Workers’ self-management is on the rise, as a response to recurring neoliberal crises: this is the central argument in a new book co-authored by Professor Dario Azzellini, senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology, University of Duisburg-Essen with previous roles at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas (Mexico) and Cornell University (USA).
In particular, Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work homes in on worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs), a form of workers’ self-organisation whereby workers restart troubled, bankrupt, or shuttered companies as co-operatives or other forms of democratic workplace.
Worker buyouts are not new – and Co-op News’s recent interview with Bruno Roelants touched on the success of Italy’s Marcora Law, which facilitates such transfers. But Azzellini argues that WREs are transformative not just for workers and organisations, but communities and wider democracy too. He and co-author Marcelo Vieta add a class-analysis dynamic to the re-emergent labour question, drawing on a range of contemporary case studies from around the world.
“What we try to do in the book is to go back to the original idea of what co-operatives were at the beginning,” Azzellini says. “And co-operatives at the beginning were part of the workers’ movement. It was a collective response to the idea of ‘everyone according to their capacities, and everyone according to their needs’.”
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