Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take over

This book investigates the return of workers’ self-management in recent decades as responses to recurring neoliberal crises. In particular, the book homes in on worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs), a promising form of workers’ self-organization whereby workers restart troubled, bankrupt, or shuttered companies as cooperatives or other forms of democratic workplace.

The book argues that WREs are prefigurative of new forms of work based on equality and sustainability. Framed by the concepts of autogestión, the labour commons, and prefigurative ethico-political practices, the book argues that WREs contribute to the construction of more directly democratic community economies. Drawing on a range of contemporary case studies from numerous countries in the Global South and North, as well as new theories of workers’ self-management, the book contributes a critical development, political economic, and class-struggle Marxist perspective to the re-emergent labour question within anti-systemic social movements, while theorizing the transformative nature of WREs for workers, work organizations, and communities.

Bringing a class-analysis back into current discourses and debates concerning democracy at work and alternatives to global capital, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of development studies, labour studies, political economy, sociology of development, sociology of work, and political science.

Dario Azzellini, PhD in Political Science and in Sociology, is Visiting Research Fellow at the ILR School, Cornell University, USA. Azzellini’s over 20 books, 11 films, and more than 100 journal articles and book chapters focus on labour, self-management, sustainability and just transition, social transformation, and global political economy, many of which have been translated into various languages. He is also the founder of the multilingual website workerscontrol.net. Follow his work at www.azzellini.net

Marcelo Vieta, PhD in Social and Political Thought, is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Leadership, Higher and Adult Education and co-director of the Centre for Learning, Social Economy and Work at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education of the University of Toronto, Canada. He has published award-winning books and dozens of articles and book chapters on workers’ self-management, economic democracy, cooperativism, and the social and solidarity economy. Follow his work at www.vieta.ca