Ours
to Master and to Own:
Workers’ Control From the Commune to the Present
Edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario
Azzellini
Chicago, IL, Haymarket, 400 pp.
Review by Andy Piascik
Much recent discussion and
scholarship has gone into dissecting the decline in the strength of the working
class in the United States. For the most part, the emphasis has been on the
steady weakening of trade unions and on excavating why union officials have
been unwilling to attempt new forms of resistance. In such a context,
discussions of workers control of the means of production—how it might look,
what about it has succeeded and failed in the past, its relationship to
revolutionary change—may seem a stretch. But maybe not. For perhaps what the
U.S. working class needs as much as anything is to explore alternatives not
only to neoliberalism but to traditional unionism, even that of the social
movement type.
Ours to Master and to Own: Workers
Control from the Commune to the Present
edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini goes a long way in assisting us in
that exploration. Ness and Azzellini are well-positioned to put together such
an important work; both have long radical histories as writers, teachers and
activists. The result of their efforts is a rich collection of stories of
workers seizing control of production in different epochs under a vast array of
circumstances in numerous countries.
Councils, in a nutshell, are self-
management organizations established by workers to administer production,
usually in periods of great tumult. They may take shape in a single plant, in
an entire industry or, in a revolutionary situation, in many plants and
industries simultaneously. Through them, workers oversee all aspects of
production including those which, under capitalism, are done by owners and
bosses. The forms differ greatly but the common thread is that those who do the
work should decide how it’s done.
There are two important themes that
emerge as one reads through the cases collected by Ness and Azzellini. One is
that many workers across time and around the world have understood better than
any revolutionary theoretician that the working class controlling its own work
is the way it should be. Second is that councils, apart from any trade union or
vanguard party, develop spontaneously and organically as the system of private
ownership slips into crisis. As detailed in the book, this development occurs
so frequently in such instances as to be almost a natural phenomenon.
Ours to Master and to Own begins with four overview essays and follows with groups of
analytical chapters in four categories. Significantly, stories of the global
South are well-represented. Though far less industrialized than the North (and
perhaps precisely for that reason), countries like Argentina and Venezuela are
home to some of the most important contemporary experiments in workers control.
With upheaval rocking much of the Middle East and Latin America, these case
histories, together with those where councils were an integral part of
anti-colonial insurgencies in Indonesia and Algeria, take on an additional
timeliness.
Ours to Master and to Own also includes a number of familiar cases. Perhaps the three
best known occurred in revolutionary (or at least what were perceived by some
of the participants as revolutionary) situations: the soviets in Russia leading
up to and immediately after 1917; the councils in Germany during World War I up
to the unsuccessful uprising of 1919; and the anarchist and
anarcho-syndicalist movements in Spain in the 1930s and earlier. Each of these chapters is highly instructive, with nuanced
analyses of the wide array of challenges the different groups faced. For the
most part, each of these council movements failed simply because the forces
aligned against them were too strong. However, there are valuable lessons
within each that the contributing authors do an excellent job of mining.
Equally important are more recent
cases such as Argentina during the economic crisis of 2001, compellingly
summarized by Marina Kabat. Initially a response to neo-liberalism, the factory
takeovers that helped topple President Fernando de la Rua took on a life of
their own. As the takeovers evolved, workers grappled with how best to affect a
degree of control within a capitalist society. No easy feat that, and many
efforts failed or were coopted. As with the uprisings in the early 20th
century, however, there is much in the experience of value. As Kabat writes of
the takeovers, “an objective study of their characteristics and shortcomings
will help remove obstacles and develop their complete potential for the
future,” especially since “[t]he reprise of the economic crisis has opened new
horizons for the taken factories.”
Other chapters of note are two from
Eastern Europe—one on Yugoslavia by Goran Music and one on Poland by Zbiginew
Marcin Kowalewski. Both document ongoing struggles for autonomy in societies
purported to be workers’ states. The class conflict that surfaced quite
dramatically in Poland in 1980 with the formation of Solidarity, for example,
was the culmination of decades’ worth of work, rather than a brand new
phenomenon. In Yugoslavia, Music relates the continuous contention between
workers and the state over the form of self-management that lasted until the
collapse of 1989.
Then there’s a fascinating case in
India authored by Arup Kumar Sen where workers in a variety of work- places
went head to head with a Communist state government within a capitalist
society. Events unfolded much as those in other cases, and workers there faced
many of the same obstacles. It would seem from so many examples that
vanguardists are right in one thing and that is the revolutionary potential of
the working class. That they often fear it and have frequently been—from Lenin
and Trotsky forward—as hostile to it as any capitalist is one of the most
important lessons of this volume.
Trade unions, including ones of the
left, have also frequently opposed working class autonomy in the form of
councils, especially at times of great upheaval. The period when fascism in
Portugal was overthrown in 1974-75 is a prime example. As related by Peter
Robinson, the alliance the Socialist unions forged with liberal military officials
checked the possibility that the Revolutionary Councils of Workers, Soldiers
and Sailors might expand their influence right at a point when something
besides corporate liberalism was a possibility. Again, as we examine what was,
we are left to wonder what might have been.
Still, the tone of Ours To Master
and To Own is decidedly positive. In chapter after chapter, we can
practically see workers contending with the most fundamental of revolutionary
questions: what should the kind of society we want look like? How do we best
get there?
Again and again, as events unfold,
great emphasis is placed on process. In fact, in case after case, a successful
outcome, however else that is measured, is inseparable from process. Workers
went forward as often as not without deeply elaborated theories, but with a
highly attuned sense that each was responsible to one another as well as to the
future.
There is also much strategic
discussion that is of immense value. In a revolutionary situation, for example,
do councils pre-figure a working class state? Or does their consolidation mark
the beginning of the end of the state? If the former, what should the
relationship of the councils be to the state? Although some of the contributors
put forward more decisive answers than others, the overall tone of the book is
that these are still open questions to be answered with greater experience.
Inclusion of at least a few chapters
authored by workers might have added another dimension to the book. Workers are
quoted throughout and their insights are meaningful parts of a number of the
analyses. Still, hearing summaries and perhaps some tentative conclusions from
on-the-ground participants could have provided a larger understanding of the
subject at hand.
The specific experiences of women in
worker councils are also largely invisible in these accounts, perhaps because
industrial work has been the domain of men and the councils largely the domain
of the industrial work- force. Still, it would have been beneficial to hear
about the role of women in at least a few of the case studies.
Though it is difficult to imagine
any popular movement, working class-centered or otherwise, in which women would
not play a prominent role, much of the work women do remains below the surface.
It is for this reason that councils of the present and the future, at least
those that are the most inclusive, may be influenced by cooperative economics
with its emphasis on the citizenry at all levels—worker, domestic laborer, and
consumer. At the same time, analysis that assumes the special role of women may
bring into being more inclusive council
formations.
The value of Ours to Master and
to Own is that its contributors collectively wrestle with these kinds of
big questions. Who should decide and which factors must be weighed in the deciding—are
not questions with easy answers, after all. Ness, Azzellini, and all of the
contributors have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of how to
go forward. All the better that a second volume is in the works.
Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning
author who writes for Z Magazine,
Counterpunch, The Indypendent and many other publications and websites.
He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.