Henrique Tahan Novaes, Associated Labor and Production in the Age of Barbarism: Education Beyond Capital, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024, 252 pp. ISBN: 978-3-031-51182-0.
Henrique Tahan Novaes’s Associated Labor and Production in the Age of Barbarism: Education Beyond Capital examines the relationship between associated labour, workers’ self-management, and the overcoming of capitalist labour relations within a theoretical and historical framework. Ranging from worker-recovered enterprises in Brazil and factory committees to cooperatives and the experiences of the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST), the study explores the possibilities and limits of workers taking over the management of the production process. One of the book’s central questions is under what conditions collective ownership of the means of production can be transformed into genuine workers’ control over the labour process.
A key concept in Novaes’s analysis, “associated labour,” does not simply refer to work organised in the form of cooperatives. Rather, it points to a broader social relation in which workers collectively have a say not only in their relationship to the means of production, but also in the organisation of production, decision-making processes, and the use of the surplus produced. At the same time, the book does not idealise these experiences as they emerge within capitalism: while forms of associated labour may contain the seeds of new social relations, they can also reproduce certain elements of existing relations under the pressures of the market, competition, and the capitalist division of labour.
The work of István Mészáros occupies a decisive place in the book’s theoretical framework. Drawing on this perspective, Novaes distinguishes between changing the ownership of the means of production and establishing genuine control over production. The transfer of an enterprise to cooperative ownership or its takeover by workers does not in itself mean that capitalist labour relations have been overcome; the crucial issue is whether overall control of the labour process is exercised by the associated producers. The book therefore argues that beyond individual self-managed enterprises, production and distribution need to be democratically organised on a broader scale, with structures such as workers’ councils serving as instruments of this process.
One of the concrete grounds for this discussion is provided by worker-recovered enterprises in Brazil and Argentina. Novaes shows how these experiences can partially overcome some of the characteristic divisions of the capitalist enterprise: between managers and managed, planners and executors, and mental and manual labour. Practices such as democratic assemblies, rotation in strategic positions, and the revocability of positions are considered means through which workers can become not merely those who carry out production but actors who manage the production process itself. At the same time, tendencies such as market competition, wage differentials, the re-emergence of hierarchies, and the employment of outside wage labour by cooperatives also reveal the limits faced by enterprise-level self-management within a capitalist environment.
One of the book’s distinctive dimensions is its treatment of self-management as a process of learning and education. As workers take over the management of production, they have to learn not only their technical tasks but also the enterprise’s budgeting, investment decisions, organisation of production, and mechanisms of collective decision-making. Knowledge that is concentrated in the hands of particular groups of managers and specialists in capitalist enterprises can thus be shared more broadly within the workers’ collective. Linking this process to Gramsci’s approach to the pedagogical role of factory councils, Novaes emphasises that workers learn self-management through the very practice of self-management.
In these respects, Associated Labor and Production in the Age of Barbarism provides an important resource for discussing the relationship between workers’ control and workers’ self-management, as well as the limits of self-management established in individual enterprises within broader capitalist relations. While treating collective ownership of the means of production as a necessary but insufficient transformation in itself, the book frames the central question in terms of who exercises control over the knowledge of production, decision-making mechanisms, and the labour process. It thus makes it possible to understand worker-recovered enterprises not simply as alternative forms of ownership, but as contradictory and open-ended experiences through which producers seek to regain control over production.