Deniz Gürler, İşgal, Direniş, Üretim!: İşçi Denetimi Mücadelesi, Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2023, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-975-05-3546-8.
İşgal, Direniş, Üretim! is a study that examines factory occupations within the historical development of the struggle for workers’ control and self-management. It discusses factory occupation not simply as a more radical form of strike or protest, but as an action that directly intervenes in existing relations of ownership and work. As workers take effective control over the means of production and the workplace, occupation becomes a form of struggle that challenges capital’s right to manage and raises the question of “who should manage the workplace?”
Within this framework, the book examines the major factory occupation movements of the twentieth century within their historical and economic contexts. It discusses the conditions under which struggles for workers’ control emerged in different periods, the relationship between factory occupations and broader workers’ movements, and the circumstances in which occupations developed towards workers’ control over production and management. Factory occupations are thus understood not as isolated events, but as parts of a longer struggle for workers’ control and self-management that has re-emerged in different historical periods.
The second central axis of the study concerns the continuities and differences between the factory occupations of the twentieth century and the “occupied factories movement” that emerged in the twenty-first century. While a significant proportion of earlier factory occupations were national-scale movements that arose in particular political conjunctures and were relatively short-lived, some factories taken over through occupation in the contemporary period have developed into long-lasting experiences of workers’ self-management. Moreover, these experiences have not remained confined to a single country, but have emerged in different countries and developed relations of solidarity with one another. For this reason, the book conceptualizes the contemporary phenomenon not simply as “factory occupations,” but as the “occupied factories movement.”
The book focuses particularly on the conditions of neoliberal globalization within which this movement emerged. Processes such as factory closures, unemployment, the liberalization of capital movements, deindustrialization, and the weakening of traditional workers’ organizations are examined as the economic and social background against which workers occupy their factories and restart production under their own control. At the same time, although workers may transform relations of ownership and management within the factory, they cannot alter to the same extent the market conditions within which they continue to operate; consequently, the tension between self-management and the external pressures of the capitalist market is treated as one of the central problems confronting these experiences.
Examining occupied factories in different geographical contexts, particularly experiences in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, the study does not approach the movement solely within the framework of worker cooperativism. While some occupied factories adopt the cooperative form, others advocate different forms of ownership, such as nationalization under workers’ control. For the book, what is decisive is not so much the legal form of organization as workers taking control of the means of production through militant collective action and reorganizing production on the basis of relations of self-management.
In this sense, İşgal, Direniş, Üretim! understands contemporary occupied factories not as a new phenomenon disconnected from earlier struggles for workers’ control, but as a contemporary form of the struggle for workers’ control and self-management that has re-emerged under different conditions and in different forms throughout history. Occupied factories are neither fully realized models of self-management existing outside capitalist relations nor structures capable of replacing trade unions and other workers’ organizations. Nevertheless, by demonstrating workers’ capacity to establish direct collective control over production and management, they offer another perspective of struggle through which the working class can intervene in how and by whom production and the workplace are managed.