After more than a decade, the discussion of the Gezi uprising is still topical due to its mobilization of millions against authoritarianism and eco-social destruction. Capitalism’s endless drive to accumulate has now run against the world’s limits, multiplying ecologically induced movements and contentions throughout the globe, especially as market-driven plunder of nature and atomization of society intersects with and compounds state- and empire-making by authoritarian leaders. “Gezi,” as both rebellion and the beginnings of a movement, exemplifies a popular response to this morbid intersection.
Kaan Ağartan’s book, Gezi: The Making of a New Political Community in Turkey, uses Polanyian lenses to highlight Gezi’s counter-market aspects (Polanyi K [1944] The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar and Rinehart). In line with recent Polanyian literature, Ağartan emphasizes that neoliberalization destroys society and nature. Consequently, social movements like Gezi do not just “erupt” to save a broken system but attempt to reconstruct the social foundations of a more egalitarian and sustainable world. Gezi was not just an eruption – as condensed in the peak of clashes – but a longer “episode” (in Ağartan’s language) that stretched over several years through neighborhood forums and other popular initiatives. Ağartan’s book integrates the analyses of the mobilizational, spatial, and prefigurative aspects of this historic movement.
Neoliberal globalization led to individual isolation, the destruction of nature, the weakening of labor, and rising inequalities in Turkey, as it did across the world. Crises at the end of the 1990s led to even more neoliberalization. People ultimately responded through protest. Ağartan points out that Gezi’s reaction to neoliberal destruction had precursors: Zonguldak miners; Bergama peasants; İstanbul social forums; ecological resistances; TEKEL workers. There were also urban precursors, Ağartan explains: throughout out the 2000s, Turkey witnessed increasingly more mobilization in response to destructive urbanization. These social movement trends culminated in the participation of broad strata in the Gezi protests.
While most public attention focused on clashes at the peak of the protests, Ağartan points out that what came after them was more important. The democratic, non-commercialized, and collective practices in the occupied park were “sedentary” expressions of the movement. This aspect of Gezi received more attention in the opposition media, but the author emphasizes that the movement persisted even after the occupation of the park ended. When the police disbanded the occupation, the movement went from what Ağartan calls “sedentary” to “residentiary” mobilization.
What emerged during both the sedentary and the residentiary phases of the movement was “radical democracy”: anti-capitalist, autonomist, horizontal practices without central leadership. The concepts of the commons, commoning, and “the common” – as Ağartan uses them – are very informative: many movements are reactive defenses of the commons; but through the practice of “commoning,” Gezi and similar movements build a new world – “the common.” This happens through appropriating the public realm from the state and the market.
Different phases of the movement created challenges for this practice of “commoning.” For instance, in the “residentiary” phase, issues became more locally oriented and more amenable to handling in small workshops. But still, people did not let go of the radical democratic, horizontalist aspects of the movement. Actually, there were some who felt that the new meeting schedules and similar bureaucratic processes were damaging the horizontalism they cherished. This dissatisfaction led to a key turning point in the movement.
A few of the relatively more horizontalist activists occupied two buildings and built “squat houses.” The flexibility and spontaneity of the squat houses, their collective resolution of issues, and their engaging in solidarity with the broader neighborhood that encircled them were more in line with the spirit of the revolt than the workshops, according to Ağartan.
The dynamism documented in these pages is breathtaking. Yet, this positive portrayal inevitably raises the question: What are the reasons why such an apparently broad-based and innovative movement did not survive?
Ağartan first covers the reasons for fizzling out as stated by participants and the existing social science literature: too much talk alienated participants; leftist groups and their egos derailed the process; too many issues, too many committees, and little coordination between them created a chaotic environment; heavy reliance on social media and lack of central organization intensified all these problems. Ağartan then argues that three other factors were more important than those most emphasized in the literature. The first of these is the “mobilizational dynamic.” This includes the disorienting pace of the events, especially for younger and recently politicized participants; and the misalignment between the expectations of the masses and the activists. However, these difficulties arise in almost all massive, unexpected mobilizations. More focus is needed on why Gezi – and, more broadly, the mobilizations of the 2010s – were so unequipped to handle them. The second and third factors discussed by the author shed some light on this question.
Ağartan’s theorization of “spatial fragmentation” and “calcification” is what I find to be the most pathbreaking contribution of the book. These together constitute the second major factor that the author adds to the existing analyses of the Gezi movement’s limits. After the occupation at Gezi Park ended, activists became more connected to localities, but that also led to the movement’s routinization and the dissipation of the initial energy. Moreover, some activists became narrower in their focus, while others attempted to develop national agendas, but those clashed with national agendas produced in other localities.
This dynamic in Gezi contrasts with similar movements in Argentina and Venezuela, where neighborhood assemblies were connected to workplaces. Therefore, democratic experiments in these countries lasted longer than in Turkey. The production-related links were weaker and shorter in Yoğurtçu Park, which was the sturdiest of the post-occupation forums.
