To Prevent Words from Running Out of Meaning: The
making of solidarity in grassroots activism in Croatia
Master Thesis
In completion of the Research Master in Social Sciences (RMSS) Program
Author: Korana Radman Student number: 10463941
korana.radman@gmail.com
Supervisor: Matthijs van de Port
M.P.J.vandePort@uva.nl
August 2014
Graduate School of Social Sciences (GSSS) University of Amsterdam
ABSTRACT
Since the onset of the global economic crisis in 2008, and the austerity measures introduced to contain it, the world has attested to a considerable rise in contentious politics. Mapping and capturing the textures of this discontent, anthropologists have recently pointed out that these movements are preconfiguring the very notion of political, by practicing a more open-ended, situated and knowledge-based politics. However, very few have turned to studying new forms of collective action emerging in the post-socialist spaces. Building on these approaches, in this thesis I explore the relationship between political action, knowledge-practices and solidarity in everyday political practice in Croatia. Based on five months of ethnographic fieldwork among political activists in Zagreb, I demonstrate the centrality of knowledge, research and analysis for the movement’s politics, and the role of such knowledge-practices for cultivating and expanding solidarity networks. Furthermore, I show the extent to which such orientation to knowledge is a product of contextually specific circumstances, as it is linked with histories and experiences of past struggles. Lastly, based on activists’ reflections on their own experiences, I argue that this kind of political practice has the potential to transform and bring about fundamentally different political subjectivities.
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION 4
1.1. SOCIAL MOVEMENTS - PRODUCERS OF KNOWLEDGE AND SUBJECTIVITIES 7 1.2. ‘MESSINESS’ OF COLLECTIVE ACTION AND EMERGENT SOLIDARITIES 10
1.3. CONTEXT OF MY RESEARCH 15
CHAPTER 2: PUTTING KNOWLEDGE INTO MOTION 18
2.1. RECOGNIZING THE KNOWLEDGE-PRACTICES 18
2.2. CONTINUITIES AND DISCONTINUITIES WITH THE STUDENT MOVEMENT 24
2.3. ACTIVISM ‘AFTER HOURS’ 27
CHAPTER 3: SOLIDARITY-IN-THE-MAKING 35
3.1. TRADE UNION ORGANIZING IN CROATIA – A BRIEF INTRODUCTION 35
3.2. “IT’S A QUESTION OF BUILDING THE SOLIDARITY” 39
3.3. FROM FRICTIONS TO ‘VULNERABLE’ POLITICS 46
CHAPTER FOUR: TO PREVENT WORDS FROM “RUNNING OUT OF
MEANING” (DISCUSSION) 51
4.1. THE BALANCING ACT OF DOING POLITICS 52
EPILOGUE 56
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
I want to begin this story about solidarity, activism and politics of social movements in a somewhat unusual way – with a confession. During the course of my research, and probably in spite of everything anthropologists are taught to do, I have myself become enthralled by the subject of my research – activists of a small political group in Zagreb. This, naturally, took me by surprise. At first, I consciously sought ways to create distance. I would limit myself from spending too much time among the activists. My academic training pushed me to look for idiosyncrasies and tensions, because that is where the most interesting stories usually are, event though I felt sympathetic to their cause. About halfway into my fieldwork, I experienced a strong bout of melancholy. Overcome with anxiety that my research was leading nowhere, I spent an entire week in bed. I had lost my appetite, and more importantly, my ability to write. Back then, I chose to interpret my sadness as a sign of fatigue, so I decided to give myself some time off.
In the weeks following my lapse, things took a turn for the better. I felt more engaged, and all of a sudden my observations on solidarity started making more sense. I continued with my research driven by this newfound inspiration, as if nothing had happened. It was not until the last fieldwork report that I sensed that something had shifted in me. In hindsight, I realize now that the crisis I experienced had very little to do with being overworked. The more I recognized how diligent, knowledgeable and humble my interlocutors are, and observing to what extent their political practice was based on deeds instead of ‘empty’ discourses, the more I became enthused by what they did. While I partially expected to find people who love to perorate about how to take down the neoliberal capitalist regime (which, granted, says more about my own misconceptions), I had discovered them to be self-critical and reflexive, clear-headed and measured in their words and actions – resembling more in my mind what I know of academia than political activism. This left a profound impression on me. In that sense, the story I present here is as much a story about solidarity and politics, as it is a story of my personal transformation from a sympathetic agnostic to an outright ‘believer’.
While it might not be unusual for social movement scholars to openly identify with the politics of the movements they are studying (cf. Edelman 2001), it might seem out of the ordinary to describe this experience in the terminology of religious studies. While the two research experiences certainly deserve a more thoughtful comparison, my understanding of the term ‘believer’ here draws on Katherine Ewing’s (1994) experiences with researching Sufism in Pakistan. In the essay, Ewing extensively criticizes the notion of ‘going native’, arguing that anthropologists “are drawn, sometimes unwillingly, into
the nets of significance cast by the people among whom they conduct research and are thrust into their discourse and debates” (1994: 578), making them a part of the communities they are studying. In a similar way, Kirin Nayan argued that this qualification rests on an erroneous assumption about researcher’s own identity as singular and unproblematic (1993: 676). In that sense, rather than being described as a ‘native’ anthropologist ‘gone native’, my position here is closer to what Katherine Ewing understood as a position of a ‘believer’; a researcher who takes her interlocutors seriously, allowing “them to play a role in shaping what are ultimately realities we share as participants in a global human community” (ibidem: 579).
During my research1, I spent most of my days in Zagreb observing, participating and talking to members of a left-oriented organization called OWID2 (Organization for Workers Initiative and Democratization). The first time I had heard of OWID was when I came across an invitation on one of the social networks for a workshop they had organized on the topic on how to organize solidarity. The speakers were diverse, and included, among others, some of my former colleagues from the human rights NGOs in Zagreb. The term solidarity, which is still more closely associated with the Yugoslav state-socialism rather than the vibrant leftist political movement in Croatia, immediately caught my attention. It had seemed that OWID was, among other things, interested in building a wider solidarity platforms. This had sparked my interest. Motivated by some of the ethnographic approaches to solidarity in collective action (Fantasia 1988), as well as an interest in how things “stick together” (Latour 2005: 13), I wanted to explore how solidarity is enacted. I was especially interested in how social movements like OWID engage in building solidarity. I argue that focusing on such processes of solidarity making, which have rarely been the topic of anthropological research, can offer a new perspective on why politics practiced within such movements matter – both to those that practice them, as well as for the society in general. In order to come to understand better how solidarity was enacted, for the duration of my research I became de facto a member of OWID. I attended the monthly meetings and public workshops, joined and observed some of the workgroups3, participated in several protests and attended other events which
1 I conducted my research in Croatia, from beginning of September 2013 until late January
2014.
