Worker Self-management

On the Crisis of Capitalism, Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises, and the Possibilities for Another World

An interview with Eduardo Murúa, former president of Argentina’s Movement of Recuperated Enterprises, on how workers occupy failing firms, resist repression and re-open them as workers’ coops.

In the interview, Murúa lays out how almost 10,000 workers in over 200 once-failing, owner-run firms eventually came to manage them cooperatively and without bosses. Most poignantly for our current conjuncture, he also predicts that the world’s capitalist system, debt-ridden and exploitative as it is, is inevitably heading for an impending financial crisis – a crisis we are now living through. He also expresses clearly and with passion his vision for a different Argentina and Latin America – where wealth might be distributed more equitably and where work, the means of production, and the products of workers’ labours could be controlled by workers themselves.

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"Ours to Master and to Own" - Chris White - Chriswhiteonline

"Ours to Master and to Own
Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present”
edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (Haymarket Books, 2011)

This excellent series of essays is essential reading for anti-capitalist activists and all those who know that we do not need our bosses.
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Essential Components in Workplace Democracy

Given the wide variety of attempts at workplace democracy, what could we learn if we were to examine a huge number of those concrete cases, and sought to find out why some democratized companies failed, while others succeeded? In particular, could we discover what was there in the internal functioning of worker-managed companies that led some to thrive over the long-term, while others failed (even though their external conditions such as market opportunities, financial support, etc. were favorable)? read more »

Strike Bike: an occupied factory in Germany

The 124 workers of Bike Systems in Nordhausen have occupied the factory since the July 2007. At the end of October 2007 they will start producing solidarity bicycles under self management.

Nordhausen is a small town in Thuringia (former DDR). Of its 43,000 inhabitants 7,500 are unemployed. Bicycles have been produced here since 1986, initially as part of an engine factory with 4,000 workers. After German reunification, only the bicycle production remained, and most recently 135 workers and up to 160 temporary workers were labouring there. read more »

Mondragon revisited

It is impossible not to be impressed by the resilience that has enabled this great complex of worker-owned cooperatives to take their share of economic hits and emerge largely unscathed.

In the face of the global financial crisis that has Spain’s unemployment level standing currently at some 22 per cent, the Mondragón co-operatives offer an astonishingly successful alternative to the way we organise business and economies.

Revisiting recently for the fifth time, since the early nineteen-eighties, the great complex of worker-owned manufacturing, retail, agricultural, civil engineering and service cooperatives centred on Mondragón in the Basque region of Spain, it was impossible not to be impressed by the resilience that has enabled them to take their share of economic hits and emerge largely unscathed. read more »

Here's the chocolate factory, but where has Willy Wonka gone?

No bosses in sight at plants taken over by ex-employees in new workers' revolution in Argentina.

If Willy Wonka and Karl Marx went into business together the result might resemble Ghelco. read more »

An Agreement to Live: From Zanón to FaSinPat

A chapter from the book "Sin Patron", by La Vaca collective from Buenos Aires.

It is one of the biggest "recuperated factories" in Argentina with exemplary worker management. read more »

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