I find Ağartan’s analysis of fragmentation–calcification very valuable but also think that the real task is understanding why Argentina-type links could not be constituted in Turkey. For instance, Ağartan mentions that the Yoğurtçu Park forum developed a short-lived cooperative, vegetable gardens, and links to the Kazova textile factory. Thick descriptions of these experiments would be nice, rather than two to three sentences on each of them. Such descriptions would allow us to ask: If counter-tendencies against neoliberalization are as global as capitalism itself, why do counter-movements take such contrasting shapes in different countries? Why are some less effective than others?
In my own work, I have been arguing that one reason for the relative ineffectiveness of the Gezi protests was Islamist hegemony over the working classes. Many workers acquiesced to the neoliberal project not as passive, conservative–compliant, consumer subjects, as the book emphasizes throughout, but as Islamic–nationalist passive–activists. At the end of my comments, I will argue that hegemony needs to be central to the analysis, on both sides of the authoritarianism/democracy equation. In other words, for a proper understanding of Gezi, we need not only a fuller, deeper picture of what constituted the neoliberal–authoritarian government’s strength, but also a thorough explanation of why democratic forces in the country were unable to cultivate and normalize alternative subjects whose counter-market practices and habits appeared as “natural” as the neoliberal–conservative practices and habits of government supporters.
The third major factor Ağartan points out is the fetishization of leaderlessness, which culminated in lack of organization. Counterintuitively, this reproduced the individualism of neoliberalization. As a result, Gezi fell “short of reconstituting the social around the common” (p. 144). To be more explicit: Despite all its “commoning” practices, which led to many instances of “the common” (i.e. public realms liberated from the state and the market), the Gezi movement did not establish a broadly shared and persistent set of practices. Rather than establishing the groundwork for a new society, it connected many “individualisms” to each other. Even though I fully agree with the author here, I found this factor to be less thickly theorized than the spatial factor. The intriguing and counterintuitive symbiosis between neoliberalization and horizontalism could have been discussed in a much more sustained way.
As these three factors increasingly weighed on the movement, Yoğurtçu activists – just like the activists of Yeldeğirmeni, another major forum – either reverted to old leftist language or went into full anarchist mode. Don Kişot squat house, the last prominent node of Gezi’s legacy, ultimately split. In sum, spatial fragmentation and calcification subverted the other, more generative dynamics of the movement.
We witness the dynamics Ağartan calls spatial fragmentation and calcification in many movements. Why were they more harmful in the case of Gezi? Why is it that Gezi’s “commoning” practices could not undermine these pernicious dynamics? We would need to look at hegemonic and class processes more closely to answer these questions.
Ağartan’s book’s originality is developing a theorization of Gezi’s spatial limits, but I have been arguing that there were sturdier limits to Gezi’s success: the first of these was the consent for the regime among the working classes. The second (and related) major impediment was the class structure of the Gezi movement. These two factors are closely related to each other, and as will be discussed below, they have spatial dimensions too.
The book overemphasizes the destructiveness of neoliberalization, and it does not fully consider the worldwide turn to what has been called “inclusive neoliberalism” or “Post-Washington Consensus” (Öniş and Şenses [2005] Rethinking the emerging post-Washington consensus. Development and Change 36(2), 263–290), and the even deeper “neoliberal populism” in Turkey and similar cases. (For a discussion of the limits of such protective policies, as well as the frameworks that have been used to study them, see Akçay [2018] Neoliberal populism in Turkey and its crisis, IPE Working Paper 100/2018; Bekmen and Özden [2022] The rise and demise of neoliberal populism as a hegemonic project: Brazil, Thailand, and Turkey. Rethinking Marxism 34(3), 338–360; and Tuğal [2022] The strengths and limits of neoliberal populism: the statism and mass organisation of contemporary rightwing regimes. Contemporary Politics 28(5), 611–634.) Building on critical scholarship, Ağartan argues that the government’s populism, as seen for instance in its public housing projects, only made people’s lives worse. The book acknowledges some policies that partially alleviated the poor’s troubles but misses the depth of hegemony.
This is not the author’s fault alone. The populism in question is indeed dismissed as manipulative and thin in both mainstream and critical literatures. However, the mentioned housing provision was an organic part of a much broader hegemonic project that provided not only spatial benefits but employment and dignity to millions (Tuğal [2023] Politicized megaprojects and public sector interventions: mass consent under neoliberal statism. Critical Sociology 49(3), 457–473). It is true that this employment was mostly insecure, and one could argue that the dignity in question was exclusive and anti-democratic. But for most working people (at least those who felt allegiance to Sunni-Turkishness), this was better than what any center-left or center-right force offered in the preceding decades (Balaban [2025] Industrial Islamism: How Authoritarian Movements Mobilize Workers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press).
