Changing Hegemonic Strategies of Business in Turkey before and after the Neoliberal Turn: from Defense to Counter-Attack

The financial collapse of 2008 and the following great recession with its cataclysmic repercussions have made a deep impact on, and consequently shattered the dominant paradigms in, the field of economic thinking. Mainstream convictions regarding the virtues of free markets, finance, and business in general that until recently seemed all-pervasive, hegemonic, and invincible have been significantly undermined giving way to widespread skepticism towards the existing economic and social order. Inevitably, this has shifted the scholarly trends, making themes, issues, and currents that were marginalized in the last three decades attractive once again. To what degree this ideological shift translates into actual policy-making is another issue. Yet, arguably and in broad brush strokes, what we are witnessing is the gradual ending of an epoch marked by a “pro-business” intellectual climate. It is an appropriate time, then, to trace the origins of this epoch and deepen our understanding of how business succeeded in establishing a favorable intellectual climate for itself in different national contexts.

The epoch that, I argue, was marked by a “pro-business” intellectual climate dates back to the global rise of neoliberalism in the early 1980s. The concept of neoliberalism has generally become a short-hand term to describe major political economic transformations of the last three decades such as globalization, deregulation, and financialization.¹ Although there are tremendous disagreements among scholars concerning the causes, consequences, and working mechanisms of neoliberalism,² David Harvey’s conceptualization as “the restoration of the class power of capital”³ has perhaps been the most appropriate way thus far to capture the essence of the aforementioned transformations. The structural factors behind this restoration are well documented. We therefore have a great deal of knowledge about the process through which certain transformations in the world economy (the crisis of Keynesianism, the end of Bretton Woods, the IT revolution, globalization, financialization) combined together to strengthen the hand of capital to the detriment of labor.⁴ Emphasizing the structural factors, however, runs the risk of neglecting the subjective element in this process of restoration, that is, capital’s strategic and collective actions as a class.

Limited attention has been paid to this aspect of the neoliberal transformation.⁵ Moreover, the literature at hand becomes even less satisfactory when the issue is collective action in the field of ideology.⁶ For instance, what exactly did the restoration of the class power of capital mean in the ideological realm? To concretize the issue, the changes in the public perception of business as an indicator within the ideological realm, before and after the rise of neoliberalism, are as astonishing and drastic as the changes in global political economy. Broadly speaking, in most countries of the west, the late 1970s was marked by economic crisis, political chaos, popular discontent and labor militancy accompanied by a deep skepticism/hostility towards business.⁷ This could be observed even in the US, where labor militancy and the radical left have historically been significantly weaker.⁸ After a decade or so, however, business skepticism was almost totally eradicated, radical aspirations were coopted or marginalized, and free market society seemed to declare its eventual victory over rival societal visions. Indeed, there seemed to be no alternative. How was this ideological transformation achieved? What kinds of strategies did the business front employ to enhance and consolidate its ideological influence? These important historical questions need to be answered through close empirical research on the efforts of business in the realm of ideology.

In this paper, I aim to answer these questions for the context of Turkey by focusing on two employers’ associations, namely MESS (Türkiye Metal Sanayicileri Sendikası—Turkish Employers’ Association of Metal Industries) and TİSK (Türkiye İşveren Sendikaları Konfederasyonu—The Confederation of Turkish Employers’ Associations) as representatives of the Turkish capitalist class in the concerned period. Based on an analysis of the periodical publications and public statements of these associations, I identify the changing ideological strategies of business in Turkey before and after the neoliberal turn. Apart from the sections that...