§0. Lately, workers’ control is brought back into discussions as key to building people’s power and popular sovereignty, especially in the production sphere. Many times, the discussion comes without carrying over the lessons from nor a critical reflection on past experiences.
This is not a historical curiosity. It’s a strategy question for today’s transformative and revolutionary movements. Our starting point is: What might workers’ control mean as a strategy today?
What is it?
§1. Workers’ control has meant different things in different eras and countries. Let’s start by clarifying what we mean, in this particular essay, by workers’ control.
By workers’ control, I mean the direct authority workers exercise over the labor process, production process, and decisions about what to produce and how to produce it – not merely a financial stake or representative vote. (I will avoid terms like self-management or auto-gestion, because they might carry different connotations in different countries.)
§2. The foundational principle is that the right to decide must be derived from work, not from ownership or property — otherwise the logic reproduces capitalism’s own basis for authority. This is therefore distinguished from
- share-based ownership (e.g., post-Yugoslav factory shares distributed to retirees, whose interest was to sell rather than produce)
- state ownership (too indirect; the state as constituted power has legal, financial, and media advantages over the constituent power)
- cooperative-as-business-model (cooperatives that elect a board every two years and otherwise strip workers of ongoing decision-making, or that use cooperative status to evade labor law – like the case of Italian logistics cooperatives who sub-contracted to Amazon paying 5–6 €/hr; in all cases entrepreneurial survival logic subordinates solidarity to company-as-property)
What has it been?
§3. Workers’ control has emerged in virtually every major political crisis of the past 200 years: the Paris Commune, revolutions in the early 20th Century (e.g. Mexico, Russia, Germany, Italy, Austria), destroyed economies and the end of WWII (e.g. France, Japan), anti-colonial movements (e.g. Algeria, Indonesia), neoliberal restructuring in the 1980s (e.g. Canada, Italy), and resistance to invasive state socialism (Poland 1950s/80s, Hungary, Czechoslovakia). Historical mobilizations of workers’ control were typically offensive, arising from existing revolutionary or class consciousness using it as a tactic.
The contemporary wave is distinctly defensive: workers occupy factories not from prior political strategy but because there is no other option — no union solution, no state response, no party with an answer.
(The website https://www.workerscontrol.net/ has an extensive collection of historical and contemporary examples and case studies.)
§4. The primary driver today is therefore pure necessity. Company closure leaves older workers (40–60) with no realistic job-market prospects, family obligations, and inability to relocate. Entire communities face deindustrialization: shops close, populations shrink, neighborhoods impoverish — the stakes exceed individual income. Unions typically offer negotiated early retirement only for those near pension age; those between 40 and 60 are “simply alone and helpless”.
A secondary driver can be political initiative taking. This is the case, for instance, with tech and gig workers realizing they possess the knowledge to manage the means of production themselves (delivery-app workers asking why they should surrender 50–70% of income when they could build their own app; workers in tech entering the sector with illusions of creative freedom and colliding with “rock-hard capitalism” now organizing for union rights and contracts). Similarly, communities (including women’s and disabled persons’ cooperatives) found collective structures because governments and parties do not facilitate their visions — “they took matters into their own hands”. In addition, traditions of mutual aid in indigenous, rural, and certain Afro-descendant communities provide cultural substrate for collective organization.
§5. With this, we are implicitly privileging experiences of factory and service workers. In those cases, the transition to workers’ control is more immediate because even without self-management experience, they have collective work experience, production knowledge, and organizational habits.
In contrast, for instance, landless rural workers in Brazil often lack even basic agricultural knowledge (having worked only as day laborers in monoculture, e.g., only picking oranges) and they lack the knowledge base that factory and service workers possess; which then requires practical as well as political training from scratch. The land occupations therefore give us a different process than the one we will focus on here. In this sense, workers’ control in agriculture is more commonly found in indigenous communities and Afro-Caribbean communities, and areas with surviving collective traditions (e.g., Barlovento in Venezuela post-slavery, former Quilombo areas in Brazil).
How does it roll?
§6. Let’s start with a relatively recent example, of the Vio.me workers in Thessaloniki, Greece. A former industrial glue and chemical construction materials factory, it was occupied around 2010–11 after closure and non-payment of wages. Initially workers only demanded back wages. A key intervention was that a group of activists organized crowdfunded flights for two workers from FaSinPat (Fábrica Sin Patrón, a ceramics factory in Argentina) to Greece to share experiences directly. After several days of peer-to-peer exchange, Vio.me workers shifted demand: instead of back wages, they demanded the entire factory and the right to produce under workers’ control. They switched from harmful chemical construction materials to fully organic personal hygiene products and industrial cleaners — a decision driven by health and environmental values that only became possible once workers controlled what to produce.
§7. What does the above story tell us? At least the following:
With workers’ control, new questions become possible that are off the table in a conventional wage-negotiation frame: what are we producing? what materials are we using? how much time must we spend here? how harmful is this to our health?
The entire labor process is now managed with different values and priorities.