2 In Croatian, the organization is called BRID (Baza za radničku inicijativu i demokratizaciju). 3 I have observed and participated two workgroups within OWID. “Grupa za migrantski rad” 2 In Croatian, the organization is called BRID (Baza za radničku inicijativu i demokratizaciju). 3
I have observed and participated two workgroups within OWID. “Grupa za migrantski rad” [Group for Migrant Work] was a research group set up to collect data and information on the prevalence of migrant work, primarily in Croatia, and to try to establish contact with some of the workers that were involved in that type of labor. The group “Analiza zakona o radu”
were frequented by OWID’s activists, such as public lectures and conferences. Additionally, through courtesy of OWID’s members and their syndical partners, I was also privileged enough to extend my observations to the daily operations of a local trade union, with whom they have developed a close working relationship. Aside from better understanding of OWID’s activities, this enabled me to get an insider perspective on the syndical activism in Croatia, in which OWID was partially embedded. For a short while, I also observed and followed the work of “Ženska fronta za radna i socijalna prava” [Women’s Front for Labor and Social Rights], a feminist ad-hoc platform comprised of activists, NGO professionals, and unionists together with some OWID members, which monitored the process of drafting of the new labor legislation in Croatia.
By the same token, given the emphasis of recent anthropological literature transformative nature of collective action for subjectivities of those involved in them (Osterweil 2013, Razsa and Kurnik 2012, Juris 2008), I wondered whether activists of OWID experience their own engagements as equally transformative. To that extent, asides from the observation and participation, a good portion of my time in the field was spent engaging in conversations, and sometimes even formal interviews, with OWID’s activists. While the conversations were important for broadening my understanding of OWID and were not registered verbatim, formal interviews were an opportunity for me to inquire about the history of OWID, development of their politics as well as for activists to reflect personally on their engagement in OWID. The narratives presented here were all taken from the transcripts of the formal interviews, with the exception of one narrative that is indicated as acquired otherwise. While these narratives certainly provide additional insight into the processes I have observed, they also partially tell a story of “the ways in which persons are constituted through social experience” (Biehl, Good and Kleinman 2007: 13).
In that sense, my research here follows the recent anthropological scholarship that sees the social movements as political processes aimed at reinvigorating democracy (Nugent 2012), which are embedded in extensive critiques of capitalism and austerity measures (Fominaya and Cox 2013). Based on ethnographic approaches to collective action and the everyday aspects of social movements, these studies have likewise raised important question in regards to the interconnectedness between collective action, deliberative practices and production new forms of subjectivities. In that sense,
[Labour Legislation Analysis] was set up to analyze and compare the old Labor Law to the newly drafted version, which was supposed to be presented to the Croatian Parliament that winter.
my research follows this recent shift in literature that seems to move away from studying social movements through the perspective of grand events, towards studying social movements as ongoing, creative political processes.
1.1. Social movements - producers of knowledge and subjectivities
In the article “Blurring Boundaries: Recognizing Knowledge-Practices in the Study of Social Movements”, Maria Isabel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil and Diana E. Powell convincingly argue that majority of what movements do, in their everyday practice, is produce and act upon various forms of knowledge (2008: 19-20). Building on their own ethnographic research on social movements, as well as the social movements scholarship after the “cultural turn”, authors critically argue that the knowledge produced within the movements is politically productive (ibidem: 26). Such an approach radically expands what constitutes and counts as knowledge to include:
…stories, ideas, narratives, and ideologies, but also theories, expertise, as well as political analyses and critical understandings of particular contexts. Their creation, modification and diverse enactments are what we call “knowledge-practice”…Knowledge-practices in our view range from things we are more classically trained to define as knowledge, such as practices that engage and run parallel to the knowledge of scientists or policy experts, to micro-political and cultural interventions that have more to do with “know-how” or the “cognitive praxis that informs all social activity” and which vie with the most basic social institutions that teach us how to be in the world…( Casas-Cortés , Osterweil and Powell 2008: 21)
Studying such practices, then, contributes to understanding social movements as political processes that produce new forms of politics and subjectivities, as well as social change, through a series of material and embodied practices, which are enacted in everyday life of activists (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell 2008: 51).
In a similar fashion, Michal Osterweil recently argued that, while the knowledge-work of movements “blurs” the boundary between academic and activist knowledge, it produces subjectivities that “know, think and do differently” (2013: 600). Osterweil starts her discussion of the Italian
Movimiento dei movimenti (MoM) by positing that what activists do, on a
day-to-day basis, is to engage in “a series of material practices of analyses, deliberation, contemplation and research”, that make up the theoretical practices or knowledge-practices (2013: 606). In that way, activists:
…chip away at the hegemonic or totalizing vision of social and political reality, instigating experimental or spectacular actions that have semiotic or preconfiguring effects on people’s imaginations and impinge on their way engaging with and perceiving society as it currently stands…These practices help create the conditions of possibility for new ways of being in the world,
challenge what we consider to be valid or viable knowledge or truth claims, and reconceptualize the kinds of “real” entities that populate the socio-political terrain (Osterweil 2013: 607)
However, such strong statements about prefigurative effects of movements on “new ways of being in the world” are hardly substantiated by Osterweil’s ethnographic account. Activists from her ethnography talk about quite abstract concepts rather than the way they experience their own engagement; like the activist who explains how MoM challenges the “classical polarities of the 20th century”, such as reform and revolution, and another positing that MoM is “the only possible anti-body, the only possibility for rethinking of the political in terms of…real political participation” (Osterweil 2013: 608).
The distinction between subjective and collective processes gets even further blurred as MoM is described as the “becoming movement”, due to its “ongoing practice of investigation, experimentation, and imagination” that the activists recognize as “becoming” (Osterweil 2013: 609). This introduces a problematic shift in her analysis, as it uncritically equates processes through which one becomes a different subject while participating in collective action and processes through which the movement itself is in the process of becoming. This shift from personal to collective is problematic on several levels. By conflating two very different processes of becoming, Osterweil further obfuscates the actual everyday experiences of activists, leaving the reader with the impression that subjectivities are changed habitually, just by participating in social movements. Likwise, one could very easily argue that activists who have taken part in MoM have done so precisely because they were already different subjects to begin with. In that sense, in Osterweil’s account of subjectivity seems to be somewhat one-dimensional.
