Mücadele Birliği (Struggle Unity, Türkiye)
The first part of this article appeared in the previous issue, Platform No.33 (February 2026)
V
With the financial flow initiated by full economic subjugation, which took its sharpest turn between 1997 and 2001, dot-com companies in imperialist centers inflated like balloons. The world, almost unanimously, set about using all its trade surpluses, extra monopoly profits (and later, the surplus value generated by small businesses), to inflate the assets of imperialist centers, such as bonds and stocks. At the beginning of 2001, when the reality of this over-investment, which failed to deliver the expected profits, became apparent, dot-com company shares plummeted. The loss amounted to $6 trillion.
This sudden collapse led to questioning the role of the US financial structure as the “last safe haven” and it immediately lost its magnet function of attracting almost all of the world’s monopoly profits. However, the effectiveness of this financial pool depends on its concentration in a single center; otherwise, the debt-credit chain breaks down. This situation means a hegemonic collapse for both imperialism and the US. And to reverse the collapse, the September 11 provocation was staged, and World War III began. The goal was achieved. This time, under the pretext of “fighting terrorism,” the US gained access to all bank accounts worldwide, and the structure dismantled by the ineffective magnet was forcibly rebuilt.
On the other hand, nothing had been accomplished yet; on the contrary, it was just beginning, otherwise this power could not have operated for so long. The first steps toward complete economic subjugation had just begun to be taken. There was still ample room for maneuver to obtain extra monopoly profits through high labor exploitation stemming from capital scarcity in dependent countries.
The extent of this room can be calculated in the simplest and crudest terms as follows: the greater the difference between a country’s nominal GDP and its Purchasing Power Parity GDP, the greater the extra profit that imperialist monopolies can extract from these countries. In the years mentioned, at the beginning of the century, the nominal-PPP difference was fourfold in the lowest-ranked countries such as Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Roughly speaking, this means that the monopoly profit to be obtained from these countries is four times greater than that from imperialist centers. In moderately developed dependent countries such as South Africa, Turkey, and Argentina, the difference was nearly twofold during the same years. At the beginning of the 21st century, the world was still far from the “Full Economic Subjugation Paradox” that would emerge with the reduction of the nominal-PPP gap.
In this favorable environment, imperialists quickly found a way to recoup the $6 trillion that evaporated in the dot-com crisis and began exporting large amounts of capital to the world from the forcibly reconstituted common debt pool. This process increasingly fragmented and diversified supply chains and stratified the global division of labor. Having learned their lesson, imperialists invested their extra profits not in the semiconductor sector, but in the real estate sector. The internet was forgotten; the construction sector became king. The real estate sector, which had become almost a flying balloon with the soaring support of land rents, burst much earlier than expected. The 2008 crisis continued for a long time and buried the EU’s banking system in history. The only way for imperialism to manage this crisis was to send the excessively inflated common pool, pumped up by credit money from the united Central Banks, to dependent countries in the form of short-term loans. Debt capital, once again attacking dependent countries, reached dizzying proportions. However, this was not to add new links to the supply chains, but to indebt every part of capital accumulation, including SMEs in dependent countries, in order to earn interest income. Private debt (corporate + consumer debt) in dependent countries multiplied rapidly. This situation eroded the profits of monopolies that had entered into tacit agreements, forcing them to borrow more just to stay in the game and pay their debts. Capital accumulation in these countries began to decline markedly, making production almost entirely dependent on imported inputs.
It is time to address the “Full Economic Subjugation Paradox”, which became evident in the 2020s. With full economic subjugation, dependent countries were producing not only for the domestic market but also for the world market (as subcontractors/contract manufacturers). However, they lacked the capital concentration, accumulation, and supporting industries necessary to achieve such large-scale production and distribution. Yet, the scale of production, which could only be sustained through debt, quickly made them dependent on imports. This dependency reached 70% in the manufacturing industry in countries such as Turkey. This is where the problem began: living conditions in general, and the reproduction of labor power in particular, were based on products with high labor costs as a result of import dependency, and the medium- and long-term consequence of this situation was the closing of the nominal GNP gap specific to dependent countries. And from another perspective, as dependent countries tried to keep the exchange rate low in order to postpone the debt crisis, this gap closed at an even faster pace. As the extra profit margins of imperialist monopolies narrowed, they began to cut orders from the countries at the bottom of the chain. This meant rapidly rising living costs accompanied by rapidly rising unemployment. As in the cases of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, the “Full Economic Subjugation Paradox” became the cradle of an unstoppable social explosion and revolution.
