Reproducing capitalism through survival: Pseudo-entrepreneurs and compensation-driven investors in Turkey

English (OpenAlex)

This article examines the restructuring of capitalist reproduction in neoliberal Turkey through two interlinked dynamics: the transformation of self-employment into pseudo-entrepreneurial outsourced labor and the increasing integration of wage earners into financial markets as a survival mechanism. Rather than democratizing opportunity, these processes represent new modalities of accumulation in which survival strategies are subsumed into capital. Drawing on post-2018 data, we argue that wage earners are increasingly positioned as both exploited labor and subordinate participants in rent-based regimes. We introduce “share-commodifying” to capture how stable wage relations are dismantled and reframed as entrepreneurial risk-bearing, and “compensation-driven financialization” to describe workers’ reliance on financial markets, not for wealth creation but to offset stagnant wages and insecurity. Together, these generate a “survival strategy trap”: adaptive responses to precarity that ultimately deepen market dependence and capitalist control, reorganizing social reproduction by turning coping strategies into vehicles of valorization.