CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2010
| Author | Schulze, Frederick Kristofer |
|---|---|
| Title | Capital, Contract, and the Conditions of Contention: an Ethnographic Account of the 2009 Occupation of the Visteon UK Plant in Belfast |
| Summary | This paper anthropologically unpacks the 2009 occupation of the Visteon UK factory in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It asserts the centrality of the contract as an equivalent value-form in the relations of capitalism and asserts that the constructive capacities of capitalist state effects maintain this value-form as part of their primary function: the reproduction of the conditions of capitalist commodity production. The Belfast occupation was made possible by both the relations of production and production's relation to the capitalist state, though the other myriad conditions which allowed this radical undertaking are also accounted for. While class and solidarity are certainly mobilizing concepts for this thesis, my research problematizes the idea of class-consciousness by explaining the utilization of the contract fetish as a catalyst for radical action. This paper is the result of eleven days of fieldwork and interviews with several key figures in the occupation and its community of support. |
| Supervisor | Kalb, Don; Rigi, Jakob |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2010/schulze_frederick.pdf |
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