Similarly, in their ethnography of Occupy Slovenia, Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik offer insights into the relationship between subjectivity and direct democratic practices (2012: 240). Razsa and Kurnik show that Occupy Slovenia, unlike its counterparts in the United States, builds on the experiences of previous local collective struggles, from alter-globalization movement from struggles for minority rights (ibidem). Furthermore, drawing on João Biehl and Peter Locke’s (2010) concept of “becoming”, the authors argue that the anthropology of (direct) democracy would benefit from focusing more on the “forms of open-ended subject making…embedded in and constitutive of collective struggle” (2012: 241). In that sense, rather than “emphasizing the prefigurative qualities of direct democracy”, the authors focus on what they recognize as the “politics of becoming” (ibidem). According to the authors, such politics was most pronounced in the workings of Workshop for Direct Social Work.
The Workshop, while being open to other participants, mostly brought together social workers and users of social services who, in spite of the antagonistic nature of their relationship, engaged in a “process of dialogue, common study and reflection – as well as weekly direct actions” (Razsa and Kurnik 2012: 249). Through sharing their mutual experience, problems, needs and desires, the social workers and the marginalized produced “a new intersubjective understanding and consensus” (ibidem). The workshops, thus, became themselves spaces of encounters “grounded in common struggle”, in which such differences came together and were transformed in the process (ibidem). In other words, the activists and participants of Occupy movement in Slovenia have engaged in a continual and open-ended “self-conscious processes of becoming-other-than-it-now-is” (ibidem: 250). In that sense, the activists became different subjects not only by participating in deliberative practices and collective processes, as it seems to be the case in Osterweil’s account (2013), but by forging common understanding and relating it to their own experiences and current struggles.
However, similar as in Osterweil’s account, a substantial portion of the Razsa and Kurnik’s ‘thick’ description of the becoming process is dedicated to minutiae of the processes within the Direct Social Work Workshop, rather than on the experiences of those who participated in them. Furthermore, understood in this way, becoming juxtaposes two different forms of subjectivities, one ‘before’ and ‘after’ participating in collective action, which rests on the assumption that the two are necessarily or easily distinguishable. Human beings are changing all the time, as Arthur Kleinmman argues, because people are “engaged stakeholders who have important things to loose, to gain and to preserve” (1998: 362). In that sense, collective action is hardly the only such site that can elicit powerful personal transformations.
For approaches that emphasize the everyday aspects of doing politics and participating in social movements, as well as foreshadow the emergence of new forms of subjectivities, these ethnographies say very little about the activists themselves, about the context of their lives and their previous experiences. In that way, while the political processes within the movements are discussed meticulously and with particular attention to history, situated and local character of these practices, the portrayal of activists seems to be only ‘skin-deep’. This trivializes the discussion of activists’ subjectivities, reducing them to illustrations of the collective processes at play, as well as it portrays their agency in an ahistorical and decontextualized manner (cf. Ortner 1995, Mahmood 2002).
The problems pertaining to the treatment of subjectivities notwithstanding, the issues raised in the works I have just discussed are
extremely valuable and deserve further attention. These ethnographies very convincingly show that social movements are places of creative engagement. Whether to show that movements generate and politically act upon various forms of knowledge, or how they build on experiences of previous collective actions, these approaches have opened up new avenues to study social movements in their own terms (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell 2008: 27). They point out, and rightfully so, that studying social movements cannot be reduced to only assessing whether movements manage to effectuate social change, but have to be studied as ongoing, open-ended and creative political processes. This kind of approach to social movements also has some implications for the way in which solidarity making processes can be studied in the processes of collective action.
1.2. ‘Messiness’ of collective action and emergent solidarities
Many anthropologists studying collective action have made the argument that, looking from up close, collective action seems to look ‘messy’, “with activist groups and coalitions forming, dividing and reassembling and with significant sectors of their target constituency remaining on the sidelines” (Edelman 2001: 286). Likewise, writing about Italian MoM, Michael Osterweil similarly observes that their “theoretical practices” represent a “nuanced, contingent and even messy form of political practice” (2013: 610), as do for instance Maple Razsa and Andrej Kurnik, who describe the horizontal and processual ‘nature’ of Occupy Slovenia as “‘messy’ encounters” (2012: 252). This ‘messiness’ of political action is nothing new, as such practices have been at the ‘core’ of the alter-globalization movement (Featherstone 2012: 193), and have been crucial for the formation of “horizontal and networked forms of organizations of” the new left movements (Razsa 2013: 8). However, beyond claims that such ‘messy’ and progressive social movements strive to “attain maximum effective solidarity without stifling dissenting voices” (Graeber 2005: 171), very few have turned their attention to how such seemingly heterogeneous and diverse collectives manage to sustain solidarity among their participants. While there have been some notable exceptions (Fantasia 1988, Featherstone 2012, Juris 2008), the social movements studies have rarely explored how “roots, anchors, intimacy and proximity” (Appadurai 2002: 45) are created and enacted in the process of collective action? To use the famous words of Bruno Latour, how do these ‘messy’ encounters between individuals and groups engaged in collective action “stick together” (2005: 13)?
The question how society ‘sticks together’ has been at the core of works of various early sociologists and philosophers, and was most influentially expressed in Emilé Durhkeim’s (1997 [1933]) notions of
“mechanical” and “organic” solidarity. While solidarity as a concept has played an important role in various strands of religious theologies and contemporary liberal political projects (cf. Stjernø 2009), solidarity as a term has its historical origin in the international workers’ movement (Gill 2009: 667) and has, as such, been part of the discourse and practice of the progressive left movements throughout its history (Featherstone 2012). It is particularly to this strand of thought, which places solidarity as one of the central concepts for the progressive left movements that I wish to contribute. To situate this literature, I start with a short sketch about the ways in which solidarity has been studied in the last decades.
