Introduction

Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini

 

In the past one hundred years, workers have occupied factories and other workplaces and formed workers’ councils and self-managed enterprises in almost all regions of the world. Under all forms of government and political rule, workers have struggled for participation in the decision-making processes of the enterprises they work for and have attempted to develop forms of co- and self-management, or workers’ control; they have founded cooperatives and councils as a genuine expression and manifestation of their historical and material interests. Even without knowledge of previous council experiences, collective administration through workers’ assemblies has emerged in many cases as a natural tendency of rank-and-file workers. What is clear from the work of classical and contemporary advocates is the emancipatory nature of workers’ control in transforming a situation of capitalist alienation and authoritarian control into one of democratic practice. In his analysis of the Paris Commune, Marx emphasized in The Civil War in France that the commune “was essentially a working class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of labor.”

The chapters of this book document experiences of workers’ control and uncover the practices and intentions of historical and contemporary workers’ movements that have been largely obscured until now. Trade unions established in the early to mid-twentieth century, operating through the institutional frameworks of governments, have held a monopoly over labor history. They had no interest in promoting workers’ autonomous struggles, since the mere existence of those struggles called into question the traditional union structures and roles. In addition, most left, Socialist, and Communist parties did not promote workers’ control either, since it challenged the centrality of the role of the parties. Lost to historic and contemporary accounts are the creative and constructive practices undertaken by workers to bring permanence and predictability to their workplaces and to stabilize their communities through expressions of participatory democracy on the job and within society. As well as illuminating such empowering moments in labor history, we seek to reveal the important workers’ struggles against forms of autocratic and inequitable command and control by capital, business, and traditional labor unions as well as by party or state bureaucracy.

Over the last century, instances of workers’ control have often enlivened activists’ imaginations and raised new possibilities for the democratic organization of workplaces and of communities, and for genuine innovation within unions. Rank-and-file workers’ and labor networks organizing outside of established business-union structures have been crucial to the emergence of workers’ control; in some cases the established mediatory mechanisms were simply displaced by workers’ spontaneous, autonomous actions. This book critically examines the possibilities and problems inherent in the attempts to build workers’ councils and other structures of self-management.

Almost all the historical experiences of workers’ control, in particular the workers’ councils, have inevitably clashed with political parties, labor unions, and state bureaucracies—from the Bolshevik Revolution to Italy in the 1970s, Poland in the 1980s, India in the 1990s, and contemporary Argentina. The dominant revolutionary left typically viewed workers’ control as part of a system of dual power necessary during a transition to socialism, while contesting the power of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist-dominated state. Workers’ councils were seen as an interim structure relevant only until “real power” was achieved, usually denoted by the consolidation of a revolutionary party or “revolutionary state.” However, a minority current—traced from Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune through council communism, Trotskyism, anarcho-syndicalism, Italian operaismo, and other “heretical” left currents—has always viewed workers’ control and councils as the base of a self-determined socialist society.

Historical and Geographic Arenas of Workers’ Control

Workers’ councils have been commonly portrayed as paralyzed by widespread difficulties and filled with acute institutional problems. But they have also confronted authentic challenges in organizing a democratic workplace. In many cases, these predicaments have been imposed by state and party officials; in others, workers have had to overcome significant hurdles in governing enterprises on their own when seeking to operate within the dominant culture of capitalist society. Unavoidable interactions with sectors of capitalist society and the potential for worker-controlled production to interact on a capitalist playing field have also resulted in complications and contradictions for workers’ councils.

In the multiplicity of experiences over the past century, we can observe how workers’ control usually emerges from a situation of capitalist crisis—be it political, economic, or both. This temporal and material setting of workers’ control within the context of crisis contributes to several challenges, one in particular being obsolete production methods and manufacture of unnecessary products, especially in recent times and in situations without a direct revolutionary overthrow of a capitalist regime. Often, distribution markets have become so eroded that the capitalist entrepreneurs do not even wish to continue operating the firms slated for closure—even if they also oppose the firms’ being controlled by workers. The problem of obsolescence of technology and market failure is a particular predicament in contemporary Latin America and increasingly in the global North as well. Even in times of capitalist crisis, among the primary difficulties arising in the supposed transition of an enterprise to workers’ control is the paradox that worker-run industries must compete in the capitalist marketplace against domestic and foreign enterprises. Operating outside the logic of capitalism in a market system, the establishment of democratic working conditions and adequate wages and benefits is exceptionally difficult or nearly impossible.

