The Anatomy of a Rotten Order: Capitalist Plunder, the AKP, and a Decaying Superstructure

Comrades, my dear fellow citizens;

That heavy, fragile defeat the national team suffered on the green pitch today… That defeat is neither a coincidence nor merely a stroke of sporting misfortune. The listlessness you see in stadiums and on television screens today, that collapse on the field—it is the mirror on the pitch of the great, organized social decay that has been driven into our very marrow, from the factory to the university, from the kitchen to the government office! We do not say this in vain: When the infrastructure collapses, the superstructure rots! This order—backed by political power, indifferent to what the people feel, feasting in their villas in Bodrum while the futures of young people are stolen at interview-room doors, pocketing million-lira bonuses—is the photograph of a collapsing Turkey, built by spoiled elites. On one side, the children of the people who play football like lions despite being unable to pay their mother's visa fees; on the other, those who look down on the people and stand like statues on the field saying "we're afraid of the trolls"... In this meritless, mafia-like order created by the ruling power, neither on the pitch nor in public service is there any place left for those who honestly earn their due.

Come, let us together look at the philosophical roots of this decay, at how capital has turned this country into a plunder zone, with concrete facts.

The Plunder Order: Liquidation of Public Assets and Stolen Wealth

Capitalism did not bring exploitation to these lands alone; through the AKP it transformed the state apparatus into a loot-sharing center. Step into the street, look around you; where are the factories, ports, and mines that our fathers and grandfathers built with their taxes and sweat?

Comrades, my dear fellow citizens, our honorable people wronged in the streets, struggling every day with the fire in their kitchens;

It is our duty to decipher this order established by the bourgeoisie and its loyal executor on these lands, the AKP government, piece by piece, down to its philosophical roots. Karl Marx, explaining the essence of the capitalist system, said "there will remain no human or public value that capital has not penetrated and commodified." That is exactly what we are living through in Turkey today. The capitalist class, merging with the bureaucratic and mafia-like apparatus of power, has turned this country into a barbaric zone of primitive accumulation and plunder.

The name of this order is the most savage, most meritless, and most organized parasitism of capital! The bourgeois state apparatus, through AKP rule, has carried out the largest public liquidation operation in its history. Every collective asset we built throughout the history of the republic with this people's taxes and the labor of workers who wore out their elbows on the railways, in the mines, and in the factories—all of it has been sacrificed to the profit hunger of neoliberal globalization and local parasitic capital.

The Seizure of Public Property and Neoliberal Plunder

By its nature, capitalism must seize the public sphere to overcome its crises. The "privatizations" carried out in Turkey over the last twenty years are not simple economic moves; they are outright organized seizure of public property. From Türk Telekom to paper mills, from ports to sugar factories, strategic strongholds that were the common property of the people were broken apart.

This plunder process was crowned especially with public goods handed over to imperialist capital circles and Arab capital. As public production was liquidated, Turkey sank into a foreign-debt swamp; the external debt burden, which stood at 129 billion dollars before the AKP, has today soared to 576 billion dollars. This debt is a class shackle piled onto the backs of a people whose production was destroyed, whose agriculture was wiped out on their own soil, and their grandchildren.

Wealth Transfer as Class Character and London Mansions

Marx teaches us that the capitalist state is nothing but a committee managing the common affairs of the ruling class. The crony contractor gangs created by the ruling power, seizing public tenders through "delivered-to-address" interviews and loyalty mechanisms, have siphoned this people's sweat from the budget.

But the plunder does not stop there; the billions of dollars sucked from these lands like leeches have been turned into wealth smuggled to world banks. While the people cannot bring bread home on the minimum wage, while even the futures of their grandchildren are mortgaged, these rent-seeking gangs have transferred their wealth to tax havens and invested it in luxury homes in London, holding funds, and skyscrapers. This is a historical betrayal and a class transfer operation in which national wealth was smuggled to the centers of international finance capital.

The Commodification of Sovereignty and Honor: Citizenships for Sale

The moral and political disorder of capitalism has reached such a scale that no sacred value money cannot buy has been left standing. Citizenship, the most concrete document of sovereignty, has been turned into a commodity sold for money.

