Capital's insatiable appetite for exploitation: Extractivism and privatisations
Today, the line stretching from Soma to Akbelen and Iliç proves that the fates of workers, dispossessed farmers and exploited labourers are linked by the same mechanism of exploitation.
When we look at the roots of the deep poverty, malnutrition and insurmountable livelihood crisis that large sections of the population in Turkey face today, we see a systematic agenda of dispossession. Today, whichever social issue we touch upon, whichever vital problem we trace, we inevitably see the liquidation of a public asset or the abandonment of the public's regulatory role, leaving the field open to the market. From the unstoppable rise in food prices to the impossibility of accessing quality, free education, from the bottlenecks in the healthcare system to the housing crisis, everything is a direct result of the dysfunction of institutions that were once the driving force of social welfare.
On the other hand, privatisation policies are not merely a transfer of ownership, but also serve as a “political locomotive” that ensures the continuity of political power by consolidating its own capital circles. This transformation has now turned into a siege aimed at the wholesale liquidation of the public sphere. The AKP era, in particular, represents the most radical phase of this process in terms of both scale and method. As Aziz Çelik aptly observes, the ruling party, which is a ‘privatisation party,’ has become a staunch defender of the market while disposing of the people's common assets, from health to education, factories to power plants. Moreover, this process is being reinforced in an anti-democratic manner through ‘against the people’ tender methods and midnight decrees that bypass social objections.
The fact that these processes are often conducted behind closed doors constitutes an implicit admission that the government's policies have lost their social legitimacy. As this admission indicates, the promises of ‘efficiency, competition and cheapness’ repeated for decades by privatisation advocates have resulted in a heavy cost burden on the people. Today, we see this insatiable appetite and dispossession agenda in its most naked form in areas where nature and land are commodified through a directly colonialist logic. This situation makes land colonialism (a phenomenon also expressed in forms of extractivism and excavation) one of the most important issues of struggle today.
THE FIRST STEP OF EXTRACTIVISM: THE INDUSTRIALISATION OF AGRICULTURE
The most destructive effects of privatisation and structural adjustment policies based on extractivism are observed in rural areas. We can examine one aspect of this in terms of its effects on agricultural production. The other aspect can be examined in terms of the transformation in agricultural production; based on mining activities linked to the increasing opening up of rural areas to non-agricultural activities, we can examine how rural areas have become the centre of colonial resource transfer.
Let us first take a brief look at agriculture. Turkish agriculture has been forced to undergo a radical transformation since the 2000s within the framework of IMF-World Bank-focused programmes. The cornerstones of this process are the removal of support purchases, the reduction of subsidies and the privatisation of agricultural public enterprises. With the divestment of institutions that provided inputs to farmers or regulated the market, industrial corporate agriculture—which could be described as the first form of extractivism in our country—gained strength, leaving producers to face multinational corporations (MNCs).
Farmers unable to cope with this transformation have abandoned their land and become cheap labour in cities or industry. This picture provides us with a glimpse of how the countryside has been made part of international capital accumulation. Moreover, when we look at the life stories in regions where mining disasters have occurred, such as Soma and İliç, we can see that deliberately making agricultural production impossible paved the way for colonial mining. The fact that tobacco ceased to be a means of livelihood in Soma and that animal husbandry was destroyed in İliç, followed by colonial mining in both cases, did not happen by chance.
NEITHER COINCIDENCE NOR FATE, BUT IMPERIAL RESOURCE TRANSFER
The systematic corporatisation of agricultural production tools in rural areas has created a bed of roses for mining and energy projects, which will be at the centre of colonial resource transfer. As the people's common assets, from agricultural lands to treasury lands, from coasts to rivers and pastures, were caught in the grip of privatisation and commercialisation, the country was transformed into a limitless accumulation area for capital, surrounded from one end to the other by construction sites, quarries and mining fields. Understanding the imperialist dimension of this process is essential to grasping the class-based causes of today's conditions. Indeed, multinational corporations (MNCs) have always taken the lion's share of the plunder of our country's resources.
As John Bellamy Foster points out, with global raw material extraction tripling over the last forty years, extractivism has become the most critical element in our understanding of the global ecological crisis. This uncontrolled expansion has ushered in a new era of dependency, leading to an intense acceleration of extractivist pressures, particularly on the Global South and neighbouring countries. In this context, extractivism should be understood as a form of imperial regime in which the common assets of the people, the resources, are offered as a gift without compensation to the chains of capital accumulation.
The mining boom in our country is the local manifestation of this global exploitation mechanism. The fact that 386,000 mining licences were issued in just the last 15 years, compared to a total of 1,186 in the 80 years from the proclamation of the Republic to 2002, proves that our country is under imperialist siege. Moreover, the development promises behind this massive licensing campaign are nothing but an illusion. Statistics show that the mining sector's share of GDP has remained stuck at around 1% for years. In other words, while tens of thousands of hectares of forest land are being turned into mining sites, olive groves are being plundered through bag laws, and peasants are being deprived of their livelihoods, the wealth created is flowing into foreign coffers, not into the pockets of the people.
The issue here is not just underground wealth. It is the seizure of the will of the communities living on the land. This colonial model, which opens the door to unregulated practices at every stage of production, also undermines workers' right to organise and gives the plundering an unregulated structure. In other words, this production model has been made possible by the absence of democratic control over resources. Consequently, Turkey's record of extractivism is a story of authoritarian dispossession, feeding its own capital network through construction, energy and mining tenders and linking its political survival to this rent-seeking system.
However, this destructive process is not absolute. Today, the line stretching from Soma to Akbelen and İliç proves that the fates of workers, dispossessed peasants and precarious labourers converge in the same mechanism of exploitation. Across this vast geography, the people's unyielding resistance is building a powerful barrier against capital's attempt to render society powerless.
Note: This article is translated from the original article titled Sermayenin doyumsuz sömürü iştahı: Toprak sömürgeciliği ve özelleştirmeler, published in BirGün newspaper on March 1, 2026.
