Peer2Politics

DARIO: The importance of this wide range of worker control experiences rests in its showing that during the past one hundred years workers have occupied their workplaces and started democratically controlled and self-managed production enterprises in almost all regions of the world. Under all forms of political rule, workers have struggled for participation in the decision-making processes of the enterprises they work in, and have attempted to develop forms of co- and self-management, or workers’ control; they have founded cooperatives and councils as a genuine expression and manifestation of their historical and material interests. In the early twentieth century, workers tried to gain control over production in social and socialist revolutions like those in Russia or Spain, and under state socialism as in Poland or Hungary; they did so as well in anti-colonial struggles and democratic revolutions in Portugal, Indonesia and Algeria. This form of worker control was present in labor struggles against capitalist restructuring in the last third of the twentieth century in Great Britain, Italy, Canada, and elsewhere; and it manifested itself strongly as an instrument of workers and communities contending against the consequences of global capitalist crises since the 1990’s, in Argentina, most of Latin America, and as well in India and some European countries.