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Protesting for Production: The Dita Factory Occupation and the Struggle for Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina

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The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia

Abstract

This chapter examines and analyses the strategies of the occupation of Bosnia’s Dita factory by its workers in 2012, which saved the factory from asset stripping and closure. This occupation, new and unprecedented, enabled a wider solidarity network that articulated and enacted demands for a more inclusive justice during the February 2014 protests and plenums. This is justice which cannot be bought off, bankrupted, privatized, or subject to contractuality: the workers of Dita affirmed it as the unbribability of the infrastructure of life itself in the context of a dominant governance which is seeking to rule through poverty in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. Through analysis and through the reiteration of the logic of the struggle of Dita workers, the authors of the chapter assert that the right to violence must be upheld in collective refusal to accept and inhabit the world where the currently dominant ethno-capitalist organization of life is presented as the only possibility.

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Correspondence to Damir Arsenijević .

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Arsenijević, D., Husanović, J., Vasić-Janeković, V. (2017). Protesting for Production: The Dita Factory Occupation and the Struggle for Justice in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Jelača, D., Kolanović, M., Lugarić, D. (eds) The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47482-3_13

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