Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (eds.), Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011, 456 pp. ISBN: 978-1-60846-119-6.
Edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present examines workers’ struggles to exercise direct control over production and management within a broad historical and geographical framework. Bringing together experiences from the Paris Commune to the contemporary period, the book explores the different historical forms of workers’ control, workers’ councils, and workers’ self-management as an important and recurring current within the modern labour movement.
The experiences collected in the book reveal a diversity that prevents workers’ control from being reduced to a single organisational form or historical period. From workers’ councils and factory committees to factory occupations, direct worker action, recovered enterprises, and different forms of self-management, the cases show the different forms taken by workers’ attempts to establish collective control over production processes and workplace management under varying historical conditions. The volume brings these experiences together in six main parts and twenty-two chapters.
The first parts of the book move from historical and theoretical debates on the relationship between workers’ control, revolution, and workers’ councils to the revolutionary experiences of the early twentieth century. Revolutionary shop stewards in Germany, factory committees during the Russian Revolution, the Turin factory councils, and workers’ democracy during the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1937 are examined as different instances in which workers created collective organs of decision-making and management as alternatives to existing structures of authority.
The volume does not limit itself to these revolutionary processes, but also examines how workers’ control and self-management emerged under very different political and social conditions. Experiences of state socialism in Yugoslavia and Poland; anti-colonial struggles in Indonesia and Algeria; and processes of political transformation in Argentina and Portugal illuminate different encounters between workers’ control and questions of the state, revolution, bureaucracy, and property. Workers’ self-management thus appears as an issue extending beyond the relationship between workers and employers within the capitalist enterprise to encompass questions of state power and bureaucratic management.
The later parts of the book bring the discussion to the restructuring of capitalism during the twentieth century and to more recent workers’ struggles. From factory occupations in Britain and factory councils and autonomous workers’ assemblies in Italy to workers’ struggles in West Bengal, recovered enterprises in Argentina and Brazil, and experiences of workers’ control in Venezuela, these cases demonstrate that workers’ control is not simply an organisational form belonging to the revolutionary episodes of the past.
At the same time, this historical panorama highlights an important distinction: the experiences examined in the book do not all represent the same political or organisational model. A workers’ council emerging during a revolution and an institution of self-management under state socialism, just like a factory occupation and an enterprise recovered by its workers, develop under different conditions and confront different problems. One of the volume’s major contributions is precisely that it allows us to consider, without reducing them to a single model, the different historical forms through which workers have sought to establish collective and democratic control over production, work, and management.
In this sense, Ours to Master and to Own provides a wide-ranging resource for understanding workers’ control and self-management not as experiences confined to particular revolutionary moments or belonging solely to the past, but as a tradition of workers’ struggle and organisation that has repeatedly emerged under different historical conditions. From capitalist crises and revolutionary transformations to anti-colonial struggles, state socialism, and recovered enterprises in the neoliberal period, the book’s historical and geographical breadth provides rich ground for comparatively examining both the possibilities of workers’ control and the limits it encounters under different social and political conditions.