Solidarity has, since Durkheim, rarely been theorized (Calhoun 2002: 148) or researched (Komter 2005: 3). The majority of the existing studies on solidarity seem to follow the Durkheimian tradition, which sees solidarity as a form of social ‘adhesive’ (1933 [1960]: 105). Good examples of such approaches are, for instance, Aafke Komter’s study on solidarity and the gift (2005) or Sarah Kedzior’s research on solidarity among Uzbek’s dissident communities (2011). In addition to expressing general concerns over the alienation of contemporary society, much like Durkheim himself more than a century ago, such approaches often portray solidarity as being ‘lost’ in the globalized world (Calhoun 2002: 147) and under constant threat from neoliberal capitalism (Malkki 1998: 436; also Gills 2009: 667). This line of reasoning follows a more general anxiety, expressed across different disciplines, which sees forms of sociality, like solidarity, as threatened by development of globalization and neoliberal rationality (cf. Montesinos Coleman 2013: 170). While these concerns are indeed warranted, and I return to them by the end of this chapter, it is the form in which they are addressed that has some unwanted consequences for the study of solidarity.
Solidarity has its morphological root in the Latin term solidum, which means both “whole sum”, as well as something durable or solid.4 As a form of social relation, it invokes associations of robustness, persistence and steadfastness. In that sense, much like in Durkheim’s own understanding, many of the scholars either suppose solidarity occurs naturally, as society keeps being functional, or assume that it is in the process of being dissolved due to, for instance, onslaught of globalization or neoliberal capitalism. Both of these positions take solidarity for granted, assuming either its presence or absence, taking one of the two options simply as a social fact. As David Featherstone argues:
4
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solidarity (accessed 25th of July 2014)
The problem with that account of solidarity is that it doesn’t enable ‘movements’ or political activity any agency or role in shaping how solidarities are constructed. It assumes that there is a pre-existing ‘aptitude’ to solidarity underlying human action. This is a poor starting point for engaging with the many contested ways in which solidarities come to be practiced and enacted. It also systematically ignores the ways that solidarities are located and forged through particular contexts. (2012: 19)
In that sense, following Featherstone, one could also see solidarity making processes as a form of agency. This is further corroborated by some of the ethnographic studies of solidarity in collective action.
For instance, in his ethnography of the alter-globalization protests in Prague and Barcelona in 2000s, Jeffrey C. Juris discusses solidarity as a sort of affective state that emerges among participants during protests and actions (2008: 63). The emergence of such “affective solidarity”, as Juris maintains, is crucial for sustaining the activists’ engagement in collective actions (ibidem: 65). Similarly, Lesley Gill’s research on transnational organizing against Coca-Cola uncovers the processes through which solidarity is created between Colombian workers and North-American human rights activists (2009: 668). However, for Gill, solidarity is more than just an affective state. Gill sees solidarity clearly as political phenomenon, defined as a “horizontal class-based relationship” between people who “recognize their common interests as workers under an exploitative, capitalist system” and fight “the development of capitalism through the establishment of relationships of trust and mutuality” (2009: 667). Gill’s account of solidarity also uncovers that these processes are not necessarily harmonious (2009: 669).
Transnational political solidarities, like the one outlined by Gills, have their own ‘hidden’ history. In his book “Solidarity. Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism”, David Featherstone traces solidarity formation processes to “tell stories about forms of agency and political activity construed through mobilizing practices of solidarity” (2012: 4). In that sense, Featherstone understands solidarity “as a relation forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression”, as the “central practice of the political left” (2012: 5). Far from being given, he shows that solidarities are produced through political practices that engage with differences, rather than emanating from a preconceived sense of the common (ibidem: 23).
A similar understanding of solidarity is also found in one of the rare in-depth ethnographic accounts of solidarity practices, Rick Fantasia’s (1988) “Cultures of Solidarity”. Fantasia, who studied various collective actions of workers in the United States in the late 1970s, defines solidarity as “a process of mutual association…[and] a practical attempt to restructure, or reorder,
human relations” (1988: 11). Analyzing two unauthorized strikes in an iron foundry in New Jersey, Fantasia comes to the conclusion that:
the solidarity that the strike achieved and expressed was not inherent in the workforce…but was to a significant degree a product of the collective action itself. But although solidarity was not an a priori “fact”, neither was it without a social basis. For the conditions of work and the day-to-day social interaction they shaped created at least a surface level of mutuality, a foundation of trust among workers. (1988: 92).
Through certain practices, like particular positioning on the shop floor vis-à-vis the foreman or by refusing to wear their working clothes, the workers formed an opposition to the management and engaged in what Fantasia recognizes as “praxis of solidarity” (Fantasia 1988: 108). In that sense, both relations between the workers themselves, as well as their alignment against the management, played an important role for the making of solidarity (ibidem: 109).
Both Fantasia and Featherstone argue that solidarity is not inherent to social groups, but is produced in various material practices, through which actors engage with each other. In that sense, solidarity is also relational phenomenon, as it includes multiple different actors and can produce “new ways od relating” (Featherstone 2012: 5). By way of creating new associations between actors, solidarities have the potential to “reshape the terrain of what is politically possible and what counts or is recognized as political” (ibidem: 7). In that sense, when solidarity is studied as a political phenomenon, one that is created through collective action and within social movements, one seems to uncover completely different qualities then those that are usually associated with solidarity. Quite opposite from approaches that see solidarity as an ubiquitous ‘social glue’, solidarity in this context seems to be both contingent and insecure (Featherstone 2012: 16).
Ideas that Featherstone and Fantasia express here seem to reflect a similar kind of epistemological approach to reality that characterizes some of the actor-network scholarship. For instance, seeing how solidarities are enacted through material practices echoes Annemarie Mol’s argument that “objects come into being – and disappear – with the practices in which they are manipulated (2002: 5). In that sense, much like solidarity in collective action, social reality is enacted and produced through a series of “common, day-to-day, sociomaterial practices” (Mol 2002: 6), and does not seem to exist outside of them. This epistemological approach, instead of taking the social for granted, looks at society as a form of network in which:
actors associate with other actors, thus forming a network in which they are all made into “actors” as the associations allow each of them to act. Actors
are enacted, enabled, and adapted by their associates while in their turn enacting, enabling and adapting these. While the verbs keep on moving between active and passive, the relations that make actors be, may take the form of stable syntaxes or, alternatively, of fluid associations (Mol 2010: 260)
From this perspective, “[e]verything is entangled with everything else”, forming a movable and dense set of “webby relations” (Law and Singleton 2013: 490). By the same token then, following the cues on solidarity from Fantasia’s and Featherstone’s account, it is possible to see solidarity as a type of political relation that is enacted in a similarly dense network of associations between various actors. The task becomes then to trace these associations (Latour 2005: 5), as one possible form of connection between things.