- One example from Venezuela is when workers decided those without primary school education work 6 hours/day to finish school; those without secondary school work 7 hours/day; all others 8 hours — this was collectively agreed, based on what workers thought was important for them.
- Trust built during the occupation (sleeping in the factory, shared risk, police confrontations) dramatically reduces conflicts about work-time contribution once production restarts — a problem endemic to voluntarily founded cooperatives.
- Personal relationships formed during occupation (knowing families, daily life) create informal social contracts that handle exceptions (e.g., leaving early for a child’s doctor appointment) without formal grievance procedures.
§8. This transformative power is crucial. The factory (unlike the union) contains all workers regardless of political tendency — it is a site of class formation, not a filtered political club. We have seen many cases of explicit right-wing workers changing political orientation through the occupation process and solidarity experience. We have seen GKN workers in Italy becoming active allies of Palestine solidarity movement, climate movement, and other arenas.
The tactical value of it today
§9. As we noted before and as the recent examples also show, the sequence has inverted historically: previously, revolutionary consciousness preceded and caused occupation; now, occupation produces political consciousness.
This matters especially now because abandonment by unions, social-democratic parties, and even leftist parties has produced generalized rage that feeds far-right and fascist movements among workers. In this context, occupied workplaces are one of the main antidotes.
Historically, unions provided not just wage negotiation but workers’ education, youth camps, cultural clubs, community infrastructure — a full social ecosystem for working-class life. In the Global North, unions have narrowed to works-council representative training and negotiation skills; general workers’ education has been abandoned. This withdrawal is part of a broader social development where everyone is asked to be “an individual service person, not a collective creative person”. This social texture must be rebuilt and occupied workplaces are one site where this rebuilding happens from below.
For workers’ control to fulfill this tactical function, we must put emphasis on the politicization pipeline. Strategically meaningful workers’ control requires that decisions be revocable and continuous, not delegated for fixed terms (as it might be the case of cooperatives or union representatives).
§10. In a larger sense, workers’ control points towards a vision of popular sovereignty. Workers’ control is not just a workplace issue, it is a mechanism for decommodifying labor — converting labor power from a privately exploited commodity into a commons.
Workers’ control permits us to put at the center the sustainability of work: work itself must be sustainable — which then necessarily encompasses how production and consumption happen, rather than treating them separately. The relationship between humans and nature is mediated primarily through work; therefore, questioning the form of work is inseparable from ecological questions. Centering our discussion on the productive process is crucial in order to realign our approach to power.
Workers’ control as part of a larger movement ecosystem
§11. Naturally, four key stakeholders in any genuine model of democratic production are workers/producers, surrounding communities, consumers, and producers of raw resources. The articulation and coordination of these different sectors have been a source of heated debate among the left.
On the one hand, various democratic economic planning models offer detailed coordination mechanisms, often leveraging computing power. Indeed, computer programs offer promising capability but we should be aware that they do not produce empowerment: in fact, they allow delegation away from control rather than the experience of having control.
On the other hand, commodity chains among recuperated workplaces (building supply/trade relationships within the solidarity economy) change not just survival odds but the perception of what economic relationships can look like. They help humanize economic relationships, as different sectors negotiate directly with each other, with no lawsuits for late payment or deferred billing between cooperatives.
§12. Workers’ control, as part of a movement-level strategy, provides strengths like base-building, politicization, workers’ sovereignty, prefiguration of economic and social relationships, and all of this embedded into the immediate needs of workers.
To complement this “spontaneous” process, giving visibility to, keeping memory of and carrying over knowledge and experience across workers’ control experiments is a crucial task for organizers (such as done by the Workers’ Control website). We can thereby cultivate a culture of imagination. And this articulation also increases the economic chances of survival of an enterprise run by the workers, as it gives more connection points.
Weaving each experience into a larger ecosystem of workers’ control also allows us to include other sectors and therefore to democratize the planning of production. This in turn involves articulation with other social movements, which feeds back into the politicization process.
N.B. This text is the outcome of a structured conversation between Dario and Sinan after several unstructured conversations. Sinan synthesized the main arguments, which Dario then reviewed. The text therefore does not fully align with either’s writing style but has a taste of both.
Dario Azzellini is Senior Researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen, holds a PhD in Political Science and in Sociology, and is a filmmaker. He has conducted research into social transformation processes for more than 30 years with a special focus on Latin America and Europe. His studies focus on labor, self-management, work and just transition, social transformation, and global political economy. He recently co-authored Commoning Labour and Democracy at Work: When Workers Take Over (with Marcelo Vieta), and co-edited the Handbook of Research on the Global Political Economy of Work (2023). More information on his personal website www.azzellini.net. Dario has supported recuperated factories, worked in popular education in Latin America, engaged in building leftist organization in Germany, and is part of the collective of activist labor scholars organizing the annual Labour Transfer School in Sardinia, Italy, which brings together militant researchers and activists from the world of work for a common exchange of experiences, analysis and strategic debate (https://www.labourtransferschool.org/).