The passport of this country has been put on the market stall for international mafia bosses, money launderers, and oligarchs of unclear identity who buy real estate worth three or four hundred thousand dollars. These moves, rotting society's moral compass, turn our streets into the center of gang wars, while this country's own children—bright university graduates—are eliminated in interview rooms and condemned to a futureless existence.

The Collapse of Institutional Trust and Political Corruption

For this plunder order to stay on its feet, merit had to be destroyed and the bureaucracy fully partisanized. The data of Transparency International cannot hide this rottenness: Turkey has slid uninterruptedly down the corruption perception index to 124th place and has anchored itself to the bottom of world lists on rule of law.

Government offices have been driven into anomie (normlessness) through exam irregularities and the whitewashing of "he steals but he gets things done." The fact that even 79.1% of employees of the Presidency of Religious Affairs admit to nepotism and favoritism within the institution is the most concrete proof of how the ruling ideology and its institutions have morally "hit rock bottom"

• Public Goods Handed Over to Arab Capital: This country's most strategic institutions—telecommunications infrastructure, sugar factories, paper mills—were piece by piece handed over to foreign capital, especially Arab capital, under the name of "privatization." What belonged to the people was written overnight into the profit ledgers of international monopolies and local collaborators.
• Wealth Smuggled to World Banks and London Villas: Do you know where the billions of dollars collected from this people through taxes, price hikes, and indebting unborn children went? While the people were crushed below the poverty line, a handful of commission agents and crony contractor gangs transferred their wealth to secret accounts in world banks. This country's resources were plundered and invested in mansions bought in London's most luxurious districts, in skyscrapers and holding funds. The people's future was melted down in the marketplaces of imperial centers.
• Citizenships Sold for Money: One of the most shameful scenes of capitalist corruption is this: the honor of these lands, the citizenship of this country, was dropped onto the market stall. The passport of this country was sold for money to international mafia bosses, money launderers, and oligarchs of unclear identity who buy real estate worth three or four hundred thousand dollars. While our streets turned into the settlement ground of drug gangs, the people's children were left only to pay the price of this decay.

From Boğaziçi to Fake Diplomas: The Slaughter of Education and the Future

The order of capital is hostile to objective knowledge and honest labor; because a people that is not kept ignorant is hard to exploit. The blows struck against the education system in Turkey in recent times are precisely the product of this class fear.

In every crisis period when capitalist relations of production reach a dead end, ruling classes attack the most dynamic elements of the social superstructure—that is, science, universities, and youth—in order to sustain their parasitic existence. The process carried out through the AKP government, stretching from institutional occupations symbolized by the trustee appointment at Boğaziçi University to fake diploma scandals that turned e-Government gates into a marketplace of structural decay, is not a series of isolated incompetences or simple security breaches. This process is the natural outcome of the state apparatus completely losing the principle of impartial public interest and turning into a loyalty-based mechanism of plunder and reinforcement.

In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx clearly shows how superstructural institutions are shaped by property relations in the infrastructure. Today, the blow to the autonomy of higher education institutions, the purging of academia from meritocratic values, and the liquidation of quality are directly linked to capital's strategy of creating a cheap, insecure, and obedient army of labor. The interior of universities, fortresses of qualified scientific production and critical thought, has been deliberately emptied. In its place, through heedlessly opened provincial universities, the rate of higher-education graduates in the 25–34 age group has been dramatically pushed to 44.9%. Yet this quantitative increase, because the capitalist infrastructure cannot create qualified employment, has produced a massive army of unemployed graduates.

The crisis of "elite overproduction" conceptualized by Peter Turchin has turned into a full slaughter of youth on these lands. The ruling system distributed diplomas to millions of young people, offering them a false illusion of class mobility, but in the end condemned them to low-paid, unskilled jobs far below their expectations. The fact that 26.7% of young people aged 15–29 in Turkey are pushed into the position of "home-bound youth" with neither education nor employment is the most concrete tragedy of this class planning.

This futurelessness and narrowing space for class mobility has triggered deep anomie (normlessness) and moral decay in the superstructure. As Robert K. Merton emphasized in Strain Theory: when a society sanctifies goals such as wealth, status, and diplomas but blocks the legitimate and fair paths to reach them, individuals turn to illegal and shortcut methods. The fake diploma scandals that erupted at exactly this point are far beyond a digital "hacker" case; they are the anatomy of a system in which the principle of merit has been completely eroded. In an order where 63% of society shares the belief that "to succeed in life you absolutely need a connection, a powerful acquaintance," and where even Diyanet personnel admit favoritism at a rate of 79.1% in their own institution, the diploma itself is no longer the mark of an educational process but merely a "formal piece of paper" that can be bought or counterfeited.

