Kids These Days: The Youth Politics Nobody Was Expecting

[People dance in Gezi Park on the eleventh day of the resistance there, 7 June 2013. Photo by Tolga Sezgin/Nar Photos.] [People dance in Gezi Park on the eleventh day of the resistance there, 7 June 2013. Photo by Tolga Sezgin/Nar Photos.]

Kids These Days: The Youth Politics Nobody Was Expecting

By : Josef Burton

I heard the same line from booksellers and esteemed political scientists, from television producers and textile workers and from youth activists themselves: “Youth today aren`t political.” It was a common experience for me, when I explained that I was in Turkey to research youth movements, to be greeted with a puzzled look and a comment to the effect of “Why?” or “That doesn`t happen anymore.”

It became clear during the course of my research that this was not simply a complaint about “kids these days”—people from a variety of social and political backgrounds all had the same definition of what youth politics meant: mass organized political action by young people, acting as young people with the intent of gaining (or helping someone else to gain) state power. Absent this, young people were seen to have fallen into myopic, self-indulgent subcultures, caring only for clothes, football, and pop music.

This conceptualization of youth politics is no longer merely inaccurate: it is no longer relevant. Although the Gezi Park protests might appear to be a return to a different era, they are a type of movement that is wholly new, and the reasons for this can be found in Turkey`s recent history.

To put youth into context in Turkey, it is important to note that is not just a generational reference: “the youth” are not just everybody who happens to be young, but were (and to a large degree, still are) considered to be an age-based sub-section of elite, urban populations connected somehow with the state. The young Turkish Republic put considerable effort into creating and maintaining a cult of youth that would both embody and carry forward its westernizing, modernizing mission. This sense of mission is embodied in Ataturk`s “Speech to the Youth,” reprinted on the inside of every school textbook and memorized by millions of schoolchildren, which ends with an explicit call for young people to rise up in revolt should the government become “blind and misguided.” The prominence of the youth in the Turkish Republic`s foundational rhetoric fits well with the state`s overall paternalistic attitude: Atatürk, “father of the Turks,” would raise the new nation into “civilized” adulthood. 

As the 1960`s and 1970`s arrived, the children of this pioneering youth became increasingly politicized as the stresses of postwar urbanization and the expansion of Turkey`s limited democracy resulted in a polarized and radicalized nation. Hundreds of groups on the left and right took their struggles to save Turkey from American imperialism or Communist anarchy to the campuses and streets. 

This idolized era of heroic youth activism comes with a thick, black line under it: the military coup of 12 September 1980. Unlike the end of many socio-cultural periods, this was not a date chosen by scholarly consensus, but rather by a massive coordinated action of the police, intelligence services, and military that detained forty thousand people on its first day alone. The coup of 1980 can be seen as sort of “zero hour” in the political life of modern Turkey. General Kenan Evren and his compatriots ostensibly acted to secure public order; however, this avowed response to street violence was a convenient fig leaf for the re-making of Turkish political life through brute force exponentially greater than that seen in earlier military interventions. The crackdown came down especially hard on young people. University occupations and boycotts, students` main form of political expression, were forcibly ended. Youth associations and groups were disbanded, and the universities came under immense state pressure. Faculty were forced to recite daily loyalty oaths, while thousands of students were detained and tortured. The establishment of the watchdog Higher Education Committee was intended to, among other duties, prevent any reemergence of leftist tendencies in Universities. 

While the main force of the coup was delivering a body blow of state repression that effectively shattered the Turkish left, it is worth noting that hundreds of far-right “Idealist Youth,” more commonly known as Grey Wolves, were also imprisoned. Nobody and nothing was exempt. The scale of the state repression and its consequences would be hard to overstate. The numbers of the detained were in the hundreds of thousands. Torture was common.

During three years of military rule and the army-endorsed reign of Turgut Özal that followed, Turkey began to replace its failed state-driven autarkic industrialization policies. State-run industries were privatized, and further restrictions on Turkey`s once-militant trade unions, already reeling from the effects of direct state violence, were imposed in what amounted to legislative union-busting. This IMF- and World Bank-endorsed program of neoliberal restructuring began to integrate Turkey into the global economy. Protectionist tariffs were abolished, and consumer goods like Nescafe, Marlboro cigarettes, and blue jeans that in the 1970`s had been exotic luxuries became available to anybody with the money to buy them. 

