Democratic Work: Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour 3031278550, 9783031278556

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

Democratic Work Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour

Alexis Cukier

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms

Series Editors Marcello Musto, York University, Toronto, ON, Canada Terrell Carver, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The Marx renaissance is underway on a global scale. Wherever the critique of capitalism re-emerges, there is an intellectual and political demand for new, critical engagements with Marxism. The peer-reviewed series Marx, Engels and Marxisms (edited by Marcello Musto & Terrell Carver, with Babak Amini, Francesca Antonini, Paula Rauhala & Kohei Saito as Assistant Editors) publishes monographs, edited volumes, critical editions, reprints of old texts, as well as translations of books already published in other languages. Our volumes come from a wide range of political perspectives, subject matters, academic disciplines and geographical areas, producing an eclectic and informative collection that appeals to a diverse and international audience. Our main areas of focus include: the oeuvre of Marx and Engels, Marxist authors and traditions of the 19th and 20th centuries, labour and social movements, Marxist analyses of contemporary issues, and reception of Marxism in the world.

Alexis Cukier

Democratic Work Radical Democracy and the Future of Labour

Alexis Cukier Department of Philosophy University of Poitiers Poitiers, France Translated by Jean-Charles Khalifa Poitiers, France

Brendan Prendiville Rennes, France

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic) Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ISBN 978-3-031-27855-6 ISBN 978-3-031-27856-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3 Translation from the French language edition: Le travail démocratique by Alexis Cukier, © Presses Universitaires de France 2018. Published by Presses Universitaires de France. All Rights Reserved. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: @ gettyimages/wenjin chen This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Titles Published

1. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts, 2014. 2. Terrell Carver & Daniel Blank, Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach chapter,” 2014. 3. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The History and Theory of Fetishism, 2015. 4. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Marx’s Associated Mode of Production: A Critique of Marxism, 2016. 5. Domenico Losurdo, Class Struggle: A Political and Philosophical History, 2016. 6. Frederick Harry Pitts, Critiquing Capitalism Today: New Ways to Read Marx, 2017. 7. Ranabir Samaddar, Karl Marx and the Postcolonial Age, 2017. 8. George Comninel, Alienation and Emancipation in the Work of Karl Marx, 2018. 9. Jean-Numa Ducange & Razmig Keucheyan (Eds.), The End of the Democratic State: Nicos Poulantzas, a Marxism for the 21st Century, 2018. 10. Robert X. Ware, Marx on Emancipation and Socialist Goals: Retrieving Marx for the Future, 2018. 11. Xavier LaFrance & Charles Post (Eds.), Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism, 2018. v

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TITLES PUBLISHED

12. John Gregson, Marxism, Ethics, and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre, 2018. 13. Vladimir Puzone & Luis Felipe Miguel (Eds.), The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism, 2019. 14. James Muldoon & Gaard Kets (Eds.), The German Revolution and Political Theory, 2019. 15. Michael Brie, Rediscovering Lenin: Dialectics of Revolution and Metaphysics of Domination, 2019. 16. August H. Nimtz, Marxism versus Liberalism: Comparative RealTime Political Analysis, 2019. 17. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello and Mauricio de Souza Sabadini (Eds.), Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis, 2019. 18. Shaibal Gupta, Marcello Musto & Babak Amini (Eds.), Karl Marx’s Life, Ideas, and Influences: A Critical Examination on the Bicentenary, 2019. 19. Igor Shoikhedbrod, Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights, 2019. 20. Juan Pablo Rodríguez, Resisting Neoliberal Capitalism in Chile: The Possibility of Social Critique, 2019. 21. Kaan Kangal, Friedrich Engels and the Dialectics of Nature, 2020. 22. Victor Wallis, Socialist Practice: Histories and Theories, 2020. 23. Alfonso Maurizio Iacono, The Bourgeois and the Savage: A Marxian Critique of the Image of the Isolated Individual in Defoe, Turgot and Smith, 2020. 24. Terrell Carver, Engels before Marx, 2020. 25. Jean-Numa Ducange, Jules Guesde: The Birth of Socialism and Marxism in France, 2020. 26. Antonio Oliva, Ivan Novara & Angel Oliva (Eds.), Marx and Contemporary Critical Theory: The Philosophy of Real Abstraction, 2020. 27. Francesco Biagi, Henri Lefebvre’s Critical Theory of Space, 2020. 28. Stefano Petrucciani, The Ideas of Karl Marx: A Critical Introduction, 2020. 29. Terrell Carver, The Life and Thought of Friedrich Engels, 30th Anniversary Edition, 2020. 30. Giuseppe Vacca, Alternative Modernities: Antonio Gramsci’s Twentieth Century, 2020.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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31. Kevin B. Anderson, Kieran Durkin & Heather Brown (Eds.), Raya Dunayevskaya’s Intersectional Marxism: Race, Gender, and the Dialectics of Liberation, 2020. 32. Marco Di Maggio, The Rise and Fall of Communist Parties in France and Italy, 2020. 33. Farhang Rajaee, Presence and the Political, 2021. 34. Ryuji Sasaki, A New Introduction to Karl Marx: New Materialism, Critique of Political Economy, and the Concept of Metabolism, 2021. 35. Kohei Saito (Ed.), Reexamining Engels’s Legacy in the 21st Century, 2021. 36. Paresh Chattopadhyay, Socialism in Marx’s Capital: Towards a Dealienated World, 2021. 37. Marcello Musto, Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation, 2021. 38. Michael Brie & Jörn Schütrumpf, Rosa Luxemburg: A Revolutionary Marxist at the Limits of Marxism, 2021. 39. Stefano Petrucciani, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy, Society, and Aesthetics, 2021. 40. Miguel Vedda, Siegfried Kracauer, or, The Allegories of Improvisation: Critical Studies, 2021. 41. Ronaldo Munck, Rethinking Development: Marxist Perspectives, 2021. 42. Jean-Numa Ducange & Elisa Marcobelli (Eds.), Selected Writings of Jean Jaurès: On Socialism, Pacifism and Marxism, 2021. 43. Elisa Marcobelli, Internationalism Toward Diplomatic Crisis: The Second International and French, German and Italian Socialists, 2021. 44. James Steinhoff, Automation and Autonomy: Labour, Capital and Machines in the Artificial Intelligence Industry, 2021. 45. Juan Dal Maso, Hegemony and Class Struggle: Trotsky, Gramsci and Marxism, 2021. 46. Gianfranco Ragona & Monica Quirico, Frontier Socialism: Selforganisation and Anti-capitalism, 2021. 47. Tsuyoshi Yuki, Socialism, Markets and the Critique of Money: The Theory of “Labour Notes,” 2021. 48. Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello & Henrique Pereira Braga (Eds.), Wealth and Poverty in Contemporary Brazilian Capitalism, 2021. 49. Paolo Favilli, Historiography and Marxism: Innovations in MidCentury Italy, 2021.

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TITLES PUBLISHED

50. Levy del Aguila Marchena, Communism, Political Power and Personal Freedom in Marx, 2021. 51. V Geetha, Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar and the Question of Socialism in India, 2021. 52. Satoshi Matsui, Normative Theories of Liberalism and Socialism: Marxist Analysis of Values, 2022. 53. Kei Ehara (Ed.), Japanese Discourse on the Marxian Theory of Finance, 2022. 54. Achim Szepanski, Financial Capital in the 21st Century, 2022. 55. Stephen Maher, Corporate Capitalism and the Integral State: General Electric and a Century of American Power, 2022. 56. Rémy Herrera, Confronting Mainstream Economics to Overcome Capitalism, 2022. 57. Peter McMylor, Graeme Kirkpatrick & Simin Fadaee (Eds.), Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics, 2022. 58. Genevieve Ritchie, Sara Carpenter & Shahrzad Mojab (Eds.), Marxism and Migration, 2022. 59. Fabio Perocco (Ed.), Racism in and for the Welfare State, 2022. 60. Dong-Min Rieu, A Mathematical Approach to Marxian Value Theory: Time, Money, and Labor Productivity, 2022. 61. Adriana Petra, Intellectuals and Communist Culture: Itineraries, Problems and Debates in Post-war Argentina, 2022. 62. Kolja Lindner, Marx, Marxism and the Question of Eurocentrism, 2022. 63. Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci, 2022. 64. Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism, 2022. 65. Terrell Carver, Smail Rapic (Eds.), Friedrich Engels for the 21st Century: Perspectives and Problems, 2022. 66. Alexandros Chrysis, The Marx of Communism: Setting Limits in the Realm of Communism, 2022. 67. Paul Raekstad, Karl Marx’s Realist Critique of Capitalism: Freedom, Alienation, and Socialism, 2022. 68. Marcello Musto, Rethinking Alternatives with Marx, 2022. 69. José Ricardo Villanueva Lira, Marxism and the Origins of International Relations, 2022. 70. Bertel Nygaard, Marxism, Labor Movements, and Historiography, 2022.

