An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy

Description

The global financial crisis has led to a new shop-floor militancy. Radical forms of protest and new workers’ takeovers have sprung up all over the globe. In the US, Republic Windows and Doors started production under worker control in January 2013. Later that year workers in Greece took over and managed a hotel, a hospital, a newspaper, a TV channel and a factory. The dominant revolutionary left has viewed workers' control as part of a system necessary during a transition to socialism. Yet most socialist and communist parties have neglected to promote workers' control as it challenges the centrality of parties and it is in this spirit that trade unions, operating through the institutional frameworks of government, have held a monopoly over labor history. Tracing Marx’s writings on the Paris Commune through council communism, anarcho-syndicalism, Italian operaismo, and other 'heretical' left currents, An Alternative Labour History uncovers the practices and intentions of historical and contemporary autonomous workers’ movements that until now have been largely obscured. It shows that by bringing permanence and predictability to their workplaces, workers can stabilize their communities through expressions of participatory democracy. And, as history has repeatedly shown, workers have always had the capacity to run their enterprises on their own. 00-Dario-FM......Page 0 00-Dario-Intro......Page 13 01-Dario......Page 43 02-Dario......Page 79 03-Dario......Page 112 04-Dario......Page 132 05-Dario......Page 169 06-Dario......Page 194 07-Dario......Page 227 08-Dario......Page 254 09-Dario......Page 285 10-Dario......Page 310 11-Dario-Index......Page 341