When Workers Take Over
Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work
When Workers Take Over
Autor: Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta
Publisher: Routledge
Seiten: 290
Veröffentlicht July 14 2025
Book at Routledge
"Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work When Workers Take Over"
By Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta
290 Pages, July 14, 2025 by Routledge (an affordable paperback will follow)
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.
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Recuperating Workplaces and Community Spaces
Part 1: Setting The Conceptual Stage: Recuperating Productive Life, Democratizing Work
Chapter 1: Class Still Matters: Autogestión, Living Labour, The Moral Economy of Work, and The Labour Commons
Chapter 2: A Conceptual Review: Workers’ Self-Management, Workers’ Control, and Autogestión
Chapter 3: A Historical Perspective: Key Debates in Autogestión
Part 2: Mapping The Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Latin America
Chapter 4: ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’: Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises Set the Stage
Chapter 5: Between The Social and Solidarity Economy and The State: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Brazil and Uruguay
Chapter 6: Cooperatives, Co-Management, And Workers’ Councils in the “Communal State”: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Venezuela
Part 3: Mapping The Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Europe and The Rest of The World
Chapter 7: Labour-Conflict Conversions Amid Wider Cooperative Movements: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Italy and France
Chapter 8: Workers’ Responses to Rising Austerity and Social Challenges: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in the Rest of Europe
Chapter 9: Inklings of a Larger Global Movement: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in The Rest of The World
Part 4: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises as Labour Commons: Contradictions and Possibilities
Chapter 10: Recuperating The Commons
Chapter 11: Commonalities in The Lived Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises
Chapter 12: The Dual Realities of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises
Chapter 13: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises and Workplace Democracy as Labour Commons
