The Compass of Class Struggle: The Political Economy of Inflation and the Plunder of the Working Class

Welcome, Comrade,

If you turn on bourgeois television these days, you will see technocrats in suits and economists drowning in jargon staging a great fanfare over July 2026 pay raises and inflation charts. They talk to you about the amount of money, market equilibrium, and macroeconomic success. Their aim is clear: to bury you in technical detail and conceal the class reality of the bread and labor stolen from your pocket every day.

In this July we are living through, a full epistemological (knowledge) war is being waged between the state's official apparatus and the data of independent scientists. This is the kind of war that determines the size of the bread on your kitchen table.

Let us dissect and examine these fresh June figures and the July raise illusion through a historical-materialist lens:

• TÜİK's Official Illusion: TÜİK, the state's official institution, announced June monthly inflation at 0.99% and annual inflation at 32.11%.

• ENAG's Material Truth: ENAG (Inflation Research Group), founded by independent economists, calculated the reality the people experience with the naked eye in shops, markets, and rent: prices rose 1.94% in June, and real annual inflation stands at 51.49%!

• The July Scythe on Wages: Based on TÜİK's artificially suppressed, scythed 0.99% monthly figure, July raise rates for millions of civil servants and pensioners were finalized. Civil servants and civil servant pensioners will receive a 13.51% raise, while SSK and Bağ-Kur pensioners will receive 17.75%.

What Do These Figures and "Index Wars" Mean?

Seen through the eyes of a political economist, the essential truth behind this picture is: TÜİK data is not a technical measurement but a conscious income-trimming operation directed at the working class.

Monopoly on Truth and Wage Suppression: The state must always show inflation lower than what the people feel. Because the six-month raise rates for civil servants, pensioners, and indirectly the working class are calculated according to this official data. The state uses its monopoly over the data production process to pull down the amount of variable capital (wages) that would otherwise leave its own coffers and the pockets of the capitalist class.

Against ENAG's cumulative 51.49% annual inflation, the 17.75% granted to pensioners or the 13.51% given to civil servants is not an "increase" but real expropriation. The numbers on the money grow (Nominal Illusion) while the bread, milk, and rent that money can buy (Real Purchasing Power) systematically shrink. Millions of workers are being sacrificed this summer, under the mask of fighting inflation, to save capital's profit rates.

Now comrade, having grasped this current ground of plunder, let us descend to the deepest roots of capital's insidious mechanism and step by step decode how inflation is in fact an surplus-value extraction pump.

What Is Inflation and Why Does It Occur? (Appearance and Essence)

Comrade, one of the most basic rules of dialectical materialism is to grasp the contradiction between "Appearance" (Erscheinung) and "Essence" (Wesen). Karl Marx makes an iconic observation in Capital: "If the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided, all science would be superfluous." Bourgeois economists on television screens narrate only the "appearance." For them, inflation is labels rising arbitrarily, shopping carts filling at higher prices. We, however, must put on the operating table the hidden relations of production behind those fancy labels—the "essence" that is class struggle itself.

The Illusion of Appearance: The Lies of Bourgeois Economics

Bourgeois academia reduces inflation to two shallow concepts:

• Demand-Pull Inflation: "The people spend too much money, goods run short, so prices rise." (So the guilty party is again the worker who eats too much bread!)
• Cost-Push Inflation: "Raw materials and energy got expensive—what is the boss to do?" (Here the boss is an innocent victim!)

This narrative presents the capitalist mode of production as if it were a natural "supply-demand balance" where buyer and seller meet on equal terms. Yet this is an illusion. Supply and demand may explain momentary price fluctuations but can never explain what a commodity's fundamental value is and why prices have systematically moved only upward for decades.

The Naked Truth of Essence: The Price Form and the Labor Theory of Value

To grasp the essence we must return to Marx's Labor Theory of Value. The real value of every commodity (metay) in the market is determined by the socially necessary labor time spent producing it. Money is the common measure of that labor.

Inflation is, in essence, the conscious severing of the bond between the price form and real value. Under normal conditions the worker labors eight hours in the factory and produces value. The nominal wage (numerical money) received in return is barely enough to sustain life and return to work the next day (reproduction of labor power).

