By Ali Cevahir in Istanbul
“‘How can I go to the bank when I’ve been arrested?’ ‘Oh,’ said the supervisor, who was already at the door, ‘you have misunderstood me. Yes, you have been arrested, but that should not prevent you from going to work.” Kafka, The Trial.
The working conditions in Turkey during a seventeen-day lockdown are pretty much the same as it is underlined in above by Kafka. If sixteen million workers are still at work, one cannot surely speak of total lockdown. The report of the Confederation of Progressive Trade Union of Turkey Research Center (DİSK-AR) has signalled that the rate of positive Covid-19 cases among the workers is at least 3 times higher than the average in Turkey. Despite a seventeen-day lockdown, the DİSK has announced that sixty one percent of the workers are exempt from lockdown, which covers twenty one percent the production sector. That is to say, free market Islamism, merged with neoliberal policies, is at work too!
One of the first Covid19 regulations of the government was to close liquor stores and ban alcohol selling. By this way, the government was going to please the plethora of Tariqats, namely, the grassroots of the reactionary forces based on religious sects.
However, it seems that after a huge protest wave on social media, the government has practically retreated from this illegal act for now. On the other hand, the government is already collecting the highest amount of money from gambling and alcohol taxes. That is how “moderate Islamists” work.
Long-standing tradition of Islamic banking
There is no doubt that Islamists have always put IMF policies and the kind into action throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and ruling Turkish AKP is no exception. In other words, right-wing religious politics just pay lip service to the inequalities of capitalism, but in reality they are the most faithful adherents to IMF and World Bank policies around the globe.
We all know that there is a long-standing tradition of an Islamic banking system which flourished with neoliberalism in 1980s, funded by Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood, as well as international capital, such as Citibank. And Islamic finance has a way with go-go fund, offering rates of return to investors that are significantly higher than those proffered by traditional banks.
Here, the Thodex crypto-currency exchange platform comes into play. The boss of this crypto platform, Faruk Fatih Özer, has gone missing, and what concerns us more is that the aforementioned guy has photos showing both the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Minister of the Interior. Needless to say, they claim that they do not know the guy. But the citizens certainly are aware that no one can visit them in their office unless they hold a powerful position.
Meanwhile, crony capitalism runs smoothly all across the North of Turkey. In İkizdere, Rize, the peasants are resisting the corporation of Cengiz Holding’s quarry, which raised its profits by way of AKP. The corporation has investments in several sectors such as energy, mining, construction, tourism and so on.
To put it in a nutshell, the capitalist class character of the presidency explicitly exposes itself in many fields in our daily life. During the lockdown for seventeen days, while people going to work are squashed into public transport like sardines, the chairwoman of DENSA, Arzu Sabancı, Tweets from her manor house along side the Bosphorus, saying “don’t you ever complain for being at home.”
The motto “stay at home” turns out to be an oxymoron while people have to work to survive, not to mention unemployment and mass poverty on the streets. Last but not least, after May Day protestors were silenced in İzmir, a photo signifying the cruelty of police violence reminds us of George Floyd, whose spirit will sooner or later show up on our streets.