This collection brings together leading historians and social scientists who have studied workers’ control, factory occupation, and worker-led socialist transformation. From the origins of the Industrial Revolution to the present neoliberal capitalist era, workers’ councils have been recognized as a tangible means for both expressing the radical and democratic impulses of the working class and grasping control from the ruling class through labor organizing based on solidarity and direct insurgency.

We have organized this collection in the interest of advancing academic knowledge of the history of workers’ self-management by presenting chapters accessible to, and in some cases informed by, workers, labor organizers, and activists. The contributions are free of jargon and rooted in historical experience. Through its publication in translation this volume aims to accomplish the dual goals of promoting an understanding and appreciation of the historic significance and necessity of workers’ councils among scholars as well as among workers throughout the world. In addition, with the help of some of the contributors and others, we have established the multilingual website www.workerscontrol.net to create a central reference and archive for inquiry and discussion around workers’ control; we hope it will help spur debate and energize new efforts.

The last collection to bring together different experiences of workers’ control dates back to 1971, with Ernest Mandel’s publication in German of Arbeiterkontrolle, Arbeiterräte, Arbeiterselbstverwaltung (Worker Control, Worker Councils, and Worker Self-Management). The legacy of workers’ control is all the more relevant today during a period of global economic crisis. We were impelled to assemble a wide range of international examples to demonstrate that not only are workers’ control and socialist democracy possible, as the chapters in this book suggest, but they also serve as a remedy to the human misery produced by the rapacious capitalist pursuit of profits and productivity through exploiting the working class and the poor.

This collection of historically relevant essays would be equally of use for a student in Johannesburg, Manila, or Sydney as for workers taking over or reclaiming factories in Caracas, Chicago, Glasgow, or Warsaw. These essays tell a story of the range of models and experiences of workers’ control in factories and other enterprises, and illustrate the multifarious struggles that workers have endured to achieve their goals under capitalist and noncapitalist systems.

The case studies span the globe and provide international, cultural, national, and regional examinations of relevant experiences of workers’ control, from the global South as well as the global North, including Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United States, Great Britain, Indonesia, Poland, Portugal, India, Algeria, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela. Some chapters contribute a theoretical and philosophical consideration. Part I of the book provides a historical overview of workers’ control and some theoretical debate on the subject. Part II focuses on experiences of workers’ councils and self-administration during times of revolution in the early twentieth century. Part III offers examples of workers’ control under state socialism, and Part IV shows some lesser-known examples of workers’ control in anticolonial struggles and democratic revolutions. Part V presents examples of the wave of workers’ takeovers against capitalist restructuring from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Part VI examines workers’ control in the contemporary era.

We deliberately organized this book as a collection, drawing from a range of historical epochs, though it is by no means comprehensive. Quite a few well-known and lesser-known examples are missing, such as Hungary (1919 and 1956), China (1920s), Japan (post-WWII), Bolivia (1950s), Czechoslovakia (1968), France and Switzerland (1968–1974), Chile (under Allende), the Argentinean Cordobazo (1969), Brazil (late 1960s–1970s), and many more. This volume is the first of two book projects on the transformation to worker self-government. We believe interest is so great among workers that we have initiated a second volume covering the experiences of workers’ control in a range of geographic and historical contexts.

In Opposition to Capital, State, and Bureaucracy

We set out to distinguish clearly between workers’ councils directly challenging capitalist hegemony and workers’ cooperatives operating within the capitalist logic of productivity and profitability. In various cases examined in this book, especially during more recent times, workers’ direct action has triggered factory occupations that have been transformed into workers’ cooperatives, due to the legal structures permissible in a capitalist society. Workers continuously press for more democracy and economic and political emancipation, but the hegemonic apparatus of national and transnational capital circumscribes how far workers may go.

Although workers represent the fundamental unit of democratic control, do they have a greater right to decide on the production process than the consumers or other members of the community? Is it not a potential contradiction to assume the workers’ preeminence over other constituents in society? How do workers conduct themselves as owners over the means of production in a different manner than capitalists? As enterprise owners, workers have frequently adopted a capitalist logic or turned over decisions entirely to business managers. Operating within the sphere of capitalism is a dilemma that many workers’ cooperatives face. As a consequence, over the last several decades, new proposals to build an authentic democratic society have encouraged workers’ control over production, with the significant inclusion and integration of subaltern sectors of society over vital decision-making processes.

