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Copyright of Turkish Journal of Geographical Sciences / Coğrafi Bilimler Dergisi is the property of Cografi Bilimler Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Michael Hillard's Shredding Paper: The Rise and Fall of Maine's Mighty Paper Industry is both a labor history of the paper industry and a political economy of corporate governance and class struggle in the United States. As a labor historian, Hillard has compiled thousands of hours of interviews with paper-industry workers and managers. As a political economist, he persuasively argues that contests over the distribution of surplus from the 1960s forward and shifts in paper-industry ownership led to the strike wave that began in the '60s and spread to every paper mill in Maine by the late 1980s. Rapacious practices by out-of-state owners challenged workers' moral compass as much as their material existence. Responding, paper workers developed a folk political economy and even a folk Marxism, creating the foundation for challenging working-class support for regressive economics. This review provides context for Hillard's claim while partially challenging it in a different context, the United States steel industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the research, the history of the paper industry in Turkey was examined and its current situation was revealed with updated data. Time series analysis, which is suitable for the scope of the research, was preferred as the method of the article. In the study, firstly, paper enterprises and production initiatives in the Ottoman Empire are explained. In the next step, the efforts to establish and develop the paper industry in order to reduce the foreign dependency of the Young Republic of Turkey were emphasized. The modern paper industry in Turkey was established in Izmit in 1934. Izmit Paper Mills, which was affiliated with Sümerbank, was affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and was named General Directorate of Turkish Pulp and Paper Mills Enterprise (SEKA). In the research, paper mills in Turkey were examined in three periods: establishment (1934-1961), expansion to regions (1970-1984), privatization and today. In addition, the numerical values in paper production of Germany and Turkey, which rank first in paper production in Europe, were compared. As a result, it has been revealed that the paper industry in Turkey has become a sector that has a foreign trade deficit every year, cellulose production is insufficient and the natural resource potential cannot be mobilized. In this context, some suggestions evaluated from a geographical perspective are presented.

Influenced by the academic work of Stephen A. Resnick and Richard D. Wolff, the author and his close collaborator Richard McIntyre have spent four decades closely reading and contributing research to adjacent radical literatures on the empirical history of workers and capitalism. In this response to Richard McIntyre's review of Shredding Paper, the author reveals how his own research into the story of Maine's paper mills has developed since the 1980s, drawing out the class implications of the details embedded in a history that stretches back to the origins of Maine's paper industry. Hillard highlights the efficacy of reading capitalist histories of focusing on subsumed classes, i.e., a "volumes 2 and 3 [of Capital] approach," alongside the much more common "volume 1" methodology common to most radical political economy and labor history. For better and worse, this story has culminated in two generations of rural Mainers rejecting the sensibilities of neoliberal capitalism. This local class formation and particular consciousness of class contains many lessons for those who see capitalism problematically, but in the absence of an established U.S. Left, and given the cultural forces and propaganda acting upon them, this critical culture appears to have moved on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]