ILPC 2026

Traditionally, territoriality constitutes a socio-spatial power that is recognized as being lodged in a naturalized and paradigmatic way in the public space. However, the capitalist enterprise rooted in private property also constitutes a disputed territory between capital and labor, despite being invisible as such.

Three sources of literature share the theoretical absence of the company property as a territory: the labour process theory; the capital and labour geography; and management studies of territorial behavior.

Faced with this gap in the studies of work, and as a further reflection from a postgraduate research thesis on the "capitalist labor territory", the present text offers a first synthesis of the theory of capitalist enterprise as a territory. The theory is explained by territorial control of the productive process between capital and labor, constituting the capitalist enterprise and its workplace as a territory also guaranteed by a counterpart state.

In effect, materializing and thus consolidating the elements of the Burawoy theory, the worker experiences marginal territorial control in the work process. Worker uses spaces to carry out actions of self-expression, which reinforces the consent with exploitation and the illusion of territorial property. In this way, company property, like the entire production process, mixes and invisibilizes its character as a territory. However, the territorial control of the worker constitutes a risk that can be organized and project an antagonism when workers raise this control through internal or external safe spaces.

In this dynamic, the political and social value of private property at the level of the political economy is territorially reflected in the work regime of the company. As Lefebvre argues, space constitutes a means of production as well as a political instrument. In effect, the value of private property at the societal level has repercussions on the fact that the critical initiatives of organized workers, such as the process of union creation or strike mobilization, acquire a rearguard and then develop regularly in safe spaces outside the company. This allows proposing the thesis of the construction of "union neighborhoods" as a union revitalization strategy, especially in front of production geographical fragmentation and loss of territorial control in the large industry phase. In this sense, it is proposed that the core thesis of Marxism is that labor is losing power over labor territory as capital domination expands.

It is concluded that the territorial analysis of the productive process redefines the politicization in the literature of labour process theory by proposing the description and evidence of the capitalist company as a political fact disputed territorially by capital and labor force, this last one, unusually conscious, always under socio-spatial conditions that it has not chosen, and with a structural territoriality that is minimal but at the same time strategic, which has been expanded and raised even to antagonistic levels in history.