FROM SELF-MANAGEMENT TO POSTSOCIALISM: INDUSTRIAL WORKERS’ SILENCED EXPERIENCES OF DISPOSSESSION IN SLOVENIA

The article explores post-socialist political and economic transformations in Slovenia through textile workers’ experiences. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, a gap is revealed between dominant macroeconomic narratives and everyday experiences of being dispossessed. It is argued that self-management constituted a political economy rooted in collective labour, long-term sacrifice, and shared investment in socially owned property. Postsocialist restructuring dismantled the institutions and the material world people had built together. Deindustrialisation thereby functioned as structural violence, erasing class conflict from public discourse, and concealing the historical, social and affective dimensions of dispossession. Keywords: industrial labour, postsocialism, dispossession, moral economy.