THE GREAT LIBERATION: THE ATATÜRK PARADOX AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

Today, citizens feel weak, betrayed and oppressed. It feels like nearly all areas of our lives are affected and have been compromised. Food is full of chemicals, housing prices are increasingly burdensome, product quality is deteriorating, while prices climb, financialisation is producing less value with higher returns and digitalisation has led to the commoditisation of the citizen. These developments are, to varying degrees, observable in all regions of the world. I do not want to put it into a timeframe or give a detailed account of how extensive this socio-economic degradation of the citizen is in each region. It is a development that is very well felt, burdening people everywhere. What I do want to do, however, is to give an account as to why this is the case. Whilst these developments, which are going to be called "the big commoditisation" going forwards, provide the perfect ground for conspiracy theories, we at Essydo already found the answer as to why this happened in 2022. Our answer is not as tangible or emotionally compelling as the explanation that global society is controlled by a malevolent elite, but it is more accurate and constructive. The answer is found in the Atatürk Paradox, a political science concept that I developed to understand how societal groups interact in non-statist societies. In this article, this concept is applied to global capitalism to explain the big commoditisation. Going further, I will forecast what is going to happen in the future and what to expect. As the title already suggests, the developments of the big commoditisation are not going to be linear – nothing in politics is. Instead, a breaking point will lead to a much more advanced form of societal progress, which is part of the societal model of the Atatürk Paradox.

The Atatürk Paradox In Brief

What this political science innovation depicts is the bilateral dynamic between two societal groups in their power dynamic. It can also be applied to understand the power relations between more than two societal groups, but as we found out in another

Seminal work on left-wing and right-wing political ideologies

Most societies can be categorised in a dual fashion in most contemporary democratic contexts. The split between generally leftist and generally rightist views in many contemporary societies is the most prominent example. However, we can also look at two groups within a political camp or even apply this explanation to the examination of bilateral relations between two competing nations or corporations. So, it is important that there are two or more actors that are oppositional to one another, meaning that they are in direct competition.

Second, another requirement is that there is a power relation; this is where the competition stems from. In most cases, this power relation is related to the ideological support and development speed of a certain camp. The Atatürk Paradox was found based on this specific dynamic in Turkish society. With the founding of the Turkish Republic, Türkiye adopted a path of secularism and nationalism as a main component of normative policymaking. It was born out of the observation that conservative policymaking of the Ottoman era was no longer applicable to the new state structure, which in itself was a response to policy inefficiencies and the lost World War. As the republic developed, this political camp was able to establish normative and ideological authority in Türkiye. The more this moral authority resulted in political success, the more the propensity to develop and advance decreased within that ideological camp, whilst the urgency and need for development and advancement within the contrary ideological camp increased. This power relation is measured in societal distance, and it requires the involved groups to base their competition on mutual exclusivity. We can also look at other examples. Euro-scepticism grew during the high times of the European Union as a response to decreasing policy efficiency of pro-European politics. Pro-capitalist structures gained traction with the corruption of the socialist idea in the Soviet Union. What is important to note here is that these developments can be viewed as reactionary societal movements to counterbalance the inefficiencies of a rigid policy course, which are inevitably going to emerge in non-statist systems. However, most scientific concepts do not tell us why the reaction takes place and is often successful. The Atatürk Paradox gives a clear answer: it is because the successful side believes it has achieved everything and is then turning on the very values that made it successful, whilst the opposite side recognises that it needs to take action to regain societal status and power.

Case Study: Application To Global Capitalism

Innocent Beginnings

Capitalism has lived through several phases. In my works on civilisational life cycles and their relationship with consumption, I explore those phases. What we need to look at in detail here is how we reached the current situation in which citizens are nearly completely commoditised. The Industrial Revolution can be viewed as a reorientation and transition phase to a new model of economic conduct. Surely, malevolent practices were observable there, but in general the terrible conditions of this phase are more rooted in the exponential growth and accompanying adaptation of global society. As we could observe afterwards, economic conduct reached a stable phase in the middle of the 20th century, which continued until the end of the century. With the abolition of the Bretton Woods system, global financialisation and capitalism began. In the context of the Atatürk Paradox, we can say that the novel idea of industrialisation, and then financialisation, was still on the rise. There was still a lot to explore, develop and gain from the full transition to this new model. Many nations that adopted this model gained wealth and almost eradicated poverty. China, the Asian Tigers and Sub-Anatolia are the best recent examples for the benefits of capitalism; of course, European and Neo-European nations also managed to eradicate poverty earlier. Rates of innovation increased drastically during the 20th century. From aeroplanes to washing machines, the television, mobile phones, credit cards and ultimately the internet, the capitalist mode led to the expansion of what was economically possible, and there was much room to grow. As this was the case, the primary concern of the mode of production was to get as far as possible. In economic terms, we can describe this phase as the move of the long-run aggregate supply (hereinafter: LRAS) curve from its position 1 to 2; whether nations travelled there with rising or falling prices was a matter of individual policymaking at that time.

What Happened In The 21st Century?

The more successful this mode became, the more other ideologies and economic modes of production were pushed away. This is a completely natural reaction. As poverty was reduced, financial market gains grew exponentially, mass wealth and access to convenience were proliferated, how can someone argue against the success of global capitalism? Nobody. The problems we face today are not rooted in some sort of negative property of capitalism, but in a very simple concept: the law of diminishing marginal returns.