In that sense, my approach to solidarity here departs from the position that solidarity, by the virtue of not being given, is created through diverse material and political practices. Following such practices, uncovers a complex landscape of associations and relations between multiple actors that shapes solidarity. By the virtue of being produced through multiple practices and multiple associations between actors, solidarity is neither as stable nor as permanent as it seems to present itself. Far from being ‘solid’, solidarity seems to be fluctuating and heterogeneous, fraught with tensions and frictions that are embedded in the process of solidarity making (Featherstone 2012: 192). Instead of a durable concept then, one which is closely associated to stasis rather than to agency, I deploy here a more makeshift concept – “solidarity-in-the-making”. I do so in order to capture the elusive and unstable nature of solidarity, as well as to emphasize further the processes through which solidarity is made in practice. In that sense, my analysis and treatment of theoretical concepts has been profoundly inspired by John Law’s (2004) instructive work on performative methodologies in social sciences.
In that sense, rather than saying something about solidarity as such, an attempt can be made to say something about how solidarity is made in collective action, in practice. This might be particularly germane for studying collective action, which is in and of itself a social assemblage, or an entanglement of “webby relations” as John Law and Vicky Singleton (2013) would contend. “Solidarity-in-the-making” might be one of the ways through which that complexity could be explored and rendered visible, while simultaneously not silencing its more elusive qualities. By the same token, focusing on the making of solidarity, a more process-sensitive approach to social movements can be taken. Social movements are usually seen through the prism of protests, camps and alike, which give off the impression that movements are active only during these ‘outbursts’ of collective action. However, collective actions neither stops nor begins with a protest. Instead, protests and similar forms of collective action can be seen as part of a
continual political process, one that is constantly being remade through practice. In that sense, “solidarity-in-the-making” can also be seen as a snapshot, as a slice of time, in a process of making and remaking of social movements. It is this particular process that I capture here in my ethnography of OWID’s solidarity making processes.
1.3. Context of my research
However, in order to fully understand the relevance of solidarity making, a few words need to be said about the context in which they are embedded. In the last decades, Croatian collective experience has been strongly marked by war that followed the dissolution of Yugoslavia, as well as growing ethnic tensions and an overwhelming rise in nationalism (i.e. Denich 1994, Hayden 1992, Jansen 2002, Lindstrom and Razsa 2004). When the peace was restored in the mid 1990s, it was noticeable that something has gone deeply awry in the transition from state-socialism to liberal democracy. Many academics have ascribed this failure to the ‘faulty’ mentality and sociocultural capital inherited from the time of Yugoslav state socialism (Prica 2007: 167, footnote). In stark opposition to the euphoric sentiments expressed before the war, Croatians have become slowly disenchanted with the transition process (Potkonjak and Škokić 2013, Prica 2004, Prica and Škokić 2011), amid the rising social, economic and labor insecurity in the newly established capitalist settings (Kokanović 2001: 156). Similar experiences of disenchantment have also been observed throughout other post-socialist spaces (Spasovska 2008, Torsello 2008, Veenis 2012).
One of the most important catalysts of that disenchantment in Croatia was the outcome of the processes of privatization, through which formerly pubic companies and large industries in Croatia switched from state to private ownership. Croatia, like many other post-socialist countries, opted for a “fast” model of transition, based on the trifecta of stabilization, privatization and liberalization, which resulted in considerable decrease of productivity, massive job losses and fall of GDP (Bagić 2010: 80). The implementation of such neoliberal economic policies continued throughout the 2000s, as “all subsequent governments continued implementing policies in the area of health, employment, social policy and education with the financial assistance of international bodies such as the World Bank and the IMF” (Dolenec 2012: 83). The devastating impact of such policies is also reflected in present day Croatia, which has been marked by “growing social stratification…as well as worrying signals of social exclusion through poverty and long-term unemployment” (ibidem: 73). Similar fate befell other post-socialist countries (cf. Crowely and Ost 2001), as well as many developed capitalist countries (cf. Lee and Kofman 2012, Stone 2005, Procoli 2004).
In order to fully grasp the scope and breath of these socio-economical transformations, a very brief sketch of neoliberal socio-economical regimes is necessary.5 Privatization of public assets, flexibilization of working conditions and further dismantling of a wide array of social services that were provided by the state, are just some of the consequences of neoliberal economic regimes. Neoliberalism can be best understood as a “theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can be best advanced by…strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (Harvey 2005: 2). This represents an extension of the logic of the market onto the sphere of social relations (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 305), which introduces neoliberalism as a form of governance (Montesinos Coleman 2013: 170). Many have argued that the development of neoliberal capitalism has lead to social fragmentation (Gill 2009: 668), due to its emphasis on extreme forms of individualism (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 305). While it is important to acknowledge the detrimental impact of such processes on society at large, it is equally important to notice that such processes never run completely smoothly and without interferences (Tsing 2005:4-5)
The emergence of OWID as a political movement in Croatia is, in that sense, closely linked to both the worsening of the social conditions and further deterioration of workers rights, as well as the continuation of previous struggles against neoliberalism, such as the resistance of Student Movement in 2009 to the marketization of public education.6 The Student movement marked a re-introduction of openly leftist movements to Zagreb’s activist scene, like “Mladi antifašisti Zagreba” (MAZ) [the Young Antifascists of
Zagreb] and “Centar za radničke studije” (CRS) [Center for Labor studies],
one of the many active collectives known under the term “nova hrvatska ljevica” [the New Croatian Left]. Likewise, by collaborating with the Rosa
Luxemburg Stiftung, a political organization associated with the German
left-wing parliamentary party “Die Linke”, OWID is also part of the larger struggles against neoliberalism on a European level.
In that sense, the structure of the thesis is as follows. In the second chapter, I introduce OWID as a knowledge-producing type of social movement, as I map the ways in which its activists create, disseminate and act on various forms of knowledge. I also situate this kind of political practice in the context of previous struggles, such as the Student Movement that emerged in 2009. Through this I also address with some of the everyday intricacies of being an
5
For a book-length insightful discussion of neoliberalism see Harvey (2005).
6
Clearly, the struggle against neoliberalism in Croatia did not begin in 2009 with the Student movement. In the early 2000s there was an active anarchist and anti-globalization movement, which has been very little researched (cf. Razsa 2013).
activist, and what kind of tensions that might create in one’s own personal life. In the third chapter, I delve deeper into the solidarity making processes that OWID was a part of, arguing that these processes shed a different light on solidarity than it is usually assumed. The chapter four builds on the previous two chapters by exploring some of the implications of the kind of vulnerable politics OWID and similar social movements seem to be enacting. Instead of coming to an absolute conclusion, this thesis ends with a more fragile and elusive personal reflection on the ‘nature’ of social change and the role of being a ‘believer’.
