Die letzten beiden umfassenden Darstellungen von Arbeiterräten und Arbeiter-selbstverwaltung stammen aus den Jahren 1971 und 1991. Ernest Mandel gab 1971 die Anthologie Arbeiterkontrolle, Arbeiterräte, Arbeiterselbstverwaltung heraus, die auch weniger bekannte Beispiele wie Seattle 1919, Bolivien 1953-1963, Algerien und Indonesien berücksichtigte. 1991 legte der Iraner Assef Bayat die Studie Work, Politics and Power – an international perspective on workers' control and self- management vor, die insbesondere den globalen Süden in den Blick nahm. Angeregt dazu hatte ihn die hier kaum wahrgenommene Arbeiterrätebewegung während der iranischen Revolution von 1979, die er in Workers and Revolution in Iran analysiert hatte. Dass nun auf Englisch und Deutsch eine weitere breit angelegte Textsammlung zu Fabrikräten und Selbstverwaltung erschienen ist, deutet auf das in der tiefen Jahrhundertkrise des Kapitalismus wiedererwachte Interesse an Alternativen zur profitorientierten Produktion hin, und es scheint auch kein Zufall zu sein, dass im letzten Teil des Buches zu Erfahrungen aus der Zeit 1990 bis 2010 die Beispiele aus Lateinamerika im Mittelpunkt stehen. Vor allem die praktischen Versuche der Übernahme der Produktion durch ArbeiterInnen in Argentinien sind – nicht erst durch Naomi Kleins Film The Take – weltweit zu einem Symbol für die Möglichkeit von Arbeiterselbstverwaltung geworden. Auf der großen Demonstration im belgischen Genk gegen die Schließung der dortigen Ford-Werke im letzten November kursierten Flugblätter, die eine Fortführung der Produktion in Eigenregie vorschlugen und dabei ganz selbstverständlich auf die Erfahrungen aus Argentinien hinwiesen.

Der vorliegende Sammelband, für dessen deutsche Ausgabe Marx' positive Beurteilung der Pariser Kommune von 1871 als Titel gewählt wurde – „Die endlich entdeckte politische Form“ – trägt eine ganze Reihe von gut bekannten, aber auch weniger bekannten Beispielen für die Kontrolle von ArbeiterInnen über die Produktion im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert zusammen. Die Herausgeber erwähnen ausdrücklich, dass sie keine Vollständigkeit beanspruchten, weshalb gerade für den lateinamerikanischen Kontext zentrale Beispiele wie die Bewegung der Cordones Industriales während der Regierungszeit Salvador Allendes 1970 bis 1973 in Chile oder der mit Rätestrukturen verbundene Arbeiteraufstand in der argentinischen Fabrikstadt Córdoba von 1969 fehlen (siehe zu diesen beiden Bewegungen die Artikel von Alix Arnold in der ILA Nr. 345 und 325). Die Herausgeber halten das Interesse am Thema aber für groß genug, um an einem zweiten Band zu arbeiten, der solche Lücken sicher schließen wird.

