Erhan Acar, Çalışma Hayatında Özyönetim Deneyimleri: Kazova Örneği, Istanbul: Sosyal Araştırmalar Vakfı (SAV), 2019, 208 pp. ISBN: 978-605-9816-12-0.
Erhan Acar’s Çalışma Hayatında Özyönetim Deneyimleri: Kazova Örneği is a comprehensive study of workers’ self-management in Turkey through historical experiences and the Kazova Textile resistance. Taking management and control relations in capitalist enterprises as its starting point, the book discusses workers’ attempts to establish collective control over the means of production and labour processes through both historical and contemporary examples. At the centre of the study is the Kazova resistance, which began in 2013, tracing its development from occupation to the reorganization of production and the experience of self-management.
The first part of the book addresses the question of self-management in the context of capitalist relations of production and the organization of the labour process. Alongside the concepts of alienation, management and control, occupation, and self-management, the study examines debates extending from utopian socialism to Marxism, as well as Taylorism, Fordism, and transformations in the capitalist organization of work. Workers’ self-management is thus situated not merely as an organizational form emerging in particular enterprises, but as a historical question arising in opposition to capital’s management and control over the production process.
The second part places Kazova within a historical continuity with earlier experiences of occupation and self-management in Turkey. Following discussions of the Derby and Singer factory occupations, the self-management experiences of Alpagut and Yeni Çeltek are examined, while struggles in Turkey are connected with worker-recovered enterprises in Argentina and similar experiences in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America. This historical transmission is also important for Kazova: the book emphasizes in particular the influence of the Alpagut experience on the Kazova workers’ turn towards occupation and self-management.
The third part, which constitutes the empirical core of the book, examines in detail the process of organization, resistance, occupation, and transition to self-management at Kazova Textile. The impact of the Gezi Park protests on the resistance, the formation of the Diren Kazova Cooperative, the attitudes of trade unions, the role of the press and social media, and the cultural and artistic activities developed during the resistance are addressed as different dimensions of this process. The study does not limit the Kazova experience to the continuation of production without bosses; it also draws attention to the workers’ attempt to transform everyday and cultural life alongside labour relations.
Acar also does not leave the internal contradictions and limitations of self-management outside the discussion. The book examines how disagreements among the Kazova workers resulted in the experience splitting into two organizations, the Diren Kazova Cooperative and the Özgür Kazova Textile Collective. Nevertheless, it notes that both organizations continued to pursue forms of organization based on common ownership of the means of production, mutual accountability among workers, democratic management, and solidarity. At the same time, attention is drawn to the danger that the competitive pressures of the capitalist market may push self-managed enterprises back towards the logic of capitalist relations of production.
In this respect, Çalışma Hayatında Özyönetim Deneyimleri: Kazova Örneği is one of the important studies establishing a direct connection between the historical accumulation of workers’ control and self-management in Turkey and a contemporary experience. It approaches Kazova not simply as a factory resistance, but as an attempt to create an alternative to capitalist labour relations through occupation, common ownership, collective production, democratic management, and solidarity. By also making visible Kazova’s internal divisions and the pressures of the market, the book enables an assessment not only of the possibilities of self-management but also of the organizational and structural problems it confronts.