In a capitalist society, economic capital is hegemonic. Economic logic dominates as a cultural ideology because the tendency is toward conversion of all forms of value into that of the capitalist market, symbolized by money, a commodity that stands for the value of all other commodities but which has no use value of its own. Bourdieu acknowledges the domination of economic capital in a capitalist society when he argues that social and cultural capitals function as disguised forms of economic capital. But he goes on to say that cultural and social capitals are “never entirely reducible” to economic capital (1997: 54). The tautological reason he gives is that social and cultural capitals have their own respective “efficacies.” We would add that they have their own socially bounded spheres of valuation, rules of exchange and communication, and institutionalization. It remains an empirical question whether these capitals perform the function of hiding economic capital, presumably because of the dangers associated with revealing class relations of inequality.
The social world is indeed a world of accumulated history. In the context of middle-class formation in Istanbul, to be or become an upper middle-class family requires not only material wealth but also social and cultural capital. Cultural capital in its objectified and embodied form of education and certification of individuals requires long-term collective planning and execution. It begins at birth with a plan for an education path that leads to a top university. From the standpoint of the multicapitalized family and its middle-class norms, employment follows education, marriage follows employment, and family follows all three in the life course. The sequence is enacted through many conversions of the forms of capital. The long march of family members, or embodied capital, from primary school to university is the sine qua non of a process of accumulation that is meant to ensure not only the reproduction of the person but also the reproduction of the family as upper middle class. Person, family, and class are mutually constituted through multiple capital conversions and the practices associated with them.
Notes
1. See Karl Polanyi’s class work, The Great Transformation (1944).
2. Bronwyn Davies and Peter Bansel (2007) explore how qualitative studies fit into the discourses and practices of neoliberalism in ways that enable us to understand state policies toward education and how they affect the making of a new middle class.
3. For issues related to spheres of social and economic exchange and how different forms of value are converted from one to another in different societies, see Sahlins 1965. For historical examples of the same issues, see Polanyi, Erensberg, and Pearson 1957.
2
THE NEOLIBERAL LANDSCAPE
A coup in 1980 marked the end of national developmentalism in Turkey and the beginning of the country's liberalization episode. The aim was to remove trade barriers in order to increase the rate of economic growth through an export-oriented strategy aimed at entry into global markets. By 1980, Turkey had a modern class structure built on the foundation of a combination of state-owned and state-guided private enterprises. There was a thriving national market for consumer goods produced by Turkish manufacturers and nursed by state promotion of a cultural ideology of consumption. The captains of industry had achieved the status of a national bourgeoisie, which, in turn, had come to rely upon the entrepreneurial, managerial, technical, and professional services of an urban, university-educated upper middle class. The core fragments of the middle class consisted of the salariat, which distinguished families of the middle class from a class of wage earners and those who held the means of production. By 1980, the core middle-class family could expect a comfortable life, secured by state provisioning of health, education, and pensions.
In the decades prior to 1980, the families of middle and upper middle-class fragments seemed to share consumption habits anchored in twin aspirations of living “a comfortable life” and attaining higher education. Perceived differences were embedded in a shared structure of feeling that the lives of their children would be better than theirs. In other words, the idea of improving class by means of education was common to both fragments of the middle class, belying the reality of the privileges already enjoyed by the established upper middle class.
The characteristics of and distinctions within the middle class of the post-1980 era in Turkey might best be understood within the context of the forces of global neoliberalism shaping developing economies. Over the past several decades, in one country after another, the logic of the globalizing market exerted pressure on nation-states to make wide-ranging policy changes favorable to free trade and economic growth. The policy of solving national problems through growth in capital opened virtually every sector of the national economy to the forces of global capitalist markets. Direct investment by foreign corporations became, in the eyes of many analysts, the most efficient cure for all social, political, and economic problems. This neoliberal perspective on the problems of the nation-state found an audience in almost every developing nation across the globe.1 The ideology of neoliberalism, as globalized free enterprise came to be called, proclaimed national borders to be an obstruction to the free flow of global information and ideas, technological innovation, goods, people (labor), and financial capital—all factors critical to other forms of social and cultural development. Under the increasing pressures of neoliberal ideology and policy-makers, national governments came to be viewed as imposing an unbearable regulatory burden on individual initiative and a tax on collective welfare. Removing such obstacles would unleash human creativity and wealth, and also would bring a rising tide of wealth to all countries and all classes of people. These economic suppositions went hand in hand with the political claim that opening national markets to global trade and capital would bring not only the benefits of efficiency but also the elusive blessings of equity. The rising tide of global capital would raise all boats. People of every country, eventually and inevitably, would be better off in the new global marketplace.
Liberalization and the Restructuring of the Turkish Economy
Turkey participated in this project of neoliberal reforms. Its liberalization episode, which embodied the ideas of free-market benefits, began with an economic and political crisis in 1979 following a decade of turmoil between the Turkish political left and right. This crisis culminated in major bottlenecks in the economy, a slowdown of growth, a very high rate of inflation, high accumulation of external debts, and serious social unrest and street violence that resulted in thousands of deaths. A solution to the crisis that would help stabilize the Turkish monetary system was agreed upon between the Turkish government and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). On January 24, 1980, the government introduced a comprehensive economic stabilization program.2 The major elements of the reform program, aimed at deregulating markets and opening them to competition, were as follows: the gradual removal of trade restrictions towards full commodity trade liberalization, the liberalization of the interest rates and the exchange rate regime, the privatization of industries and public services such as education, and the elimination of price controls and subsidies. This was followed throughout the 1980s by complete financial liberalization. The state abruptly abandoned national developmentalist policies.
A new government established in 19833 announced that it would reinforce the economic policies initiated in 1980 by introducing a greater degree of liberalization, minimizing the role of the state in regulating markets, and reducing what was perceived to be excessive intervention in the economy.
The historical role of state policies in redistributing resources vital to class formation now took a different turn, one that not only changed the national distribution of economic capital but also changed the social contract between the state and the middle class. In order to understand how this happened, and what it meant for middle-class economic and social reproduction,