Die vorliegenden Beiträge im Buch sind auf sechs Teile verteilt. Im ersten behandeln vier Texte, die sicherlich zu den stärksten im Buch zählen, die historische und politische Bedeutung der Phänomene Arbeiterräte und Selbstverwaltung im Zusammenhang mit der Frage nach einer revolutionären Transformation der Gesellschaft. Der zweite Teil behandelt ihre Bedeutung „im Verlauf von Revolutionen“ im frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Novemberrevolution in Deutschland, Fabrikkomitees in der Russischen Revolution, Fabrikräte in Turin 1919/1920 und die spanische Revolution 1936/37). Zwei Beiträge zu Jugoslawien und Polen bilden den dritten Teil „Arbeiterkontrolle im Staatssozialismus“. Im vierten Teil werden Indonesien 1945/1946, Algerien, Mendoza (Argentinien) 1973 und Portugal 1974/1975 unter dem etwas unscharfen Titel „Antikolonialer Kampf und demokratische Revolution“ zusammengestellt. Der fünfte Teil besteht aus Beispielen, bei denen die Besetzung vor allem eine Kampfform und weniger den Versuch, die Produktion zu übernehmen, bildete: Großbritannien in den 70er-Jahren, die großen Sit-Down-Streiks Mitte der 30er-Jahre in den USA, der italienische „Heiße Herbst“ 1969 und ein spektakulärer Kampf von TelefonarbeiterInnen in Kanada 1981. Der letzte Teil „Arbeiterkontrolle 1990-2010“ besteht aus vier Beiträgen zu Indiens kommunistisch regiertem Bundesstaat Westbengalen, zu den besetzten Fabriken in Argentinien, der Arbeiter-kontrolle in Venezuela im Rahmen der „Bolivarianischen Revolution“ und selbstverwalteten Betrieben in Brasilien. Da die Versuche in Argentinien und Venezuela auch im deutschsprachigen Raum breit diskutiert werden (siehe auch die Artikel in diesem Schwerpunkt), soll sich im Folgenden auf eine Wiedergabe der brasilianischen Erfahrungen beschränkt werden.

In Brasilien beginnt die Geschichte von Versuchen der Selbstverwaltung schon in den 80er-Jahren mit „einer Reihe isolierter Experimente“, wie Maurício Sardá de Faria und Henrique T. Novaes in ihrem Beitrag „Die Zwänge der Arbeiterkontrolle bei besetzten und selbstverwalteten brasilianischen Fabriken“ schreiben. In den 90er-Jahren versuchen immer öfter ArbeiterInnen, vor allem in Familienbetrieben, die in die Insolvenz geraten, sie selbst weiterzuführen. In Brasilien wird diese Tendenz auch vom neuen Gewerkschaftsverband CUT unterstützt, der sich im Unterschied zum gewerkschaftlichen Verhalten in anderen Ländern solchen Versuchen der genossen-schaftlichen Produktion öffnet, statt nur um Abfindungen zu kämpfen. Als die mit dem CUT verbundene Arbeiterpartei PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) unter Lula 2003 die Regierung bildet, erfährt dieser Prozess eine institutionelle Förderung durch die Einrichtung des Nationalen Büros für Solidarische Ökonomie (Secretaria Nacional de Economia Solidária – SENAES) beim Arbeitsministerium, deren heutiger Direktor der erste Autor dieses Buchbeitrags ist.

Ende der 90er-Jahre hatten sich die verschiedenen genossenschaftlichen Versuche, deren Schwerpunkt im industrialisierten Süden und Südosten Brasiliens liegt, in einem Verband der Kooperativen und Solidaritätsunternehmen zusammengeschlossen (União e Solidariedade das Cooperativas – UNISOL). Damit sollte u.a. das Unwesen der sogenannten Coopergatos bekämpft werden – Scheinkooperativen, die von den Unternehmern benutzt werden, um die Arbeitsverhältnisse zu prekarisieren. Dem Verband gehören heute etwa 280 Genossenschaften an, von denen zwar nur 25 selbstverwaltete Betriebe sind, die aber für 75 Prozent der Umsätze stehen. Es gibt zwar keine genauen Statistiken zu den besetzten und selbstverwalteten Betrieben, aber in einer Studie von 2005 wurden bereits 65 solcher Experimente mit 12 070 ArbeiterInnen untersucht. Wie auch in anderen Ländern hängt das Ausmaß der Demokratisierung und der Veränderung der Produktionsstrukturen stark davon ab, ob die Selbstverwaltung aus aktiven Kämpfen gegen die alten Unternehmer hervorgegangen ist und in welchem Maße diese Versuche mit breiteren gesellschaft-lichen Bewegungen verbunden waren. Insgesamt sehen die Autoren heute einen „Degenerationsprozess“ der genossenschaftlichen Bewegung, weil sich die Experimente zunehmend bürokratisieren. Die breiten gesellschaftlichen Kämpfe fehlen und auch in den aus heftigen Konflikten entstandenen selbstverwalteten Betrieben wird das Wissen um diese Kämpfe nicht an die Jüngeren weitergegeben. Es bleibe aber die Hoffnung, dass die Kooperativenbewegung in Brasilien im Zuge der neuen sozialen Auseinandersetzungen in der Krise und auch unter dem Eindruck der Versuche in Nachbarländern wie Argentinien mit neuem Leben gefüllt werde. Zur Veranschaulichung behandeln sie ausführlicher die zwei Betriebe Cooperminas und Catende Harmonia, die schon aufgrund ihrer Größe, aber auch wegen der um sie geführten Kämpfe „Sonderfälle“ bilden.

