Liberatory

What would it mean to overcome or transform this? What have movements imagined, attempted, and built?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes. The school does not resolve the disagreements among traditions. It puts them in front of the room and lets the room think.

The central question of this lens is who should run work, and how. The traditions gathered here do not agree. Some want workers to take over the workplaces they have through unions or councils. Some want to abolish the wage relation and the market entirely. Some want less work, or the end of “work” as compulsion altogether. Placed side by side, these positions stage the argument the room should have.

Anchor questions

Who should decide what gets produced, how, and by whom? The market, the state, the workers, someone else?
Should workers aim to run the workplaces they have, or to abolish the wage relation entirely?
Are unions a vehicle for transforming society, or a way of managing workers within capitalism? Can they be both?
What is the difference between a workers’ council, a union, and a cooperative? What can each do that the others cannot?
What would it mean for work to be free? Less work, better work, or no “work” at all?
If work were abolished tomorrow, who feeds the child, washes the body, and tends the soil? Can that work be abolished, or only shared out differently?
These things have been tried: Mondragon, Aragon, Yugoslavia, the recovered factories of Buenos Aires. When they failed, did the idea fail, or did something else?
Is it enough for workers to run the firm, if the firm still has to sell, compete, and cut costs to survive?

Materials

Free unless marked otherwise. This lens deliberately gathers positions that disagree with each other.

Programmatic and strategic writings

Anton Pannekoek (1873 to 1960), Workers’ Councils (1947). The major statement of council communism, arguing that workers should run production directly through councils rather than through trade unions or a party-state. The foundational alternative to the union form. Free: marxists.org
Antonio Gramsci (1891 to 1937), The Turin Factory Council Movement (1921). Gramsci’s reflection on the 1919 to 1920 factory councils of Turin, treating the council as the germ of a workers’ state and contrasting it with reformist union bureaucracy. Free: marxists.org
Kim Moody (b. 1940), The Rank and File Strategy (2000). Argues that socialists should root themselves in the organized rank and file to rebuild militant unionism from below against the labor bureaucracy. The reference point for the rank-and-file debate. Free PDF: solidarity-us.org
Jane McAlevey (1964 to 2024), No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age (2016). The book the rank-and-file argument keeps returning to: structure tests, organic leaders, and whole-worker organizing, against mobilizing the already convinced. Behind a paywall, and worth chasing down anyway; see the note on access. Not free: janemcalevey.com
Jane McAlevey, Jane McAlevey on How to Organize for Power (interview, 2019). The free way into the same argument, in her own words, if the book is out of reach. Free: currentaffairs.org

The anarchist and post-work alternatives

Rudolf Rocker (1873 to 1958), Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (1938). The standard introduction to revolutionary syndicalism, presenting the union as a tool to abolish the state and capital together through direct action and the general strike. Shared with the capitalism theme. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Peter Kropotkin (1842 to 1921), The Conquest of Bread (1892). The foundational anarchist-communist argument against retaining any wage system, including under state socialism, sketching a society that organizes production and need in common. The deep counterpoint on abolishing the wage. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
André Gorz (1923 to 2007), Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism (1980). Questions whether the industrial working class is still the agent of liberation and opens the post-work argument for reducing labor time and freeing life beyond work. A deliberately contested position. Free to borrow: archive.org
Bob Black (b. 1951), The Abolition of Work (1985). A provocation arguing that work as compulsory production should be abolished and replaced by freely chosen play. The sharpest anti-work voice for the post-work debate. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org

Accounts and models of alternatives

Richard D. Wolff (b. 1942), Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (2012). Makes the case for worker self-directed enterprises, where workers themselves are the collective owners and managers, as a concrete transformation of who runs work. A bridge to Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: haymarketbooks.org. Wolff’s Talks at Google on this exact book is free, at about 3.3 million views: youtube.com

What was actually tried, and what it taught

Every position above has been attempted somewhere. The attempts are the best argument in this lens, because they are the only part of it that can be wrong in public. Read this section for the failures as much as the victories: a tradition that cannot say what went wrong at Fagor, in Aragon, or in Yugoslavia is asking for faith rather than a decision.

