I.

The Two Stages of the Peace Process:

From Not Being Racist to Anti-Racist Democratic Transformation

 

The process led by the MHP (National Movement Party) and the DEM Party (Peoples’ Equality and Democracy Party) and publicly referred to as “Terror-Free Turkey,” has now completed nearly one year. The reports submitted by political parties to the Parliamentary Commission on National Unity, Brotherhood, and Democracy have once again made visible the existence of two irreconcilable political paradigms regarding the Kurdish question.

On the one hand stands a security-centered approach that treats non-violence as the final goal; on the other, a perspective that insists peace must be achieved through democratic transformation. This divide explains why the process has reached a critical threshold.

The reports of the AKP (Justice and Development Party) and the MHP largely overlap. Both define the process primarily through the lens of counterterrorism, framing “Terror-Free Turkey” as the main objective.

Within this framework, the complete disarmament of the PKK is defined as a precondition; The Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) are also expected to be dismantled in line with the March 10 Agreement, and no explicit reference is made to the right to hope, amnesty, or political reintegration.

The reports emphasize the necessity of preventing armed organizations from maintaining their existence under different names and reaffirm a non-concessional security policy. The Kurdish question is thus treated not as a historical and structural issue, but as a security problem driven by external forces.

The CHP (Republican Popular Party) and the opposition alliance known as the New Path Group diverge notably from the ruling bloc.

While not directly framing the issue as the Kurdish question, the CHP foregrounds the rule of law and democratic restoration: Judicial independence, implementation of Constitutional Court and ECHR rulings, ending trustee (kayyum) practices, guaranteeing fundamental rights and freedoms.

The proposal to abolish statutes of limitation for unsolved political murders is particularly significant for repairing collective memory. Strengthening local governments indirectly challenges Turkey’s centralist state structure. Yet, the report does not articulate a concrete position on the right to hope, amnesty, or the return of former militants.

The New Path report seeks to balance security and democracy, emphasizing social reconciliation, negotiation, and shared solutions. It represents an intermediate attempt to construct a common ground between opposing political camps.

The DEM Party report stands out qualitatively from all others. It insists that the process must be understood not merely as a cessation of violence but as peace and democratic societal reconstruction.

This perspective: Defines the issue as historical, structural, and institutional; calls on the state to confront policies of denial, assimilation, and repression; frames the Kurdish question as a regime problem rooted in the foundation of the Republic.

Here lies the fundamental rupture: while the government portrays armed conflict as the result of terrorism, the DEM Party interprets it as a consequence of persistent democratic exclusion.

For the DEM Party, Öcalan’s freedom, the abolition of the trustee regime, and comprehensive democratic reforms constitute the mandatory second phase of the process. The AKP and MHP, by contrast, seek to freeze the process at the first stage.

During the first year, Turkish society has experienced—albeit in a limited way—a climate of “not being racist.” Reduced violence, softer political language, and increased intercultural interaction have been tangible outcomes. Yet this does not amount to the dismantling of institutional and historical racism.

The distinction between the three positions is crucial:

• Being racist: Constructing Turkish identity as not only dominant but superior;
• Not being racist: Avoiding overt discrimination while leaving racist institutions intact;
• Being anti-racist: Actively transforming the institutions, discourses, and historical regimes that produce racism.

The first stage corresponds to the second definition at best. Sustainable peace requires moving to the third. The Second Stage is Anti-Racist Democratic Integration.

The core weakness of the 2011–2015 peace process was the absence of a democratic framework. Without dismantling institutional racism, appeals to “peace” and “brotherhood” remained hollow.

Anti-racism is not merely an ethical stance but a project of institutional dismantling. Democratic integration is therefore the key concept. Democratic integration encompasses equal citizenship, linguistic and political rights, historical reparation, deliberative democracy and a multinational republic.

It unites racial justice and social/class justice within a single transformative project.

In his Call for Peace and a Democratic Society (27 February 2025), Abdullah Öcalan defines democratic integration as follows: “Society integrates itself into the democratic republic by constituting itself as a democratic society. Integration includes equality and is established through democratic negotiation.” This conception rejects top-down assimilation and instead frames integration as a constituent act of society itself, aligning with but also localizing the theoretical trajectories of Fanon, Balibar, and Arendt.

A binational and multinational political order offers the most rational framework for reconciling historical reality with democratic equality in Turkey. Such a model recognizes Kurdish nationhood, promotes the democratic transformation of Turkish identity, and institutionalizes equal citizenship. The experiences of Switzerland, Canada, Bolivia, and Ecuador demonstrate that multinationalism can strengthen democratic stability when properly institutionalized.

Turkey faces three options:

• Reproducing the problem through a monolithic nation-state paradigm;
• Rejecting racism rhetorically while preserving its institutional foundations;
• 3) Building a binational and multinational republic based on anti-racist democratic integration.

This article argues that the third option is the only realistic path—both theoretically and practically.

* * * * *

II.

Authoritarian Capitalism, Decay, and Controlled Cleansing: 

State, Hegemony, and the Strategic Deadlock of the Left in Turkey

In Turkey, the recent operations conducted under the banners of gambling, drugs, and “moral decay” are presented on the surface as legal interventions and acts of purification. Yet these developments cannot be explained by isolated corruption cases or by the state’s alleged capacity for self-correction. On the contrary, what we are witnessing is part of a classic regime-restoration strategy employed by authoritarian capitalism in times of crisis.