Die Minengesellschaft CBCA hatte 1917 die Kohleförderung in Criciúma aufgenommen und war Mitte der 80er-Jahre in die Krise geraten. Jahrelang kämpften die Bergarbeiter mit teilweise heftigen Aktionsformen, wie der Drohung, sich mit Dynamitstangen in die Luft zu sprengen, gegen die Schließung und Zwangsversteigerung der Mine. Sie erreichten schließlich 1997 die Übergabe des Betriebs und gründeten ihre Genossenschaft Cooperminas. In den ersten Jahren gab es eine funktionierende Versammlungsstruktur, an der sich fast alle der 1200 Bergarbeiter beteiligten, und sie führten deutliche Verbesserungen der Arbeits-bedingungen unter Tage ein. Aber auch hier setzt heute ein Bürokratisierungsprozess ein, weil viele von denen, die um die Eroberung des Betriebs gekämpft haben, bereits in Rente gegangen sind.

An dem Projekt Catende Harmonia ist vor allem interessant, dass es einen Land und Stadt verbindenden Versuch von „solidarischer Ökonomie“ darstellt. Im Bundesstaat Pernambuco hatte sich die 1829 gegründete Zuckermühle Milagre da Conceição in den 50er-Jahren zur größten Zuckerfabrik Lateinamerikas entwickelt – mit eigener Eisenbahnlinie, einem Wasserkraftwerk und ausgedehnten Zuckerrohrfeldern. Ende der 80er-Jahre geriet das Unternehmen in die Krise, 1993 sollten 2300 Zuckermühlen-arbeiterInnen entlassen werden. Zusammen mit den LandarbeiterInnen entwickelte sich dagegen ein breiter Kampf, und als 1995 die Insolvenz der Firma beantragt wurde, übernahmen die ArbeiterInnen die Kontrolle und starteten ihr Projekt Catende Harmonia, das etwa 4000 Familien mit 20 000 Personen umfasst. Neben 48 Zucker-mühlen und der Zuckerfabrik gehören dazu noch ein Wasserkraftwerk, eine Töpferei, eine Schreinerei, ein Krankenhaus, Staudämme und Bewässerungskanäle und eine große Fahrzeugflotte sowie mehrere der ehemaligen Herrenhäuser, von denen eines in ein Bildungszentrum umgebaut wurde. Nach sieben Jahren Projektarbeit konnte die Analphabetenrate von 82 auf 16,7 Prozent gesenkt werden. Auch wenn dieses Projekt heute unter gewissen Bürokratisierungstendenzen leidet, betonen die Autoren, dass es einen radikalen Wandel für den von der Zucker- und Alkoholproduktion geprägten Nordosten Brasiliens bedeutet, der immer noch starke Spuren von Zwangs- oder gar Sklavenarbeit aufweist. (zu Catende vgl. auch die Beiträge von Gert Eisenbürger in der ila 255 und von Astrid Schäfers in der ila 304).

Trotz seiner Unvollständigkeit und mancher Mängel in den einzelnen Darstellungen bietet das Buch umfassendes Material und viele theoretische Anstöße für die heute wieder aktuell gewordene Debatte um eine andere Welt und eine andere Produktion. Im Vergleich zu hiesigen Debatten um „solidarische Ökonomie“ ist vor allem begrüßenswert, dass die ArbeiterInnen und ihre Kämpfe hier als die eigentlichen Subjekte einer solchen Veränderung in den Mittelpunkt treten.

