workers control

With a lot of rhetoric and propaganda the Chavez administration has advanced different examples of co-management which, they claim, demonstrate their desire to transform Venezuela’s relations of production. A compañero from Europe visited us recently and got to know two of the most celebrated cases: Alcasa and Invepal.

Workers Control at Venezuela’s Sanitarios Maracay under Attack
By Megan Hise

Instead the workers want to buy the shares of the foreign management, and are proposing they (the workers) run the company themselves, promising to bring down the cement market price from LE400 per ton (expected to rise soon to LE600) to LE200.

Introduction
Worker self-management (WSM) has re-emerged as a major movement in Argentina, particularly this year with over 200 factories organized and controlled by their workers and a national co-coordinator of self-managed enterprises in the process of being organized.

This simple introduction to syndicalism, workers control and libertarian communism originally appeared as a series of articles in War Commentary for Anarchism in 1943.

Contents
1. Not Centralism - But Federalism
2. Economic Federalism
3. Abolition Of The Wages System
4. The End Of The Money Trick
5. To Each According To His[/Her] Needs
6. Workers' Control of Distribution

The pace of Japan’s economy is picking up again after more than a decade of stasis. During this long period of economic stagnation, the many personnel practices favoring employees known by the rubric “lifetime employment” have been subjected to increased criticism by pro-investor, neo-liberal voices.

Frequently asked questions about workers self-management.

Adequate statistical information is difficult to obtain, but the following data should give a general idea of the extent of the libertarian revolution on the land and in the cities.

This was published by Wildcat in December 2003 but has only now been translated into English (for prol-position news #6, July 2006), and a short introduction added. Although it is a bit old, it still contains unique insights into the situation, hopes, difficulties and dynamics of the occupation process and many personal interviews.

In Italy in 1960s and 70s San Basilio, one of Rome’s outlying ghetto areas, a movement was developing of people fighting against their lousy, inhuman living conditions. There were 40,000 people trapped in this slum district. In the previous few months about 100 families had been on rent strike. This started as a spontaneous protest, and was becoming more organised.

The reformist unions then negotiated an end to the conflicts, clearing the path for the fascist reaction - the Biennio Nero (two black years) of 1921-22.

The First World War was hardly over, it was February 1919, and the leadership of the revolutionary rank-and-file union the Industrial Workers of the World was in jail. However, the IWW idea of the general strike became reality for five days in Seattle, Washington, when a walkout of 100,000 working people brought the city to a halt.

Introduction

That company was Zanon and it's part of a network of worker-managed businesses that are transforming people's lives. At the centrr of that network is the Hotel Bauen, a four star hotel in Buenos Aires, run by its workers.

Detailed account of worker-controlled agriculture in revolutionary Spain

COLLECTIVES IN THE SPANISH REVOLUTION
by Gaston Leval
Published by Freedom Press, London, 1975

Text from anarchosyndicalism.net

It was just one of thousands of businesses that sank as Argentina's once prosperous economy went into meltdown, pushing almost half the population below the poverty line.

Today a new furnace where the red hot glass is melted is burning. The factory is one of more than 100 "recovered businesses" which are now putting themselves forward as an alternative business model for the country.

An account of the workings of rural agricultural collectives in Aragon, revolutionary Spain, 1936-39

Agrarian Collectives during the Spanish Revolution and Civil War
Michael Seidman
PDF Format (108KB)

Due to the large number of footnotes from primarily Russian language sources, they have been omitted from this online version. See www.slavicreview.uiuc.edu/ for information about subscriptions and back issues.

Russian Labor and Bolshevik Power after October
William G. Rosenberg
Slavic Review, Vol. 44, No. 2. (Summer, 1985)