In an inflationary environment, however, the ruling class drives commodity prices far above the real value they themselves produce. While the worker's wage stays fixed (or rises arithmetically behind inflation), the prices of basic commodities the worker must buy to survive—food, housing, clothing—multiply geometrically.

Mechanism of Dispossession: Inflation insidiously erodes the purchasing power of the worker's money (that is, the return on labor already spent) and transfers it to the coffers of the capitalist class. This is literally "legal and organized theft," a second round of plunder of surplus value in the sphere of circulation.

The Material and Class Causes of Inflation: Deep Analysis

Having demolished the "supply-demand" lie of appearance, let us examine in depth the three basic objective mechanisms that produce inflation and wield it as a weapon against the working class:

Profit Inflation (Monopoly Capitalism and Monopolistic Pricing)

V.I. Lenin, in Imperialism, explains that capitalism has left behind the era of free competition and entered the stage of Domination of Monopolies. Today's market is not "free," as bourgeois economists claim; it is under the control of giant monopolies and cartels.

• Price-Setting Power: Big capital cliques freely push prices upward with monopolistic force to prevent profit rates ($M$) from falling during crises or raw-material spikes.
• Greedflation: While costs rise 10%, they raise prices 30%. The 20% gap is the super-profit cut directly from the worker's throat and deposited in the coffers of monopolistic bourgeoisie. The engine of inflation is not worker demand but capital's profit hunger.

Unbacked Money Printing and the State's "Seigniorage" Plunder

Money is not a mystical power in itself; it is a representation of social labor. The bourgeois state, as the ruling class's joint management committee, turns to the printing press in every crisis.

• Class Transfer: When the state prints unbacked money and releases it into the market (increasing the money supply), it dilutes the total labor value in the market.
• Who Wins, Who Loses? This newly printed money does not first enter the worker's pocket; it flows through state tenders to crony contractors, to banks via cheap credit, and to big bourgeoisie. By the time money reaches the worker, the inflationary wave has already sent prices soaring. The state uses its Seigniorage Right (monopoly over printing money) to steal the value of money in the worker's pocket and deploy it as subsidy to keep the capitalist class afloat.

Collapse of Production Relations and Structural External Dependence

The material basis of chronic inflation in a country is the rollback of productive forces and production relations. In peripheral capitalist countries like Turkey and Argentina, this is not fate but the imposition of imperialist division of labor.

• Liquidation of Agriculture and Industry: When peasants are liquidated and agriculture collapsed through neoliberal policies, when factories are reduced to assembly industry and made dependent on imported raw materials (the Euro and Dollar zones), the production chain breaks.
• Foreign-Exchange Yoke: An economy forced to import in order to produce dumps import inflation directly on the people's backs with every devaluation of the local currency. A society that loses productive capacity becomes exposed to price dictates from imperialist centers.

Comrade; in short, the "essence" of inflation is neither the quantity of money nor the shopkeeper's conscience. Inflation is the act by which the capitalist class, seeking in crisis times to prevent the fall of its profit rates and to continue exploitation, uses the price mechanism as a weapon to seize the share the working class receives from total social product.

The Global Landscape: Why Can't Argentina and Others Escape? (Imperialist Dependence and Unequal Exchange)

Comrade, when you open bourgeois media, hyperinflation crises in countries like Argentina, Venezuela, or Zimbabwe are usually explained with a single argument: "Bad governance, populism, and corruption." This shallow approach hides the big picture by blaming not the system but only its momentarily incompetent actors.

Historical materialism teaches us that Argentina's inability for decades to escape the inflation swamp is not personal incompetence but the inevitable consequence of global capitalist division of labor and imperialist relations of dependence. Let us dissect this global landscape in depth with Lenin's analysis of imperialism and concepts from the dependency school:

Center-Periphery Contradiction: The Rules of Global Division

Capitalism is a global system beyond national borders. Marxist economists (Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein) divide the world into Center (Metropole/Imperialist countries) and Periphery (Dependent countries).

• Center Countries (USA, EU): They hold technology, financial capital, and high value-added production. Their currencies (Dollar, Euro) are global reserve currencies. That is, they exploit real value by selling the paper they print to the world.
• Periphery Countries (Argentina, Turkey, etc.): In this system they are positioned as the center's depot of raw materials, agricultural products, cheap assembly industry, and cheap labor. Global market rules do not allow them to build their own native and independent industries.