VI
The “Full Economic Subjugation Paradox”, accompanied by the revolutions it triggered, led to dramatic declines in monopoly profits flowing to imperialist centers. As a result, financial markets, which cannot extinguish themselves and can only function as magnets for surplus value by inflating further, needed a manipulative pump. The slogan “artificial intelligence will change the world” became the vehicle for this manipulation. Moreover, this time, the bubble, which resembles a crude Ponzi scheme, is four to five times larger than the previous one. Gopinath, the former chief economist of the IMF, predicted that $35 trillion would evaporate.
As we can see, this bubble arises from extraordinarily high fixed investments not being supported by intensive labor exploitation. According to MIT University’s calculations, only 5% of the $400 billion in artificial intelligence investments by 2025, which will reach $5-7 trillion in four years, will be productive, meaning they hold no hope of creating added value. Where will the profits come from, which cannot be obtained in the production process and whose compensation opportunities are now diminishing due to the “full economic subjugation paradox”? From stock trading, which has turned into a Ponzi scheme. All artificial intelligence monopolies and a handful of financial capital groups that follow them are parties to this Ponzi scheme. They have created a capital cycle where the investor, producer, creditor, and customer are one and the same. In this way, artificially inflated stocks are the only way to attract monopoly profits that are on a downward trend. The more you inflate the stocks, the more you get a piece of the shared monopoly profit. The math is simple.
It is inevitable that this bubble, advancing at an unprecedented speed toward its bursting point, will affect the entire world. This is because the global financial system is excessively dependent on the US stock market. The US stock markets are where the debt-credit chain, which has circled the world many times in the form of short-term debt since the 2008 crisis, returns. And each return is necessary to initiate a recovery and a new credit cycle. That is why the US stock markets function as a pump that must constantly operate to enable the rollover of debt. Now, the stopping of this pump will result in dependent countries, first and foremost, being crushed under mountains of debt.
One of the remaining questions is when this bubble will burst. For Marxists, this question never loses its importance. However, if the mouthpieces of finance capital have started talking about crisis, then the time is near. While many publications are running headlines about “destruction, fragmentation,” the Financial Times published a noteworthy warning. The established newspaper of financial capital published lengthy articles on how the crisis would erupt.
At this point, developments must be assessed alongside a global civil war. Let us recall Lenin’s warning that, as in nature, no phenomenon in society can be considered in isolation. The social character of production spread worldwide by the semiconductor industry pioneered the birth of global civil war, and now the same process, accelerated by artificial intelligence, is full of signs of a new phase in this war. This new phase is manifesting itself with the confirmation of the collapse of US hegemony.
Many shallow assessments made in the name of Marxism claimed that imperialist countries had transitioned to a “post-industrial society” since the 1980s. With the same shallow perspective, a “return to industry” is now being proclaimed.
In reality, imperialist centers did not deindustrialize. Only the labor-intensive parts of industry’s integrated cycle of production-circulation-expanded reproduction, which can operate with much higher rates of exploitation and profit, were transferred to dependent countries with scarce capital, and imperialism deepened its character as a “rentier society.”
The industrial cycle of capitalist production begins with money, transitions directly to production with the purchase of means of production (machinery, equipment, labor power), and then moves to the sphere of circulation loaded with surplus value, etc. This integrated cycle includes administrative, financial distribution, marketing, storage, advertising, legal, and numerous other stages. In imperialist centers, most of the labor involved in the industrial cycle is employed in the “service sector.” A multinational monopoly is the center of a production network operating in over 200 countries. If this monopoly were to relocate the direct production stages scattered across dependent countries back to imperialist centers in the name of reindustrialization, the following would occur. It would be forced to eliminate most of the labor power gathered under the service sector, and not content with that, it would not pay its workers more than the producers in dependent countries. And both transformations would mean serious civil war in imperialist countries. Because, despite the “Full Economic Subjugation Paradox,” the wage and living standard gap with dependent countries is enormous, and such a gap can only be closed by bloody civil war.
The US, whose hegemony is collapsing, is moving away from the exploitation processes and supply chains that sustain the rentier society, not because of a choice to “reindustrialize,” but because of the markets it has lost. And it is going completely off the rails in its attempt to compensate for this situation with a show of force, the ultimate rule of competition between monopolies. Trump is the most striking symptom of the terminal phase of US hegemony. Under Trump, the US is setting the world on fire to escape its own internal war.