Dario Azzellini/Immanuel Ness (Hg.), „Die endlich entdeckte politische Form“. Fabrikräte und Selbstverwaltung von der Russischen Revolution bis heute, Neuer ISP Verlag, 540 Seiten, 29,80 Euro, ISBN 978-3-89 900-138-9

"The Roman arena was technically a level playing field. But on one side were the lions with all the weapons, and on the other the Christians with all the blood. That's not a level playing field. That's a slaughter. And so is putting people into the economy without equipping them with capital, while equipping a tiny handful of people with hundreds and thousands of times more than they can use." (Louis Kelso in A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers; Doubleday, 1990)

Can anyone any longer doubt that money and corporate power define the agenda of American politics? Can anyone seriously argue that if we fail to tame the economy, and bring it under democratic control, the 1% (more accurately the .1% or even .01%) will determine the fate of the planet and its people?

The agenda of our time should be to create voluntary associations as forums within which everyday people can discuss, debate, deliberate, argue, compromise, reflect, evaluate, learn, and powerfully act on their values and interests framed by a search for the common good, the public interest, and a blurred vision of the good society. Shared core values—those of the historic democratic tradition and of the justice teachings of the world’s great religious faiths—should frame a discussion that recognizes that all solutions are partial, that each presents new problems, that none are total, and that, in the words of the 1960s civil rights movement song, “freedom is a constant struggle.”
Worker Ownership and Control

This commitment to democracy is found in both Ness/Azzellini and Mathews, whose respective books are essential reading for anyone interested in how democracy might apply at the workplace. The former is an impressive collection of articles examining workers’ control as an expression of socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. Essays are both historical (spanning the twentieth century, and reaching into the first decade of the twenty-first) and international (the U.S., Soviet Union, Britain, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America). Ness/Azzellini place worker ownership and control under the rubric of socialism.

Writers in the Ness/Azzellini collection are painfully aware of important nuances in the development of worker ownership: ownership without control; ownership in which old patterns of deference to authority—based on class, party, education and status—are maintained; ownership controlled by the state; ownership constrained by the vagaries of a market beyond the control of individual enterprises or even collections of them. They deal with the necessity of coordination beyond the enterprise level, the relationship of the state to the economy, the tendency toward parochialism and narrow self-interest that can arise in worker-owned businesses, and more. This is an important book.

A consistent Ness/Azzellini theme is criticism of vanguard parties and state control. In his “Worker’s Control and Revolution,” (Ness/Azzellini), Victor Wallis criticizes Lenin’s “disfavor to worker-control initiatives…In defense of [Lenin’s] stance, one can point out that many workers escaping the old [factory] discipline abused their freedom of action; however workers’ widespread heroism in the civil war suggests that if given meaningful opportunity [experienced managers would become “consultants”] the workers might well have acted differently.” The examples in the rest of the book testify to the realism of that possibility.

Mathews, on the other hand, wants to establish cooperativism as a “third way” between socialism and capitalism, and is particularly interested in its Catholic theological origins in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum and a subsequent expression—the Distributists. Their history is murky, including 1930s flirtations with Italian and Spanish fascism and with anti-Semitism. The intellectual origins of this theory are in “the prominent Catholic writers Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Chesterton, together with—a little later—Gilbert’s younger brother Cecil Chesterton...all three were former socialists whose schooling in and around the socialist movement of the day enabled them to think their way through to a clear understanding of what sort of social reform made sense to them…[K]ey aspects of distributist thought were incorporated into new socialist philosophies such as guild socialism. The differences and tensions between the two camps, demonstrated in the ongoing debate on public platforms and in the weekly journals of the day, enriched both of them.” (Emphasis added.) This is an important book as well.