The Trap of Unequal Exchange

At the root of Argentina's inability to escape inflation lies the Unequal Exchange mechanism formulated by Arghiri Emmanuel.

Argentina exports tons of lithium, soybeans, or beef; in return it imports high-tech machines, chips, and software from center countries.

The gap between the social labor-time spent producing soybeans and the labor-time spent producing a microchip continuously widens in favor of imperialist monopolies. Each year the periphery country must sell more soy to import the same amount of machinery. This creates permanent Current Account Deficit (foreign-exchange gap) in periphery economies. As foreign exchange tightens, local currency turns to dust; as local currency turns to dust, inflation explodes.

IMF and World Bank: The Strangulation of Modern Finance Capital

Lenin, in Imperialism, describes the debt web with which financial capital (banks) wraps the world strand by strand. Argentina is the most tragic victim of this web. Whenever the country goes to the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the international usury institution, to close its foreign-exchange gap, "Structural Adjustment Programs" are placed before it.

Modern Debt Slavery: The IMF imposes these conditions to lend: "Cut public spending, freeze worker wages, end support for domestic producers, privatize state factories."

These policies collapse the economy further and destroy production. As production ends, the state prints more unbacked money or borrows at higher interest from usurers. This is a full vicious cycle: Debt $\rightarrow$ Money Printing $\rightarrow$ Inflation $\rightarrow$ New Debt. Argentina is a shackled slave nailed to imperialism's financial chains.

The Character of Comprador (Collaborationist) Bourgeoisie

Another internal reason countries like Argentina or Turkey cannot escape is the comprador (collaborationist/rentier) character of native bourgeoisie.

The capitalist class in these countries, rather than making national investments that would develop productive forces, obtains profits by partnering with international finance capital (import trade, banking, mega construction projects). In moments of crisis native capitalists do not invest surplus value in factories; they immediately convert money to Dollars or Euros and flee to safe accounts in Western banks (Capital Flight).

As capital flees the country, the local currency is left completely defenseless and hyperinflationary collapse is triggered.

The Absurdity of Bourgeois Solutions: The "Dollarization" Illusion

Policy Applied (e.g. Javier Milei Era)	Promised (Appearance)	Class Reality Realized (Essence)
Dollarization (Abandoning local currency for the US Dollar)	"Inflation will be cut like a knife; stability will come."	Handing the country's entire money-printing and economic sovereignty directly to the US Federal Reserve (Fed). Condemning the working class to absolute servitude.
Savage Privatization and Shock Therapy	"The state will shrink; the market will rationalize."	Public assets handed cheaply to imperialist monopolies, social assistance destroyed, mass unemployment.

The savage neoliberal "shock therapies" recently attempted in Argentina and the hysteria of abolishing local currency and switching to the US Dollar (dollarization) differ little from giving a painkiller to a cancer patient. Even if they stop inflation on paper, they fully colonize the country and condemn the working class to hunger.

Comrade; in conclusion, the reason Argentina and similar countries cannot escape this crisis is not a technical error but a structural law of the capitalist world system. Periphery countries are condemned to be crushed under the inflationary whip of global finance capital unless they break the imperialist chain with revolutionary will and build their own independent, planned, public production economies.

Turkey's Chronic Disease: A Process of Decades and the AKP Era

Comrade, examining the inflation history of Turkish capitalism is like reading a patient's epicrisis report with a historical-materialist method. Bourgeois historians simplify this process into the bracket of "bad fiscal policies" or "political instability."

Inflation in Turkey, however, is not a temporary economic malfunction; it is a chronic and structural disease arising from the country's dependent position in imperialist division of labor, the parasitic character of native bourgeoisie, and the state apparatus reaching into the working class's wallet every decade to resolve capital accumulation crises.

Let us analyze this historical process in depth by slicing it through the transformation phases Turkish capitalism has passed:

Neoliberal Rupture: The 24 January Decisions and the Inflationary Chaos of the 1990s (1980–2002)

Turkish capitalism faced the structural crisis of the exhausted "import-substitution" (state-supported, inward-looking) model in the late 1970s. The capitalist class could not prevent falling profit rates and could not raise the rate of exploitation against the rising organized struggle of the working class. This blockage was overcome with the 24 January 1980 Decisions.

