Dario Azzellini and Michael G. Kraft (eds.), The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century, Leiden: Brill, 2018, 321 pp. ISBN: 978-90-04-29146-1.
Edited by Dario Azzellini and Michael G. Kraft, The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers’ Struggles in the Twenty-First Century examines new forms of workers’ struggle and self-organisation that have emerged in response to labour relations transformed by neoliberal capitalism. Published as volume 150 of the Historical Materialism Book Series, the book focuses on democratic and independent forms of workers’ organisation that have developed outside or in opposition to traditional and bureaucratic trade-union structures.
One of the book’s starting points is that the reorganisation of production over the past few decades, the spread of precarious and flexible forms of employment, and the emergence of new forms of social and economic marginalisation have also transformed the conditions under which the working class organises. The contributions approach these transformations not only through the framework of traditional collective bargaining and institutionalised trade-union politics, but also through practices such as grassroots organising, direct action, autonomous workers’ committees, radical trade unionism, workplace occupations, and workers’ self-management. One of the editors’ central questions is how, in the face of changing labour and production relations, workers develop new forms of organisation, tactics, and strategies capable of shifting the balance of power between labour and capital.
Bringing together examples from the Global North and the Global South, the book covers a broad geographical range: from workers’ struggles in India and the autonomous committees of the Marikana workers in South Africa to grassroots struggles in Greece and experiments in workers’ control in Venezuela; from the struggle at the Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago to cases in Egypt, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Colombia. The struggle at the Babylon Cinema in Germany, radical trade unionism and workers’ self-management in Indonesia, struggles in Italy’s logistics sector, and the organising of Latin American cleaners in London are also among the experiences examined in the collection.
The book also has particular relevance for Turkey. Demet Ş. Dinler’s chapter, “New Workers’ Struggles in Turkey since the 2000s: Possibilities and Limits,” discusses the possibilities and limitations of new workers’ struggles that have emerged in Turkey since the 2000s. In this respect, rather than presenting struggles in different countries as examples of a single universal model of organisation, the collection seeks to understand each experience within its own historical conditions and the specific relations of power between labour and capital.
The significance of The Class Strikes Back for workers’ control and self-management lies in its placement of these practices within a broader discussion of workers’ self-organisation. While the recuperation of factories by workers and the resumption of production, workers’ control, and direct democratic management occupy a central place in some chapters, the book also brings into view the limits these practices encounter in their relations with the capitalist market and the state. The experiences of Venezuela and Indonesia in particular raise the question of whether workers’ control remains limited to taking over the management of individual enterprises or can contribute to the construction of broader democratic economic relations among producers, consumers, and local communities.
Another area highlighted by the collection is the capacity of workers to create new sources of power within changing systems of production and distribution. In the case of struggles in Italy’s logistics sector, migrant and precarious workers identify strategic choke points in capital’s distribution networks and develop collective action around them, showing that contemporary capitalism can generate not only new obstacles to workers’ organisation but also new possibilities for struggle. Workers’ self-organisation is thus understood not simply as an alternative to existing trade-union institutions, but as a process of developing new strategies of struggle by analysing the changing organisation of production.
From this perspective, The Class Strikes Back is an important collection that situates workers’ control and self-management within the broader framework of twenty-first-century class struggle. While showing that experiences across different geographical contexts cannot be reduced to a single organisational model, the book demonstrates how tendencies such as organising independently of bureaucratised trade-union structures, direct democracy, workers collectively directing their own struggles, and establishing control over production re-emerge under different conditions. This historical and geographical diversity provides a rich basis for comparatively examining both the possibilities of workers’ self-organisation under neoliberal capitalism and the limits it encounters.