The real recipient of the 4.9 tons of cocaine transported from Colombia to Turkey has still not been disclosed. Despite the known links to the 9 tons of cocaine seized by France in the Caribbean, no serious investigation has followed. Instead, media figures have been targeted under the pretext of “private parties,” serving not to dismantle horrifying crime and capital networks, but to intimidate by punishing users and showcase figures. The real mafia bosses embedded in politics, the judiciary, the media, and major capitalist corporations remain untouched, while the truth is systematically covered up.

The circulation of tons of cocaine within Turkey has corrupted not only society but also the Palace regime itself. As progressive circles have long argued, the deep economic crisis imposed by the People’s Alliance has spread decay layer by layer throughout both state and society. Poverty, precarity, and political repression have created exceptionally fertile ground for criminal economies.

The drug trafficking route known as the “white trade,” which ran through Afghanistan–Turkey–the Balkans–Europe during the 1970s and 1980s, was largely dismantled by the late 1990s. At that time, seizures were limited to a few hundred kilograms. Today, the picture has radically changed: tons of drugs are shipped from Latin America—particularly Colombia—by sea. Turkey has moved beyond being merely a transit country to becoming a center of distribution and consumption. Turkish groups now openly occupy leadership positions within mafia structures, and the domestic market is rapidly expanding.

Between 2019 and 2024, this trade reached a historic peak, encompassing elements within the media, judiciary, Directorate of Communications, and senior layers of the ruling bloc (AKP–MHP). Money laundering, drug trafficking, and the betting economy have merged with the social disintegration produced by economic crisis, enveloping broad segments of society—especially youth—across class and cultural lines. What we face today is not an isolated crime wave, but a structural crisis of authoritarian capitalism.

The essence of this strategy is not to eliminate decay, but to render it controlled, manageable, and politically functional. The issue is therefore not the detention of a few celebrities or the partial exposure of certain criminal networks, but how the state sustains its structural relationship with crime- and rent-based forms of capital accumulation.

Decay: Not Deviation, but a Product of the Accumulation Regime

From a Marxist theory of the state, corruption is not a “breakdown” of law but the naked exposure of its class function. In authoritarian capitalist regimes, law, competition, and transparency apply only to certain fractions of capital. For others, the state becomes an apparatus that distributes tenders, transfers rent, launders dirty money, and regulates criminal economies.

In Turkey, the expansion of drug, gambling, and money-laundering economies has proceeded in parallel with neoliberal destruction, precaritization, and extreme inequality. Under conditions where productive capital accumulation contracts, the regime leans on crime-based forms of primitive accumulation. Here, decay is not a moral problem but a technique of governance and accumulation.

To understand this reality, approaches that view the state as a neutral apparatus that can simply be “captured” are insufficient. Under authoritarian capitalism, the state is not merely a repressive superstructure but a nodal point where capital relations are concentrated.

The authoritarian state does not function by suspending law outright, but by applying it selectively and arbitrarily. Drug barons, betting networks, and money-laundering mechanisms grow not due to state weakness, but through deliberate state choices. In today’s Turkey, the links between the judiciary, security bureaucracy, and political power show that the criminal economy has become the rule, not the exception.

Hegemonic Crisis and the Discourse of “Moral Cleansing”

Yet the state rules not only through coercion but also through consent. This is where the most critical dimension of current operations emerges. The regime reframes decay not as a systemic problem, but as a matter of individual immorality and “degenerate lifestyles,” attempting to reconstruct its ideological hegemony.

This is a distinctly Gramscian counter-hegemonic move: the source of decay is displaced from capital–state relations, secular life is cast as the agent of cultural corruption, and an Islamist–conservative moral regime is consolidated under the banner of a “clean society.”

In doing so, the regime both renews its legitimacy and conceals class relations behind a cultural fog.

At this point, the strategy of controlled cleansing comes into play. Without touching central capital and security networks, the regime sacrifices peripheral figures. Media personalities, sports figures, and secondary criminal networks are targeted, while the corporations, tenders, and bureaucratic protection mechanisms enabling billion-dollar rent systems remain unquestioned.

This is not genuine accountability but crisis management. The goal is not to eliminate decay, but to prevent it from politicizing and turning into popular anger that threatens the regime.

The Left’s Theoretical and Political Deadlock

Large segments of the Turkish left fall into two erroneous positions in the face of this reality:
On one side, liberal–moralistic calls for “clean politics”; on the other, a democracy discourse reduced solely to opposition to authoritarianism.

Yet corruption is not the sum of individual crimes; it is a mode of class rule. There can be no bribe-taker without a bribe-giver. Political corruption cannot persist without public tenders, rent extraction, and dirty money. Any critique of corruption that does not target capital relations inevitably remains within the regime’s ideological boundaries.

The task of the left cannot be reduced to calls for “restoring the rule of law.” The real issue is to expose which classes the state serves and through which accumulation regime it operates.

The CHP-centered opposition also carries serious limitations. Framing corruption primarily as “AKP mismanagement” or “personal interests” keeps critique within systemic confines as long as capital–state relations remain untouched.

It is not enough to oppose investigations targeting only CHP-run municipalities; major capital groups, the tender regime, and public–private rent networks must also be confronted. Otherwise, the opposition becomes a passive observer of the regime’s controlled cleansing strategy.

What we are witnessing is not a “moral collapse,” but a structural crisis of authoritarian liberal capitalism. This crisis deepens not only at the top, but among broad popular layers—especially youth—condemned to poverty, precarity, and hopelessness.

A genuine cleansing is possible only through: Comprehensive exposure of capital–state–mafia relations, a class-based analysis that rejects cultural moralism, and a left strategy that binds these insights to a mass counter-hegemonic political project.

What the government is doing today is managing its own decay. The historic task of the left is to render this decay illegitimate—and to organize the social force capable of overcoming it.