Mathews correctly identifies the beginnings of distributism in “an emergent synthesis between two more immediate reactions to poverty, namely those of British socialism as exemplified by the socialist revival of the 1880s, and the Catholic social teachings [of] Pope Leo XIII—acting in part at the instigation of the great British cardinal, Henry Manning,” and subsequently elaborated by the “personalist teachings of the prominent French Catholic philosophers, Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier.” His examples on the ground are the British Rochdale Cooperative Movement, the Nova Scotia Antigonish Movement, and “finally, by the ‘evolved distributism’ of the great complex of industrial, service and support co-operatives—now the Mondragon Co-operative Corporation (MCC)—which a remarkable Catholic priest, Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta established in the 1940s and 1950s.”
Where Shall The Twain Meet?

It is astonishing to me that nowhere in Ness/Azzellini is there mention of the Antigonish Movement, Mondragon, Rochdale Cooperativism, guild socialism or GDH Cole, the latter’s principal theorist. Equally stunning is Mathews’s lack of reference to the rich experience and theoretical discussion present in Ness/Azzellini’s intelligent case studies.

Why? I believe the answer to this question is that down-deep these authors want worker ownership to serve a more overarching theory of how justice is to be achieved—socialism in the case of Ness/Azzellini and their collection of writers, distributism (cleaned of anti-semitism and fascism) in the case of Mathews, and capitalism in discussions of Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs)—where earnings are demonstrably greater in firms that combine employee ownership with employee participation in management. These tendencies exist despite the fact that the protagonists are all small “d” democrats. None is enamored of either a closed vanguard party, or of a theological or corporate elite who must guide the people to freedom or control them.

Are these different routes to worker ownership and control to remain in separate silos of conversation, or is there a way to bring the discussions together to strengthen each other? Can radicals, liberals, progressives, socialists, personalists, populists, social gospelists, small “c” capitalists or anyone else who cares about social and economic justice and popular participation (i.e. democracy) overcome the power of the present corporate and financial power elite without an affirmative answer, without constructing forums that bridge the silos? This is possible to achieve, as proven by numerous small “d” democratic organizers who have worked on the ground with faith in the capacities of everyday people and over the last hundred years have created the popular forums in which democratic power might be built, expanded, and enhanced.

Two Communist organizer/leaders of the Depression era, William Sentner in District 8 (St. Louis, Missouri area) of the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers (UE) and Herb March in the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), fought their own party when its dictates contradicted their democratic vision and commitment to their unions. They worked with Catholics, socialists, liberals, and other democrats to make their unions into democratic forums. On local matters each of them was generally able to beat down efforts from “on high” to tell them how to conduct union business. They contested “party discipline” and often beat it. Their experiences are detailed in Reuther, Zack and Balanoff/March.

The UE was expelled from the CIO as a “Communist-dominated” union. It survived the purge, along with the West Coast longshoremen’s union, ironically to be further weakened by the Communist Party. As James Lerner describes it, “The great reduction in UE’s membership, caused first by the McCarthy hearings and later by Communist Party efforts to break up the union in favor of the AFL-CIO merger, had devastating effects on the union’s bargaining strength.” The lesson of “ism” trumping small “d” democracy is well illustrated in his tale of UE; Reuther fills in details.

Herb March worked closely with Saul Alinsky in the development of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC)—where the alliance of the union with local Catholic parishes, the Archdiocese, and small capitalists (i.e. neighborhood merchants and businessmen who extended credit during the duration of the packinghouse strike, and otherwise supported the strikers) was central to victory. Like Sentner, he fought against the Community Party for union democracy; he finally left the Party, he told me, over that struggle.

I am persuaded that Alinsky’s organizations, that sought to bring “everyone” in a broad constituency together under a common organizational umbrella so that they could unite behind a people’s program in a blurred vision of the good society and in opposition to any kind of centralized elite control, remain organizational forms from which important lessons for today can be drawn. Recall Victor Wallis’ phrase, “if given meaningful opportunity…” It echoes Alinsky’s idea of democracy, “given the opportunity, most of the time the people will make the right decision.” In a criticism of more current organizing, the extraordinary Chicago Catholic priest Msgr. Jack Egan asked me shortly before his death, “Mike, aren’t we supposed to get everybody in these organizations?”
Toward A Reframing