TITLES PUBLISHED

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71. Marcos Del Roio, Gramsci and the Emancipation of the Subaltern Classes, 2022. 72. Marcelo Badaró, The Working Class from Marx to Our Times, 2022. 73. Jean Vigreux, Roger Martelli, & Serge Wolikow, One Hundred Years of History of the French Communist Party, 2022. 74. Vincenzo Mele, City and Modernity in George Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis, 2023.

Titles Forthcoming

Vesa Oittinen, Marx’s Russian Moment Spencer A. Leonard, Marx, the India Question, and the Crisis of Cosmopolitanism Joe Collins, Applying Marx’s Capital to the 21st century Jeong Seongjin, Korean Capitalism in the 21st Century: Marxist Analysis and Alternatives Marcello Mustè, Marxism and Philosophy of Praxis: An Italian Perspective from Labriola to Gramsci Shannon Brincat, Dialectical Dialogues in Contemporary World Politics: A Meeting of Traditions in Global Comparative Philosophy Francesca Antonini, Reassessing Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire: Dictatorship, State, and Revolution Thomas Kemple, Marx’s Wager: Das Kapital and Classical Sociology Xavier Vigna, A Political History of Factories in France: The Workers’ Insubordination of 1968 Attila Melegh, Anti-Migrant Populism in Eastern Europe and Hungary: A Marxist Analysis Marie-Cecile Bouju, A Political History of the Publishing Houses of the French Communist Party Mauro Buccheri, Radical Humanism for the Left: The Quest for Meaning in Late Capitalism Tamás Krausz, Eszter Bartha (Eds.), Socialist Experiences in Eastern Europe: A Hungarian Perspective

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TITLES FORTHCOMING

Martin Cortés, Marxism, Time and Politics: On the Autonomy of the Political João Antonio de Paula, Huga da Gama Cerqueira, Eduardo da Motta e Albuquer & Leonardo de Deus, Marxian Economics for the 21st Century: Revaluating Marx’s Critique of Political Economy Zhi Li, The Concept of the Individual in the Thought of Karl Marx Lelio Demichelis, Marx, Alienation and Techno-capitalism Salvatore Prinzi, Representation, Expression, and Institution: The Philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Castoriadis Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and the Reconstruction of Marxism Éric Aunoble, French Views on the Russian Revolution Patrizia Dogliani, A Political History of the International Union of Socialist Youth Christoph Henning, Theories of Alienation: From Rousseau to the Present Daniel Egan, Capitalism, War, and Revolution: A Marxist Analysis Emanuela Conversano, Capital from Afar: Anthropology and Critique of Political Economy in the Late Marx David Norman Smith, Self-Emancipation: Marx’s Unfinished Theory of the Working Class Tomonaga Tairako, A New Perspective on Marx’s Philosophy and Political Economy Matthias Bohlender, Anna-Sophie Schönfelder, & Matthias Spekker, Truth and Revolution in Marx’s Critique of Society Mauricio Vieira Martins, Marx, Spinoza and Darwin: Materialism, Subjectivity and Critique of Religion Aditya Nigam, Border-Marxisms and Historical Materialism Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital : A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation Armando Boito, The State, Politics, and Social Classes: Theory and History Anjan Chakrabarti & Anup Dhar, World of the Third and Hegemonic Capital: Between Marx and Freud Hira Singh, Annihilation of Caste in India: Ambedkar, Ghandi, and Marx Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro, An Introduction to Ecosocialism Mike Berry, A Theory of Housing Provision under Capitalism Maria Chehonadskih, Alexander Bogdanov and Soviet Epistemologies: The Transformation of Knowledge After the October Revolution Peter Lamb, Harold Laski, the Reluctant Marxist: Socialist Democracy for a World in Turmoil

TITLES FORTHCOMING

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Raju Das, Marxism and Revisionism Today: Contours of Marxist Theory for the 21st Century Gary Teeple, The Democracy That Never Was: A Critique of Liberal Democracy Alfonso García Vela & Alberto Bonnet, The Political Thought of John Holloway: Struggle, Critique, Emancipation Erick Omena, Urban Planning as Class Domination: The Games of Land Dispossession

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 Context and Method 1.2 Beyond Workplace Democracy 1.3 A Marxist Approach to the Democratisation of Work

1 3 9 12

Part I Democratic Criticism of Work 2

3

The Political Meaning of the Critique of Work 2.1 Workers’ Voices: Democracy Concealed Impeding Discussion Impossible Decision-Making Disorganised Collective Action The Political Function of Work and the Loss of Meaning at Work 2.2 New Alienations and Neo-Managerial Organisation of Work: The Challenge of Democratic Power Alienation at Work, a Democratic Issue From Subjective Alienation to Social Alienation Reification as the Impossibilisation of Democratic Activity at Work

21 22 22 24 27

Neoliberalism Versus Democratic Work 3.1 Financialisation of the Economy and Political Management of Public Debt

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29 34 35 38 42

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CONTENTS

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Dismantling Labour Law and Anti-Democratic “Governance” in the European Union Financialisation of the Company and New Managerial Power Gender, Race and Class in the Neoliberal Division of Labour Conclusion of Part I: Democratic Work and the Political Centrality of Labour

53 57 61 66

Part II Theoretical Models and Political Issues 4

5

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The Class Struggle: Revolutionising Institutions to Democratise Labour 4.1 Marx, Labour and Revolution 4.2 Class Struggle and Working-Class Government Industrial Democracy: Democratising Work to Transform Institutions 5.1 Dewey and the Normative Foundations of Industrial Democracy 5.2 Korsch: Industrial Democracy and Class Struggle Through the Lens of Workers’ Councils Materialist Feminism: The Democratic Stakes of the Definition of Work 6.1 Sexual Division of Labour and Gender Relations: Redefining the Concept of Work 6.2 Mode of Domestic Production and Social Reproduction 6.3 The Political Struggle of Women Workers and the Problem of the State Political Ecology: What Kind of Work Does the Critique of Productivism Lead to? 7.1 Contributions of and Limits to Gorz’s Critique of Work 7.2 The Metabolic Rift Between Man and Nature: An Alternative Ecological Critique of Labour 7.3 Ecosocialism and Democratic Work 7.4 Conclusion of Part. II. Democratic Work and Economic Democracy

75 76 80 87 88 93 101 102 105 108 115 116 120 124 128

CONTENTS

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Part III Work, Democratic Experiments 8

9

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Self-Management: Towards a Revolution in the Process, Organisation and Division of Labour 8.1 Reorganising Work and Its Purposes? 8.2 Workers and Non-Workers: A New Social Relationship 8.3 Political Issues of Self-Management Production 8.4 Towards New Institutions: “Work Councils”, “Economic Councils” and Producer Autonomy Workers’ Councils and Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Transformation of the Company, the State and the Municipality 9.1 Soviets, Consigli di Fabbrica, Control Obrero, Cordones Industriales… from Workers’ Control to political counter-power 9.2 Workers’ Control, the State and the Municipalities 9.3 Towards New Institutions: “Social Councils” and Democratic Mode of Production Conclusion

Index

137 141 144 147 151

155

157 166 174 179 187

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This book is based on a simple idea: if we want to radicalise democracy, we must first democratise work.1 The question at hand here concerns what we term “democratic work” and can be formulated as follows: how and why can democratising production be associated with the creation of new democratic institutions? The underlying notion in this book’s title should therefore be understood in two complementary ways: the democratic control of the conditions, means and ends of work, and the contribution of work to the democratisation of society. The book is based on empirical research into the contemporary world of work—mainly from a social sciences and French perspective—and it will argue that democratic work is socially justifiable, theoretically conceivable and politically necessary. The argument will emphasise the fact that criticism of workplace conditions has today given rise to democratic expectations (e.g. more discussion, decision-making and having a hand in

1 This introduction replaces the original French-language introduction—it offers an update, complete with elements of presentation of the French context intended specifically for the English-speaking readership. For a brief overview of this research, see Cukier, Alexis. 2022. Democratic Work: Grounds, Models and Implications. In The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Work. Whither Work?, eds Keith Breen and Jean-Philippe Deranty. London and New York: Routledge.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_1