Hegemonic depth is related to Gezi’s second limitation: the movement’s class nature. The book underlines that the urban poor participated in the uprising too, at least in their own neighborhoods. However, it overlooks leadership and marginalization issues within the movement. Class and geographical divides in voting patterns paralleled these social movement dynamics, i.e. the Turkish-Sunni working classes and most non-coastal regions have remained loyal to the governing party, before, during, and after the uprising. The book’s focus on the new middle classes is thick and well-deserved, given their centrality to Gezi. But in comparison to this, the focus on the poor and dispossessed is thin. That is reflective of their lack of centrality to the agenda of the revolt too. Despite participation by broad strata, the Gezi movement arguably had a middle-class ideological character. (This is not a settled issue. For instance, see the polemic between Yörük and Yüksel [2014] Class and politics in Turkey’s Gezi protests. New Left Review 89, 103–123 and Tuğal [2015] Elusive revolt: the contradictory rise of middle-class politics. Thesis Eleven 130(1), 74–95.) Moreover, even though they participated in relatively smaller numbers than warranted by their share of the population and did not lead the movement, the fatalities were from the ranks of the urban poor and working classes. Tragically, they died for the movement but did not put their ideological and class stamp on it. This paradox deserves more scholarly and public attention.
Ağartan acknowledges that the two primary “forums” were in middle-class districts: Kadıköy and Beşiktaş. “Upper-middle-class” would actually be a better term for these places. This by no means implies that all forum participants and leaders were middle class. However, the distinctiveness of these districts is hard to overlook, and their prominence has many implications for the movement’s character. Kartal, Okmeydanı, and a couple of other working-class neighborhoods are also discussed in passing. A full analysis of the movement’s class character would require exploring why forums and assemblies (and more generally, the “residentiary” phase of the mobilization) remained very small and ineffective in working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods.
The third sturdy limit, I have been arguing (e.g. see Tuğal [2023] From the Gezi uprising to the 2023 earthquake: charting Turkey’s ecological destruction and reconstruction. Jadaliyya.com, April 7), was the movement’s failure to produce either a “21st-century” agenda or a novel organizational structure – in one word, an alternative hegemony. Taksim Solidarity and a few other groupings aimed to keep the Gezi rebellion on an urban–democratic, ecological, and overall anti-authoritarian path. However, none of these attempts created a shared agenda. The assemblies of the forums, their workshops, and other gatherings could neither produce such an agenda nor create the organizational means to sustain the mobilization under changing circumstances.
There were certainly hopeful moments, and germs of a new world. But these could not inspire broad masses. Among these embryonic forms, the book focuses on squat houses. However, as the author himself points out, despite all their hard work and good intentions, neither these houses nor the upper-middle-class district forums that birthed them had the appeal and outreach of the assemblies and land occupations in Latin America. Taking the squat houses as the epitome of “the common” reveals the limits of Ağartan’s framework and of the movement itself: Gezi’s practices of squatting and occupation were closer to the European student and bohemian movements than the Latin American peasant and workers’ movements. Even though Ağartan takes the Zapatistas, Argentinian factory occupations, European squat houses, and Gezi as the expression of the same “commoning wave,” their class differences should not be neglected.
There were a couple of missed opportunities in the book for further discussion of Gezi’s “less-than-hegemonic” dynamics. For instance, the several paragraphs on the group of activists “Müştereklerimiz” (“Our Commons”) is fascinating. Ağartan points out that the language and vision of this group presaged the revolt. The group was active in the earlier days of the movement. Its “unstructured structure” facilitated its influence. However, its coordination efforts did not amount to much. These are all important points, and I would like to add that some members of this group were aware of the ecological and movement dynamics analyzed in the book at least a decade before Gezi. During and shortly after the revolt, the group even attempted to speak to the hegemony-related issues I raised above, yet could not surmount these hurdles. Were the reasons for their inability mostly structural, or did the habitus and/or strategies of these activists prevent them from establishing the beginnings of an alternative hegemony? Future researchers could uncover much regarding the sociological and political dynamics of Gezi by pursuing these questions.
The book ends with an analysis of Gezi’s contradictions: Yoğurtçu Forum was a real, prefigurative experience, but most activists could not resist the pull of the national, Ağartan underlines. They did not see their prefigurative experience as politics with “real” impact. An initiative called Kadıköy Urban Defense remained true to the prefigurative experience, but many activists channeled their energies instead into the Birleşik Haziran Hareketi (“United June Movement,” a gathering of mostly socialist activists). Ağartan accuses these activists of fetishizing the national, but the book itself risks fetishizing the local (e.g. see pp. 161–162). Our challenge is not choosing between the local and the national, I would argue, but figuring out how to connect the two. The Erdoğan regime indeed connected the two thanks to its hegemonic approach; by contrast, the Gezi movement had no hegemonic project. In my humble opinion, the path should have been through scaling up urban–ecological issues to the national level (e.g. see https://t24.com.tr/yazarlar/cihan-tugal/gezi-hareketi-ve-secimler,7307), rather than through either sticking to the local, or developing a national platform immediately.
