An Alternative Labour History

Worker Control and Workplace Democracy

Assistant Professor Dario Azzellini

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783601578
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Lavoro e relazioni industriali

The global financial crisis has led to a new shop-floor militancy. Radical forms of protest and new workers' takeovers have sprung up all over the globe. In the US, Republic Windows and Doors started production under worker control in January 2013. Later that year workers in Greece took over and managed a hotel, a hospital, a newspaper, a TV channel and a factory. The dominant revolutionary left has viewed workers' control as part of a system necessary during a transition to socialism. Yet most socialist and communist parties have neglected to promote workers' control as it challenges the centrality of parties and it is in this spirit that trade unions, operating through the institutional frameworks of government, have held a monopoly over labor history. Tracing Marx's writings on the Paris Commune through council communism, anarcho-syndicalism, Italian operaismo, and other "heretical" left currents, An Alternative Labour History uncovers the practices and intentions of historical and contemporary autonomous workers' movements that until now have been largely obscured. It shows that by bringing permanence and predictability to their workplaces, workers can stabilize their communities through expressions of participatory democracy. And, as history has repeatedly shown, workers have always had the capacity to run their enterprises on their own.

O N E

Council Democracy, or the End of the Political

Alex Demirović, translated by Joe Keady

Democracy, as it is widely understood, is equated with parliaments, periodic elections, parties, and representation. This form of liberal democracy has repeatedly been in crisis since the 19th century, but it has consistently been able to revive itself and, if anything, expand further. Parliamentary democracy has once again been diagnosed as being gradually eroded and in crisis in recent years: the dominance of business interests in politics, the distance of parties and parliaments from the general public, the imperviousness of public opinion to the interests of the populace, the executive decisions made to benefit institutional investors, and the spread of corruption, as well as that of right-wing populism and nationalism, are all symptoms of this erosion. Critics often pin their hopes on forms of direct democracy, but contrary to what this term suggests, it offers little potential for participation or agency. Direct democracy operates within the framework of liberal democracy, which is based on finding majorities to pass bills and therefore ultimately on a dichotomous yes or no position. As a result, social relations themselves are not constituted in a directly democratic way. Rather, direct democracy adds yet another procedure arises which is supplementary to the parliament instead.

The council democracy tradition represents one alternative to this. This may appear at first blush to be a museum piece, but during periods when social movements no longer oriented themselves to the parameters enforced by the ruling classes and no longer demanded these standards to be reinforced, but instead have transitioned into constitutive action, they have repeatedly updated their demands for a radical democratic alternative (see Arendt 1963). That demand has assumed various forms, including control over production, changes in the distribution of property, self-government, the cooperative management of production and distribution, anti-authoritarianism and self-determination of all social relations from the workplace to the school to the family. It can be expressed as “Work differently, live differently”. The forerunners of the council democracy tradition are the English and French revolutions; the fundamental impetus comes from the Paris Commune and the council communist movement in Russia as well as in Germany, Hungary, Austria and Italy following World War I (see Ness and Azzellini, 2011). It was revived by the uprising in Hungary in 1956, by the social protest movements since 1968 and finally, by new initiatives in Latin America in recent years. Often spurred on by the social movements of their time, intellectuals such as Marx, Trotsky, Gramsci, Max Adler, Karl Korsch, Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis have addressed the matter of council democracy at various times.

In this article I address certain aspects of council democracy. My intention is neither to apply old debates to the present-day situation without comment nor to suggest that they are directly applicable to it. Instead, I call attention to a particular problem in the debate on council democracy and therefore read older texts from the perspective of democracy theory. If the impulse towards council democracy has repeatedly renewed itself in the prevailing historical conflict, then a critical reading of this kind will be useful in three ways. It will recall these older discussions; it will show that council democracy utilizes important ideas in pursuit of fundamental democratization that are useful for today’s social movements, and finally, it brings to light the problems connected with the demand for council democracy. I would first like to show that liberal democracy innately produces the necessity of a radical alternative. In the second section, I introduce the reasons for this with support from observations by Marx and the significant perspectives he developed on council democracy based on the experiences of the Paris Commune. The third section examines the problems that developed in the council democracy movement after World War I that are instructive for any new considerations of democracy theory.