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implementing decisions affecting one’s own workspace) that only innovative work institutions could bring about. And it will propose novel institutional bodies to implement such democratic work, in which social activities considered to be work would be harnessed not to increase capitalist accumulation but to democratise society—itself conceived as inseparable from the necessary ecological and social revolution that, hopefully, will soon allow us to start mitigating the unfolding environmental catastrophe. Our research takes sides in a debate that opposes two traditions of democratic work, two ways of criticising the capitalist mode of production with a call for public participation in collective deliberation, decision-making and action. The first tradition—which is on the side of refusing work or what has recently been called in the United States the “anti-work” movement—relies on democratic norms to challenge the commonly held belief of the political centrality of work, i.e. the idea that work should remain at the heart of social life.2 This viewpoint tends to reduce labour to the “deadly dimension of capitalist production (i.e., wage labour)”3 and most often argues that it could never become anything other than what it always already is: sheer domination. It should therefore be abolished, put into perspective or considered as a temporarily necessary evil, and the movement to emancipate labour should in any case be abandoned.4 The second tradition argues, on the contrary, that power will never be wielded democratically without democratising labour, and that we need to find therefore, in Marx’s words, the “political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of

2 Within Marxism, we can mention, among others, the works of Moishe Postone, notably Postone, Moishe. 2009. Time, Labor and Social Domination. A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, or the Manifesto Against Labor published online by the Krisis group, https://www.krisis.org/1999/manifesto-aga inst-labour/. 3 Ogilvie, Bertrand. 2017. Le travail à mort. In Travail vivant et théorie critique. Affects, pouvoir et critique du travail, ed. Alexis Cukier. Paris: PUF, 154. 4 For a critique of this position, see Renault, Emmanuel. 2016. Émanciper le travail: une utopie périmée? Revue du Mauss 48; for responses to objections to the thesis of the centrality of work, see in English Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 2015. Historical Objections to the Centrality of Work. Constellations 22.

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Labour”.5 In other words, there would be no genuine civil and political democracy without an industrial and economic democracy. But if it is true, as Bruno Trentin maintains, that: “what is essential in modern forms of democracy—‘awareness as a pre-requisite to participation in decisionmaking’—becomes unattainable if it does not coincide with new forms of democracy in the workplace”,6 then we need simultaneously to overcome capitalist alienation of work7 and the crisis of legitimacy of political institutions in so-called democratic societies.8 In this book, it is this second tradition, i.e. the search for a real form of democratic work that we intend to reconstruct, defend and update. This introduction will present the four sections of this book. Firstly, its specific context and method, followed by an explanation of how its approach to democratic work differs from the Anglo-Saxon debate around “workplace democracy”. The third section will reflect upon how this theoretical research can be situated within the Marxist school of thought. And, in the final section, proposals will be put forward on how to bring democratic labour into being within what we will call a “democratic mode of production”.

1.1

Context and Method

When I began writing this book (spring 2016), a large social movement was taking place in France in opposition to a neoliberal draft bill aimed at dismantling the labour legislation that had been passed throughout the twentieth century.9 This mobilisation made it possible, at least for a few months and in certain places, to raise once again the problem of the relationship between work and democracy: on the one hand, in

5 Marx, Karl. 2010. The Civil War in France. In Marx Engels Collected Works 22. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 334. 6 Trentin, Bruno. 2012. La Cité du travail. La gauche et la crise du fordisme. Paris: Seuil, 404–405. 7 On the alienation of labour in contemporary capitalism, Braverman, Harry. 1974.

Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, remains a seminal reference. 8 For an argument based on a similar starting point, see Wolff, Richard. 2012. Democracy at Work. A Cure for Capitalism. Chicago: Haymarket Books. 9 See Bourdeau, Vincent, Cukier, Alexis and Paltrinieri, Luca (eds.). 2021. Normes du droit du travail en France. Paris, L’Homme et la Société/L’Harmattan.

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order to oppose neoliberal attacks on labour law, what form of democracy should be implemented here and now, and prescribed for the future? But on the other hand (and this is starting point of our book): how can work become a means for such a democratic transformation of society? The aforementioned “specific context” for writing this book began with this protest movement and its aftermath as, for example, in 2017 when similar protests appeared in opposition to the “Macron ordinances” (i.e. the direct extension of the 2016 Labour Law). These protests stimulated debate, in particular between researchers and trade unionists, on these and following issues such as the proposition to create an alternative Labour Code10 or the political dimension of suffering at work.11 Since then, other events also reflect on this book: for example, in France, the condemnation of the telecommunications company France Télécom for institutional moral harassment; and more generally, in other countries of the Global North, the confinements linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, the public debates around core jobs and the loss of meaning in work, as well as “The Big Quit” that they have given rise to, the development of the fourth wave of feminism and the success on an international scale of the feminist strikes on 8 March 2017 (and in the following years), the rise of an extreme right defending the so-called value of work, the acceleration of ecological disasters, etc. To sum up the issue at stake: do we want democratic and ecological work or neoliberal capitalism and ecocide? Let’s widen the field. Before looking at the political significance of the routine critique of work, as opposed to a utopian view of democratic work, we need to be aware of the recent, fundamental transformations of the worlds of work in countries of the Global North. On the one hand, the social division of labour has been disrupted over the last four decades by far-reaching economic and political trends, including:

10 See GR Pact. 2016. Proposition de Code du travail 2017. Paris: Dalloz. For a Marxist reading of what is at stake in such proposals, see in English Cukier, Alexis. 2018. Exploitation, Marxism, and Labour Law. Legal Form (Online), December 2018. 11 In France, the debate has been mainly developed by Christophe Dejours’ psychodynamics of work and Yves Clot’s clinic of activity. On this subject, see in English Dejours, Christophe, Deranty, Jean-Philippe, Renault, Emmanuel and Smith Nicholas H. 2018. The Return of Work in Critical Theory. Self, Society, Politics. New York: Columbia University Press.

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– the financialisation of the world economy and the intensification of inter-capitalist competition at the global level. – a renewal of the sexual and ethno-racial division of labour at the international level. – new forms of intervention by the State and supranational political institutions in the economy. – the strengthening of shareholder power in the corporate world. – and the generalisation of mass unemployment and precarious employment. All of this constitutes what can be called the neoliberal labour regime. On the other hand, the organisation of work has been considerably transformed by two factors: 1. the rise of neo-management, i.e. a set of techniques for planning, directing and controlling work processes based on new forms of global organisation of production (e.g. just-in-time management, total productive maintenance, the “lean enterprise” model, the “continuous improvement process”, etc.) 2. local activity coordination mechanisms (e.g. management by software and/or by project and/or by competence, individualised evaluation, total quality standards, reporting, benchmarking, etc.) These devices can also be found in platform capitalism companies (such as Uber and Deliveroo) which put workers and customers in contact by means of online digital platforms and thus aim to shield their exploitation practices from the limits imposed by labour law. Lastly, the work process has also evolved very rapidly, firstly with regard to service sector growth— today, in France, 70% of employees work in service professions—but also the importance of organisational work. The development and spread of new information and communication technologies, by transforming tools, procedures and jobs, have also contributed to the neoliberal reorganisation of work. This reorganisation is based on segmented objectives whereby managers and employees must actively participate, and according to which they must themselves adapt their behaviour and modulate their tasks. These developments have led to new forms of negative social experiences which have been the subject of numerous recent publications, notably on the issue of suffering at work

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generated by the destruction of work collectives, by new forms of workers’ evaluation and by prescribing work methods which workers are opposed to.12 On the other hand, we need to define neoliberalism politically, from the angle of its effects on work13 but also more widely. Generally speaking, we see it as a political project to “de-democratise”14 labour and, more broadly, as a “political project that would curb the power of labour”.15 As will be shown in this book in relation to the dismantling of labour law in Europe, recent European history offers many examples of this ongoing process: Margaret Thatcher’s government policy (1979– 1990), elected after the massive hospital and rail strikes in the UK, with a mandate to tame the public sector unions; the “turning point of austerity” (1983) in France imposing neoliberal economic policies and continued membership of the European Currency Snake at the expense of the proworker measures of the Common Programme (a common government platform between the French Socialist, Communist and Radical Parties in the early 70s); the capitulation of Solidarnosc and its socialisation programme of the Polish economy during the 80s; or more recently in Greece, the European Union’s victory over the Syriza-Anel government (2015), obliged to drop its Thessaloniki economic programme. Despite its many weaknesses, this programme included: restoration of the minimum wage and labour legislation, a moratorium on debt, transformation of the economy along democratic and ecological lines and the aim of bringing public services under democratic control. In each of these cases, the specific threat of an increase in workers’ power was targeted. These counter-revolutionary political initiatives16

12 On the subject of this “ethical suffering”, see in particular Rolo, Duarte. 2015. Mentir au travail. Paris: PUF. 13 See for example Lelay, Stéphane and Rolo, Duarte. 2017. Ce que le néolibéralisme fait au travail: le cas d’un centre d’appels téléphonique. In Néolibéralisme et subjectivité, eds Jean-François Bissonnette and Alexis Cukier, Terrains/Théories 6. 14 The term “de-democratization” is borrowed from Wendy Brown, see especially Brown, Wendy. 2017. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books. 15 Harvey, David. 2016. Neoliberalism is a Political Project. Jacobin, July 23 2016. 16 On the neoliberal “counter-revolution” in France, see Friot, Bernard. 2017. Vaincre

Macron. Paris: La Dispute.

