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.
The two theorists, following different trajectories, reached a common conclusion: that the real content of socialism is the complete control of labour by the workers themselves.
Some currents argue that the experience of small-scale self-management under capitalism is useful preparation. However, self-management is impossible without real socialist democracy.
Human alienation will disappear through the withering away of commodity production and social division of labour, through the disappearance of private ownership of the means of production.
In Argentina, the government attempted to ‘institutionalise’ the occupied factories, de- politicising the radical aspects of workers’ actions in exchange for financial and technical assistance.
"The difference between councils and trade unions is that, while the latter lose their functions in a decaying capitalism, the former become a prefiguration of the organisation of socialist society."