facility:spine tower

  • On Erdogan’s ‘Ordinary Things’: The Soma Massacre, the Spine Tower, and the Corporate-State’s Fitrat in Turkey
    http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/17742/on-erdogan%25E2%2580%2599s-%25E2%2580%2598ordinary-things%25E2%2580%2599_

    This “Labor Massacre,” and not “work accident,” illustrates the deadly and despicable effects of the “high pace of development” enshrined in the fitrat of Erdoğan’s corporate-state. Further, it reflects how that “development” produces and depends upon a variety of disasters in the cities and the hinterland. The Soma Massacre is not a calamity that has befallen the Soma miners, but a massacre committed against an entire town under the increasingly reckless and callous subcontractor (taseron) capitalism of Erdoğan’s “corporate-state.” Among the elements that constitute the particularity of the Erdoğan form is that the disposability of these particular bodies, all 321 of them and counting, is expected to be cloaked over in a language of takdir-i ilahi (divine predestination) and fitrat (genesis).

    The particular form that capitalist destruction takes under Erdoğan—and the scale and pace of the plunder economy it forms and performs—is reflected in the connections between the depths of the Soma mine and the heights of the Spine Tower, the luxury residence tower that looms imposingly over Istanbul’s Little Dubai in Maslak (Image). The Soma Group that “rents” the coal mine in Soma also happens to be the force behind the “Spine Tower.” With luxury flats for sale starting at 3.4 million USD in the Tower, the Soma Group has registered a 250 percent increase in production over the course of the last six months alone. At the same time, construction workers were faced with lowered wages, deteriorating working conditions, and a complete lack of emergency safety infrastructure in Soma. As a short article on Diken has put it: the cost of twenty safety rooms to ensure the possibility of evacuation for up to eight hundred miners in Soma would have been the equivalent of the cumulative price of four of these luxury flats in Maslak. This fact alone is maddening enough in the aftermath of the Soma Massacre to inspire a mass movement demanding that the Soma Group and its state-level beneficiaries be brought to justice and held accountable for the man-made catastrophe they have wrought.

    #Turquie #capitalisme #travail