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were aimed at consolidating the hegemony of the new forms of managerial, financial and bureaucratic power characteristic of neoliberalism.17 But if we are serious about fighting neoliberalism, defending the institutions of liberal democracy is totally insufficient and—as this book contends—we need to create and impose institutions of democratic labour. Lastly, the argument in favour of reviving the very notion of democratic labour can be seen both in people’s frustration with existing political institutions and in the reorientation of democratic expectations in other directions, of which the company remains the primary example. This book’s first section will illustrate this with empirical surveys, revealing workers’ expectations concerning their activity as well as their criticisms of the neo-managerial organisation of the workplace which both demonstrate a form of “democratic intuition”.18 Moreover, we will show that, although these criticisms are not usually expressed in a political way—in language or in practices—they do include a democratic demand, i.e. genuine participation in debate, decision-making and collective implementation of decisions taken. By way of building on this empirical starting point and exploring its political and theoretical consequences, this book draws on the method of “social philosophy”.19 Social philosophy differs from traditional political philosophy by using a more inductive approach, i.e. one which is not based on an analysis of ideal norms but rather on the explanation of norms at work in real-life social experience. More specifically, this method begins by examining (1) empirical research in the humanities and social sciences in order to carry out: (2) epistemological work to clarify concepts and norms, (3) critical work to evaluate normative and prescriptive narratives on the one hand, and the institutions that claim to establish these norms on the other, and (4) reconstructive work to examine the norms immanent in the practices of social critique and social transformation in order to support or bring to light proposals for new institutions.

17 See Harvey, David. 2007. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 18 Ferreras, Isabelle. 2007. Critique politique du travail. Travailler à l’heure de la société des services. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Sciences Po, 1. 19 See Fischbach, Franck. 2009. Manifeste pour une philosophie sociale. Paris: La Découverte.

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Concerning the relationship between work and democracy,20 this method begins with a contextual analysis of the social experience of work. Based on empirical research—in particular the sociology and psychology of work—it listens to the workers’ critique of work and seeks to account for it. So, this book will not begin with new definitions or authoritative sources as to what work or democracy should but rather with a common sense understanding of the production process of goods and services, on the one hand, and of participation in collective deliberation, decisionmaking and action, on the other. This method is a direct reference to Marxism—via the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory in particular—but also to the in-house research carried out by workers themselves (workers’ inquiry), by trade unions and by activists into the world of work. In retrospect, I would describe this book’s method as “class struggle unionism in theory”, in that it illustrates the analogy between the role of trade unions in politicising workers’ experience and the role of theory in highlighting the political implications of the critique of labour. We will therefore demonstrate that workers are correct when they claim that opportunities for democracy in the workplace have been neutralised in various ways: – by organising competition between employees, neo-management practices have quashed the conditions for collective deliberation and cooperation at work. – by multiplying work procedure norms, bureaucracy has tended to deprive workers of the chance to intelligently implement decisions. – by reinforcing shareholder power, finance has weakened the forms of participation in decision-making won by employees before the 1970s and the advent of neoliberalism. This book thus begins with a theoretical reconstruction of the political meaning of the workers’ critique and that of the political economy (part 1). Part 2 analyses the theoretical models that could lead to the democratisation of both labour and society as a whole, while also allowing light to be shed on the political issues of labour highlighted by materialist feminism and political ecology. Lastly, Part 3 examines which democratic 20 See Cukier, Alexis. 2017. Travail et démocratie. La philosophie sociale comme méthode, entre Théorie critique et pragmatisme. In Méthodes en philosophie politique, ed. Magali Bessone. Rennes: PUR.

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experiments in production procedures and which institutional proposals could remove the obstacles to these democratisation processes.21 Our aim is to convince readers that democratising work has to go further than simply reorganising cooperation in the workplace, i.e. it requires a radical transformation of the ends, conditions and institutions of work. Similarly, the political function of work also needs to be transformed so that it is no longer a platform for the reproduction of gender, race and class social relations, but rather one which facilitates the democratisation of society as a whole.

1.2

Beyond Workplace Democracy

This perspective implies going beyond the debate around “workplace democracy” which has been highlighted by “workplace republicanism” in recent years.22 The discussion on this subject has centred on two questions in particular: the type of justification that is most appropriate for designing such a project and the institutional forms it could take. On the first point, there are several types of justification: workplace democracy can be understood, for example, as an analogy between the State and enterprise in democratic societies23 ; as expressing the value of workers’ voices and making it possible to fulfil the expectations of meaningful

21 For this English-language version, some passages had to be cut for editorial reasons (notably on Mario Tronti and Vladimir Illitch Lenin in Chapter 3 on class struggle, and on Joseph Proudhon in Chapter 4 on industrial democracy), and two chapters were altogether omitted, the first on the theory of the commons (Negri, Dardot and Laval) in part 2 and the second on production cooperatives in part 3. 22 See in particular Nien-Hê Hsieh. 2008. Workplace Democracy, Workplace Republi-

canism, and Economic Democracy. Workplace Democracy: Why not? Revue de philosophie économique 9, and Iñigo González Ricoy. 2014. The Republican Case for Workplace Democracy. Social Theory and Practice 4 (2). 23 This option seeks to demonstrate that “if democracy is justified in governing the State, then it must also be justified in governing economic enterprises” (Dahl, Robert A. 1985. A Preface to Economic Democracy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 111). See especially Anderson, Elisabeth. 2017. Private Government: How Employers Rule our Lives (and Why we don’t talk about it. Princeton: Princeton University Press. More on the subject of this analogy, see Landemore, Hélène and Ferreras, Isabelle. 2016. In Defense of Workplace Democracy: Towards a Justification of the Firm-State Analogy. Political Theory 44 (1).

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work24 ; or as a means of non-domination.25 It may even be considered, as Keith Breen and Onni Hirvonnen suggest from a neo-republican perspective, that “workplace democratization as an instrumental means to promoting freedom as non-domination” is not sufficient to justify a project of workplace democracy (as opposed to the alternative project of Universal Basic Income for example) and therefore propose to “expand our understanding of political freedom to include workers’ autonomy”.26 However, in our view, all these normative foundations are insufficient because they do not take into account (on the basis of empirical surveys, as proposed in Chapter 2) the political significance of workers’ normative expectations concerning their activity. Moreover, they are too restrictive because they are not conscious of either the intrinsically democratic character of these expectations, or the fact that their aim goes beyond the limited framework of the time and place of work to include the whole of social life. More generally, as Jean-Philippe Deranty and Emmanuel Renault show: From the point of view of the experience of work, republican approaches overlook two key aspects. First, they do not sufficiently consider the democratic potential that is inherent in work collectives. Such democratic potential stems, we argue, from the specific logic that brings together, namely the logic of production, of doing and making things, and doing them together. A second blind spot of workplace republicanism concerns the kind of democratic practices that are made possible (in the best scenarios) through participation in well-functioning work collectives. Republican accounts focus on classic, long-established ways to offset domination and ensure participation, namely legal frames and the affordance of voice. Looking at workplace domination from the experience of work, it becomes clear that democratization also involves other kinds of demands and practices.27

24 See especially Yeoman, Ruth. 2014. Meaningful Work and Workplace Democracy. A Philosophy of Work and a Politics of Meaningfulness. Palgrave MacMillan: London. 25 See in particular Breen, Keith and Hirvonnen, Onni. 2022. Workplace Democracy and Republican Freedom. In The Politics and Ethics of Contemporary Work, op. cit. 26 Ibid., 134. 27 Deranty, Jean-Philippe and Renault, Emmanuel. 2022. Democratizing Workplaces

from below. Beyond workplace republicanism, in Ibid., 151.