In a 2003 interview in the Communist journal, Political Affairs, noted playwright Tony Kushner was asked “about the crisis in theory…Do you think that the left feels it can’t proceed for lack of a grand explanation for moving forward…?” “Yes,” He replied, “Yes...I don’t know that a meta-theory can really ever have credibility again. I don’t know that it ever should…Any theory that seeks to explain all of history, and offers a single prescription for the incredible variety and the complexity of human behavior, has to rest on an oversimplification of people. Human beings are both communal beings and individuals, and to lose sight of one or the other is problematic…It’s the notion of economic justice, something like social justice, something like a recognition finally of the communal as well as the individual…powerful ideas that have persisted for centuries [with] great value in them” that are the overarching basis for moving forward. Those are ideas to be found in the Old Testament, Koran, Christian Gospels, and the secular Enlightenment tradition.

“All the problems of democracy,” Kushner says, “can only be solved by more democracy. If there is hope, it lies in a radical vision of democracy as a universal enfranchisement.”

For me, Alinsky’s “I don’t like to see people pushed around” combined with democratic values and practice, and careful analysis of current power relationships is sufficient. If others need grand theory, that’s o.k. But whatever the grand theory is, it needs to acknowledge that it doesn’t have a monopoly on the truth—and that democratic forums are needed to arrive at proximate truths, revise them based on experience, and continue on in the constant struggle for freedom and justice.

Mike Miller directs the San Francisco-based ORGANIZE Training Center. Reach him at www.organizetrainingcenter.org

Material discussed includes:

Ness/Azzellini: Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini, Ours to Master and to Own: Workers Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket Books, 2011); Mathews: Race Mathews, Jobs of Our Own: Building a Stakeholder Society—Alternatives To The Market and the State (Distributist Review Press, 2nd edition, 2009); Feurer: Rosemary Feurer, Radical Unionism in the Midwest, 1900-1950; (University of Illinois Press,2006); Lerner: James Lerner, edited by Richard Neil Lerner and Anna Marie Taylor, Course of Action: A Journalist’s Account from Inside (RNL Publishing, 2012); Targ: Harry Targ, “Herb March and Vicky Starr: Chicago Organizers of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA-CIO) (paper presented at the Working Class Studies Association, 2011 Conference, Chicago, Illinois); Balanoff/March: Elizabeth Balanoff and Richard March, Interview with Herbert March;” Roosevelt University Oral History Project in Labor History (November, 1970); Kushner: Tony Kushner, “Dramatic Revisions and Socialist Visions: interview with playwright Tony Kushner,” Political Affairs (January, 2003); Kelso/Hetter: Louis Kelso and Patricia Hetter, Two-Factor Theory: The Economics of Reality (Random House, 1967); Miller: Mike Miller, Mondragon: A Report From The Cooperatives in The Basque Region of Spain (Organize Training Center, 1994); and Schutz/Miller: Aaron Schutz and Mike Miller, People Power: Classic Texts in the Alinsky Community Organizing Tradition (Vanderbilt University Press, title tentative, 2013).

As I write this review, tens of thousands of people are engaged in Occupy protests and occupations around the world. Most famously in Wall Street, but also on the doorstep of the London Stock Exchange and in a hundred other locations around the globe. Workplace occupations have also been part of the recent struggles - here in the UK, in the last few years at the Visteon and Vestas plants. As this book ably documents, workers control, or at least workers management has been a feature of recent class struggle, as well as in the past. The revolution in Egypt is still developing, so it forms no part of the debates here. Perhaps a new chapter will have to be written soon.

Nevertheless, this collection of essays is extremely timely. Divided into several parts, the editors have collected articles to examine the full range of experiences. Some of the strongest articles are over-views of the historical process from a Marxist point of view. Of these, two in particular stood out. Donny Gluckstein's summary of the experience of Workers' Councils in Europe, based in part on his excellent book The Western Soviets looks at how workplace council's rose as out of revolutionary struggles, beginning with the Paris Commune and then the upheavels following the end of World War One. Similarly, Sheila Cohen's article looks at some of these events and those post World War Two in Europe, together with questions of the role of the State and alternatives to capitalism.