These decisions were Turkey's charter of integration into the global neoliberal wild market order. The 12 September 1980 military fascist coup that immediately followed was nothing but the political superstructural apparatus ensuring these economic decisions were implemented by crushing the working class, closing unions, and naked violence.

• The Instability Illusion of the 1990s: Throughout the 1990s Turkey lived with chronic high inflation in the 70–80% band. Bourgeois media presented this as "incompetence of coalition governments."
• Class Truth: Inflation was then a distribution club used by weakened native bourgeoisie to erode real wages against strong worker unions. The state deliberately drove Public Economic Enterprises (SEKA, TEKEL, Sümerbank and other public factories) into loss, indebted them, and funded debt by printing money. The resulting inflation served to insidiously erode the working class's historical gains and transfer them to capital. This process ended with the great structural collapse of 2001.

AKP Era — Phase One: False Spring in a Sea of Debt and Illusion (2002–2013)

After the 2001 crisis, the AKP, coming to power, faithfully inherited the financial program prepared by imperialist centers (IMF and World Bank). The fall of inflation in Turkey to single digits between 2002 and 2013 was not the "economic miracle" AKP media claimed but a temporary conjunctural game of global capitalism.

• Global Liquidity Abundance: In the global process after the 2001 twin towers attack, US and European central banks pumped cheap dollars/euros crazily into markets. This imperialist hot money flowed into periphery economies like Turkey.
• Overvalued Lira and Liquidation of Production: The AKP artificially kept the Turkish Lira overvalued with this intense foreign-exchange inflow. As the dollar cheapened, everything imported from abroad (raw materials, intermediate goods, food) cheapened. Inflation fell on paper; yet in this period native agriculture was collapsed, public production strongholds like Sümerbank and sugar factories were privatized and plundered. Turkey was transformed into a wholly import-dependent paradise from straw to wheat, from industrial inputs to medicine. Masses consumed on debt (credit cards and consumer loans), mortgaging future labor. This was the calm before the storm.

AKP Era — Phase Two: Collapse, the "Nas" Theater, and Historical Plunder (2018–2026)

By 2018 global money taps were tightened and the sea of debt receded. The AKP's debt- and construction-rent-based economic model structurally hit a wall. An economy that needed constant foreign exchange to import but could not produce entered a heavy devaluation spiral (TL losing value).

• The Ideological Function of "Nas" Discourse: Political power, between 2021 and 2023, staged a philosophical "superstructural" masterpiece. The "There is Nas, we will lower interest rates" discourse was an aggressive capital transfer operation hidden behind religious dogmas.
• Inflation Turned Bombardment: When the Central Bank artificially pushed interest rates far below inflation, state printing presses pumped trillions of lira unbacked as cheap credit to crony construction cliques, holdings, and banks. Bourgeoisie receiving the money invested not in production but in foreign exchange, land, and luxury. The Turkish lira turned to dust, costs exploded, and a hyperinflationary explosion occurred reaching over 100% in ENAG data and nearing 80% even in official figures.

History's Greatest Wealth Transfer: In this period the AKP deliberately and willingly used inflation as a "discipline instrument." While the working class's purchasing power was destroyed through inflation, corporate profit rates broke historical records. The Turkish working class faced the greatest wave of dispossession in republican history.

Political-Economic Summary of Turkey's Inflation History

Comrade, to clarify your memory let us fix this decades-long transformation of Turkish capitalism in a table:

Period	Dominant Capital Accumulation Model	Class Function of Inflation	Outcome
1980–2002	Transition to Neoliberalism and Wild Free Market.	Transferring unionized working-class wages to capital by eroding them through inflation.	Chronic 70–80% inflation, 2001 financial collapse.
2002–2013	External Debt and Hot-Money-Focused Import/Construction Regime.	Artificially hiding inflation with overvalued TL, liquidating native production and agriculture.	Single-digit false inflation, deepening external dependence.
2018–2026	Keeping Exhausted Regime Afloat with Cheap Credit and "Nas" Policy.	Funding crony bourgeoisie by crazily printing money, billing the crisis to the working class through hyperinflation.	ENAG 100%+, official 50–70% band, historical collapse in labor's share of national income.

