Worker-led Production
Written by Theodoros Karyotis.
Worker-led production refers to a diverse set of practices that aim to give protagonism to the subjects of labour: the workers themselves. Throughout the industrial era, with its associated processes of deskilling and mechanization, workers not only have demanded a bigger share of the profits through union struggles but have also strived to participate in decision-making processes at their workplace; they have set up cooperatives based on egalitarian self-management; and ultimately, they have occupied businesses and put them under workers’ control.[1]
The cooperative movement, developing alongside the workers’ movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has been a formidable attempt at calling into question the basic social and economic divisions of industrial modernity. However, in the twentieth century, it was absorbed into the capitalist mode of production, since it largely embraced and naturalized wage-labour relations. However, with the onset of the neoliberal capitalist restructuring in the late twentieth century, a new radical cooperativism emerges in many countries, overlapping to an extent with the nascent movement of social and solidarity economy.
More importantly, around the turn of the twenty-first century, in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Venezuela, workers respond to the de-industrialization brought about by the restructuring of the economy. They occupy their bankrupt or abandoned companies, resist eviction attempts and restart production relying on their own forces – a practice dubbed ‘recuperation’. With the spread to the European periphery of the economic conditions that gave rise to the Latin American movement, a nascent movement of workplace recuperations arises after 2011, with examples in Italy, Greece, Turkey, France, Spain, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina. The vision of a future society directed by the ‘associated producers’ themselves cuts across all historical currents of the left; to this day, democratic self-management at the workplace is for many an effective way to bridge the chasm between this vision of the future and the day-to-day struggle within capitalism, thus becoming an essential component of prefigurative politics, that is, politics which attempts to construct alternative social relations in the present. The replacement of existing hierarchies with horizontal decision-making practices not only helps overcome the alienation inherent in industrial production and liberate the workers’ creative powers, but also makes it easier to substitute the myopic profit-seeking motive with humane considerations related to the welfare of the workers and of society at large.
However, elements of worker-led production, divested of their subversive potential, have been gradually introduced in capitalist production. On the one hand, contemporary business management practices pursue increased productivity by allowing – and requiring – some groups of workers to self- direct their activity. On the other hand, as economic restructuring dismantles social welfare provision, commodifies the commons and creates large ‘surplus populations’ of unemployed and precarious workers, a ‘social economy’ qua an ‘economy of the poor’ on the fringes of the mainstream economy is regarded by neoliberal elites as a ‘safety net’. This is an inexpensive means of providing a livelihood to the lower social strata, and thus of maintaining social peace. As a kind of social economy, it simply conceals the inability of contemporary capitalism to ensure social and ecological reproduction.
Indeed, in the context of such a social economy, self-managed workers are often victims of self-exploitation: while internal hierarchies may be abolished, competition within the capitalist market determines what is to be produced, as well as the prices, wages, and ultimately the conditions and intensity of labour. The struggle of these endeavours for survival may vitiate their emancipatory character and relegate environmental or social considerations to the background.
Recuperated companies usually face additional obstacles: lack of access to credit; obsolete machinery; a dwindling market share in conditions of recession. More often than not, they are embroiled in long legal battles against the state and the former owners, with very little in the way of legal arguments besides their social legitimacy as ways of preserving livelihoods.
Thus, workers’ control over the productive process is a necessary but insufficient condition for social emancipation. However, unlike capitalist businesses, worker-run workplaces do not exist in social isolation but usually form part of wider social movements, which compensate the lack of economic and technological innovation with ‘social innovation’. Participation in communities of struggle and networks of worker-run companies helps redirect production towards socially useful products and create alternative avenues of distribution based on solidarity rather than competition. Most newly recuperated companies in Europe have shifted towards environmentally and socially conscious production: Scop-ti and Fabrique du Sud in the south of France towards organic herbal tea and ice- cream respectively; Viome in Greece from chemical building materials to natural cleaning products; Rimaflow and Officine Zero in Italy towards the salvaging and recycling of electronics.
It is precisely the embeddedness of worker-run companies in wider social movements and their attentiveness to the needs and demands of communities that make them important components in a strategy of maximizing social resilience and self-determination. By opening up the company to concerns that are alien to capitalist productivity and profitability, workers call into question the division between the social, the economic and the political spheres, on which capitalist modernity rests. In Latin America and in Europe, occupied factory grounds offer their space to schools, clinics and social centres; they accommodate farmers’ markets, bazaars, concerts, and artistic events. In short, ‘solidarity ecosystems’ are formed around the ‘factory commons’, helping make the leap from the mere production of commodities to the production of relationships, subjects and collectives, encompassing social life in its entirety and acting as a bulwark against processes of dispossession and enclosure.
Note
[1] Workers’ control: an archive of workers’ struggle, a multilingual online resource presenting news, debates, analyses and historical accounts. See http://www. workerscontrol.net/.
Further Resources
Azzelini, Dario and Oliver Ressler (2015), ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’, http://www. ressler.at/occupy_resist/.
Azzellini, Dario (2018), ‘Labour as a Commons: The Example of Worker- Recuperated Companies’. Critical Sociology. 44 (4–5): 763–76.
Barrington-Bush, Liam (2017), ‘Work, Place and Community: The Solidarity Ecosystems of Occupied Factories’, http://morelikepeople.org/solidarity-ecosystems/.
European Medworkers Economy, http://euromedworkerseconomy.net/.
Karakasis, Apostolos (2015), ‘Next Stop: Utopia’, http://www.nextstoputopia.com/.
Lewis, Avi and Naomi Klein (2004), ‘The Take’, http://www.thetake.org/.
Ruggeri, Andrés (2013), ‘Worker Self-Management in Argentina: Problems and Potentials of Self-Managed Labor in the Context of the Neoliberal Post-Crisis’, in Camila Piñeiro Harnecker (ed.), Cooperatives and Socialism: A View from Cuba. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Leave a Reply