Can it escape? No. Because all economic and political conditions are forcing it to squeeze extra monopoly profits out of its own society. The artificial intelligence breakthrough threatens administrative, logistical, financial, and other labor processes the most. That is why the term “civil war” is beginning to appear in headlines and spots in the US press. Trump is using a militia force larger than the US army, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents, to terrorize society. The Pentagon is preparing a “Rapid Response Force for Civil Unrest.”
Headlines such as “fragmented society,” “tired democracy,” and “the collapse of civilization beyond economic and political collapse” are the clearest expressions of this landscape.
VII
There is a simple rule not written in bourgeois economics books. In the words of Sadun Aren: “As long as there are lenders, there will always be borrowers.” The 21st-century manifestation of the New Phase of Imperialism was shaped by debt capital. It targeted large infrastructure investments such as power plants, roads, and ports, as well as industrial investments that rapidly elevated collaborative capital to a monopolistic position. With the New Phase, all dependent countries became extensions of imperialist markets; while the integrity of the domestic market was fragmented, import-export became the main economic activity of these countries. This transformation encompassed not only collaborative sectors but all areas of production, including agriculture. Production began with debt capital, extra monopoly profits were transferred to imperialist financial capital, and gradually all production activity was reduced to a mere means of servicing debts, accumulation aside.
This development, which reversed the capital cycle, manifested itself twice in the form of crises.
The first was the 2008 crisis, which led to the major popular uprisings of 2011. The second crisis occurred during the COVID period, and this time South Asia and Africa were shaken by revolutions.
When the revolution broke out in Sri Lanka in July 2022, the economy was completely out of control. Yet, over the past decade, the country had surpassed Bangladesh in devaluing its labor force. When COVID cut off foreign capital inflows, the Sri Lankan people realized that whatever they needed had to be imported with foreign currency, and all foreign exchange reserves were quickly depleted. The biggest problem was gasoline and diesel; the state was unable to pay its own employees’ salaries. The uprising erupted at this critical threshold because the next step meant starvation for millions.
A similar COVID-related disaster was unfolding in Bangladesh. The country, which had saved labor-intensive industries such as textiles with the world’s cheapest labor force, was pushed to a point where it could no longer pay the interest on its massive debt. When shopping malls around the world temporarily closed, Bangladesh’s textile industry, which carried the burden of meeting their needs, experienced a downturn. However, the treadmill could not stop; even a brief pause was enough to make it impossible to pay the interest on the debt. In this sense, Bangladesh symbolized how dependent countries experiencing a full economic subjugation had become sensitive to the slightest fluctuations in imperialist markets. Unemployment rose rapidly, and the result was a full-blown uprising. In 2025, economies like Madagascar and Indonesia experienced another aftershock, varying in intensity and scope.
The countries that made it onto the list of revolutions share a common feature: they are all at the very bottom of the process of full economic subjugation. A domino had fallen in the world, and the next ones began to fall one after another. When Sri Lanka fell, the financial capital barons in London not only voiced this domino theory, but also admitted that they had bet that Turkey would be the first stone to fall.
The process that toppled the dominoes is what we referred to in previous sections as the “full economic subjugation paradox.” In summary, countries with scarce capital, and therefore cheap labor, inflated their import and export figures with the debt capital needed for production and the machinery, equipment, and intermediate goods purchased with that debt, along with full economic destruction. However, since production depended on imported inputs laden with the extra profits of most imperialist monopolies, the monetary value of labor costs inflated at the same rate. Not only labor costs, but all input costs increased extraordinarily. Even if the collusive monopolies pushed exploitation to its absolute limit, they could not find other dependent countries where the costs they borrowed were lower; the zombie companies that could not escape this time truly died.
The full economic subjugation paradox is closely related not only to rising labor and other input costs in import-dependent production, but also to the fact that the debt capital that initiated and circulated this production eroded the accumulated capital before full economic destruction and, at a certain point, fell to a point of profitability where it could no longer cover the interest on the debt. Therefore, the following should be added to the unwritten law of bourgeois economics: As long as there are lenders, there will be borrowers, provided they pay the interest…
VIII
The last quarter-century of monopoly capitalism in Turkey has been marked by conditions of full economic subjugation. This process also tells the story of how every branch of production, especially industry, became unable to operate without debt and could no longer produce without imported inputs; how capital accumulation increasingly turned into a form of wealth that did not produce surplus value; and how, as a result of all these transformations, it became unable to produce surplus value for imperialist financial capital.
