Marxist academics defended Erdoğan using center-periphery subaltern theory

Evidence

Meanwhile, defenders of the Erdoğan project scrambled to declare that the situation here was very different from the movements it was echoing. In an article for Al Jazeera entitled “Taksim Square Is Not Tahrir Square,” two university professors pointed to the presence of radical Kemalists in the square and claimed they were using the revolt to overthrow a government that had “revolutionized center-periphery relations.” This was the language of the intellectual left, being deployed to shore up Erdoğan’s AKP. “As anthropologists and Marxist academics,” they wrote, “we observe that the AK Party still holds the support of the subaltern, the real subjects of a possible revolution. Since 2002, the people on Turkey’s periphery have become the centre. Today’s chaos threatens to reverse this.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 351

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• APHORISMS: Not advice, but a recurrent lesson: anti-elite populist framing can claim the ‘subaltern’ mantle to defend the powerful. Worth pairing with any populism-in-power analysis.
• XREF: Precisely parallels the earlier book claim that repertoires and rhetoric get captured — here radicals’ own categories are weaponized by the target regime’s defenders.