The dequalification of education in this way and the institutionalization of fraud paralyze not only the present of youth but also the country's future administrative, technical, and scientific capacity. The loyalty and interview regime that replaces meritocratic values either drives the most competent minds out of the system into mass brain drain or condemns those who remain to deep hopelessness. This rotten superstructure reinforced by fake diplomas and connected appointments is the greatest theft the AKP government, capitalism's loyal executor, has stolen from the people's future. This slaughter cannot be solved by the bourgeois opposition's cosmetic promises about interviews or in-system restorations; the solution lies in freeing science and education from capital's yoke and bringing them to the people's common property and a socialist infrastructure based on merit

• Boğaziçi University and the Academic Slaughter: The attacks on Boğaziçi University, the apple of this country's eye, considered a fortress of science and enlightenment, the trustee-rector blows—are not random. They fear free thought, the democratic university. By throwing academics out the door and surrounding campuses with police barricades, they tried to turn universities into centers of submission where they would train their own unqualified elites.
• Organized Fake Diploma Scandal: It was not enough that they drove the quality of education below the OECD average; they turned the diploma itself into a commodity of fraud. The scandal of thousands of fake diplomas produced through unauthorized access in e-Government and digital systems is proof that institutional decay has seeped into the heart of the state. According to data from the Ankara Social Sciences Foundation, today 63% of our people accept the painful truth that "to succeed in life you absolutely need a connection, a powerful acquaintance." They drove into the soul of society like a dagger the perception that you cannot get anywhere by working honestly and wearing out your elbows.
• Interview Terror and Diyanet's Confession: Those subjective, unjust criteria in oral exams eliminated the most qualified young people while placing only cadres loyal to the regime in their place. Moreover, they did this hiding behind talk of religion, faith, and morality. But the spear cannot be hidden in the sack; in research conducted by Diyanet-Sen itself, 79.1% of Diyanet employees admitted to connections, favoritism, and nepotism within the institution. Those who market the most sacred values did not hesitate to consume people's rights in interview rooms when it came to distributing jobs.

Infrastructure Is Collapsing, Hopelessness Is Deepening!

My dear fellow citizen; while our external debt before the AKP was 129 billion dollars, today it has reached 576 billion dollars. Will those in the palace pay this debt? No—you will pay it, your children, your grandchildren! Where once a retiree who worked a lifetime and paid their premiums could buy 8 quarter-gold coins, today on a poverty wage they can barely afford 2 quarter-gold coins. In law we jumped from 55th place in the world ranking to 118th; in poverty we climbed to the top of world lists.

What this order offers us is a program of planned impoverishment, a spiral of organized futurelessness! Before us is not merely a technical economic crisis or a temporary weakness of governance. Before us is a structural collapse in which capital grew by dispossessing the people and the state apparatus protected this dispossession with interviews, pressure, and fraud.

The Debt Swamp and the Economy of Planned Impoverishment

The capitalist plunder mechanism, backed by political power, has triggered the largest debt and food crisis in the history of these lands.

As the inevitable result of abandoning the production economy and liquidating agriculture, today we are in the middle of the greatest food crisis in our history. These exorbitant rises in food prices are neither coincidence nor a "market condition"; they are a conscious, planned blow that impoverishes broad popular masses while enriching a handful of rentier class. The truth is this: There is not only a governance crisis in the middle; there are millions who are being impoverished specifically and systematically!

The Seizure of Labor and the Liquidation of Social Security

Those who pay the heaviest bill for this rotting infrastructure are our retirees and workers who worked and produced their whole lives. Where once a retiree who devoted their life to production and paid their premiums could bring home 8 quarter-gold coins with their pension; today in the grip of capitalist exploitation and the inflation monster they can barely afford 2 quarter-gold coins.

The capitalist class seizes the worker's past gains and accumulated labor in broad daylight through inflation and currency games. People turned the system's wheels their whole lives, paid premiums, but in return were condemned to misery and a life below the hunger line. This is the most savage form in which surplus-value seizure has been legalized through the state!