Lucas Aerospace Combine Shop Stewards Committee, Alternative Corporate Plan (1976). Facing redundancy at a British arms firm, the stewards surveyed their own members and drew up 150 alternative products, kidney machines, hybrid road-rail vehicles, heat pumps, arguing that workers should decide what gets made and not merely who owns the making. Management rejected it, and so, largely, did their own unions. The best free case of workers’ planning attempted at scale, and the sharpest lesson in what defeats it. Free, from the campaign that still carries it: lucasplan.org.uk
The Take (Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, 2004, 87 min). Laid-off Buenos Aires auto-parts workers occupy their shuttered plant and restart it themselves: occupy, resist, produce. The Argentine recovered factories as they happen, legal fights and internal arguments included, and honest about how fragile the whole thing is. A sympathetic movement documentary. Where to watch: justwatch.com
Sam Dolgoff (1902 to 1990), editor, The Anarchist Collectives: Workers’ Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, 1936-1939 (1974). Participant accounts of the self-management that actually ran for roughly three years across Aragon and Catalonia: how the collectives handled money, distribution, and the people who refused to join. It does not hide the coercion questions. The largest anarchist experiment ever tried, in the words of those who tried it. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
Andy Anderson, Hungary ‘56 (1964). The 1956 uprising told as the story of the workers’ councils that formed within days and went on functioning after the tanks arrived. Anderson reads it as workers moving against a state that called itself theirs, which cuts at the party-state and the union form at once. Libertarian socialist and anti-Leninist. Free: libcom.org
Sharryn Kasmir, The Myth of Mondragon (1996). The counterweight to Wolff, and the reason cooperatives are an argument here rather than a happy ending. Kasmir lived in the Basque town and found that the celebrated literature treats the co-ops as apolitical and looks past the shop-floor workers, for whom cooperative membership often obstructed union organizing rather than replacing it. A hostile ethnography, and it says so. No borrowable copy exists. Paywalled: sunypress.edu
Gar Alperovitz and Thomas M. Hanna, Gar Alperovitz (and Mondragon) On the Fagor Bankruptcy (2013). In November 2013 Fagor, the founding Mondragon cooperative, went bankrupt owing more than a billion euros, and the network reabsorbed some 1,800 worker-owners so that almost none went unemployed. The movement’s own reckoning, arguing the failure was market and scale, not democracy. Partisan, which is the point: read it against Kasmir and let the room decide what Mondragon proves. Free: geo.coop
Juraj Katalenac, Yugoslav Self-Management: Capitalism Under the Red Banner (2013). The longest-running experiment in self-management anywhere, argued to have been capitalism the whole time: wage labor, commodity production, and the market stayed intact, and control simply passed from Soviet-style bureaucrats to local technocrats, leaving the councils to preside over their own exploitation. The hardest challenge to every position in this lens that stops at who manages the firm. Left-communist and openly hostile to self-management as a strategy. Free: libcom.org

The feminist and ecological answer to post-work

Kropotkin, Gorz, and Black want an end to work. The writers here ask the question that puts to them: someone still has to feed the child, wash the body, and tend the soil. That work cannot be abolished, automated, or played at. It can only be reorganized, and the question is who does it and on what terms. This is the argument the anti-work tradition tends to skip, and it belongs in the room with it.