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The authors thus rightly insist on the limits of an approach centred on the democratisation of the workplace alone, which neglects what they call the “strategic circle between workplace and social democratisation” whereby the processes of democratisation of work and that of society condition each other. Our approach also sees this reciprocal conditioning (see Part 2) between the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy, as the principal difficulty in reaching the goal of democratic labour. In this context, we can add four other blind spots of these procedural and neo-republican conceptions of work democratisation. Firstly, these theories of workplace democracy neglect the issues at stake in the democratisation of the work process. Yet we will argue that the critique of neo-managerial work organisation as well as democratic experiments at work shows that, fundamentally, workplace democracy refers to workers’ demands to deliberate, decide and participate in their own work organisation within their own productive activity. Secondly, they do not allow for a democratisation of the social and sexual division of labour. By restricting the analysis to the issue of redefining status in the workplace, they obscure this issue, the centrality and radicality of which materialist feminism (see Chapter 6) has summarised in the question: who should decide what constitutes work, or not? Thirdly, workplace democracy theories do not really question the separation between the economic and political spheres, even in cases where they propose to compare them in an analogical way. However, we will show throughout the book that there are both political expectations of work and a need to anchor democratic activity in productive activities, so that in our conclusion, we will recommend abolishing the division between the status of worker and citizen. Lastly, they fail to take into account theoretically and politically—which, as we recall in Chapter 4, is one of Marx’s fundamental achievements—the fact that the conditions, means and ends of work depend essentially on institutions outside the workplace, i.e. the market and the State (and also today, supranational institutions and transnational agencies, etc.). This is why we need to integrate the inputs of workplace democracy into a broader and more radical approach—which we call “democratic labour” rather than “economic democracy”,28 a term 28 See, for example, recently Malleson, Tom. 2014. After Occupy. Economic democracy for the 21st century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, and Weipert Axel (ed.). 2014. Demokratisierung von Wirtschaft und Staat. Studien zum Verhältnis von Ökonomie, Staat und Demokratie vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute. Berlin: Nora.

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we find unsatisfactory because it implies that labour is only one “sector” of the economy and democracy, among others—which takes into account the democratisation of all the institutions on which labour depends as well as the central contribution of labour to the whole of society. These arguments also address the weaknesses in workplace democracy theories regarding the issue of labour institutions. The work of Isabelle Ferreras, for example, in the United States and France, imports the criteria of justice typical of supposedly democratic and liberal societies into corporate governance and proposes on this basis a system of “economic bicameralism”—consisting of a House of Representatives of the capital providers, a House of Representatives of the labour investors and a government accountable to both Houses.29 However, such a proposal does not address the criticism that work has lost its meaning of work, nor does it address issues of discrimination based on gender and race, for example. Beyond that, this type of proposal, centred on corporate governance, does not allow us to question the obstacles to the joint democratisation of work and society (e.g. the financialisation of the economy and the sexual division of labour) or to support a class policy concerning current ecological crises. Therefore, our conclusion will put forward institutional proposals for worker-citizens to participate in deliberations, decisions and their implementation not only at the level of the company (enterprise council), but also at the level of the economic sector (economic council) and at the level of society as a whole, at different regional scales (social councils).

1.3 A Marxist Approach to the Democratisation of Work In several respects, this book supports a Marxist approach to the democratisation of labour. Firstly, the method used updates the dual Marxist foundation of the critical theory of society, based on workers’ experiences in Chapter 2, and the political economy critique of contemporary capitalism, in Chapter 3. Secondly, the theoretical references discussed refer, directly or indirectly, to the history of Marxism,

29 Ferreras, Isabelle. 2017. Firms as Political Entities. Saving Democracy through Economic Bicameralism. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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i.e. Marx and Korsch, of course, but also, for example, materialist feminism and ecological Marxism (in part 2). Finally, in the third and last part, the self-management and councilist, democratic workplace experiments that are analysed—i.e. from the specific angle of the political relations that were created between workers and non-citizens—belong to that part of the historical workers’ movement closely associated with Marxism. More widely, it will be argued that the political centrality of labour is at the heart of Marxism, and this forces us to consider labour not only as the aim of democratic politics, but also as the place (democracy at work) and the most efficient vehicle—more precisely the engine and accelerator30 —(democratisation through labour) for it to thrive. But contrary to the common criticism of Marxist approaches, our analysis does not usher in full powers to either the workers or the State; indeed, avoiding this alternative is the whole political point of the articulation between the first and second meanings of democratic work. In truth, taking an interest in self-management and councilist experiments in practice before examining their theories illustrates more clearly that genuine democratisation of work always includes a form of decompartmentalisation between workers, users and inhabitants, alongside the bringing together—always partial and provisional—of productive activity and political activity. Thus, the transition from a (more) democratic organisation of work to the democratisation of all social relations can be initiated by an association or an informal collective solidarity group (composed of consumers and activists) alongside co-operatives or self-managed companies, by a local authority integrating workers’ representatives or by a social movement mixing workers with other actors of the mobilisation, trade unions, of course, but also, decisively, the inhabitants. We will show that these hybrid actions do not prevent class struggle initiatives from maintaining the aim of workers’ democratic control over their activity and subsequently, that of “citizen workers” over the whole of social life. On the contrary, analysing the contributions, limits and contradictions of selfmanagement and councilist experiments will help us envisage democracy 30 We borrow these images from Franck Fischbach: “Workplaces and workforces can in this sense be seen as the foci from which the democratic form of social life can develop, unfold, and spread out to other surrounding public spaces, even to the point of considering the whole of a given social organisation. The work collectives can be seen as places from which struggles and strategies aiming at hegemonizing democracy as a social form of life to the whole of social relations can be launched” (Fischbach, Franck. 2015. Le sens du social. Puissances de la coopération. Montreal: Lux, 203).

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within the workplace and more broadly, what we will call a “democratic mode of production”. But in that case, one may object, if it is a question of overcoming the alienation and exploitation specific to capitalist labour, why qualify this democratic activity as “labour”? And, to begin with, how do we define the concept of work?31 In accordance with materialist feminism, this book argues that the definition of work is not primarily an anthropological or economic question, but a political question—in the sense of organising life in common—one of the fundamental means of which is control of the production of goods and services. Moreover, collectively defining what constitutes work (or not) should therefore, in our view, be one of the main democratic activities and thus be the subject of deliberations and decisions in the appropriate institutions. Indeed, work has not only economic functions—to produce useful goods and services and to produce wealth and value—but also social functions—of individuation, division, integration and regulation—and a political function: to produce (reproduce, control, transform) institutions and social relations. Therefore, rather than replacing work with activism (voluntary and freetime) as the main vector of democratisation in society—as is still more or less explicitly advocated by contemporary proponents of Universal Basic Income, for example, but also by a large part of the political ecology movement in Europe—we propose to integrate political activity into work and to transform its ends, means and institutions so that work is in the service of democracy. In other words, in this proposal, which updates the option of council democracy, it is a question of putting an end to the division between “the worker” and “the citizen”, in order to create new democratic rights for a “worker-citizen” who shares authority in the workplace on an equal footing with all other workers, but who also participate, during their working hours, in all the democratic decisions concerning the means and ends of their activity. It will be argued that this struggle for the creation of workers’ democratic rights and power (with reference, in particular, to the work of Karl Korsch32 ) targets the heart of capitalism; its aim is to remove the control of owners and the power of the

31 See on this subject Cukier, Alexis. 2018. Qu’est-ce que le travail? Paris: Vrin. 32 See Korsch, Karl. 1980. Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte. In Gesamtausgabe, Band 2:

Rätebewegung and Klassenkampf. Frankfurt-am-Main: Europäische Verangestalt., and also « Was ist Sozialisierung ?, Ibid.

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State—whether capitalist or socialist, and seen as a separate sphere from labour—over production. This is why this book will advocate bringing together (by including them in the category of “democratic work”): – a reduction in working time and the right to work for all, – the transformation of the means and ends of labour in support of the democratic planning of the economy and the ecological revolution and – the implementation of new institutions (works councils, economic councils and social councils) as well as new democratic rights for workers. So, it is not about restoring some golden age of work, as if it could be defined in abstracto as a value or a societal project; nor is it just about working less and improving work conditions. It is about exploring the genuine possibility of a democratic mode of production, in which the alienating divide between citizenship and work would cease. Today, supporters of the established order are struggling to rescue the capitalist mode of production. At the same time, an increasing number of citizens refuse to engage with political institutions, and society is confronted with the urgency of decarbonising and de-polluting the economy to mitigate ongoing ecological disasters.33 Faced with these crises, the solution is neither the utopian belief in the end of work nor the extension of liberal democratic principles to the workplace. Rather, we need a collective effort to democratise both work and society as a whole. By exploring the concept of democratic labour, the aim of this book is to help clarify this problem and to analyse the basic requirements needed to solve it.

33 On this point, see Cukier, Alexis. 2020. Démocratiser le travail dans un processus de révolution écologique et sociale. Les Possibles 24.