CHAPTER 2: Putting knowledge into motion
The first weeks into my fieldwork were spent, among other things, in frantically drawing and revising diagrams of OWID’s organizational structure, the people and activities in which they were involved. The lack of any vertical organizational structure, as well as OWID’s dedication to keeping the organization open to new developments, has made it incredibly difficult for an outsider like me to easily grasp what was exactly happening on a day-to-day basis. It was only towards the end of my research, and with a little help from an OWID member7, that I came to notice the inordinate amount of research and knowledge that informed the organization’s proceedings. Indeed, knowledge and research seemed to be the ‘red thread’ running through the organization. Nonetheless, it took a while before I could understand why it was so important to the activists. In that sense, this chapter outlines the knowledge production of OWID, building on the approaches proposed by María Isabel Casas-Cortés, Michal Osterweil and Diana E. Powell (2008) and Michal Osterweil (2013). I also extend their arguments further, arguing that such practices are relevant, not only because they help imagine and create alternative and political ways of engaging with the world, but also because they facilitate solidarity making processes.
2.1. Recognizing the knowledge-practices
In a most immediate sense, many of OWID’s members are engaged in diverse forms of “analysis, concepts, theories, imaginaries…methodological devices and research tools”, recognized as “knowledge-practices” (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell 2008: 28). The majority of OWID’s members actively publish essays and analysis in well-known left-oriented printed media in Croatia, like “Zarez” or the Croatian edition of “Le Monde Diplomatique”. For instance, Jovica had published articles about trade unions and workers’ struggles in Croatia 8 , as well as the privatization struggles of the “Petrokemija”9 oil refinery in Kutina. Similarly, Marina and Livada10 recently
7 It was Ankica, an academic and active member of OWID, who had first suggested to me to
focus on the knowledge production within OWID.
8 “Kontekst radničkih borbi u Hrvatskoj (1. Dio)” [The context of workers’ struggles in Croatia:
part one] (http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/kontekst-radnickih-borbi-u-hrvatskoj-1-dio, accessed 17th of April 2013) and “Kontekst radničkih borbi u Hrvatskoj (2. Dio)” [The context of workers’ struggles in Croatia: part two] ( http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/kontekst-radnickih-borbi-u-hrvatskoj-2-dio, accessed 17th of April 2014)
9
“Petnaest godina borbe” [Fifteen years of struggle] (http://lemondediplomatique.hr/petnaest-godina-borbe/, accessed 17th of April 2014)
10
“Linije (dis)kontinuiteta” [The lines of (dis)continuity] (http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/linije-diskontinuiteta, accessed 27th of July 2014)
published an essay on forms of workers’ organizing in Croatia, while Bojan11, Nina, Ankica and Vedrana12 have all published and edited interviews with relevant stakeholders on the issues of workers’ rights and labor relations. In March 2014, OWID as an organization curated a whole section in “Zarez” dedicated to new labor legislation currently being drafted in Croatia, containing detailed discussions and analysis as well as examples form other countries in the region undergoing similar processes.13 As of December 2013, members of OWID also maintain a web-page “Radnička prava”14 [Workers
Rights], where they publish news, gather all labor legislation directives and
laws, analyses and essays related to the issues of workers rights and trade union organizing.
Likewise, in the past year OWID organized and co-organized a number of public events, such as lectures and round-table discussions, which they called workshops. The workshops were aimed at providing a different perspective on some of the economic and social problems Croatia.15 With the exception of the first workshop that I attended, that dealt with the role of media for success of collective actions, the workshops held in October, November and December of 2013 were focused more on various labor and economic issues. For instance, the workshop “Kako restrukturirati poduzeće: Primjeri Jedinstva Novog i Konfekcije Novska” [How to restructure a company:
examples from “Jedinstvo Novo” and “Konfekcija Novska”]16, held on the 9th of October 2013, presented and discussed in details the two most successful cases of worker’s self-management17 in Croatia. Such examples are rarely ‘visible’ in the mainstream media, most likely due to their uncomfortable associations with state-socialism and, as previously discussed, but also
11 “Borba za očuvanje uspješne proizvodnje” [The struggle to maintain successful production]
(http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/borba-za-ocuvanje-uspjesne-proizvodnje, accessed 27th of July 2014)
12 “Rat je počeo na strategiji kršenja radničkih prava” [The war started with the strategy on
violation of workers’ rights] ( http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/rat-je-poceo-na-strategiji-krsenja-radnickih-prava, accessed 27th of July 2014) and “Oblici diskriminacije na radnom mjestu” [Forms of discrimination in the workplace] (http://www.zarez.hr/clanci/oblici-diskriminacije-na-radnom-mjestu, accessed 27th of July 2014)
13 Temat “Degradacija radničkih prava” [Degradation of Worker’s Rights] was a topical section
published in “Zarez” and edited by OWID (http://www.zarez.hr/arhiva/379, accessed 17th of April 2014)
14 http://www.radnickaprava.org/ (accessed 27th of July 2014)
15 I attended all five workshops that were organized between September and December 2013. 16 Both “Jedinstvo Novo” and “Konfekcija Novska” were successful companies during the
state-socialism period, which have resisted privatization efforts and have implemented forms of workers’ self-management.
17
Worker’s self-management (in Croatian also known as “radničko samoupravljanje”) is an organizational form in which workers employed in a company are simultaneously also the owners and managers of their production. Although there are many variants of this model, cooperative is probably the most common.
because such practices call into question decades of experimentation with neoliberal policies (Dolenec 2012: 82). In that sense, such discussions provide a counter-narrative to the mainstream neoliberal discourses, which often proclaim that “there is no alternative” (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell, footnote 19) to the current socio-economic system.
The majority, if not all of OWID’s public events were filmed and made accessible via YouTube, and recently the organization has even started making their own series of short documentaries and reportages.18 Members of OWID have also held lectures on conferences and appeared as experts on various topics. Along with one other member of OWID, Jovica presented at the international conference “Predicaments of the Left: Conjunctures, strategies, perspectives”19 organized by a left oriented, sister organization “Centar za Radničke Studije” [Center for Labor Studies]. The topic of Jovica’s presentation20 was initially supposed to be about union organizing, but he decided to change the focus slightly in order to address some of the issues he felt were more relevant for the future of left political organizing.