It is on this point that the simple narrative of purposeful youth giving up and turning to consumerist indulgence breaks down: if the very same process that gave rise to market-driven consumerism in Turkey came hand-in-hand with the wide-ranging violent political repression of young people, is the relationship between consumerism and depoliticization one of correlation or causation? A generation of children was raised by parents who experienced state terror, indefinite detention, and the disappearance of friends; this generation was told again and again to “not be political.” The risks were too high.

With organized mass movements rendered off limits, and with the effects of structural adjustment whirling around them—creating new tensions, urban spaces, economic conditions, and a newly vibrant and expansive profit-driven mass media—a “retreat” into subculture followed. “Youth” as a coherent political identity no longer existed, and young people began to choose their own identities. Some of these new identity formations were deeply threatening to existing power structures: Kurdish movements that emerged out of the Turkish left would soon engage in a secessionist armed conflict that would become a civil war in the country`s south-east, and LGBT and feminist movements would challenge foundational constructions of gender. As neoliberalism progressed under Erdoğan, other identities emerged that appeared to be totally apolitical. The commercialization of football led to large, fanatical fanbases with customized jerseys and scarves, and the proliferation of private media channels created common touchstones for young people that were not state-centric or politicized. While “politics” in the traditional sense remained firmly off-limits, nothing else seemed to be.

Many, myself included, were surprised when the efforts to save Gezi Park escalated into a national mass movement (due, more than anything else, to people of all ages mobilizing against police violence), but the diversity of youth identities involved and the apparent reconciliation of intractable identity conflicts did not seem like such a contradiction after a year of fieldwork among Turkey`s youth activists.

The subaltern activisms which emerged in the 1980’s and 1990s—LGBT, feminist, and Kurdish—have led the way in this movement. For these groups, their struggles have been long and difficult, involving consistent politicization for decades. Yet the treatment of the new movement as the “repoliticization” of youth remains apt, because outside of those subaltern activisms, the majority of those who have joined in street activism belong to the much maligned “subcultures” long held to be totally antithetical to any sort of social activism, and these formerly “apolitical” groups have entered the streets with equal enthusiasm. Blasé hipsters, football hooligans, Eksisozluk-trawling computer nerds, and monied tikki party kids have all taken to the streets when facets of their identities came under threat. Identities matter, and the networks of belonging—even transient, impersonal, “inauthentic” belonging like hanging out in the same neighborhood or “liking” the same Facebook page—can, as we have seen in the past months, lead a gang of rowdy soccer fans to charge police riot vans with a bulldozer, turn a nightclub into a refuge for street activists, and make an ironic penguin meme into a symbol of revolt.

Indeed, rather than Gezi Park being a re-emergence of the politics that the 1980 coup repressed, the suddenly expansive and inclusive movement can instead be read as an expression of the politics the 1980 coup created: small, affinity based “subcultural” movements, many apolitical in the traditional sense, which emerged as a sort of survival tool, an evolutionary response to the complete impossibility of traditional mass movements in a repressive state.

In my own research, youth activists from across the political spectrum no longer discussed politics in terms of manifestos and doctrines, but rather as a series of experiences rooted in personal subjectivity. The young people politically active in Turkey today practice a form of activism that is increasingly informal and ecumenical. Activists from across the ideological spectrum consistently made reference to their political activity in personal terms. Literature, humor, creativity, and subcultural belonging are the basis for youth politics in modern Turkey. As we have all seen, this is a powerful force when mobilized. In this light, what we are seeing is not a “re” politicization of young people, but rather a new politics which has actually existed for years taking to the streets.

This has important implications for the future of youth and street politics in Turkey: The informality of this new politics and the manner in which it is embedded in youth culture(s) has made it resilient, flexible, and open to whole new arenas of non-traditional resistance. Police, in great enough numbers, may clear out a park, but rooting out a politicization that has organically emerged out of youth identity is a much taller order, and something no amount of tear gas can accomplish.

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]