The result was the dissolution and disintegration of the industrial structure (flight abroad), its transformation into a black money reserve to keep the debt chain turning, and excessive work and an excessively expensive life for labor.
Table 3 shows the development of credit dependency over the last quarter-century. It resembles heroin addiction; each debt creates a need for more: as the credit ratio grows, the economy’s growth figures shrink. This dependency renders every branch of production unable to function without imported inputs. Dependency rates in key areas are as follows: Energy: 69%, CNC machine tools 80%, fertilizer 95%, automotive machinery 95%, textile machinery 95%… The list goes on. Imported inputs exceed 70% of total manufacturing.
To understand the extent of the economic damage, the automotive production sector is a striking example. Six thousand parts are needed for a car. Some of these are simple parts that can be produced domestically by medium-sized businesses. But listen to how an automotive industry boss complains: “We produce a significant portion of these parts domestically, they are exported, and then the company prints its logo on them and sends them back.” The imperialist monopoly is squeezing blood from a stone. For the car entering the final assembly line, the collusive monopoly is not only dependent on 80% imported parts, but also has the imported input goods produced domestically by the ancillary industry, buys them to stamp its logo on them, and sells them to the supplier at a price as if they were the product of high-wage labor in its own country. Thus, it can extract extra monopoly profit not only from final assembly but even from the simplest parts of production, such as gaskets and windshield wipers. This gives meaning to the bifurcation we saw in Table 2 (see previous article).
This dependency has two important consequences. The first concerns the monopoly collaborative capital, the second the economy as a whole. Let’s start with the second. Table 3 shows the trajectory of credit dependency, which is growing and becoming insufficient as it grows. It is clear that development has followed a separate path since 2018. At this stage, we can assume, at the very least, that credit dependency has risen to 75%. Turkey pays an average of 8% interest to global financial capital for this credit. If production cannot grow at an annual rate of 6% (75% of 8%), this interest cannot be paid. In this case, beyond borrowing for production, borrowing to repay interest becomes inevitable. For financial capital, this type of debt is like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in another; it is impossible. Over the past 10 years, the Turkish economy has failed to achieve the necessary growth. As a result, the economy became awash in black money. As the Central Bank’s net error and omission item swelled, drug gangs became holding companies. But thanks to this, Turkey was able to avoid falling into a debt crisis.
The outcome for monopolies whose positions of collusion were shaken is quite dire: at this point, almost all of their profits are allocated to debt repayment. What has shaken the position of the collaborators over the last 25 years is their inability to return their own savings to the expanded reproduction process. Because it is the imperialist capital groups that decide how, when, on what scale, and for which markets production will take place. Collaborators, who produce for foreign markets through import-dependent production, have ceded all of the extra monopoly profit to their imperialist partners in this cycle. So what did they do with the smaller profits that remained for themselves? They turned them into wealth, into a form that does not produce surplus value. The main mechanism of this transformation is the gold and jewelry trade. But it was more construction activities.
Why construction? Because every capital flowing into this area receives its share of the economy’s total surplus value through rising land rents. Rent is one of the ways of appropriating surplus value created in other areas of production. Monopolies provide the money needed to construction companies, each of which is a real estate partnership, and in return, they own the mortgage papers of the offices and apartments built. These mortgages are certificates of participation in surplus value sharing through rising land prices. Again, thanks to these extensive real estate assets (mortgages), the collusive monopolies obtain collateral for new loans for the imperialist economy.
Incidentally, it has become fashionable to target the “gang of five” (Erdogan’s inner circle) through the production of housing, hospitals, airports, residences, etc. As if they were monopolizing all the rent. Yet they perform an indispensable function for monopoly capital: converting capital accumulation into wealth and multiplying this wealth through rent. But as the old saying goes, what comes from nothing goes to nothing. This wealth, which does not enter capital accumulation, i.e., expanded reproduction, is a fragment of debt and can only play a role as collateral for debt payments.
