Dario Azzellini (ed.), An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy, London: Zed Books, 2015, 352 pp. ISBN: 978-1-78360-154-7.
Edited by Dario Azzellini, An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy examines workers’ control and workplace democracy through a tradition of struggle that has largely remained outside mainstream labour history. The book approaches the history of workers’ movements not only through political parties, major trade unions, and institutionalised organisations, but instead places at its centre autonomous forms of organisation and struggle through which workers have sought to exercise direct control over production and the workplace.
One of the book’s central points of departure is that workers’ control does not belong to a single historical period or political tradition. Tracing a trajectory from the Paris Commune through council communism, anarcho-syndicalism, Italian operaismo, and other radical currents, the collection brings together experiences in which workers developed collective decision-making power over work and production through councils, assemblies, factory committees, and other forms of grassroots organisation. In this sense, workers’ control is considered not simply as a temporary form of management that might emerge during a transition to socialism, but as part of a broader search for democratisation and social transformation grounded in workers’ own collective capacities.
The historical and geographical scope of the collection is extensive. Alex Demirović’s theoretical discussion of council democracy is followed by Dario Azzellini’s study of contemporary crisis and workers’ control and Elise Danielle Thorburn’s chapter on workers’ assemblies. Subsequent contributions examine the Austrian Revolution of 1918–1919 and working-class autonomy, the cordones industriales under Allende in Chile, workers’ control in Japan, factory commissions in Brazil, struggles for self-management in Mexico, enterprises recovered by their workers in Uruguay, and self-managed commons in contemporary Greece. Experiences emerging in very different periods and contexts are thus brought into a comparative framework without being reduced to a single model.
The global financial crisis of 2008 and the renewed visibility of workplace occupations and workers’ control initiatives provide another important point of departure for the book. Azzellini’s chapter “Contemporary Crisis and Workers’ Control” examines struggles developed by workers seeking to maintain production in workplaces threatened by closure or liquidation. Alongside Republic Windows and Doors in the United States and experiences of occupation and self-management in Greece, cases from countries including France, Italy, Egypt, and Turkey demonstrate that workers’ control is not simply a phenomenon belonging to revolutionary periods of the past, but can re-emerge under conditions of capitalist crisis.
Within this framework, the book also establishes a direct connection with experiences of workers’ self-management in Turkey. Azzellini’s chapter on contemporary workers’ control struggles discusses the factory occupation and self-management experience of the Kazova Textile workers. Placing Kazova alongside international cases makes it possible to understand workers’ control and self-management struggles in Turkey not simply as a local experience, but as part of a broader international wave of struggles around economic crisis, workplace occupation, the resumption of production, and workers’ attempts to establish collective forms of management.
An Alternative Labour History also provides an important framework for thinking about the distinction between workers’ control and worker participation. The experiences foregrounded in the collection concern more than workers’ limited participation within existing management structures: they also raise questions about how production is organised, who makes decisions and through which mechanisms, and how hierarchical relations within the workplace might be transformed. Councils, workers’ assemblies, and practices of self-management are therefore approached not simply as forms of economic management but as political experiments that test the possibilities of direct and participatory democracy in the workplace.
From this perspective, An Alternative Labour History is an important collection that proposes rereading labour history through workers’ attempts to organise themselves, establish control over production, and democratise the workplace. Experiences from different historical periods and geographical contexts demonstrate that workers’ control can be reduced neither to a single organisational form nor solely to moments of revolutionary crisis. One of the book’s major contributions is to make visible experiences often overshadowed in dominant narratives of labour history, allowing the historical continuities of workers’ control, workplace democracy, and self-management—as well as the possibilities and limits they encounter under different conditions—to be considered together.