In net result comrade; Turkey's decades-long inflation saga and the recent AKP period show us that this disease is not a mistake capitalists made "by accident." Inflation is a structural apparatus of exploitation that systematically seizes the worker's bread to postpone crises of peripheral capitalism. The AKP has pushed this apparatus to its most savage, most unrestrained limits in the recent period.

Two Technicians, One Mission: Kemal Derviş and Mehmet Şimşek (The Myth of Bourgeois Salvation and the Debt-Collection Officers of Finance Capital)

Comrade, whenever the capitalist system enters structural crisis and the ruling classes' capacity to govern is paralyzed, bourgeois media and academia put on stage a glittering myth: "The supra-political, impartial, genius technocrat savior." According to this narrative, the economy is not a battlefield of classes but a broken machine solvable only by "well-trained engineers." Kemal Derviş, imported from Washington (World Bank) in the 2001 crisis, and Mehmet Şimşek, called from London's financial corridors after 2023 to clear the wreckage of the "Nas" model, are precisely prototypes of this myth.

As Marxists our task is to tear off the "savior" mask of these two figures and expose the class essence of Technocracy, one of bourgeois ideology's greatest deceptions.

Epistemic Degeneration of Technocracy: Presenting Politics as Mathematics

The greatest feat of technocrat technicians is to market the most savage class decisions as if they were objective mathematical necessities. When Mehmet Şimşek sits before the cameras and says "There is no alternative but to return to rational ground" or Kemal Derviş preaches "The rules of the economy are one," they produce ideological illusion.

Masking Class Choice: Not raising the minimum wage, turning pension checks to bird feed, privatizing public services are not "mathematical rules" but conscious class choices.

Technocrats hide the decision to condemn the working class to hunger in order to save bourgeois profit rates behind fancy graphs and English financial terms (disinflation, fiscal discipline, tightening). Their claim of impartiality is an epistemological veil covering exploitation.

Kemal Derviş: Architect of Neoliberal Fencing (2001)

When Turkish capitalism experienced the greatest banking and liquidity crisis in its history in 2001, what was the mission of Kemal Derviş, appointed with full authority by the coalition government?

• Integration of International Finance Capital: Under the name "Transition to a Strong Economy Program," Derviş applied the IMF structural adjustment package to the letter.
• Plunder of Material Assets: With laws passed as "15 Laws in 15 Days," the Central Bank was made "independent." That independence meant the state bank becoming independent of popular oversight and falling directly under international financial monopolies. The legal infrastructure was laid for privatizing all remaining public assets from Türk Telekom to sugar factories and handing them to foreign and domestic monopolies. Derviş fully opened the veins of Turkish capitalism to Western capital and left a smooth, thornless neoliberal rose garden to the AKP regime that would follow.

Mehmet Şimşek: Wreck-Clearer and Restoration Worker (2023–2026)

The mission of Mehmet Şimşek, who took office after the 2023 general elections and in 2026 has carried his policy to its most cruel limits, is to restore the neoliberal machine Derviş built but the AKP collapsed with its "Nas" theater.

• Billing the Crisis to the Proletariat: Şimşek put a "belt-tightening" program into effect in the name of lowering inflation. This program's target is not holdings or banks but the worker's, civil servant's, and pensioner's throat.
• Demand-Crushing Strategy: By pushing interest rates to 50%, drying money in the market, limiting credit-card installments, and erecting a summer raise barricade on the minimum wage, Şimşek's bourgeois logic says: "If the worker cannot spend, prices will fall." This is a savage distribution shock that pushes the working class to absolute poverty and below the hunger line to lower inflation.

Dialectical Comparison of the Two Technicians

Comrade, though these two figures' names and periods differ, their functions (missions) within imperialist capitalist system are entirely symmetrical:

Analytical Criterion	Kemal Derviş Period (2001–2002)	Mehmet Şimşek Period (2023–2026)
Origin	World Bank / Washington	Merrill Lynch / London Financial Corridors
Nature of Crisis	Collapse of public banks and overnight interest shock.	Hyperinflation exploded by "Nas" policy and current account deficit.
Weapon Applied	IMF Program: Privatizations and regulations (Institutional fencing).	Orthodox Program: Excessively high interest and wage suppression (Consumption whipping).
Real Mission	Removing national obstacles before capital.	Squeezing the worker's throat to save capital's profit rate.
Class Winner	International monopolies and big holdings (TÜSİAD).	Finance bourgeoisie, banks, and hot-money usurers.

