Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Rural Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jrurstud The (re)production of the new peasantry in Turkey Murat Öztürk a , Joost Jongerden b,c,* , Andy Hilton d a Kirklareli University, Turkey b Wageningen University, The Netherlands c Kyoto University, Japan d Istanbul Technical University, Turkey ABSTRACT The recent, neoliberal period has seen a deepening penetration of capital into agriculture in Turkey alongside mass urban migration. This would seem to imply the realisation of classical political economic theory, which argues for the demise of the peasantry. Yet, while the number of people living in villages in Turkey has declined quite dramatically in recent years, the number of smallholdings has not. We address this apparent anomaly in terms of strategies of resistance, emphasising the adaptive and creative agency of the peasantry. For this, we employ a combination of (mostly) state-produced statistics with our own quantitative and qualitative research in villages across Turkey as well as with urban migrants. We observe the development of a dual-circuit articulation that combines the farm and family as systems of commoning together with capital engagement, which means financial inputs, particularly through engagement with the market and labour relations, and which is ultimately enabled through a wide variety of living arrangements. Thus, we argue that the traditional analysis of a dif- ferentiation process in capitalist development, the bifurcation of simple and extended reproduction in which the former is squeezed out, is refuted or transcended by people motivated by a core value of holding onto their land and maintaining the family farm. The result is a broad concept of the ‘new peasantry’, one that is rooted in the family farm but nevertheless integrates capitalistic relations, is not bound by agriculture and transcends the rural-urban division of space. 1. Introduction The agrarian question has been much discussed in Turkey. 1 In the 1960s and 70s, the focus of this debate was on whether the structure of Turkish agriculture was semi-feudal or capitalist in character (Seddon and Margulies, 1984). The 1980s, however, changed this debate, as Turkey, along with much of the rest of the world, initiated a funda- mental shift away from state-led models of economic development to that of neoliberal globalisation, along the lines of the Washington Consensus. In the early 2000s, wide-ranging and huge cuts were made in Turkey's agricultural sector, with the scaling down and termination of state production and distribution facilities (including processing and packaging plants) and marketing and market protection mechanisms (including fixed-price purchases and high import duties) (Eşiyok, 2004). In this new context, the debate about the agrarian question in Turkey took on new dimensions, related now to deagrarianisation and the absolute decline of the rural population. Indeed, village life itself seemed to be dying, and with it, the peasantry. Particularly in the light of the earlier discussions on Turkey's agrarian question in terms of feudalism, a preliminary word on termi- nology –‘peasant’ and ‘the peasantry’– is in order here. Although there was/is no word for ‘peasant’ in the Ottoman language or modern Turkish – the nearest being ‘rençber’ (poor farmer, rural labourer) and ‘köylü’ (villager) – this term can be applied to the Anatolian situation in its generalised meaning of smallholder/subsistence farmer, and ‘pea- santry’ is a reasonable translation of ‘köylülük’, the abstract noun made from the word for ‘villager’ and sometimes used in scholarly work. Basically, we take ‘the peasant way’ to centre on the maintenance of a non-commodity reproduction circuit (Van der Ploeg, 2013: 29), through which smallholders assert control over the reproduction of their own farms. Beyond what is referred to as subsistence farming, however, the (new, contemporary) peasant way of production also in- volves a commodity circuit, and, as we show in this article, is even dependent on it. There is an ambiguity inherent in this approach, highlighted by the fact that when the commodity circuit starts to dominate the re- production of the farm, the farm may become structured by the logic of capital. The duality of commodity and non-commodity – or commodity https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2017.10.009 Received 2 August 2017; Received in revised form 2 October 2017; Accepted 29 October 2017 * Corresponding author. Wageningen University, The Netherlands. E-mail addresses: moztrk@gmail.com (M. Öztürk), joost.jongerden@wur.nl (J. Jongerden), andysevgi@hotmail.com (A. Hilton). 1 See also TB (2001), Boratav, K. (1981, 1985, 2009), Köymen, O. (2008), Öztürk, M. (2010, 2012), Toprak, Z. (1988).