PART I

Democratic Criticism of Work

The first part of this book discusses a specific critique of work, involving democratic expectations concerning activity in the workplace. This is the first meaning of “democratic work”, i.e. that of a political norm built up through protest over specific forms of work organisation that prevent workers’ discussion, divide the labour force, thereby hindering workers’ participation in decision-making and foster labour processes that disorganise workers’ collective action and their efforts to solve social problems. This democratic norm can be seen, firstly, in the writings of John Dewey: “what ‘democracy’ means is that the individual should participate in determining the conditions and objectives of his own work”.1 This norm is implicit in the everyday criticisms of workers and can also be reconstructed by means of theoretical analyses of the organisational causes of suffering at work, of the deterioration in working conditions and/or of injustices in the workplace. We need this inductive approach here to shape the analysis of democratic work in a second sense, and this is the principal aim of this book, i.e. to present a model aimed at transforming the world of work and, by extension, society at large. The antagonism between capitalist work and the democratic norm is not, by any means, a new topic for analysis. It is what allowed Marx to formulate the political perspective according to which “The working class, 1 Dewey, John. 1987. Democracy in Education. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 11. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 233.

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in the course of its development, will substitute for the old civil society an association which will exclude classes and their antagonism, and there will be no more political power properly so-called”.2 This contradiction is also a fundamental starting point of John Dewey’s social philosophy: “In what is termed politics, democratic social organisation makes provision for this direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains external and autocratic”.3 But more specifically, in what ways are the process, organisation and division of labour, anti-democratic today? In this first part, I will argue that some of the most striking aspects of the present phase of capitalism, linked in particular to the financialisation of the economy and the neo-managerial organisation of work, together form a process of alienation,4 in the specific sense of the subjective dispossession and the objective impossibilisation of workers’ control over the production process and, by extension, over all the institutions. This argument allows us to reply to a certain number of issues that have underpinned recent debates concerning the political dimensions of the critique of work.5 Firstly, the relationship between political norms within the workplace and those concerning other parts of social life. Isn’t it reasonable to think that we may not expect the same thing from work and from other social activities? On the contrary, we will argue that workers in both the private and public sectors also criticise their work when it does not allow them to play a part in solving social problems and in controlling institutions outside their workplace. Secondly, these debates are most often framed within a “before” and “after” context: work is seen as having been more autonomous before the arrival of the neo-managerial organisation under criticism, while the forms of professional solidarity and working-class culture of the previous period are valued. It is not difficult

2 Marx, Karl, 2010. Poverty of philosophy. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 6. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 212. 3 Dewey, John. 1980. Democracy and Education. In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, vol. 9, Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 269. 4 Concerning the re-actualization of the category of alienation in the context of the current period of capitalism, see in French, for example, Haber, Stéphane. 2014. Penser le néocapitalisme. Vie, capital et aliénation. Paris: Les prairies ordinaires and in English Jaeggi, Rahel. 2014. Alienation, Columbia: Columbia University Press. 5 See Cukier, Alexis and Renault, Emmanuel (eds). 2016. Enjeux politiques du travail. Revue Travailler, n°36.

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DEMOCRATIC CRITICISM OF WORK

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to respond to this nostalgic perspective that the critique of heteronomy at work does not date back to the 1970s but rather refers to the structural condition of subordinate labour in capitalism. Yet there is something right in the claim or intuition of a loss of autonomy in the contemporary organisation of work. It is not the idea that workplace democracy was indeed more advanced in the post-war period of Fordism, but rather that new forms of democratic potential were emerging at that time, which neoliberalism has strived to neutralise. This is the third problem that we will try to solve in this first part of the book: in what specific sense can it be argued that the prospect of democratic work has been halted? We need to specify what “democratic potential” means here. It doesn’t mean a clear political project with welldefined contours that is supposed to have been defeated but, rather, a set of real possibilities inscribed both in worker’s expectations regarding their work and in the concrete reality of their relations of production. Our first chapter is centred on the prospect of democratic work by explaining the political significance of the contemporary criticism of work. In the second chapter, we argue that such a prospect constitutes the main target of the political project of neoliberalism.

CHAPTER 2

The Political Meaning of the Critique of Work

This chapter argues that the most common contemporary analyses of work, even when they are not expressed by workers in an explicitly political vocabulary, imply democratic expectations concerning the process, organisation and division of labour, and, hence, social life as a whole. The analysis of this “democratic intuition”” of the workers needs to be predicated on a definition of democracy: the collective activity of deliberation, decision and organisation in order to solve problems encountered in the course of social life. Empirical research on the contemporary organisation of work has shown that an important part of the critique of work is based on workers’ demands to be able to deliberate, decide and organise their work, as well as to control and, if necessary, transform or produce the institutions that their activity affects and on which it depends. This kind of democratic expectation lays the conceptual groundwork for democratic work. In this chapter, we will give democratic work a voice. Firstly, by listening to what workers have say about their work experiences; secondly, by examining empirical research on the subject; and thirdly, by drawing on the theoretical category of alienation insofar as it allows criticism of the neo-managerial organisation of work.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_2

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2.1

Workers’ Voices: Democracy Concealed

Several recent studies have revealed and analysed the critical narratives of workers regarding the contemporary organisation of work. They have highlighted in particular that work is no longer rewarding or meaningful and that cooperation is increasingly chaotic. The picture is now quite clear: what workers suffer from today and what they massively contest is the difficulty they have in organising their work collectively, due to the increasing threat of unemployment and the pressure of the job market. More recently, there has also been a contraction of workers’ rights alongside an increase in managerial procedures (individualised evaluation, total quality standards, benchmarking, etc.) imposing the logic of profit at the very heart of work. We will discuss the ways in which these changes in the nature of work prevent deliberation, render decision-making impossible and disorganise activity. Impeding Discussion In a remarkable sociological survey on the effects of managerial measures imposed since the 1990s in French Post Offices [La Poste],1 Fabienne Hanique revealed that one of the earliest consequences of neo-managerial “modernisation” concerned employees’ freedom to discuss, and therefore to communicate and agree in the course of their work, with a view to solving problems collectively. During the fieldwork, this point was raised constantly: “We don’t get along anymore”, says Sandra bitterly, a teller at La Poste; we “can’t rely on each other anymore”, relations between tellers “are deteriorating” and “now it’s everyone for themselves”.2 Similarly, the team leader complained of tellers constantly calling him in to deal with problems that used to be solved by the tellers themselves: “I don’t understand: it really seems that they don’t know how to work anymore”.3 What is in question here is top management imposing a new work organisation which coordinates activity in a just-in-time manner and encourages direct contact with clients rather than cooperation between tellers. One particularity in these changes is that of the physical workspace of the post 1 Hanique, Fabienne. 2004. Le sens du travail. Chronique de la modernisation au guichet. Paris: Erès. 2 Ibid., 177. 3 Ibid., 179.

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offices: there are no longer any windows between tellers and clients, and this “reshaping of the sound landscape” means that employees can no longer hear each other, adding to the “depletion of cognitive resources and alteration of the ingredients of cooperation”.4 For example, there are no longer any informal discussions between workers, and when a technical problem occurs, assistance is provided, but no words are exchanged.5 And so, the author adds, “modernisation has resulted in an alteration of collective functioning, the definition of what is done and what is not done can no longer be a matter of discussion”.6 The managerial reorganisation of work in the post offices has eliminated whatever was necessary for employees to have any collective discussion about their job. A similar diagnosis emerged from a study carried out in the accounting department of a regional planning agency.7 Clearly, setting up collective discussion sessions on work created spaces for employees to voice criticism of managerial procedures, as well as helping them to understand the complex reality of other colleagues’ jobs: “everyone pointed to the work constraints that weigh on them, but in specific ways that the others, to be honest, were unaware of until then”.8 The increasing number of “reports” required by general management makes it harder to discuss “work priorities” that should really be “the subject of a collective discussion or deliberation where every worker can actually give their opinion according to their position in the work process”.9 Moreover, the political dimension of the workers’ stifled expectations became clearly visible when the reinstatement of employee discussions opened up a virtuous circle. Restoring cooperation led not only to a “considerable lightening of the workload” but also to the fact that “the employees henceforth became involved in the reorganisation of the service”.10 The example of another public company undergoing “modernisation” illustrates how

4 Ibid. 5 See in particular Ibid., 98 and 109. 6 Ibid., 275. 7 Dejours, Christophe. 2015. Le choix. Souffrir au travail n’est pas une fatalité. Paris: Bayard, see chapter “Travailler autrement, c’est possible”. 8 Ibid., 152. 9 Ibid., 153. 10 Ibid., 159.