Several articles examine these processes in detail. Three look at the worker's council movement in Europe post World War One, examining Italy, Germany and Russia. The article on Germany is particularly interesting, as it looks at the question of workers organisation under the conditions of illegality, as well as the challenges posed by a young, immature shop-stewards movement faced with an explosion of revolution. It also rescues the fascinating and magnificent role of the workers leader, Richard Muller, who has been largely forgotten to revolutionary history. There are also superb chapters on obscure moments of working class history, Java and Algeria being two. One great strength of this book, is that it doesn't concentrate on the experience of workers in America or Europe, but draws on lessons from every corner of the globe, including near forgotten moments of our history.

These chapters are in my opinion some of the strongest. This is not because they are better written than the others, rather it is because the revolutionary period they cover is inspiring and offers real examples of alternatives to capitalism. The stories of how worker's ideas change at moments of mass revolutionary action is always inspiring and examples of how people take production into their own collective hands, overthrowing the boss and the manager and beginning to run society in their own interest are always useful.

Sadly, later chapters don't match these peaks. This is not simply because the subject matter is obscure. Their is confusion with the definition of workers control. For some authors, it is blurred between the potential for the revolutionary control of the means of production and any example of workers being involved in factory management. This later definition can often come from very top down initiative, such as the experience in Yugoslavia (the rather clunky titled chapter on "Self-Management as State Paradigm").

This is duplicated in later chapters on South America. Here worker's control and self-management have been taken to great heights by the state. Workers are encouraged to take control of their factories, managing them in the interest of the wider economy, yet without the bottom-up experience that marks the high-points of revolution. This is not to say the experience isn't positive. In Brazil, the reaction to bankruptcy of some industries has lead to "Recovered Factories" where despite the problems, it is "impossible to be indifferent after entering a factory like the former Botoes Diamantina... and watching the factory workers handling all different matters themselves, with the CUT flag hanging in the conference room."

However in many cases, the experience of taking over factories in economic crisis has proved difficult, if not impossible. A chapter on Venezuela points out many of the difficulties for such workers co-operatives. How much worker's control is there really when because "the state was the majority stockholder, all important decisions had to be approved by the ministry"? In response, the workers moved on from "comanagement" to workers councils, because, as one worker said, "we didn't kick out one capitalist to create 60 new ones". There is a danger, within capitalism, that isolated examples of workers management lead to a "market of solidarity" between such enterprises, struggling to survive without a further challenge to the status quo.

Despite this, even in the context of capitalism co-operatives challenge the priorities of the system. One characteristic of almost all the examples in the book is that when workers are given some control over their lives, they begin to change. The thrilling story of the Canadian telecom workers who, for five days ran the whole telephone company is a powerful story of how, by kicking out managers, work becomes more interesting, more fulfilling and the service improves. These workers learnt their own power, and because they could engage with others in the workplace, they understood their industry even better, learning about company jobs that they had never heard from before. This is the very beginnings of the old quote from Lenin, about how in the new workers state, "every cook should govern". The Canadian telecoms workers remained until forced out by the existing state and its legal apparatus, though the solidarity they received shows the potential for action even at low points in the class struggle (this was 1981). Their story is particularly of interest, because the strategy of occupation and control was used by a union that was considered weak and couldn't sustain the normal strike procedures.

It would be wrong to review such an important book without engaging in some slight criticism. One criticism I have is that in too few of the articles do we hear how the actual occupations, workers control or self-management worked. The Canadian story is one of the exceptions, but if we are to inspire a new generation of factory occupations and workers councils, we'll have to show how workers' democracy can work (warts and all) and how occupations might proceed. This book has too much of what the people at the top say and do, and too little stories from the ground. A few more quotes and recollections from participants would have helped enormously.