Leninist Perspective: Debt Collection of Financial Capital

V.I. Lenin, in Imperialism, explains that in the modern world industrial capital and bank capital merge to form Financial Capital (Finance Capital) and that this power binds states with debt ties.

Kemal Derviş and Mehmet Şimşek are the chief debt-collection officers of this global financial capital in local branches. Their task is to ensure smooth transfer abroad of surplus value extracted from the native working class so Turkish capitalism can pay its debts to international usurers (syndicated loans, swap debts).

These technicians presented to the people as "saviors" are in fact bourgeois mechanics who come to oil the gears so the exploitation machine's cogs do not wear out. The working class must seek salvation not by pinning hope from one bourgeois technician to another but by abolishing altogether the capitalist relations of production and distribution on which those technicians sit.

What Should Actually Happen, What Is Happening Now? (The Epistemic Gulf Between Socialist Planning and Neoliberal Yoke)

Comrade, bourgeois ideology's greatest paralyzing effect on the masses is Margaret Thatcher's famous "TINA" (There Is No Alternative) dogma. Mehmet Şimşek's refrain "We must return to rational ground; there is no other way" is the 2026 version of this dogma. The ruling class presents current exploitation and belt-tightening policies as if they were an inevitable law of nature like gravity.

Yet dialectical philosophy shows us that what capitalism calls "inevitable necessity" is nothing but the necessity of protecting rulers' profits. In this section we will dismantle how the inflation contradiction would be radically resolved in a workers' state (What Should Actually Happen) and what is being imposed on the masses under bourgeois dictatorship today (What Is Happening Now).

What Should Actually Happen? (The Sphere of Freedom and Socialist Planning)

Inflation is a direct product of market anarchy and profit drive. Therefore the way to eliminate it is not trying to tame the blind forces of the market but bringing the ownership of means of production and distribution mechanisms under the control of collective reason (planning). As Friedrich Engels states in Anti-Dühring: "With the seizure of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and with it the dominion of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by conscious planning."

The political-economic steps that must be taken for a real and lasting solution are:

• Nationalization of Finance and Strategic Monopolies: All private banks, financial institutions, and giant monopolistic holdings from energy to telecommunications must be nationalized without compensation. Money flow and credit mechanisms must be managed from a single center not for the speculation of a few parasites but for social development.
• Central Democratic Planning: How much bread, housing, and medicine to produce must be decided not by market "price signals" (that is, demand of those with money) but by society's objective and human needs. When production is organized not for exchange-value (profit) but for use-value (social benefit), the material ground of arbitrary price inflation (profit inflation) is destroyed.
• De-commodification of Basic Needs: Housing (rent), health, education, transport, and energy (electricity, water, natural gas) must be constitutionally provided free or at symbolic fees. When these areas vital to the working class's survival are removed from market pricing, inflation waves cannot seep into the worker's kitchen and home.
• Foreign Trade Monopoly and Planned Agriculture: Agriculture regimes collapsed throughout republican history must be restored to a planned structure supporting peasants and establishing collective farms, and foreign trade must be taken as state monopoly. Thus foreign-exchange shocks seeping from imperialist centers and import inflation cannot enter the country.

What Is Happening Now? (Prison of Necessity and Class Savagery)

The policy applied today under the mask of rationality is literally an operation to discipline the working class with hunger, unemployment, and poverty. The capitalist class is billing the crisis it created and the unbacked money it printed to the proletariat's back under the pretext of lowering inflation.

The hidden articles of the program being run in current reality are:

• "Cooling" Labor, Not Capital: The polite expression of Mehmet Şimşek's program, "cooling the economy," is actually squeezing the working class's throat. With interest rates raised to 50%, small tradespeople and workers are pushed into debt spirals; credit-card limits are restricted so even masses' access to basic food is blocked. The aim is to impoverish the people so much that prices must rise out of necessity yet inflation appears to fall on paper because no one can buy anything.
• Wage Suppression and the Summer Barricade: In this 2026 summer, not granting an additional raise to the minimum wage and trimming civil servant and pension raises with TÜİK's fake index games is a conscious strategy. The worker's real wage is eroded, labor's share in total costs is reduced, and thus bourgeoisie's falling profit rates are saved.
• Tax Exemption for Crony Holdings, Tax Bombardment on the People: While wiping billions in tax debts of crony monopolies like Cengiz, Limak, and Kolin overnight to close the budget deficit, the state collects heavy taxes on everything from the worker's bread through VAT and excise rates, from needle to thread. Budget damage inflation creates is again extracted from the poor through indirect taxes.