The failure of liberal democracy

Council democracy is an alternative to liberal representative democracy. From the perspective of council democracy, parliamentary democracy is a principle that does not challenge the bourgeois class. Rather, parliamentarianism must be seen as a form of bourgeois domination (see Adler, 1919: 134–5; Pannekoek, 1946: 67–8, 266–8). The shortcomings of parliamentary democracy are therefore not simply incidental to it: they systematically contribute to the dominance of the bourgeoisie and its specific structure of ownership. Liberal democracy operates in the context of a two thousand-year conception of democracy. In this understanding of political organization, democracy is a regime in which, as a form of compromise, common people to a certain extent participate in that domination, alongside the rich. From this perspective, therefore, democratic institutions are not controlled through the shared and equal participation in the shared production of shared living conditions and shared interests. If the mechanisms of liberal democracy are not explicitly aimed at preventing the will to develop from the bottom up will, together with the collaborative formation of social relations, then they are designed to break down, postpone, filter and then selectively accept this will and its enactment. This happens through the process of representation, the institution of parliament and political parties, the separation of the legislative and executive branches, and the particular form of the state’s management of people.

Liberal democracy separates the economic from the political sphere, the public from the private sphere and the universal from the particular in the social sphere. Universal interests are represented in the political. The political sphere constitutes the terrain of a universal will that is separate from society, which is to say it acts according to its own specific logic in terms of its juridicial subject-position, autonomous free will, universality and representation. By contrast, life at work, at school, or in the family is regarded as a particular, private matter. To prevent the state from restricting freedom in these private spheres, it is permitted to set down binding universal conditions only when they protect the rights of the individual. No consideration is given to cooperation or the shared planning of the structures of everyday life. While decisions are made that have an impact on the whole of social life in the fields of production, technology or the family, the state often serves only the particular interests of certain powerful groups whose interests are generalized within society as a whole in the form of the state itself.

Council democracy, by contrast, extends collective self-determination to much more than the economic sphere alone. More importantly, it comprehends all social labor as well as the social division of labor, and consequently challenges the separation and configuration of economics and politics, everyday reproductive labor and social decision-making, as well as the separation of the public and private spheres. It makes that challenge in the interest of reorganizing and democratically structuring social life in its entirety rather than simply for the benefit of individual workplaces or regions. The state, as an ostensibly neutral authority enthroned above society, consequently becomes superfluous because the planned management of production and distribution in the society is organized from below (see Korsch, 1919a: 164). From this perspective, democracy is no longer merely a political regime but instead constitutes a way of life that determines every sphere and as such constitutes a different form of community, which Marx identifies as the association of free individuals.

Marx’s understanding of the political and his assessment of the commune

With respect to his view of the state and politics, there is a great deal of overlap between Marx’s analyses of the Paris Commune in 1871 and his early writings. He saw the measures taken by the commune as steps towards the goals that he had articulated in the 1840s. Marx drew on those developments in his critique of the political state at the level of its principles, which is to say the representative state or the democratic republic based on national sovereignty (see Marx, 1843: 352, 1875: 29). He used the method of critique to tease out this representative system. According to Marx, the political, representative state is a free state that emancipates itself from society by defining social differences such as birth, status, education or occupation as apolitical; proclaiming that, “every member of the nation is an equal participant in national sovereignty”. In contrast to these particulars, which the state regards as private, it then asserts a claim to universality. Consequently, modern life is divided into two spheres: one ethereal and the other mundane: one a life in a political community in which people are citizens and the other a life in civil society in which they act as private individuals.

Marx noticed a chiasmus. Living individuals in their concrete reality are regarded as merely private and particular and therefore false. But this is where individuals are perceived as a species-being (Gattungswesen), as a member of the community, and as a citizen, while it is within the state, that they are “robbed of [their] real life and filled with an unreal universality” (Marx, 1843: 46). So the representative state operates on a higher historical plane in lieu of religion. The individual relates to all other individuals through the medium of the state. But that means that individuals relate to one another only on a limited, partial basis and many aspects of their lives, specifically everything that is considered private, are necessarily disregarded. Given that the political state becomes the intermediary between people and that they demand their freedom solely through the state’s laws, Marx identifies that state as religious and Christian:

What makes political democracy Christian is the fact that in it man, not only a single man but every man, counts as a sovereign being; but it is man as he appears uncultivated and unsocial, man in his accidental existence, man as he comes and goes . . . in a word, man who is no longer a real species-being. (Marx, 1843: 50)

The constitution of the political state in the act of revolution separates civil society from the state, gathers together all forms of politics and domination and constitutes them as the sphere of the community in contrast to the specific life activities of the individual. This political revolution is authoritarian by its own logic because in order to effect political emancipation, the state will attempt to nullify the particular spheres of life and “to constitute itself as the real, harmonious life of man”. Yet at best it can succeed for only a short period of time and only then by force, as the political declares a revolution against the social conditions upon which it is based, that is, the private life of civil society, to be permanent. That struggle is futile because, as Marx shows, the Jacobin Terror was necessarily followed by “the restoration of religion, private property, and all elements of civil society” (Marx, 1843: 47).