In the presentation, Jovica emphasized strongly the importance of knowledge as a basis for political action:
Knowledge – lack of data, archives, history that we can use. Because we were robbed of our history, and if we want to do anything I think it is really important to get that history back. How should we do it? I think there is no other way than through gathering knowledge…and it means analysis, it means theory, it means practical knowledge, so all thoughts of knowledge are really important. Why am I trying to stress this? Because you can often hear that knowledge is not that important, that it is only theorizing and people get around conferences and then they travel around Europe and nothing of that knowledge is ever put into motion. Of course, it can be like that.21
Jovica’s appeal here echoes the global processes of erasure of history “from below” of various cross-national and global solidarities and cases of resistance to capitalist regimes, whose erasure had weakened the potential of left political organizing (Featherstone 2012: 62). However, his appeal also has a particular local history. During the 1990s, the negative experiences of
18 See for instance their YouTube channel “Udruga BRID”
(https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDuqusMjCsB6tGmAN9bAuVQ, accessed 17th of April 2014)
19 The conference was organized from 17th until 19th of October in Zagreb, with support of
Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung (http://radnickistudiji.org/?p=207, accessed 17th of April 2014)
20 The presentation “Union organizing: what is it good for?” was transcribed verbatim from
English, and is fully accessible via YouTube (http://youtu.be/FeC30XGG3ew, accessed 17th of April)
21
All of the following quotes, with the exception of Jovica’s presentation from the conference “The Predicaments of the Left”, were translated from Croatian to English by the author of this thesis.
socialism in Croatia figured heavily in the nationalistic discourses, contributing greatly to the rising resentment and condemnation of everything related to socialism (cf. i.e. Bakić-Hayden 1995, Todorova 2005) – like i.e. the workers’ rights. The mainstream media at the time appropriated some of the academic discourses about the transition processes, creating a powerful discourse of a ‘failed’ transition to liberal democracy, which was ascribed to the “socialist mentality” inherited from the previous regime (Prica 2007: 168). Consequently, this has had a major impact on the development of local activist subcultures in the 1990s. As Maple Razsa notes, the stigmatization of “communism” has lead local activists to draw inspiration from the anarchist traditions, rather then from the Marxist inspired frameworks (2013: 6). In that sense, the ‘return’ of the more classic Marxist themes in the work of OWID, such as workers’ rights and self-management, can also be seen as an attempt to reinvigorate this strand of leftist critique that has been silenced over the last couple of decades.
At the same time, Jovica argues that this form of knowledge generated within social movements is distinctive from the academic knowledge:
But, I think, the problem is not in the knowledge or the knowledge production itself. I’m not talking about the Academia now, I’m talking about this type of knowledge that, let’s say, trade unions should produce or we as civil activists are trying to produce – the real knowledge. The problem is in this part “put into motion”, so practical testing of the knowledge that we are gathering. (…) And this is the part where, I think, research should come into the whole story. We have to search for initiatives, actions that maybe took place let’s say “before our time”, and by our time I mean when I, you any of us got involved, because things didn’t start with us. (Jovica, presentation on 19th of October 2013, emphasis mine)
Jovica’s views are consistent with other findings, where activists and academics alike see each other’s work as fundamentally oppositional (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell 2008: 44). While I subscribe to the view that academic and activist forms of knowledge are commensurable (Osterweil 2013: 600), such generalized claims can sometimes run ashore in particular local contexts. In that sense, Jovica’s distinction is an expression of awareness of how academic knowledge was sometimes appropriated for nationalistic political projects (cf. Prica 2007), rather that intent to uphold the difference between activist and academic forms of knowledge. His narrative also strongly emphasized the importance of research for uncovering silenced histories of leftist movements, which are vital for imagining more effective politics in the present day. Such stances have strongly shaped OWID’s own present day politics and attempts of solidarity building.
Many of the OWID activists have remarked that, after the attempts and contacts between workers and students during the Student Movement, they came to a gradual conclusion that they lacked further knowledge and capacity to engage more seriously with the workers’ rights. For instance, when Vedrana talked about the stagnation of the Student Movement, she said “there was a lot of us [in the Student Movement], and we were hungry for action, but since we didn’t know what exactly we were doing, we tried to support any coherent collective action happening in Zagreb” (interview, January 2014). In 2009, some relationships had been established between the Movement and the workers, but those were mainly with people from outside of Zagreb, like for instance the workers of “Petrokemija”22. This, explained Jovica, was the main motivation to start doing researching about the workers struggles in Zagreb in the late 1980s and early 1990s (interview, November 2013). This research, in turn, also gave rise to the idea of establishing an online public archive, “Arhiv radničkih borbi” [Archive of the
Workers Struggles], where all the materials would be accessible to interested
public.
The idea of founding an archive came originally from Livada, an activist who had been one of OWID’s most committed researchers of the history of workers’ struggles in the region. He explained to me how this came to be:
We started collecting the materials to see whether there's anyone with whom we could do an interview, which were meant to be entry points for contacts with some people, to see whether there is any room for cooperation, and not so much for publishing purposes. And in the process of collecting these materials, as there was more and more of that, it seemed like a logical step to try to systematize that, collect more materials and start building the Archive. (Interview, January 2014)
In that sense, research was from the very beginning recognized as a valuable method of ‘entry’ into the cooperation with other actors. This enabled the organization to find, map and engage with others who expressed similar interests as them, uncovering along the way a somewhat forgotten history “from below” of the industrial relations in Croatia.
Livada was also part of the Student movement, although he was not himself a student at the time. Reflecting on the kind of work OWID does nowadays, in comparison to some of the more direct actions they did within the Movement, he said:
22 “Petrokemija” was an oil refinery located in the small city of Kutina, about forty kilometers
from Zagreb. The factory became famous for their organized struggle against the privatization of their company in 1998, and the subsequent formation of a “headquarters for defense” [stožer za obranu] of the factory, which attracted considerable attention from the national media (cf. Grdešić 2007).
