14.5.2024, 18:00 – 20:00 Uhr (ct.), Programm Kolloquium InterAmerican Studies (IAS) SoSe 2024, Universität Bielefeld, Seminarraum B2-103

Dario Azzellini: Council democracy in Latin America? Local self-government and workers’ control (English language presentation)

The struggle of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, revitalized strongly the idea communal and councilist local self-government practices based on communal democracy, with a leftist and socialist perspective. Since then, similar practices of social, political and economic organization surfaced in different regions of Latin America, including Guerrero and Oaxaca (Mexico), Venezuela and Bolivia. The self-organized communities include often also the collective administration of the means of production. Moreover, workplaces taken over by workers over the past two decades and producing under workers’ control (mainly in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela) organize in ways similar to the council democracy of the early twentieth Century. In this chapter I sum up the basic principles of council democracy in the early twentieth Century. The talk sums up the main principles of council democracy, looks at historical experiences of “commune” in Latin America, and then focus on different contemporary Latin American experiences of commune-like local self-administration and productioxn under workers control, that resemble characteristics of council democracy.

https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/einrichtungen/cias/studium/kolloquium/