The Army of Unemployed Graduates and "Elite Overproduction"

One of the greatest contradictions of capitalism in Marxist literature is lowering the value of labor power by creating a reserve army of the unemployed. The AKP regime has operated this law through higher education. Together with universities opened heedlessly over the last twenty years, stripped of quality, the rate of higher-education graduates in the 25–34 age group has jumped from around 13.5% to 44.9%.

Yet because the neoliberal infrastructure has no capacity to create qualified employment, this educated mass has been pushed directly outside the system. Today we face a disaster exceeding twice the OECD average: 26.7% of our young people are neither in education nor employment (NEET). These millions called "home-bound youth" by society, imprisoned in their rooms, left futureless, are the most naked victims of the structural blockage created by capitalism. That structural crisis conceptualized by Peter Turchin—the "elite overproduction" and disappointment created by an educated population the system cannot absorb—is turning on these lands into mass hopelessness and a wave of youth fleeing abroad.

Institutional Anomie, Injustice, and the Explosion of Crime

This deep injustice in the infrastructure has shattered all moral and legal norms in the superstructure. Because of interview terror, nepotism, and crony favoritism, Turkey has slid to 124th place in the Corruption Perception Index and plunged from 55th to 118th place in world law rankings. Where belief in justice ends, the social fabric unravels.

Indeed, while 57 thousand people were in this country's prisons before the AKP, today that number has soared to 436 thousand! The overwhelming majority of this terrifying increase consists of people imprisoned not for political offenses but for ordinary crimes. This figure is the clearest, most painful photograph of a society rotted by livelihood anxiety, insecurity, and injustice and driven to madness! When people understand they cannot get anywhere through legitimate paths, honest labor, and education, when the perception of institutional distrust has delivered 63% of society to the belief that "connections are necessary for success," the moral compass has completely collapsed

The rate of higher-education graduates in the 25–34 age group jumped to 44.9%, but there is no work, no bread. 26.7% of our young people are neither in education nor employment; that is, they are condemned as insecure, futureless "home-bound youth" to their rooms. Capitalism and the meritless AKP regime can promise the people of this country nothing but decay, impoverishment, and hopelessness!

A Democratic Approach and the Society of an Emancipated Future

But comrades, my dear brothers and sisters; another world is possible, another Turkey is possible! And this future cannot be built through the bourgeois politics' internal seat struggles or fake promises that cosmeticize the interview system. The future we will build is not one where money, connections, and aristocratic spoiledness rule, but an emancipated socialist future where the people are sovereign!

Comrades, my dear fellow citizens, our noble people dispossessed by capital and its local collaborator the AKP government, whose futures are stolen in interview rooms but who never surrender their honor;

Until today we have deciphered piece by piece the infrastructure and superstructure of this rotten order. We have laid out with philosophical roots the 576-billion-dollar external debt burden that neoliberal plunder piled on the people's backs, the army of unemployed graduates produced through lack of planning, and the institutional anomie that slid to 124th place in the Corruption Perception Index. Yet Marxism is not merely a dogma that exposes darkness; it is the guide to action that will tear that darkness apart. We do not forget Marx's immortal words: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it."

Bourgeois politicians and the apparatuses of the regime tell us a fake "democracy" tale every election season. Their democracy consists of the people choosing every few years one of the ruling-class cliques that will exploit them! Yet in a capitalist order where meritlessness, connections, and corruption are institutionalized, the ballot box alone cannot bring emancipation. Real democracy is socialist democracy in which producers participate directly in governance and labor determines its own fate.

The Illusion of Bourgeois Democracy and Institutional Corruption

The capitalist state is an apparatus of repression protecting the interests of the ruling class. During AKP rule this apparatus, completely liquidating merit principles, has turned the bureaucracy into a network of relatives, fellow townsmen, and cronies. In an order where public employees admit at a rate of 79.1%—even in religiously referenced structures like Diyanet—that there is nepotism and favoritism in their own institutions, to speak of the state's impartiality or the public interest is outright absurdity.

