Marxist sociologists Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta have just published a book Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over with Routledge. After examining theories of workers’ self-management, the rest of the book analyses a contemporary example of this phenomenon in the form of worker-recuperated enterprises in Latin America, Europe and the rest of the world and their implications for how to create a commonist society beyond capitalism. The book is available in both hardcover and eBook formats.
Here’s the summary of the book:
“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.”
The book can be purchased here.