[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Book Review: Ours to Master and to Own
Michel Bauwens
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Fri Sep 12 18:15:48 CEST 2014
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Date: Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 10:55 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Book Review: Ours to Master and to Own
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From: Andy Piascik <andypiascik at yahoo.com>
Date: Fri, Sep 12, 2014 at 5:52 PM
Subject: Book Review: Ours to Master and to Own
To: "andypiascik at yahoo.com" <andypiascik at yahoo.com>
*Originally published in Z Magazine*
*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 at yahoo.com
<andypiascik at yahoo.com>.*
--
1. *EBook, November 2012: Recovering Internationalism
<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>. [A
compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download
formats] <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>
<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/>*
2.
*EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical
Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/> *
3. *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global
Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
4. *Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
<http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.> *
5. *Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement
Internationalisms. See Call for Papers <http://www.interfacejournal.net/>,
(Deadline: May 1, 2014). *
6.
*Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
<http://interfacejournal.nuim.ie/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Interface-1-2-pp255-262-Waterman.pdf>*
7. *Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a
Globalised, Informatised Capitalism
<http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/under-against-beyond/>(2011) Almost 1,000
pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980 <1980>'s-90's.*
8. *Google Scholar Citation Index:*
*http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ
<http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=e0e6Qa4AAAAJ> *
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