Paper short abstract:

Can futures be forged out of ruins—both material and ideational? This paper interrogates the imaginative force and material grounding of one such recuperative future-making project, by focusing on the “Dita” detergent-producing factory in the northern Bosnian industrial town of Tuzla.

Paper long abstract:

Can futures be forged out of ruins—both material and ideational? This paper interrogates the imaginative force and material grounding of one such recuperative future-making project, by focusing on the "Dita" detergent-producing factory in the northern Bosnian industrial town of Tuzla. Formerly a part of a once successful chemical industrial complex, "Dita" was nearly decimated by postwar privatization—the violence of which transformed the factory into a cradle of a burgeoning new labor movement. For years, Dita's workers had been occupying the factory grounds in an effort to preserve what is left of a now a largely devastated industrial park. In the summer of 2015, with the help of their court-appointed bankruptcy manager, they re-started the production of its iconic products, in order to prove to the public and potential investors their factory was still viable. Their struggle for the factory in some ways reified market logics, particularly by imagining the solution to Dita's predicament through the sale of the company to a foreign investor. Yet workers' self-organized effort to produce a viable future for themselves and their families also could not have happened had they not been able to draw upon the political heritage of Yugoslav socialism—in particular the theory and practice of what was once known as "workers self-management." My paper demonstrates how workers' postsocialist imagination and their affective attachment to the materiality of their nearly decimated industrial park, actually made their struggle both imaginable and possible.