The AK Party's 15-year reckoning: the balance of infrastructure and superstructure

In politics you can never find a frictionless, tensionless, obstacle-free, rosy environment for what you want to achieve. It has never been seen that a society was handed over to any political movement so that it could build a society or order in keeping with its ideals. There is no such easy field of politics. Politics is by its very nature difficult.

Even any two people living together quickly open up a field in which their interests, and therefore their views, begin to diverge and often to clash. All the more so since society, being a field of conflicting interests and tension, leaves no group with pure, absolute power. Even governments thought to have the most absolute power can penetrate only very few dimensions of society. And the most interesting areas that cannot be penetrated are people's very own institutions, teams or fellow travelers.

The moment you feel you have gained a certain superiority over the opponents directly across from you, you see a resistance, an incompatibility or unforeseen developments emerging in your own ranks.

When the AK Parti came to power on 3 November 2002, because of the resistance it faced, it for quite a long time displayed its practice of governing in a manner that advanced by clashing. Many times it could not do what it wanted; many times, what it had set out to do it ended up, at the end of the day, revising and doing differently. Of course, it set out with a political program, and it fulfilled many of this program's quantitative targets and more. Especially what it did in the field of development, up to a point, exceeded even its own targets. It set a target of 15 thousand km of divided highways, reached this target ahead of time, and extended it to 20 thousand km.

The AK Parti, when setting out, had a cadre that knew its business, dynamic and sufficiently competent and capable, but the road itself also taught this cadre a great deal. The new acquis learned and gained along the way joined the caravan. The dynamism that road construction in transportation and TOKİ construction in housing set off in the sector quickly became the dynamic of a serious sociological transformation. The entrepreneurs who grew up with the experience gained here have made Turkey today the world's biggest brand in construction after China.

Under the squeeze of the deep power it faced and the ideological coup rhetoric, the AK Parti had to put many things together along the way. It was in a hurry. Developing a better housing type was, in the early days, far too much of a luxury. As for making calculations to raise a better type of human being and implementing them, it was able to graduate to that only in the last period of its rule. In its place, for a long time it contented itself with making only the finest investments in the infrastructure of education.

In this context, it raised the number of universities from 77 to 185. It completed the project of establishing at least one university in every province in 2007. "A university in every province" meant, on the one hand, extending educational opportunity to everyone, but until 2011 there was a coefficient practice operating openly and deliberately against precisely this equality of opportunity.

On the other hand, a university also meant a "chimneyless factory," so that the spread of development to every part of the country would also be ensured. It would both produce employment and make university knowledge an important contribution to the development of cities, and it did. Today in every city in Anatolia there are clear differences between before and after the university in terms of the city's environmental, economic and cognitive development.

In fact, in an environment in which the world was rapidly turning toward the service sector, Turkey for the first time caught a trend on time without delay. Because the most important condition for adapting to the service sector is having a strong educational infrastructure.

In any case, thanks to this development drive, the spread of prosperity to broader masses was also ensured, and thus social justice acquired a structural foundation. Today it is very clear that the universities established in the provinces have played an important role in the realization of these goals, even if colorlessly and without ideology. But when these universities and the sociological transformation they brought about are evaluated in terms of the claims based on the AK Parti's worldview, they do not give the impression of a commensurate development.

It is very clear that there has not been an intensification parallel to the investments made in the infrastructure of the universities with regard to the understanding and quality of science, academic custom and style, and history, culture and mentality transformation. For this reason there is a discomfort felt in the AK Parti base. Although its causes rest on understandable reasons as explained above, at the end of 15 years there is no luxury of voicing any excuse for this disproportion.

The same applies at every stage of education and in the field of culture. On the side of the matter touching development, much was done in little time, that is, in the infrastructure, but developments in the superstructure could not follow this at the same speed.

A strange thing. This difference in speed or rhythm between infrastructure and superstructure is also a situation that Marxists have always talked about a great deal. But they express it not as a complaint but as a situation arising from the nature of the matter (for example, Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction).

Of course it is not possible to compare the AK Parti's experience with the course of any socialist movement, and we are not about to take refuge in the nature of the matter and be content with what is.

Ultimately, in the sense that the desired values and the desired type of human being could not keep up with the distance covered in development, all political movements face a tragic test. The AK Parti is of course not exempt from this test.

This stage of the movement requires, precisely for it, an intense self-reckoning and struggle with the self (nefs).