Intractable Subjective Outcomes of Labor Mobilizations: A Prolonged Case from Turkey

• In Event: 036 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 06. Worker and Union Strategies and Structures: Beyond the United States

Abstract

This paper is about a still ongoing case of collective mobilization lasted for nearly six years full with ups and downs, which experienced quite unexpected twists and developments. The case provides a privileged view of both mobilization and demobilization, both resistance and compliance, both revolutionizing and regressing of subjectivities. It reveals the extraordinary and the ordinary together, and more importantly the ongoing oscillations in between. The mobilization could be counted as a quite successful in many ways. However, success is always a relative term and the paper problematizes it in two ways. Firstly, by making a methodological point, I show how crucial is the time, when we leave the field and conclude our story, for our case to appear as a success or failure. Secondly, I scrutinize a not much examined dimension of success: How the workers have changed subjectively due to the struggle? This question is vital because labor movement needs much more than another unionized workplace, whose workers became more or less pleased and concerned mainly with their own rights and benefits later on. To speak about a real success, at least some part of the newly organized workers should actually join in the labor movement by embracing some form of a class-struggle subjectivity and practice it at least for some considerable period of time. Otherwise the success would not mean much more than to add a tiny group of workers within the labor aristocracy, a minority in almost everywhere but especially in the global South.

Author

• Alpkan Birelma, Bogazici University