Political-Economic Comparison of Two Worlds

Comrade; to see more clearly the gulf between "What Should Be" and "What Is Happening Now," let us put two separate systems on the table in a comparative chart:

Analytical Dimension	Socialist Planning (What Should Actually Happen?)	Neoliberal Belt-Tightening (What Is Happening Now?)
Purpose of Production	Meeting society's objective needs (Use Value).	Maximizing capital's profit rate (Exchange Value).
Price Mechanism	Prices centrally determined and fixed by the state.	Free labels abandoned to monopolies' greed and market anarchy.
Billing the Crisis	Dispossession of bourgeoisie, heavy taxation of the rich.	Suppression of the working class's minimum wage, pushing to hunger line.
Basic Services	Housing, transport, energy, and education wholly free/public.	Commodity order where everything is privatized and turned into objects of exorbitant profit.

May Lenin's Ears Ring: V.I. Lenin, in the pamphlet "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It," describes exactly this situation: "The capitalists are sabotaging state control completely, because any control the state exercises in the people's interest will hit their profits. They want control only to crush workers more."

Comrade; the theater run in Turkey today under the name of "fighting inflation" is precisely that class sabotage Lenin described. What they call rational is the worker's misery; what they call stability is the smooth continuation of exploitation. Real salvation is possible not by tightening the screws of this broken machine (Şimşek programs) but by smashing that machine altogether and establishing the working class's planned collective production order in its place.

Class Gap and Inflation (Distribution Shock) — Material Polarization and the Surplus-Value Extraction Pump

Comrade, when bourgeois sociologists and liberal television commentators describe the rich-poor gap in society, they reduce the matter to a moral question of "conscience" or "misfortune." They imprison objective reality in abstract mathematical data by saying "income inequality increased," "the Gini coefficient worsened."

Yet Karl Marx, explaining the General Law of Capitalist Accumulation in the first volume of Capital, laid out capitalism's unshakeable law of polarization in clear terms:

"Accumulation of capital is, on the one hand, accumulation of wealth at one pole and, on the other, accumulation of misery, torture of labor, slavery, ignorance, brutality, and mental degradation at the opposite pole—that is, on the side of the class that produces its own product as capital."

The most savage, most dynamic engine behind the enormous, abyssal class differences we witness today in Turkey and the world is Inflation and the Distribution Shock it creates ($Distributional: Shock$). Inflation is not merely rising prices; it is legal sleight of hand at the table where social wealth is divided, with bourgeoisie reaching directly into the working class's plate.

What Is Distribution Shock? The Second Wave of Exploitation in the Sphere of Circulation

In the production process the working class is already exploited. The worker labors part of the day to cover own wage (necessary labor) and the rest produces surplus value ($M$) for the boss (surplus labor). Under normal conditions class struggle over limiting the working day and raising wages runs in those factories.

Distribution Shock, however, takes exploitation out of the factory and spreads it across all social life. When an inflation wave begins, the capitalist mode of production applies a two-stage "scissors" operation against the working class:

Nominal Illusion and Geometric Collapse of Real Wages

When capitalists must raise worker wages during inflationary process, they present this as great favor. "We gave a 30% raise to the minimum wage," they say. This is Nominal (Numerical) Illusion. Dialectical materialism shows us that growth in the number on money does not mean growth in its essential value. While prices of meat, milk, and rent at the market stall rise 100% and the worker's wage rises 30%, the working class, though appearing mathematically to possess more money, objectively undergoes absolute impoverishment. The worker's share of total social product (living share) has shrunk.

Asset Inflation and Capital Concentration

While the working class tries to survive each month with eroding money, bourgeoisie (capital owners) surf atop the inflation wave. Because capitalists' wealth is stored not in paper money but in material assets (factories, machines, real estate, stocks, and foreign exchange).