Finally, my main criticism is the old point about reform or revolution. For me, we look at workers councils in the past, to learn lessons about how to transform society in future revolutionary moments. The councils that sprang up from the bottom during the revolutions of 1917-1920, or those in Spain in 1936 or Chile, Portugal and others in the 1970s offer both a potential for a future society and lessons for us today. There is a danger that we see them as historical curiosities. Peter Robinson falls into this trap when he concludes his chapter on Worker's Control in Portugal, writing that it "was an extraordinary period, one that needs to be further studied and celebrated". Here Robinson makes the process sound like an abstract historical argument, rather than, as other chapters show, a living breathing debate that workers' in many parts of the world are engaging in today. As the recession deepens and the capitalists try to make workers globally pay for the crisis, its a discussion that millions more will take part in.

As the current economic crisis deepens, governments around the globe are attempting to force savage austerity measures on the working class. The argument about a different kind of society, one that is run and controlled by workers and in their interests, is now an urgent one.

Marx said that capitalism creates its own gravedigger - the working class. Our history is rich with lessons from past struggles when workers have challenged for power, sometimes confronting the bosses, sometimes confronting the capitalist state as a whole.

Ours to Master and to Own is an incredible resource. With 22 essays that cover over a century of struggle, it explores experiences ranging from soviet power in Russia, self-management in Yugoslavia and Algeria, workers' control in Portugal in 1974 and co-management in Venezuela today.

The book distinguishes between experiences that challenge the political and economic power of the state directly with workers' councils - such as the successful Russian Revolution, the failed German Revolution and the Turin factory occupation movement - and experiences of workers' cooperatives or co-management working within the capitalist framework, accepting the logic of profitability, as is the case in Venezuela today, for example.

The experience of Italy in 1919-20, recounted in Pietro Di Paola's essay, proves that the sustained existence of effective units of workers' power within capitalism is not possible. Once workers exerted their collective power and took control, they either had to challenge for state power or be defeated. The capitalist bosses would not tolerate such a threat to their hegemony within the system.

One of the key debates arising from the collection is on the role of revolutionary leadership. Victor Wallis criticises Lenin and the Russian Bolshevik Party for not giving priority to workers' control at every stage of its development, suggesting that the politics that led to the eventual loss of workers' power to Stalinism were inherent in the Bolshevik Party from as early as 1919-20.

Yet looking at the examples from Italy and Spain, it becomes clear that some form of leadership is needed. This is drawn out particularly well by Andy Durgan's essay on the revolutionary committees during the Spanish Civil War. The refusal of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT to seize power during the May Days of 1937 was in large part responsible for the defeat of the revolution.

Similarly in Italy, the refusal of reformist trade union leaders and the Italian Socialist Party to spread the Turin factory movement led to the movement's failure and its defeat precipitated the rise of fascism in Italy.

In both cases the lack of a sufficiently large revolutionary organisation left workers without a leadership that could direct it strategically towards success.

But crucially such leadership must act and organise as part of the working class. In an essay on Germany, Donny Gluckstein reminds us that during the Spartacist Uprising in 1919 revolutionary leaders such as Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht thought it was possible to bypass the workers' councils, rather than arguing within them for a position in support of the insurrection. This proved to be a fatal error.

Some of the most interesting articles come from less well known workers' struggles. One such example is provided by Jafar Suryomenggolo and considers the often forgotten workers' cooperatives in Indonesia following the anti-colonial revolution in 1945.

In East Java from 1945 to 1946 workers' cooperatives and farms were formed from redistributed land once owned by the old aristocracy. For some time neither the Dutch colonialists nor the British occupiers dared to go into East Java. Other articles on self-management in Yugoslavia, "auto-gestion" in Algeria and factory control in the US also help to tell the history of movements that have been overlooked in the past.

Although the experiments with workers' co-management and self-management within capitalism have shown repeatedly that workers are perfectly capable of running society, the examples from Europe following the First World War teach us a more important lesson.

They prove that if we want to see genuine workers' democracy and control, we need to transform society through challenging capitalism altogether. The historical examples also show that we need a revolutionary leadership that can develop a strategy to win. With the sheer scope of the examples, this book is a serious contribution to debates around workers' control, what is possible and how to achieve it. The chapter on 1970s British factory occupations should be mandatory reading for the period that is to come.