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

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Altınoklu Ersoy M. N.

SIYASAL-JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCES, cilt.34, sa.2, ss.238-252, 2025 (TRDizin)

Özet

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 period-

icals published by shopkeeper unions, alongside national newspapers, reveals a three-phase discursive

evolution: from an administrative vocabulary focused on economic concerns (early 1970s), through narra-

tives 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 narra-

tives 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.