It seemed important to us not to rush headlong into things...because, from previous experiences, this turned out to be a sort of a bad policy. These ad hoc actions, were we would show up to support some workers in strike, were not opening up any new possibilities. Usually, the case was that the people involved were waging a battle with the company to receive their unpaid salaries, or they have some acute problem and the situation in the company is pretty bad; it is either bankrupt, or the situation was bad because they are poorly organized. In any case, these kinds of situations mainly revolved around this one problem that we couldn't really help them with. (Interview, January 2014)
Such experiences prompted the group to reconsider their tactics and actions. The direct and ad hoc interventions were not yielding to any meaningful results, partly because of the dire circumstances they would encounter and partly because they lacked certain knowledge and legal expertise to actually help the workers. As Vedrana said, it was impossible “to go to every strike and play The Take23 to everyone, which was what anarchists thought would be the solution to the problem” (interview, January 2014). Clearly, many people found this way of operating highly ineffective. This kind of approach proved to be unproductive, as it did not contribute to building up closer ties between the workers and the students, which is what the Student Movement wanted to achieve. This realization prompted the activists to seek more knowledge about workers’ rights, and to turn to those who possessed that kind of knowledge – namely, as I will show in the following chapter, the experienced trade-unionists.
Over time and with an admirable level of self-awareness, the activists of OWID have made the knowledge production their core activity, and have “pursued knowledge about the political and social context in order to arrive at better understandings of the present while also working to theorize, create, and posit alternatives to this present” (Osterweil 2013: 606). This research-oriented approach to political action seeps through all OWID’s activities, from writing essays and analysis to making documentaries and organizing workshops, and has over time “become the basis for political and ethical action” (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell 2008: 39). This is not entirely surprising, given that a good majority of OWID members has a background in social sciences and humanities, and are as such academically trained researchers. Therefore, it’s not entirely inconceivable that they would strive to apply some of that knowledge in their political practice.
23
“The Take” is a documentary that recounts the story of worker’s occupation of a factory in Argentina (http://www.thetake.org/index.cfm?page_name=synopsis, accessed 25th of April). Using visual materials to inspire collective action is a well-documented tactic among anarchists (cf. Razsa 2013).
As I have tried to show here, OWID activists are involved in a myriad of knowledge-practices, which “take form of stories, ideas, narratives, and ideologies, but also theories, expertise, as well as political analyses and critical understanding of particular context” (Casas-Cortés, Osterweil and Powell 2008: 21). These knowledge-practices produce “alternative ways of knowing and being, including alternative economic, social and cultural models”, and should be thought of as a form of an intervention “in a complex, contentious political field” (ibidem: 46). In that sense, the production of knowledge within social movements is in and of itself a form of political practice. However, in order to fully understand these interventions, it is important to situate them historically and look at the genealogy of such politics.
2.2. Continuities and discontinuities with the Student movement
As an organization, OWID grew out of the Occupation of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences in the spring of 2009, which soon spread from Zagreb to other faculties and universities across Croatia (Petrović 2011: 328). Their initiative was part of a larger global effort to stop the commercialization of higher education (ibid: 327, footnote 1). As Vedrana, one of OWID’s more prominent activists from the period of the Student Movement, explained to me over a cup of tea:
Since the very beginning, our agenda was to broach this issue in a broader way, to try to connect it with the situation in the society and with neoliberalism. This is what we have started introducing, slowly, into our discourse since the very beginning, connecting the problems of tuition fees with workers who are supposed to pay for it and so on. (interview, 13th of January 2014)
The Student Movement was organized in accordance with direct democratic principles and was open to participation for all interested parties, as is thoroughly explained in the publication “Blokadna kuharica” [Occupation
Cookbook] (2009).24 All the decisions were made in the public “plenums” [assemblies] and students and citizens could get involved in its activities also through numerous workgroups formed to deal in detail with specific issues that were considered of importance. The Student Movement reached its ‘peak’ in 2009 with two successful occupations of the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences in May and September, but the “plenum” sessions and workgroups continued with work at least until autumn of 2010.25
24 In Croatian, accessible for free download via
http://anarhizam.hr/component/content/article/41-izdanja/150-blokadna-kuharica-ili-kako-je-izgledala-blokada-filozofskog-fakulteta-u-zagrebu (accessed 10th of April 2014)
25
The last public call for “plenum” was on the 27th of September 2010 (http://www.slobodnifilozofski.com/2010/09/dnevni-red-98-plenuma.html, accessed 10th of April 2014)
Over time, the method of direct democracy came to be understood as the Movement’s most crucial aspect, a development that lead to the formation of another specialized workgroup - “Grupa za direktnu demokraciju” [The Group for Direct Democracy]. The purpose of this group was, as Vedrana explained, to explore how the method of direct democracy could be extended to the wider society (interview January 2014). One such example, where the Movement tried to expand the knowledge and practice of direct democracy to the wider society, was their cooperation with the workers of the “Kamensko” 26 textile factory. One night after a “plenum” session, as Vedrana recalled, a group of students decided to visit the textile workers on strike:
We knew that the women were on a hunger strike, and we found this to be problematic. And then one day after the Assembly, we simply decided to support the workers, particularly given that we were constantly expressing our support in those days [laughs] (...) And then around 20 of us came there at the Square of the French Republic and we had no idea what kind of situation we would encounter and what is it that we could do there. But they were so happy; especially because we were the first to express interest and at that point we still had a strong presence in the media as the Student movement. And it was all extremely chaotic and we tried to do various things – from trying to persuade them to stop their hunger strike to trying to figure out their situation, and then write about it, to some 'childlike' pleas to them to go back to the factory and overtake it to even trying to persuade the trade unions to do something about it. (interview, 13th of January 2014)
In many ways, the involvement with the workers of “Kamensko” was a valuable learning experience for both the students and workers, but not without its difficulties.27 Involvement of the Student movement, however, did have an overwhelmingly positive effect. It not only increased the media visibility of the case and empowered the workers, but also instigated other prominent activist organizations, like the “Zelena akcija” [Green Action] and “Pravo na Grad” [Right to the City] to get involved. Even though the joined efforts of the Movement and NGOs did not prevent “Kamensko” from bankruptcy, it did open the possibilities for future cooperation.
The Student movement also had some internal inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies (cf. Mesić 2009, for a somewhat unsympathetic critique). As
26 “Kamensko” was well known textile factory, with almost exclusively female workforce,
dating from the time of state-socialism. In 2010, the workers have gone into the hunger strike in order to try to persuade the estranged management to pay them the leftover wages and benefits, and to draw attention of the general population of the suspicious financial transactions at the core of company’s slow demise.
27 For instance, speaking of how the women involved accepted the direct democracy in
practice, Vedrana responded: “They liked the idea that somebody was asking for their opinion and that their opinions mattered, but not so much as a political idea but more on a personal level.” (Interview, January 2014)