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maintenance recording programmes helped SNCF train drivers to understand the reasons why responsibility for technical incidents was shifted from a group of workers to the individual train driver: We are still somewhat disconcerted by the extent to which we ourselves accept this individual responsibility, which more often than not turns into a feeling of guilt. Perhaps the lack of professional discussions between us encourages this transformation.11

These are just a few examples of the innumerable day-to-day criticisms of work that reveal a common expectation by workers; that of being able to discuss with colleagues in order to analyse and solve professional problems collectively, thereby taking part in the organisational transformations that are necessary for such problem solving. Impossible Decision-Making It is not only discussion that is impeded by “modernisation”, but also, quite often, decision-making itself, be it collective or individual. Patrick Viveret, former advisor to the Court of Auditors, provides an example of when he was involved in the implementation of legislation governing public finances12 during which he had a hand in deciding the criteria for public policy indicators. He tells of a discussion with a budget manager who just couldn’t wait to receive the indicators in question, to whom he replied that the deadlines were too short and that he needed time to study the proposals, to refine them and to make a decision: “I’m sure you’re right, but I still have to ask you this,” replied the manager. “Why?” “Because otherwise the computer system gets stuck”.13

11 Fernandez, Gabriel, Gatounes, Franck, Herbain, Patrick and Vallejo, Pierre. 2003. Nous, conducteurs de train. Paris: La Dispute, 87. 12 In French: Loi organique des lois de finance (LOLF), literally translated: “Organic Law on Financial Laws”. 13 Quoted in de Gaulejac, 2011. Vincent. Travail, les raisons de la colère. Paris: Seuil,

281.

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Increasing the number of IT controls and employee assessments may have the dual consequence of accelerating decision-making while also replacing decisions with rigid rules, leading to “paradoxical orders” such as “be autonomous, but do not take any decisions”.14 Employees are particularly opposed to the “total quality standards”, e.g. the managerial tools for monitoring quality, traceability and cost control imposed on the public hospital sector, which are progressively becoming goals in themselves at the expense of collective decisions to provide good care.15 Criticism may also be directed at the ideological underpinning of these procedural norms, according to which the “human factor” must be reduced to a minimum because employees are judged to be irresponsible. As a management representative from a nuclear site put it: “Here, the employees manage themselves, they do what they please, they take leave when they wish, sometimes putting the plant at risk”.16 Sometimes it is the managers themselves who question these restrictions on making decisions in normal circumstances: They tell us: be more entrepreneurial, manage your teams and your bottom line like a boss. We quite agree with that but the problem is that, in reality, it’s always them [the company management] who make the decisions on the staffing of the work teams, on what we should do, and we also have twice as many reports to write with lots of other indicators that do not really concern us...17

The “manager-entrepreneur” is not a “self-entrepreneur” as a branch of academic literature insists, following Foucault’s analyses, but first and foremost a worker whose margin of decision concerning his or her own activity is constantly diminishing.18 14 See Ibid., 239 ff. 15 See, for example, Dujarier, Marie-Anne. 2006. L’idéal au travail. Paris: PUF, 199. 16 Calderon, Jose. 2008. Démantèlement de l’autonomie responsable et reposition-

nement des salariés dans l’industrie nucléaire. Des enjeux renouvelés et des articulations inédites. In Résistances au travail, ed. Stephen Bouquin. Paris: Syllepse, 122. 17 Bouilloud, Jean-Philippe. 2013. Entre l’enclume et le marteau, les cadres pris au piège. Paris: Seuil, 47. 18 See Cukier, Alexis. 2017. Entrepreneur de soi ou travailleur aliéné ? Penser l’organisation néomanagériale du travail avec et au-delà de Foucault. In Néolibéralisme et subjectivité, eds. Jean-François Bissonnette and Alexis Cukier. Terrains/Théories, vol. 6. https://doi.org/10.4000/teth.918.

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It is quite true that workers’ heteronomy is part and parcel of their contract and the accompanying wage system. However, the neomanagerial organisation of work compels employees to systematically carry out tasks which not only do they have no say in but that they also disapprove of, or even to lie about the reality of their work. In his book, Lying at work, based on research into new forms of recreational management in a telephone call centre, Duarte Rolo clearly analyses the “ethical suffering” that employees undergo: “The female employees are all the more aggrieved by the fact that, in most cases, it is those who cheat who are rewarded by the hierarchy and recognized as the good workers”.19 Ethical suffering can thus reveal, in a negative sense, a form of political expectation with regard to work: i.e. the company must be a place where employees are involved in collective decision-making procedures which are both informed and linked to the reality of work concerning the activity and the framework of their organisation. Even in the most lowly and unskilled jobs, this expectation to be a part of decisions about one’s own job is a common criterion for comparing different work experiences, as Valerie, a supermarket cashier, points out: I loved my job when we were at Consorama. They listened to us. And that changes everything... In the way they talk to us, but also in the decisions about who works when and how we organize ourselves. I never felt like a crappy little cashier. But now I feel like that every day.20

Although these everyday criticisms illustrate the importance of employees’ expectations to discuss, decide and act collectively at work, the importance of this specific level of analysis should not be underestimated. At work, one doesn’t expect to simply give one’s opinion (as in an election), but also to contribute actively to the decisions concerning the organisation of work and everything that concerns our own particular job.

19 Rolo, Duarte. 2015. Mentir au travail. Paris: PUF, 35. 20 Benquet, Marlène. 2011. Les damnées de la caisse. Grève dans un hypermarché. Paris:

Le Croquant, 135.

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Disorganised Collective Action The diagnosis of a disorganisation of collective action and of the work collectives that enable it—via the individualisation of the relationship to work, collective deskilling of workers or anti-trade union policies21 —is the logical conclusion of the preceding analyses and is now well documented. In this context, the sociologist Danièle Linhart has stressed how this can lead to a breakdown of professional solidarity and, subsequently, of the pride workers have of their status and their trade union. For example, in a mineral water bottling centre, the oldest employees frequently refer nostalgically to the 1970s and 1980s, when, as one worker put it, there was “strong solidarity and understanding between us”, because “the unions were very powerful and we relied on each other. We were all pretty much mates and if there was a problem, we’d help each other out”.22 If, as the philosopher Franck Fischbach suggests, we accept that work collectives may be a “platform from which a democratic form of social life can develop”,23 we cannot underestimate the political significance of the destruction of workers’ solidarity which has already taken place. But there is also something else going alongside this destruction of workplace solidarities which concerns the disorganisation of collective action, understood in a weaker sense of the term; that is, within the neo-managerial model of work, employees’ objectives are increasingly at odds with those of management. For example, forcing the public or private service sectors to adopt a financial logic has a different effect on the meanings attributed to their activities by low level workers and managers. Based on his research into the reorganisation of work in France Télécom,24 the sociologist Philippe Zarifian explains this disjunction in terms of the antagonism between the “competence” of workers and the “control” of neo-managerial systems within several “productivity models”, which can be found in many other sectors of mass services. This is the case, for example, of the “event-based productivity model” which—among technical operators in particular—opposes the system of 21 See Deranty, Jean-Philippe. 2011. Travail et expérience de la domination dans le néolibéralisme contemporain. Actuel Marx 49, 85–86. 22 Linhart, Danièle. 2009. Travailler sans les autres?. Paris: Seuil, 71. 23 Fischbach, Franck. 2015. Le sens du social. Les puissances de la coopération. Montréal:

Lux, 203. 24 Name of the former French public telecommunications company.

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productivity measured by a specific piece of work, against one which takes into account “the actual work carried out by the network’s employees in the delivery of the service”.25 In this case, the activity is disorganised by the fact that operators and managers do not rely on the same standards to evaluate the quality of the work. Other models concern not the evaluation but the activity itself, such as the “service productivity model” which contrasts—especially for employees in direct contact with clients and users—on the one hand, a service understood as problem-solving in response to a demand, and on the other hand, the “particular model of capital accumulation, which specifically encloses client networks within the boundaries of the firm”.26 So, the disorganisation of work takes the form of a latent conflict over the purpose of the activity. In the case at hand, the privatisation of France Télécom in 2004 has not prevented low-level employees from, firstly, trying to solve users’ problems, while top management today aims, firstly, at profit, to the detriment of quality work. There is a large body of research highlighting this breakdown in the shared meaning of work due to the discrepancy between the operators’ and managers’ objectives, an antagonism which “middle management” has to try and deal with, often for the worse. In this case, the work collective—which in positive experiences at work constitutes “first an object of appropriation for individual activity” and then can become a “means for the development of each individual”—is no longer available for collective action and, possibly, for democratic cooperation. It could certainly be argued that not all work collectives are democratic, and that cooperation in general in no way guarantees that a specific collective action will be democratic. It is also worth pointing out, once more, that employees’ expectations of discussion, decision and collective action expressed in day-to-day criticisms of work may well concern the organisation of work but not the organisation of social life as a whole, and are therefore not in themselves “political”. Let’s take a closer look.

