Alexis Cukier, Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour, trans. Jean-Charles Khalifa and Brendan Prendiville, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, 198 pp. ISBN: 978-3-031-27855-6.
Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour is a comprehensive study of the relationship between the democratisation of work and the democratisation of society. Alexis Cukier’s fundamental point of departure is the idea that democracy cannot be confined to a sphere outside working life. The author uses the concept of “democratic work” to refer both to democratic control over the conditions, means, and purposes of work and to the contribution that democratised work can make to the broader democratisation of society. The book therefore goes beyond giving workers a greater voice in the workplace and discusses the democratic reorganisation of production itself.
The first part of the book is devoted to a democratic critique of the capitalist organisation of work. The exclusion of workers from decision-making processes, the fragmentation of possibilities for collective action, alienation, financialisation, and neo-managerial forms of organisation are examined together. According to Cukier, management through software, individualised performance assessments, reporting, and similar techniques are not merely tools for organising labour processes; they also shape workers’ possibilities for exercising control over their own activity. The book considers this transformation as part of a broader neoliberal labour regime that also encompasses platform companies such as Uber and Deliveroo.
Within this framework, Cukier places particular emphasis on the distinction between workplace democracy and workers’ control and self-management. He argues that it is insufficient to limit democratisation to representation or participation in corporate management; workers must also be able to decide, within their own productive activity, how work is organised, which means are used, and towards what purposes production is directed. Beyond this, the democratisation of work requires the democratisation of institutions outside the workplace, including the market, the state, the social division of labour, and the overall organisation of production.
In the final part of the book, this approach is concretised through historical experiences of self-management and workers’ councils. Alongside experiences of self-management such as Vio.Me, the book examines different experiences of workers’ control and councils, including the Soviets, the Italian factory councils, control obrero, and the Chilean cordones industriales. For Cukier, one of the central problems of self-management is whether democratic control can extend beyond the boundaries of individual enterprises. He therefore argues for establishing a connection between democratic organisation in the workplace and the democratic organisation of economic sectors and wider social life.
This search finds expression in the book’s proposal for work councils, economic councils, and social councils. While democratic control at the enterprise level is intended to be complemented by democratic coordination at the sectoral and societal levels, Cukier also proposes overcoming the separation between the “worker” and the “citizen.” Workers would thus be political subjects not only as citizens in political life, but also during working time, capable of making decisions concerning the conditions, means, and purposes of production.
In these respects, Democratic Work is an important resource for thinking about workers’ control and self-management beyond the enterprise level and towards a broader democratic organisation of production. Rather than treating workers’ control merely as a question of participation in enterprise management, the book approaches it as a question of democratic control over the labour process, productive knowledge, and the purposes of production, while establishing connections between self-managed enterprises, workers’ councils, economic coordination, and social decision-making. It thus takes the central question beyond how much voice workers have within existing structures of production and frames it in terms of by whom, how, and for what social purposes production should be controlled.