New arenas for debate are emerging among socialists considering the transformative significance of workers’ self-management. For instance, workers must debate not only issues of control and ownership but questions such as what to produce and how to produce for social rather than private gain. What, for example, about workers who commandeer a French factory that produces land mines or a Brazilian pesticide plant that emits toxins harmful to the community? A less obvious and more controversial area under discussion is the future of automobile production for private individual transport, which seems to have run its course and faces a temporally constrained future due to energy and ecological concerns.

Factory occupations and subsequent workers’ control occurring in industries contributing to the erosion of the environment (e.g., automotive and machine parts, chemicals, electronics, energy, food commodities, furniture, livestock, and military ammunition and weapons) must address how these goods advance or detract from community needs, how they affect environmental sustainability, and that they frequently create inequality and poverty. A fundamental conundrum facing workers who seize control over enterprises is how to convert industries that produce surplus value but do not contribute to advancing health and security for surrounding communities and society as a whole.

Moreover, seizing control over enterprises does not end all problems. Self-management necessitates a struggle over how to organize the work process to improve the lives of workers and society. As the chapters in this volume will demonstrate, workers in a range of industries have frequently protested arduous, unsafe, and unhealthy working conditions, typically without the support of established trade unions. Workers’ control over factories and enterprises requires ensuring the development of safe, socially beneficial environments. Workers must gain control over enterprises and democratically organize the production process within a supportive society. The designation “workers’ control” is not applicable if the social division of labor and hierarchies on the job are not disposed of and replaced by direct democracy in the workplace. But more often than not, even if states articulate support for workers’ control, they tend to oppose democracy as a threat to bureaucratic leadership and defer to managers who seek productivity and sometimes profitability.

Workers’ councils—workers’ control over the economic resources vital to their lives—have a prodigious history as one of the most dramatic forms of radical working-class action against business and corporate domination. Despite the fact that they have historically failed to maintain a lasting presence, the lessons of the past inform contemporary efforts as to the potential impediments and obstacles to building a workers’ democracy.

Direct Action and Workers’ Control: Constraints and Future Prospects

The theoretical foundation of workers’ control is rooted in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century socialism, which viewed workers themselves as the most democratic force in society. The emergence of workers’ councils in Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries coincided with a period of widespread optimism among workers and socialists, who considered these new forms as indicators of a teleological process of the collapse of capitalism and its replacement with an egalitarian society. As the chapters in this book make clear, the workers’ insurgencies reinforced the view that workers’ appropriation of the means of production was the emergent stage of class struggle in the eventual creation of a new state of democracy and equality.

In Western Europe, although workers did not seize state power—with the exception of the brief Paris Commune interregnum—workers’ councils represented the most important weapon in their arsenal of struggle, one that was fiercely resisted by capitalists and the state. The notable early twentieth-century examples of workers’ direct action in Germany, Italy, and Spain could not sweep out the capitalist societies, but did raise the possibility among a multiplicity of socialist observers that the process was inevitable. As documented in this work, the Bolshevik Revolution was stimulated by workers’ factory occupations, demonstrating the initial support for the revolution among the majority of Russia’s working class. The Bolshevik Revolution was supplanted by Stalinist repression and a bureaucratic-statist system, a degenerative historical process ushered in through foreign interventions and sustained by continuous internal hostility. Undoubtedly, bureaucratic centralization of a professional party played an important role in delegitimizing the socialist state.

What are the dynamics of workers’ control in the neoliberal era and how do they diverge from those of the Fordist era? Does the escalating wave of workers’ direct action from 2000 to 2010 foreshadow an impending, sustained shift toward labor insurgency and direct action rooted in working-class consciousness ? In a context of neoliberal economic crisis, what are the prospects for challenging corporate refusal to recognize workers’ self-management? The capacity of capitalism to survive and endure under crisis conditions poses a further obstacle to the construction of workers’ councils, which are forced to compete for market share against privately owned enterprises supported by the enduring capitalist state.

Even if the state tolerates workers’ councils, the historical accounts of this work illustrate that both capitalist and bureaucratic governments give preference to firms rooted in generating profits. As such, the capitalist focus on productivity always takes precedence over community and societal needs. And, finally, the changes in production and labor in the post-Fordist era—the end of the huge factories bringing together vast numbers of workers and homogenizing the workforce, the fragmentation of production processes, and the popularization of outsourcing and subcontracting—have rendered the classical factory councils unthinkable in many labor scenarios. Nevertheless, overcoming the rifts between the economic, the social, and the political is still a condition for emancipation and for leaving behind the bourgeois and capitalist state. We are confident that workers and communities, as history has shown, will find their answers and develop new forms of collective organizing to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.