As inflation rises, the value of these material assets automatically multiplies. Moreover bosses with monopolistic pricing power use inflation as pretext to raise product prices far above costs. Thus purchasing power evaporating from the worker's pocket crystallizes in big holdings' and banks' balance sheets as "historical profit records."

Empirical Evidence of Distribution Shock: The Distribution Table

We can also see how the class gap opens through official national income (GDP) data that bourgeois economics cannot hide. Total value added created in a country is fundamentally divided between Labor Payments (Wages) and Capital Payments (Profit/Rent/Interest).

We can see how radically this balance tilts in capital's favor during an inflationary distribution shock in this analytical table:

Stakeholders of National Income	Pre-Inflation Period	Inflationary Distribution Shock Period	Class Outcome
Labor's Share (Workers, Civil Servants)	35–40% band	Retreat below 25%	The worker's right to share in produced value has been systematically trimmed.
Capital's Share (Corporate Profits, Rents)	45–50% band	Surge above 65%	Value stolen from the worker's pocket has enlarged capital accumulation and monopolistic concentration.

Social and Political Pathology of Class Polarization

The distribution shock inflation creates does not merely create economic distance; it rots an entire social structure morally, culturally, and politically.

• Collapse of the Middle-Class Myth and Proletarianization: The "middle class" illusion (petty bourgeoisie, white-collar professionals, engineers) bourgeois ideology produces to defend capitalist stability is crushed under the inflationary roller. The salaried engineer, architect, or physician, seeing wage no longer covers rent and food, wakes from class fantasies and is equalized with the working class's absolute fate (dispossession). Society splits sharply in two: a parasitic minority owning means of production and a dispossessed majority with no choice but to sell labor power.
• Lumpenization and Social Decay: The class gap opens so wide that among youth for whom honest work (selling labor) no longer offers humane living possibility, deep hopelessness, get-rich-quick hysteria, corruption, and criminalization tendencies (lumpen proletarianization) emerge. The ruling class uses this social decay as apparatus to set masses against each other and legitimize its fascistic repressive apparatus.

Instead of a Conclusion: Call to the Front — Shatter the Illusion of Numbers, Organize the Class!

Comrade; those inflation figures hurled at us every month from television screens, newspaper headlines, and official podiums are the balance sheet of an economic civil war bourgeoisie silently wages against the working class every day. TÜİK's fake indices emptying our pockets and the scythed July raises granted to pensioners and civil servants are not an inevitable law of capitalism but an open class attack by the ruling class.

Two options stand before us today: Either we believe the "belt-tightening" tales of bourgeois economists and technocrats like Mehmet Şimşek and silently wait at home for the kitchen fire to reduce us completely to ash, or we bring the sledgehammer of class consciousness down on the gears of this plunder mechanism!

The founding principles of the battle line we must raise against this inflationary distribution shock and slavery imposition are clear:

• Not Charity but the Full Value We Produce: We must refuse to submit to arithmetic crumbs (raise games) the bourgeois state grants as favor. Our demand is not band-aid measures at the inflation rate but raising all wages above the humane living threshold and updating them instantly according to real living indices like ENAG (Sliding Scale System).

• Price Controls and Worker Committees: From factories to supermarket chains we must expose arbitrary raises capitalists make to save profit rates (profit inflation). With people's and worker committees established in neighborhoods and workplaces we must erect barricades against price manipulation.

• Struggle Not for Crumbs but for the Bakery Itself: Trying only to fix numbers on pay slips keeps us captive within capitalism's limits. Our ultimate goal is making energy, transport, housing, health, and education wholly free and public—that is, ending private ownership of means of production.

Comrade; there is only one rational answer to those who wish to devalue your life by devaluing money: Organized Class Struggle. The collective power of calloused hands turning gears in the factory, fingers hitting keyboards in offices, bodies mixing mortar on construction sites is greater than all digital financial panopticons of international financial capital.

If capital integrates with SEPA highways and global banks to save its profits, the working class must integrate on the street, in the square, in the union. Shatter the illusion of numbers, do not fill your stomach on false stability tales, and take your place in your class's ranks!

Because remember comrade; if capitalism's nature is inflation, the proletariat's nature is revolution!