Metin Yeğin, Patronsuzlar, Istanbul: Versus Kitap, 2006, 220 pp. ISBN: 9944-989-10-X.
Metin Yeğin’s Patronsuzlar is a work that provides a first-hand account of experiences of occupation, workers’ control, and collective production developed by workers in Latin America in response to factory closures, unemployment, and impoverishment caused by neoliberal policies. Based on journeys undertaken by Yeğin together with Dilek Çolak, field observations, and direct interviews with workers, the book is less a conventional academic study than a film-book and field narrative. In the book’s introduction, the common feature of these experiences is explicitly identified as “workers’ control”; its point of departure is the refusal of workers to abandon factories that have closed or gone bankrupt, their occupation of these workplaces, the protection of machinery, and the collective restarting of production.
One of the book’s important features is that it does not subsume the experiences of occupation in different countries under a single model, but instead compares their different political and organisational orientations. The book’s main sections approach Brazil through “occupied factory–nationalisation,” Uruguay through “occupied factory–trade union,” Argentina through “occupied factory–self-management,” and Mosconi through “piqueteros–direct democracy.” Patronsuzlar thus places side by side different responses to the question of how workers can continue production when the owner withdraws or abandons the enterprise: demands for state ownership/nationalisation, trade-union organisation, cooperativisation and self-management, or direct democracy and direct action.
In Yeğin’s narrative, workers’ control becomes visible not merely as a change in ownership or management but also as a reorganisation of everyday labour relations. The interviews describe in detail such practices as the role of general assemblies in decision-making, factory committees and coordinators, the open disclosure of financial information to workers, and the collective organisation of production and responsibilities. The disappearance of the boss and traditional management also requires workers to collectively address tasks previously undertaken by management, ranging from obtaining raw materials and dealing with electricity and financing problems to securing workers’ insurance and reorganising production.
The book also reflects the limits of these experiences and the debates within them. Some workers in Brazil argue that cooperativisation can weaken workers’ rights and turn workers into their own bosses under the pressures of the capitalist market, and therefore foreground the demand for nationalisation. In Argentina, by contrast, assembly culture, cooperativisation, and self-management come more clearly to the fore, with particular emphasis on autonomous decision-making and on the capacity of occupied factories to generate a broader social struggle. At the same time, the book discusses problems such as shortages of capital and credit, market pressures, the weakening of ties with other social movements, and the erosion of solidarity.
From this perspective, Patronsuzlar is an important Turkish-language source that presents workers’ control and self-management not as abstract ideals but through concrete struggles, forms of organisation, and everyday problems of management. The book’s value lies not only in offering first-hand testimonies concerning occupied factories in Latin America, but also in making visible, from a comparative perspective, the different paths of nationalisation, trade-union organisation, cooperativisation, self-management, and direct democracy. It therefore provides an important resource for thinking about both how production “without bosses” becomes possible and the political choices, economic constraints, and problems of collective organisation that such experiences confront.