Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work

When Workers Take Over

Dario Azzellini, Marcelo Vieta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040394083
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates the return of workers' self-management in recent decades as responses to recurring neoliberal crises. In particular, the book homes in on worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs), a promising form of workers' self-organization whereby workers restart troubled, bankrupt, or shuttered companies as cooperatives or other forms of democratic workplace.

The book argues that WREs are prefigurative of new forms of work based on equality and sustainability. Framed by the concepts of autogestión, the labour commons, and prefigurative ethico-political practices, the book argues that WREs contribute to the construction of more directly democratic community economies. Drawing on a range of contemporary case studies from numerous countries in the Global South and North, as well as new theories of workers' self-management, the book contributes a critical development, political economic, and class-struggle Marxist perspective to the re-emergent labour question within anti-systemic social movements, while theorizing the transformative nature of WREs for workers, work organizations, and communities.

Bringing a class-analysis back into current discourses and debates concerning democracy at work and alternatives to global capital, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of development studies, labour studies, political economy, sociology of development, sociology of work, and political science.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Glossary of Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Introduction: Recuperating Workplaces and Community Spaces
• Part I Setting the Conceptual Stage: Recuperating Productive Life, Democratizing Work
• Part II Mapping the Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Latin America
• Part III Mapping the Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Europe and the Rest of the World
• Part IV Worker-Recuperated Enterprises as Labour Commons: Contradictions and Possibilities
• Interviews Conducted
• Index