Kathi Weeks (b. 1963), The Problem with Work (2011). The central feminist post-work text, and the one that turns Black’s provocation into an argument: refuse work as a system rather than as a chore, carry forward the Wages for Housework insight that unwaged reproductive labor is work too, and demand basic income and shorter hours as demands rather than blueprints. Autonomist feminist. Paywalled: dukeupress.edu. The free way in is her interview with Anna Curcio (2015), where she explains why she would now ask for a gender-neutral basic income and defends utopian demands against the charge of unseriousness: viewpointmag.com
Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (2023). Why did a century of labor-saving domestic technology produce no free time? Because housework expanded to fill it, standards rose, and the work stayed women’s. Their answer is that care cannot be abolished, only collectivized: communal kitchens, public laundries, shared care instead of the private household. The direct reply to Bob Black. You cannot play your way out of a sick child. Paywalled: versobooks.com
Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction: Notes for a Counter-Hegemonic Anthropocene (2020). Written as an answer to the labor-centered story of industrial modernity, and to Silver’s Forces of Labor by its title: the work that actually sustains life is earthcare, done mostly by women, peasants, and colonized people, and written out of the story. If the forces of production wrecked the planet, the forces of reproduction might repair it. Materialist ecofeminist. Paywalled: cambridge.org. Her free interview carries the argument: undisciplinedenvironments.org
Alyssa Battistoni, Living, Not Just Surviving (2017). Working-class movements have to put social and ecological reproduction at the center of what they want rather than leaving climate to experts, because care work and the work of sustaining nature are the same kind of labor: the kind that cannot be automated away or abolished. The bridge from here to Ecology and the Climate Crisis. Eco-socialist feminist. Free: jacobin.com
David Graeber (1961 to 2020), On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs: A Work Rant (2013). Keynes promised a fifteen-hour week; instead we invented pointless jobs to fill the time, which Graeber argues is political rather than economic, since a population busy at meaningless work has no time to make trouble. The easiest way to open this argument in a room, and the most famous statement of it. A polemic, not a study, and it says so in the subtitle. Free: strikemag.org
Autonomy, The Shorter Working Week: A Radical and Pragmatic Proposal (2019). Ninety-six costed pages arguing that cutting hours answers low productivity, stress, gender inequality, and carbon emissions at once, and that it has to be universal or free time becomes one more thing only the comfortable can afford. This is where post-work stops being provocation and becomes a demand a union could actually table. Advocacy research, with the numbers shown. Free: autonomy.work

Debates and disagreements

The school holds the disagreements among traditions open. Placed side by side, these texts stage the argument the room should have.

Who should run work. Pannekoek and Gramsci (workers’ councils), Rocker (anarcho-syndicalism), Moody and McAlevey (rebuilding militant unions from the rank and file), Wolff (cooperatives), and Kropotkin, Gorz, and Black (abolishing the wage or work itself) do not agree. The union that Moody and McAlevey want to rebuild is the very form Pannekoek argues workers should move beyond, and the work that McAlevey organizes to defend is the work Black wants to abolish. Set these against each other rather than harmonizing them.
Whether cooperatives produce power or substitute for it. Wolff and Alperovitz say worker ownership transforms who runs work. Kasmir, who lived in Mondragon, says it can hollow out the union and depoliticize the workers who own it. Both are describing the same firms. Fagor’s bankruptcy is the fact both have to account for.
Whether self-management is enough. Katalenac’s charge lands on almost everyone here: if wage labor, commodity production, and the market survive, then changing who manages the firm leaves the workers to administer their own exploitation. Yugoslavia ran that experiment for decades. Put his argument to the council and cooperative traditions and see what they answer.
Whether work can be abolished at all. Black and Gorz say the end of work is the horizon. Weeks, Hester and Srnicek, Barca, and Battistoni answer that care and earthcare cannot be abolished, automated, or played at, only redistributed, and that an anti-work politics which forgets this is a politics written by people who do not do that work. This is the sharpest disagreement in the lens and the one most likely to be alive in the room, because someone in it is doing that work tonight.

Video

“How Unions CRUSH Capitalists” (Adam Conover, 2023). Roughly 28 minutes, about 782,000 views. Argues that collective action beats individual hustle and lays out what unions can win. A good “why bother organizing” opener. youtube.com/watch?v=mcgC-kuPEuo
“Worker Cooperatives: Movements for Social Change and Personal Empowerment” (Democracy At Work, Richard Wolff, 2016). Roughly 30 minutes, about 26,000 views, a niche pick kept because it directly serves this lens. Wolff makes the case for democratizing the workplace through cooperatives. youtube.com/watch?v=urCy3UOGgx8
“Jane McAlevey on Deep Organizing” (Jacobin, 2018). Roughly 12 minutes, about 22,000 views, a niche pick. McAlevey uses a Philadelphia nurses campaign to distinguish deep organizing from mobilizing. A short companion to the interview above. youtube.com/watch?v=bl6P_2jt_Vs

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially accounts of experiments outside Europe and Argentina, since what was tried in Africa, Asia, and the socialist states is barely represented here, and accounts from people who took part in a cooperative or council that failed and are willing to say why.

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