Interview mechanisms are a class barricade set up to eliminate the children of workers who come first in written exams and place loyal parasites with certificates of submission in their place. Without tearing down this barricade, without eliminating this corruption in public personnel management, democratization in the real sense cannot occur. The democratic approach we will defend requires throwing interview terror and oral-exam injustice without exception into the dustbin of history.

Socialist Meritocracy: The Emancipation of Labor and Talent

In the society of the emancipated future we will build, the concept of "merit" is not selfish careerism in the bourgeois sense or the skill of enslaving oneself to the market. We redefine merit as qualified contribution offered to social production and common life. As Robert K. Merton stated in Strain Theory, when the possibility of reaching success through legitimate paths is destroyed, society is driven into anomie (normlessness). A society where 63% of people say "connections are necessary for success" is paralyzed.

In the free society of the future, hiring and promotion processes in public institutions will be based entirely on transparent, objective measurement and evaluation methods. The "my man" mentality will give way to the most competent subject of collective production. Talent and education will be mobilized not to multiply capital owners' profit but to raise the welfare and cultural level of society. This is the real meritocratic order in which labor and talent are emancipated from alienation.

Participatory and Direct Popular Sovereignty

The society of the emancipated future will not be governed by top-down circulars or palace decrees, but by People's Assemblies rising from neighborhoods, factories, universities, and workplaces. Sovereignty will belong not to passive masses who vote once every five years, but to the people themselves who organize production, life, and the future every day.

The principle of recall (imperative mandate) will be implemented; every administrator who abuses their office, acts against the people's interest, or is tainted by corruption can be immediately removed by people's assemblies without waiting for an election period. Transparency and accountability will cease to be word games on the dusty shelves of the bourgeois state and will become an organic part of daily life through the power of digital infrastructure and collective oversight.

A New Social Contract and a Collective Ethical Compass

This rotten cultural climate in which social trust has retreated to 14%, in which people look at one another as potential swindlers, is the work of capitalism. We will uproot the corrupted ideology that normalizes theft by softening language like "he steals but he gets things done" or "he makes it work." The disorder in which those who seize office through fake diplomas and connections—that is, thieves of rights and labor—go unpunished will come to an end.

The new social contract we will build will rise on the principles of transparency, accountability, honesty, and solidarity. The education system will be socialized not to produce cheap labor for the market and "home-bound youth," but to raise free individuals who question, produce, and possess aesthetic and scientific depth. From media to popular culture, in every field not opportunism and corner-cutting but honesty, diligence, and collective success will be idealized.

Comrades, my dear brothers and sisters;

The bourgeois order imposes helplessness and acclimatization to this rottenness on us. Spoiled elites bargaining for bonuses on the stage cannot cover the hopelessness of our youth whose futures are stolen in interview rooms. We will wrest this country from the hands of those parasitic gangs that sell passports to international mafia bosses and commodify citizenship.

This collapse is not fate; we are at the threshold of a radical and shaking social transformation, a socialist founding. Every crisis lived, from fake diploma scandals to interview corruption, is the concrete sign of popular anger accumulating against this order and the call for self-criticism.

We exist, we are here! With the organized will of millions wronged in factories, in fields, at interview doors; we will surely build an equal, honest, fair, and free Turkey!

• An Order Without Connections, Transparent and Based on Labor: We will bury interview terror, connection networks, fake diplomas, and inner-circle favoritism completely in the garbage heap of history. In public hiring the sole criterion will be objective merit, honest work, and competence in serving the people.
• Reclaimed People's Assets: We will unhesitatingly nationalize all public goods, ports, and factories handed over to foreign capital; we will return what belongs to the people to the people. We will demand accountability before justice for that wealth smuggled to world banks, for those mansions in London!
• Free Education, Free Healthcare, a Secure Future: From Boğaziçi to the most remote village school we will remove education from being a commercial commodity. We will implement a planned economic structure that will provide secure employment for every young person. Our youth will dream not of fleeing these lands but of making these lands flourish.

We will take the honorable neighborhood solidarity of the old days, the culture of imece; we will blend it with the science and technology of modern society. We will neither leave the green pitches to spoiled elites nor surrender government offices to fraudsters. We will make decisions not in narrow rooms but together in people's assemblies and workers' committees.

Capitalism brings barbarism and decay to humanity. Our promise is an honest, fair, equal, and free world!

We will build another world with the organized power of the working class, wronged youth, and our honorable people!