What is it about?
Turkish capitalism has recently been defined by a boom of construction projects of all types. In the eastern province of Dersim (officially Tunceli), for example, a great number of hydro dams have been built over the past 20 years, leading to a range of economic, social and ecological crises. These recent crises are embedded in a more deep-rooted crisis: the chronic socioeconomic under-development of the region, which has been historically produced by both uneven capitalist development and the Turkish state’s assimilation policies targeted at Alevi Kurds. For almost two decades, Dersimites from all sorts of classes have been resisting these dam projects, which pose a threat to their survival and self-reproduction as well as reshaping the socio-spatial relations and deepening the existing crises embedded in this underdeveloped geography. Through their anti-dam struggle, Dersimites have not only attempted to put the brakes on the dam projects but have also engaged in the making of new geographies to overcome the crises perpetually produced by Turkish capitalism. However, as we will show in this paper, their praxis has also aided capital’s spatial displacement of crisis, enabling it to reproduce its own logic of accumulation.
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Why is it important?
Our paper engages with the following three matters of debate in order to build an empirically substantiated framework, contributing to the emerging pluralist school of labor geography. First, we reprise the long-standing criticism of labor geography of confining agency to a worker/union-centrism. We argue that this centrism, which is still prevalent even in more flexible accounts in labor geography, can be transcended by a grassroots agency perspective. Second, the emerging school of thought in labor geography has been characterized by an increasing emphasis on the problem of theorization of agency andstructure. In this regard, our paper addresses an expanded notion of socio-spatial structure to reframe the interplay between structure and agency with respect to uneven geographical development. Third, we problematize the traditional notion of labor’s spatial fix due to its drawing of a non-dialectical distinction between capital’s and labor’s spatial fixes, setting one against the other. Rather, we propound a concept of socio-spatial fix, shifting the analytical focus to coalescences between capital’s and labor’s praxis towards displacement of crisis. That is, despite all their differences, we argue that capital and labor come together to fix crises of capitalist development.
Perspectives
This paper provides an in-depth case analysis of how the people of Dersim—through their grassroots struggle against hydroelectric power plant projects—have produced a socio-spatial fix that both addresses their province’s chronic underdevelopment and assists capital in staving off its recurrent crises and reproducing its logic of accumulation. In this context, our paper expands our knowledge in three respects: First, our paper brings new insights into the debate on the theorization of agency within its spatiality and constrained nature, developing an expanded notion of socio-spatial structure as a modular analytical unit to explore the dialectic relation between structure and agency in relation to uneven geographical development. Our empirical case demonstrates that an analytical focus on socio-spatial structures embedded in differentiated space-time contexts of capitalism can significantly advance our knowledge of the spatiality and constrained nature of agency. Second, instead of the community-unionism version of worker/union-centrism, which is arguably dominating labor geography, our paper adopts a grassroots agency perspective. This perspective shift allows us to premise a more comprehensive and dialectical ontology of class and social-reproduction, which comprehends the geography-making and crisis resolution praxis from below with respect to the multi-layered, complex and dynamic nature of class-struggle endeavoring to materialize commonized inter-class interests in a socio-spatially defined context. In this respect, our paper contributes to the emerging pluralist school by going beyond labor geography’s tendency to confine class and its agency to unionized workers and mostly focus on workplace/industry- based confrontations in a Global North context. Third, our paper develops a concept of socio-spatial fix. Our notion of socio-spatial fix allows us to go beyond the traditional concept of labor’s spatial fix, by shifting the analytical focus to interconnections, interpenetrations, and concatenations between capital’s and grassroots’ agencies. That is, despite all their differences, capital and grassroots movements have a lot in common. The idea of socio-spatial fix shows how the agencies of both capital and the grassroots can conjoin with and assist each other in relation to geography-making and displacement of crisis.
Dr Celal Cahit Agar
St Andrews University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Towards a pluralist labor geography: Constrained grassroots agency and the socio-spatial fix in Dȇrsim, Turkey, Environment and Planning A Economy and Space, May 2018, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0308518x18776329.
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