Özlem Saadet Işıl and Selma Değirmenci (eds.), Yaşamı Örgütleyen Deneyimler: Kadınlar Dayanışma Ekonomilerini ve Kooperatifleri Tartışıyor, Istanbul: NotaBene Yayınları, 2020, 344 pp. ISBN: 978-605-260-253-9.
Edited by Özlem Saadet Işıl and Selma Değirmenci, Yaşamı Örgütleyen Deneyimler is an interdisciplinary work that examines solidarity economies, cooperatives, and different experiences of collective organisation from a gender perspective. Bringing together theoretical discussions and field research by women researchers, the book takes the effects of patriarchal capitalism on women’s labour and lives as its starting point and explores the possibilities and contradictions that solidaristic forms of economic organisation hold for women. One of its central concerns is whether cooperatives and solidarity economies can create emancipatory spaces of struggle for women or whether they may reproduce existing gender inequalities in different forms.
One of the book’s important features is that it does not discuss women’s place in solidarity economies solely through the lens of women’s cooperatives. Cooperatives, collectives, self-organised initiatives, worker-run factories, workplaces without bosses, initiatives, and various forms of solidaristic organisation are considered as parts of a broader field of alternative economies. The book examines how gender relations are shaped within these structures, the extent to which women participate in decision-making processes, and whether alternative forms of economic organisation can transform inequalities in the sphere of social reproduction. It thus emphasises that cooperative or collective forms of organisation alone do not guarantee democratic and emancipatory relations.
The collection brings together theoretical debates on solidarity economies with concrete experiences of organisation in Turkey. Alongside conceptual discussions of patriarchy and solidarity economies, alternative economies, commoning, and food, the development of women’s cooperatives in Turkey and policies concerning this field are assessed from class and gender perspectives. Issues such as the position of women’s labour in food production, the unequal distribution of care work, and women’s organisation within ecological production processes are also examined through different field studies. The possibilities of solidarity economies are therefore discussed not only in terms of economic relations, but also in relation to the transformation of labour, social reproduction, and gender relations.
The scope of the book extends from cooperatives to the commons, from ecological production to rural development and urban forms of collective organisation. Through examples such as ecological producer cooperatives and collectives in different regions of Turkey, the rural development experience in the Kavar Basin, collective gardens in Istanbul, and food communities, the book examines the different spatial and social forms taken by solidaristic organisation. These experiences reveal not only women’s participation in existing economic structures, but also their potential to transform the ways in which production, consumption, care, food, and the commons are organised.
Yaşamı Örgütleyen Deneyimler critically discusses the tension between the emancipatory potential of solidarity economies and the risk of reproducing patriarchal and capitalist relations. While the spread of women’s cooperatives may create new possibilities for women’s collective organisation and economic empowerment, it may also carry the risk that production and care activities traditionally undertaken by women continue under precarious conditions. The book therefore proposes looking not only at the forms of ownership or legal structures of alternative economic organisations, but also at the division of labour, decision-making processes, gender relations, and forms of democratic participation within them.
In this respect, Yaşamı Örgütleyen Deneyimler is an important reference work that brings a feminist and gender-centred perspective to debates on solidarity economies, cooperativism, and collective self-organisation. From the perspective of workers’ control and self-management, the fundamental question raised by the book is also significant: for an alternative and collective organisation to be genuinely emancipatory, is it sufficient merely to escape the control of capital or the conventional enterprise structure, or must the gendered division of labour, power relations, and decision-making mechanisms within the organisation itself also be transformed? By discussing this question through experiences ranging from women’s cooperatives to the commons and from food communities to ecological collectives, the book makes visible the gender dimension of democratic and solidaristic economic organisation.