Alternative Labour History

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, on their own, 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, this book uncovers the practices and intentions of historical and contemporary autonomous workers' movements that have been largely obscured until now. Addressing the questions of our age: What if there were no factories? What if most workers were individualized and work precarious? Can workers' control still be an option? this collection 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 always already have the capacity to run their enterprises on their own.