Vestel’s situation is a typical example of this. Europe had almost outsourced the production of white goods and electronic goods to Turkey. The situation in the automotive industry was even more pronounced. Inputs for these products were imported with high patent licensing fees and fed into the final assembly line. After China, Turkey became the second largest producer in this field, with 80% of its production exported. But the rule remained unchanged. As exports increase, imports also increase [Sabancı, one of Turkey’s largest industrialists, summarized this situation very clearly: “Our exports are 85%, but our foreign exchange debt is even higher.”]. Vestel became a “zombie,” constantly borrowing more to produce, constantly settling for less profit to be able to export, and converting its earnings into real estate wealth.
IX
The consequences of full economic subjugation in terms of labor were exposure to hellish exploitation. Recent studies have found that in some industries, the rate of exploitation (surplus value) reached an extraordinary level of 600%. Parallel to this, large monopolies and banks broke profit records, especially between 2015 and 2024. In fact, Marxists emerged who, looking at these high figures, claimed that the economy was not in crisis at all. However, the other side of the coin was quite dark. Despite unprecedented exploitation rates and record profit levels, this dark side shed light on why monopolies suddenly found themselves unable to service their debts.
In reality, monopoly capital had become unable to pay its debts as early as 2018. [As we can see in Table 3, even a 1.5-point drop in the credit rate between 2017 and 2019 was enough to change the situation]. However, the religious fascist government opened the treasury to monopolies that year and took over their debts, allowing them to survive as zombies for a while longer. But the price of plundering the treasury was high inflation. Cumulative inflation exceeded 250% between 2020 and 2025. On the other hand, the Central Bank’s reserves were depleted in order to suppress the exchange rate. Thanks to this, the exchange rate only increased by 100% in the same three years. This situation allowed monopolies that brought imported goods to the domestic market to make huge profits. In particular, storable goods such as dry legumes, meat, automotive, and electronic materials became more expensive due to inflation, while the exchange rate spent on imports lagged far behind the increase. As the gap (%250-%100) widened, importers achieved profits of up to 150%.
However, to the extent that this scheme raised domestic labor costs, it rapidly eroded profitability in total industrial production.
The fact that both production and consumption domestically depended on imported inputs turned the gap between inflation and the exchange rate into a sword of Damocles hanging over the monopolies. As the necessities for the reproduction of labor power became more expensive, labor itself became more expensive. But the real big increase was in inputs other than labor. That was the real problem. Ultimately, you can suppress labor, but you cannot manage input costs.
Although the cost of labor has increased, in contrast, labor is fighting a more intense battle for survival. A few years ago, the minimum wage, which had become the average wage, was below $200, but now it hovers around $650. However, the goods consumed by labor have increased much faster than this. Housing costs, in particular, have risen at a rate that is by far a world record. In other words, the most important element of the “full economic subjugation paradox” has revealed itself. The nominal-SAGP gap has closed. Now, many goods sold domestically are more expensive than even London’s most expensive neighborhoods. An apartment in Amasya, a small city in northern Turkey, costs as much as a mansion on the Miami-Malibu coast. This is a nightmare scenario not only for labor but also for financial capital.
Financial capital, in terms of full economic subjugation, does not care to what extent labor is exploited (even if it is 600%). What matters to it is securing two forms of profit: extra monopoly profit and interest on loans. Despite high exploitation, these are the profits that Turkish monopoly capitalism struggles to generate and, in some sectors, can no longer produce.
Excessively inflated production costs have brought profits in the industry as a whole close to zero. Even the extreme exploitation of excessively cheap labor could not prevent this decline. This is because the rate of increase in the cost of non-labor inputs was faster than the potential for increasing the rate of exploitation. To simplify: If 10 out of 100 units of cost used to be labor expenses, now 2 out of 100 units go to labor; but even increasing exploitation to five times its previous level is not enough to increase profits. In fact, the dilemma faced by monopolies due to their current position of cooperation is quite clear in this simple and confusing calculation. Ultimately, even if the rate of exploitation could be pushed to its maximum limit, Turkish monopoly capital cannot reduce its debts or pay the interest on them. Naturally, textile manufacturers with light and portable workbenches are migrating to Egypt, while financial capital is shifting automotive production to Eastern Europe at a slower pace. White goods manufacturers are crushed under the burden of debt and are collectively laying off workers. In other words, industry is disintegrating and dispersing.
First Sri Lanka, then Bangladesh and others, the full economic subjugation paradox has lined up dependent countries. Major uprisings await us.