‘LEFT-OF-CENTRE’ IN TURKEY: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO IMPASSES OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

Between 1965 and 1980, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (Republican People’s Party) formulated its position as ‘left-of-centre’ in order to claim to represent the subordinate classes. Despite contributing to the radicalisation of organised fractions of workers and peasants to a great extent, its social democratic discourse could not respond to the prolonged hegemonic crisis in the late-1960s and the late-1970s. Left-Kemalist and liberal-conservative approaches, the dominant but opposing perspectives, explained the CHP’s failure with references to the power of foreign capital and the tutelage regime of the Republican state respectively. This paper argues that both perspectives could not adequately understand social democratic welfare state as a particular sociohistorical form of capitalist state whose hegemonic crisis is embedded in class relations. Therefore, it aims to offer a consistent and coherent perspective that is critical of both approaches, and that examines the internal and dynamic relationship among the capitalist state, political parties, hegemony, and social democracy in accordance with class relations. With this aim, it borrows its theoretical and conceptual framework from historical materialism. This paper fundamentally argues that the CHP’s failure stemmed from and concretized impasses of social democracy regarding its relation to the struggle of subordinate classes