Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta, Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over, Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2026, 329 pp. ISBN: 978-1-041-08150-0.
Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over is a comprehensive study that examines workers’ control, self-management, and worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs) from a global and comparative perspective. Drawing on more than two decades of research and fieldwork, Dario Azzellini and Marcelo Vieta explore how enterprises facing crisis, bankruptcy, or closure are taken over by their workers and restarted under cooperatives or other forms of democratic organisation. The book approaches these experiences not merely as attempts to preserve enterprises and employment, but as practices of self-management through which workers regain control over their own labour and productive capacities.
At the centre of the book’s conceptual framework are autogestión, workers’ control, and “labour commons”. While discussing the differences between worker participation, workers’ control, and workers’ self-management, the authors approach recuperated enterprises as practices with the potential to transform the hierarchical labour relations of the capitalist firm. Within this framework, common ownership alone is not considered sufficient; what becomes crucial is workers’ collective control over decision-making power, productive knowledge, the labour process, and the outcomes of production. The concept of commoning, in turn, is used to describe the broader social process through which this collective control is continuously produced and reproduced.
One of the important features of the study is that it develops this theoretical discussion through numerous experiences of worker-recuperated enterprises around the world. Beginning with Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela, the book examines a broad geography extending to Italy, France, Greece, the former Yugoslav countries, Turkey, Egypt, Canada, and the United States. Through experiences such as Officine Zero, RiMaflow, GKN, SCOP-TI (formerly Fralib), Fabrique du Sud, Vio.Me, Jugoremedija, ITAS, Dita, Kazova, and New Era Windows, the book comparatively examines the conditions under which workers take over enterprises, how they reorganise production, and how they develop relationships with trade unions, the state, local communities, and solidarity economy networks.
Azzellini and Vieta also discuss the contradictions and limits of self-management. The elimination of the boss’s direct control by workers does not automatically remove recuperated enterprises from capitalist market relations. Competition, problems of financing, contradictory relations with the state, relations with trade unions, and questions of gender and reproductive labour are among the tensions faced by self-managed enterprises. This condition, which the authors approach as the “dual realities” of worker-recuperated enterprises, leads them to understand self-management not as a completed model, but as an open and contradictory process that seeks to develop different relations of production and work within existing economic relations.
One of the book’s distinctive contributions is its examination of how labour itself can be transformed within recuperated enterprises. Through more horizontal organisational structures, democratic decision-making, more egalitarian relations, task rotation, and the sharing of productive knowledge, workers not only assume the management of the enterprise but also develop their capacity to organise work and production collectively. This process is associated with learning to labour collectively through “commoning” and with the partial overcoming of alienation. The central issue thus expands from the legal ownership of the enterprise towards effective control over the labour process and productive knowledge.
In these respects, Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work is an important resource that takes workers’ control and self-management beyond the boundaries of the enterprise and connects them with labour commons and broader networks of solidarity. Through the relationships that recuperated enterprises develop with local communities, trade unions, social movements, and other cooperatives, the book explores possibilities extending from individual self-managed enterprises towards broader solidarity economies and processes of commoning. It therefore approaches workers’ control not only through the question of “who manages the enterprise?” but also through the question of how labour, productive knowledge, and the outcomes of production can be made into commons and democratically controlled.