Paper short abstract:

I examine the way emphasis on ownership can play a role in undermining neoliberal transformation. I focus on the success of a worker-owned company in Croatia to reveal the tools that workers have at their disposal to fight dispossession and the erosion of the basis for working class politics.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I ethnographically examine the way emphasis on ownership can play a role in undermining neoliberal transformation. In 2007, the workers of ITAS Prvomajska managed to take over the company from its private owners who had been downsizing it and selling its real estate. ITAS has been developing a viable economic model since then as the only company in Croatia owned and run exclusively by its workers. The case of ITAS poses the question of whether grassroots working-class politics based on worker-ownership has the potential for transformative action that would challenge neoliberalism. Croatian workers usually confronted their dispossession with traditional working-class responses such as protests, strikes, and workplace occupations. ITAS workers did the same, but they also embraced distinctly capitalist behavior such as performing a debt to equity swap to convert their unpaid salaries into ownership or using the bankruptcy process to avoid liquidation and restart production. The economic success of the ITAS model of worker-ownership has allowed the expansion of workers' access to resources and their inclusion in decision-making structures. ITAS workers now foster political alliances with other workers and activists in Croatia and abroad to bolster their struggle against dispossession and pass on their model to other settings, countering the exclusion of the working class from the political-economic sphere in post-socialist neoliberalism. Focusing on the success of ITAS can reveal the tools that workers have at their disposal to fight dispossession and the erosion of the basis for working class politics that it brings.