ABSTRACT
The TEKEL (Tobacco and Alcohol Monopoly of Turkey) workers’ resistance took place in a period when the repression of social opposition was paving the way to despair. Although the austerity policies that put the burden of the 2007 economic crisis on the working poor had fueled opposition through broad social movements throughout the world, in Turkey such mass-based action was to come. According to the early philosophers of the Enlightenment, the public sphere is related to the specific definition of democracy, meaning the institutionalization of the use of reason by autonomous citizens for public interest, determined collectively. The main element of the condition for acting together is the institutions that are specified on constitutional grounds. The history of capitalism reveals that the ways workers make use of non-working time and place have been rigorously considered by political economists, ruling authorities and capital owners. Workers plan and organize the work in their workplaces despite the unending surveillance of the capitalist.
