The military coup of July 15th... a late counterrevolutionary coup

It’s been a while since the officers’ caste wanted to intervene before the settling of Erdogan’s bourgeois fraction and the displacement of other fractions from the business deals, because the very military party was among those excluded. Erdogan had named new generals and high ranks of the army. He had transferred under the control of the governmental institutions (under AKP control) the trading of weaponry and collecting commissions for the gas and oil flow.
The first symptoms of the beginning of the end of the cycle appeared in 2013. The business deals in Turkey were shrinking. The officers caste had to establish order and mostly reinforce and Bonapartize even more the inner regime, since the situation was that inside the national borders of Turkey there was an over-accumulation of Turkish capitals that need to be expanded, to dispute spheres of influence. So they needed a strong control inside to go to the disputes.
The officer’s caste of the Turkish armed forces saw that they had to be on top of all the bourgeois fractions and take the command of this situation to look after the interests of the whole Turkish bourgeoisie.

But it couldn’t go for the coup in that moment. It had to wait until last July 15th because, from 2013 to 2015, the masses were on the streets. To try and attempt a coup under those circumstances would’ve opened the danger that they directly clash against the Turkish state and defeat it. The generals had to wait until Erdogan crush the masses. So they left the government to deal with them.
First, Erdogan crushed the uprising in the whole Turkey that had its centre in Taksim Square, in Istanbul. Then, with its trade union bureaucracy, it took care of defeating the uprising in 2014 that had as highest point the general strike. It has defeated the hard struggle staged by the Turkish working class sector by sector (metalworkers, auto workers and so on) during the entire 2014 and beginning of 2015. It enslaved the Syrian refugees in working shifts of 12 hours a day, with no rights at all, and with 20% of the average salary. The persecution and attack on the working class and the subjugated people of Kurdistan took a leap forward in the second half of 2015, when the regime started to reinforce itself more and more.

At the same time, while Erdogan was doing all of these, he was also settling his gang in the state institutions, displacing the military party. When he finished doing the “dirty work” of crushing the masses, Erdogan had already made a police that responds to him, parallel intelligence services, bout high rank officers of the armed forces that became addicts to his fraction, and he got also judges and DA’s that responded to him. That’s why July 15th coup d’état came late, because when it was attempted, the military party had already lost too much influence. Erdogan was already a majority.
Besides, it had won a huge social base in the rich middle classes and peasants that got rich with the last growth cycle, at the expenses of the working class and mostly of their subjugated sectors like the Kurdish and the refugees. He had also set up paramilitary shock forces of his AKP party. This is what took to the streets (when Erdogan called them) against the coup last July 15th.

Erdogan didn’t want to be a “squeezed lemon”, that is to say, that his only job was to crush the masses and then be removed from power by the officers of the army. So he moved first. He found out that the coup was coming, thanks to his parallel intelligence services and when that happened, he evaluated the situation. He saw he was a majority in the armed forces, in the police, in the justice and in the ministries… plus he had the AKP gangs and his social base. That’s why instead of arresting the coup plotters before they attempted it, he let the coup attempt to take place so he could defeat it and then use the generated situation to accelerate even more the Bonapartization process he was doing.