The Marketplace of Anti-Communism: Shopkeeper Ideology and the Cultural Political Economy of Representation (1960-1980)

Year 2025, Volume: 34 Issue: 2, 238 - 252, 09.10.2025

Müge Neda Altınoklu

https://doi.org/10.26650/siyasal.2025.34.1646920

Abstract

This study examines how Turkish shopkeepers constructed their class identity through anti-communist discourse between 1960 and 1980, during Turkey’s Import Substitution Industrialization period. Drawing on Bob Jessop’s Cultural Political Economy framework, integrated with Van Dijk’s critical discourse analysis, it demonstrates how shopkeepers actively transformed their structural contradictions into political agency, rather than merely reflecting their economic interests. A systematic analysis of four organizational periodicals published by shopkeeper unions, alongside national newspapers, reveals a three-phase discursive evolution: from an administrative vocabulary focused on economic concerns (early 1970s), through narratives of political alienation and representational crisis (mid-1970s), to a militant anti-communist rhetoric (late 1970s). The analysis shows how material anxieties were linguistically rearticulated into cultural narratives of national integrity through processes of ‘semiotic transformation.’ Shopkeepers’ anti-communism emerged not from ideological manipulation or mechanical class positions, but through sophisticated meaning-making practices that fused economic grievances with nationalist-conservative imaginaries. By reframing their structural vulnerabilities as moral authority and patriotic duty, shopkeepers were able to transcend their contradictory class position—being dependent on state protection yet constrained by its regulations, opposing big capital while fearing working-class mobilization. This study contributes to our understanding of class formation among the petty bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries, revealing how anti-communist discourse functioned not as a top-down imposition, but as a symbolic resource for forging political unity across divergent material interests.

Keywords

Anti-communism , Shopkeepers , Critical discourse analysis , Cultural political economy , Class formation , Türkiye

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