthiest people live, is a reality that crystallizes this contradiction.

Today, virtually all of the top executives of Doğan media, which acts as the spokesperson of the traditional Turkish bourgeoisie, have a left-wing legacy, and there are former Marxists, Maoists and members of other leftist factions among the members of TÜSİAD in considerably high numbers which serve as pieces to complete this puzzle of contradiction. These former diehard leftists -- who set out to fight against the bourgeoisie but ended up becoming members of it -- criticize the AK Party most harshly for this party's divergence from the pattern of previous governments. Indeed, the previous governments would prefer to distribute public capital among the established bourgeoisie through closed tenders and projects, while the AK Party's distribution to these circles relies totally on what they deserve. In the last five or six years, one can find numerous articles that warn the AK Party in this respect.

For instance, when the government split the divided highways project, designed to minimize traffic accidents, into smaller sections and distributed these sections to smaller contractors, this move received the strongest reaction from the Doğan Media Group and the big construction companies that are affiliated with this group. Likewise, allowing small capital companies to participate in tenders held by the Housing Development Administration of Turkey (TOKİ), which produces hundreds of thousands of housing units every year, drew similar reactions.

The AK Party has visibly put all forms of discrimination, which have become customary, aside, including the recruitment of bureaucrats, and made it possible to share public resources with the groups which were denied such resources in the past. In other words, the direction of public capital has been turned away from the traditional İstanbul bourgeoisie to the small entrepreneurs in Anatolia. The bourgeoisie, which has grown stronger through a symbiotic relationship with the state up to now, has reacted to this change of direction by seeking ways to get rid of the government. This search has revealed itself in the form of military intervention, the CHP's polarizing politics, the judicial coup and the media campaigns to weaken the government. The failure of the Doğan group and the İstanbul bourgeoisie to voice any criticism against the Ergenekon terrorist organization, which attempted to pave the way for overthrowing the AK Party government, should be assessed in this context.