These considerations lead to four conclusions.

1. Only when real individuals reabsorb in themselves the abstract citizen, when individuals have recognized and organized their own powers as social powers – that is, no longer as a state community beyond isolated private individuals but in the form of conscious cooperation with others – only then “will human emancipation be completed” (Marx, 1843: 57). This is the production of the real, cooperative community without classes and without a state as the medium of public welfare lying above social classes and individuals.

2. Marx repeatedly restated this idea of reabsorption. Yet it is clear that this cannot strictly refer to reabsorbing the state and the political into society because, as a material foundation, civil society is constitutive of the separation of civil society from the state. It must itself be fundamentally altered. Changing and overcoming the state requires, above all, a change in its social foundation. In the particular bourgeois manner in which they are articulated both civil society and the state are problematic: as spheres of particular, private individuals and as abstract community. Marx therefore concerns himself with overcoming the constitutive line that differentiates these two spheres from one another. But this differentiation occurs within society itself. As it is reorganized around the previously disavowed forms of social labor (that is to say, the privately appropriated surplus labor of waged and reproductive labor), the practices of political domination will gradually become superfluous:

State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The State is not “abolished.” It dies out. (Engels, 1882: 70)

The particular antinomies in the society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails are lifted: the specific and the universal; the tangible, living individual and the species-being (Gattungswesen); the private and the public.

3. Marx places human emancipation at the center of his thought. For him, the point is to overcome the fundamental conditions under which social classes have been formed throughout world history:

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of associated individuals, the public power will lose its political character. (Marx and Engels, 1848: 237–8)

Moreover, public power as the organized power on the part of one class for the suppression of another becomes superfluous itself. According to Marx, the proletarian class should no longer pursue the project of political emancipation and political revolution. Such emancipation would have authoritarian consequences without changing society’s foundations. The revolution must come from below and be implemented as a social revolution that changes people’s living and working conditions:

A social revolution, even though it be limited to a single industrial district, involves the standpoint of the whole, because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it starts from the standpoint of the single, real individual, because the collectivity against whose separation from himself the individual reacts is the true collectivity of man, the human essence. The political soul of revolution consists on the contrary in a tendency of the classes without political influence to end their isolation from the top positions in the state. Their standpoint is that of the state, an abstract whole, that only exists through a separation from real life, that is inconceivable without the organized opposition, the general concept of humanity and its individual existence. (Marx, 1844a: 126)

4. The problem is nonetheless that human emancipation cannot be achieved directly. Any appeal to the humanity of each individual will fade out; human rights do not extend beyond capitalist servitude because they defend the existing ownership structure. Given the actual basis of its existence and its symbolic significance in connection with all other social classes, Marx sees the working class as the one that must organize the transition, which he identifies as the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (Marx, 1875: 565). The working class is the universal class because it represents universal suffering. Marx sees the working class as the one that contributes in a particular way to sustaining society through its labor. At the same time, the working class is subsumed within capital and its living labor power exploited and appropriated as the private wealth of a few people, who base their domination on that appropriation. If the working class wants to emancipate itself, it can do so only by emancipation from itself and from the social relations under which it is a working class at all, meaning only by abolishing the bourgeois society under which everyone else also has to suffer. “This dissolution of society, as a particular e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• About the Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword by Jeremy Brecher
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Council Democracy, or the End of the Political
• 2 Contemporary Crisis and Workers’ Control
• 3 Workers’ Assemblies: New Formations in the Organization of Labor and the Struggle against Capitalism
• 4 The Austrian Revolution of 1918–1919 and Working Class Autonomy
• 5 Chile: Worker Self–organization and Cordones Industriales under the Allende Government (1970–1973)
• 6 “Production Control” or “Factory Soviet”? Workers’ Control in Japan
• 7 The Factory Commissions in Brazil and the 1964 Coup d’État
• 8 Self-Management, Workers’ Control and Resistance against Crisis and Neoliberal Counter-reforms in Mexico
• 9 Collective Self-management and Social Classes: The Case of Enterprises Recovered by Their Workers in Uruguay
• 10 Self-Managing the Commons in Contemporary Greece
• Notes on Contributors
• Notes
• References
• Index