At some point, and this is where we are today, everything is consumed already. What can make the television better than it is today? Between the first television and the high-resolution devices of our time, there was a big difference, but what truly changed in the past five years? We can look at the first mobile phone and today's smartphones and see the innovative edge. However, this is not given when comparing smartphone models of the past five years. Luxury goods are also now more accessible than ever, which automatically delegitimises the high price margins of these products. Capitalism has achieved everything it promised, and this is why it created the commodification of citizens, which we will explore in a moment. Our [works](/en/article/the-death-of-consumption) on the self-destructive effects of the [success of capitalism](/en/article/is-money-too-successful-for-the-west) underline just that.

The Wealthy Versus The Citizens

When we look back at our economic model chart, we can say that the LRAS2 curve has stopped moving, whilst the persisting pressure of capitalist systems has remained stable. This is due to the competitive nature of the measurement in capitalism: societal ranks are established based on the amount of financial power one holds. With diminishing returns, those at the perceived top of society incur negative returns, whilst the middle and lower classes move up fast, due to the successful integration and optimisation of capitalism. There is also nothing that would push the LRAS2 curve further to give the very rich more headspace to develop. We have all the conveniences we need; flying cars and robots would not make our lives exponentially better. Quite the opposite is the case, as the number of people returning to rural lifestyles is increasing. This introduces the Atatürk Paradox in this case.

As we have seen above, the social distance between the very rich and middle and lower classes is shrinking. The very rich no longer have the means to maintain this distance naturally; owning one private jet sets one apart from billions of people, but owning six of them makes no difference in terms of societal perception. They had a huge advantage in the early and high days of capitalism, which is also why most of the very rich have extensive family wealth and continue this legacy. Now that more people travel to the same places they do, buy more land and properties and consume many of the things that the very rich consume, their place in society is less important. Also, as consumption grows, its irrelevance does so too. What holds true for the very rich with their private jets holds also true for the average person who owns a car, some luxury items and perhaps a house.

The Atatürk Paradox In Action

As became clear from the examination above, the conditions of the Atatürk Paradox are met: 1. There are two groups (the rich and the citizens), 2. They are in a normative competition for societal status. Normally, the situation described above would mean that the citizens are represented as F2 in the chart because they are picking up pace as capitalism allows them to move up the ranks within society based on the perceived value of financial power. F1 would be the rich who run out of development due to the law of diminishing returns. Ideally, this would lead us to predict a shift in power and structure, away from the rich and oligarchy towards the citizens and democracy. But now we return to our introduction, where I established that it seems like everything is turned against the citizen. This is due to the rich's awareness of this dynamic. They might not be able to coin the terms that we use here, but they know that within the current setting, societal structures will inevitably change. What we can, therefore, observe here is, and this is the core hypothesis of this work, is:

The wealthy, who possess the means of production and reproduction, reshape the playing field to artificially maintain the societal distance between themselves and other citizens.

It is no longer as easy as it was to be perceived as superior based on financial wealth through production. Therefore, the citizen itself is altered. He is targeted with unhealthy food, false information, mass information overload, emotional manipulation through digital media, financial market manipulation, normative decline, lowered educational standards, ideological polarisation, inflation, urbanisation and many other factors that all result in the same thing: blocking the capacity to produce and reproduce. Today, most citizens are in a mode of emotional agitation due to the listed factors, which hinders them from further developing at a higher pace. Even worse, as these measures mount, quite the opposite is the case: societal degradation and decline pick up pace. With every bit of lowered capacity to act meaningfully, the friction increases, whilst the convenient alternatives become cheaper. In simple terms, the easy way to do things has become incredibly attractive whilst the path of genuine development has become incredibly hard. Naturally, the easy way is selected more often than the hard path, which reduces the cognitive and emotional capacities of people. The logical consequence is that the rich can uphold their social distance to the rest simply in biological terms.

Of course, people behave only in ways that the structures they are subject to permit them to behave. Accordingly, it is generally to be expected that those at the top of the constructed social hierarchy attempt to defend their position, even when the law of diminishing returns and the convenience of being at the top reduce effectiveness and eventually lead to a shift in power. Today, however, we can observe that despite the gap between the main social groups (the wealthy and citizens), malevolent practices of altering people themselves are being applied to uphold the current bilateral relationship. Perhaps these acts serve a perceived goal that requires the continued subordination of the general public for the sake of an imaginary vision.

Concluding Forecast

Or perhaps these developments signal a larger shift in society. So long as humanity retains a baseline of cognitive capacity and normative grounding—which I assess to be the case at the time of writing—the likelihood remains high that the general public will continue to develop at pace and accumulate greater power. Parity may be unrealistic for resource reasons alone, but we could witness a global public becoming increasingly aware and active in reclaiming sovereignty. It hardly needs saying that major economic or societal shocks could overturn this prediction. Equally, if cognitive decline and degradation intensify further, the prospects diminish accordingly.

In an ideal world, and this is what we work for, the capitalist civilisational cycle ends with the achievement of global wealth, eliminating the viability of the comparative measure of money and power to assess success in society. This is the entry into the post-material life cycle of societies, which inevitably will be based on the statist school of politics. Our task is to prepare the theoretical foundation for this change and lead it by example. All models and developments point to this result. What remains for us to do is walk this path that is already paved by the structures and laws of nature.