25 Zarifian, Philippe. 2009. Le travail et la compétence: entre puissance et contrôle. Paris: PUF, 14. 26 Ibid., 23.

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The Political Function of Work and the Loss of Meaning at Work The criticisms of stifled discussion, non-participation in decision-making and disorganised collective action are political in the sense that they bring into play, on the one hand, the question of legitimacy concerning those who coordinate the work of others, and on the other hand, the consequences of work organisation on social relations within but also beyond the firm. This is why these criticisms concern what we call the political function of work27 ; that is, the fact that the process, organisation and division of labour go towards reproducing or transforming the power relations between individuals and social groups. The problem of the legitimacy of managers who organise the activity of lower level workers is often paradoxical. That is to say that work is increasingly under control but no-one knows by whom, and even when the identity of these organising operators is known, they are often workers who do not understand the work they are organising or who are not given the means to carry out their “organisational work” correctly,28 and are therefore broadly perceived as illegitimate. Managers themselves often challenge the constant changes in organisational arrangements, be it in terms of the scope of activity, the control procedures, the composition and hierarchy of teams or the institutional structure of companies: In fact, they change the organisation all the time, as soon as there is a new manager, he undoes what the previous one did, takes on other consultants, and we start again. We just carry on, we say “yes, yes” but we don’t really care – we wait for the next reorganisation. (Sofiane, product line manager in a chemical company)”.29

This kind of “chaos management”30 plays a crucial role in dispossessing managers of the chance to discuss, make decisions and work collectively.

27 See Cukier, Alexis. 2018. Qu’est-ce que le travail?. Paris: PUF. 28 Concerning what she calls the “delegation” of organisational work, see Dujarier,

Marie-Anne. L’idéal au travail, op. cit., 180 ff. 29 Bouilloud, Jean-Philippe. Entre l’enclume et le marteau. Les cadres pris au piège, op. cit., 81. 30 Vincent de Gaulejac, Travail, les raisons de la colère, op. cit., 229.

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The employees are highly critical of the organising managers’ incompetence, as this cashier illustrates referring to the store managers with whom she works every day: “And we don’t know on what criteria they are chosen. Some of them really don’t give a damn as managers”.31 However, the research also studies the role of the middle managers’ superiors, as in the psychodynamic study carried out by Christophe Dejours in an aeronautical equipment maintenance workshop: “The management team wants to set up structures that are beautiful on paper but they forget about real people”32 as one employee put it. Countless other interviewees criticised the “managerial point of view” on the organisation of work, insofar as it breaks down cooperation but also, upstream, prevent the possibility that those who work—and know the work—contribute to the organisation of their own activity. Conversely, it can be shown that the proper functioning of a work collective depends on whether everyone can take part in the work organisation, as illustrated in the following example of an aeronautical maintenance workshop as yet unaffected by managerial reorganisation: Its members explain to me the conditions under which this is possible: an organisation of work left partly to their own initiative; e.g. time management, choice and adaptation of tools, design of operating procedures. ‘It is the people at the workstation who have organized themselves, the organisation has not been imposed on us’…33

The requirement for a work collective to control the production process is often implicit, but can become explicit during a strike or industrial action, in which the boundaries between operational work and organisational work, and between work and non-work, are called into question. As the supermarket cashier Nathalie put it, with regard to her experience of a strike: “At work, everyone has their problems. Sometimes, we talk about them but, in the end we deal with them alone. Whereas during the strike all the problems became collective”.34 However, these moments of explicit work politicisation are experienced and built up in 31 Benquet, Marlène, Les damnées de la caisse, op. cit., 122. 32 Bègue Valérie and Dejours, Christophe. 2009. Suicide et travail, que faire?. Paris:

PUF, 99. 33 Ibid., 99–100. 34 Benquet, Marlène. Les damnées de la caisse, op. cit., 177.

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employees’ everyday relationship to work, and in the “timid” democratic expectations voiced within that shared relationship: the right to discuss, decide and act collectively with a view to taking part in the control of the work process. Yet although the hopeful expectations underlying these everyday criticisms of work may have a political dimension, it is also because they concern not only the organisation of one’s own job, but also its purpose, and the chance to contribute, through one’s efforts at work, to the reorganisation of society as a whole. This is particularly apparent in the criticism of the “loss of meaning” of work and the impossibility of achieving what is often called its “social purpose”. So, the protest against the “modernisation” of La Poste’s offices, analysed by Fabienne Hanique, is a positive reflection of a common employee mantra: “This still a public service…isn’t it?” According to the author, this phrase is “a response to the upheavals of the framework and the meaning of work but also to the collapse of collective labour relations”.35 In such criticisms of the dismantling of public services, the (re)production of work as an institution is often paired with the (re)production of social life as a whole: “It was precisely for reasons of solidarity that the EDF-GDF36 company was founded, that is, to provide electricity and gas for all. Yes, these values seem fair to me, in a similar way to the Declaration of Human Rights”.37 Understanding the political function of work as a part of work itself is crucial to understanding the loss of meaning of work and, in the light of this awareness, the degradation of public services, for example, becomes unbearable.38 It should be noted that such a reaction is not specific to “public service culture”, but is a way, common to workers in both private and public sectors—whose privatisations and “modernisations” have, moreover, put

35 Hanique, Fabienne. Le sens du travail, op. cit., 209. 36 Électricité de France et Gaz de France was the French public national electricity and

gas company founded after World War II before they got divided into two companies in 2007. The latter got privatized the same year while the former’s privatization process is still ongoing. 37 Cité dans Ibid., p. 136. 38 See, for example, de Gaulejac, Vincent. Travail, les raisons de la colère, op. Cit., 169

concerning the french national employment agency (Pôle Emploi).

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into some sort of perspective the specificities concerning work organisation and professional ethics39 —to oppose the instrumental use of work for purposes that are incompatible with the meaning attributed to it by lower level employees. The same reaction can be seen, for example, among the workers of an automobile equipment company who, despite often enjoying greater technical versatility than in the past, feel socially useless because they no longer have direct responsibility for their job but simply for its control by supervising the machines.40 Once again, it is here, in moments of workplace politicisation, that this conflict “between the ‘ideal model’ that dignifies the profession and the ‘practical model’”,41 built up in the course of routine work, is most explicitly revealed. So, when employees’ criticism of the loss of meaning at work is transformed into demands during protest movements, the central question of social purpose in their relationship to work can lead to challenges to the social order as a whole, including the institutions of the family and the State. For example, the research of the feminist sociologist Danièle Kergoat on the social movement of the Coordination of Nurses in 1988–1989 demonstrates that their demands for a fairer reorganisation of their professional situations were closely linked to demands concerning the fundamental purpose of their work. During the negotiations with the hospital management and then with the ministerial cabinet, it was the meaning they gave to their work which was at the heart of their demands. They were “challenging the political orientation illustrated by the domination of restorative medicine over preventive medicine” and highlighting the consequences of their work for the patients’ families so the latter could “take into account the social importance of care—not simply treatment—as well as the relational and technical aspects of their work”.42 The criticism of the organisation of work extends to both the institution of the family—“it is not only the relation of these women to salaried work which underpin these objectives, but also their relation to domestic

39 See Linhart, Danièle. 1991. Le Torticolis de l’autruche. L’éternelle modernisation des entreprises françaises. Paris: Seuil. 40 See Linhart, Danièle. Travailler sans les autres ?, op. cit., 74, and Bernoux, Philippe. 2015. Mieux-être au travail: appropriation et reconnaissance. Toulouse: Octarès, 36 ff. 41 Dujarier, Marie-Anne. L’idéal au travail, op. cit., 15. 42 Kergoat, Danièle. 2012. Se battre, disent-elles… Paris: La Dispute, 296.

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work43 ” —and to the State: “How do you expect the State to talk to us if after each decision we have to go back to the general assembly… But that’s what true democracy is”.44 In other words, criticising work’s loss of meaning reflects expectation to participate in control over work situations and its organisation, but also over all social relations. And it was this perspective of democratising the work process that led the nurses to imagine a transformation of the organisation and division of labour, for both salaried workers and activists: “the need for unity and democracy” in their work explained “the feeling that the unions, as they currently function, could not represent the new (female) wage-earner figure that they prefigured”.45 So, the demand to make changes in the institution of the family and the State was thus part and parcel of their demand for democratic participation in deliberation, decision-making and collective action concerning the means and ends of their work. However, it is not only workers’ power in the company, but also the power they have over the natural and social environment via their work, that is being eclipsed or prevented by the new managerial methods. And there is reason to believe that a growing number of work situations are now, objectively, in an increasingly central position with regard to the political questions of reorganising society. This is what the psychologist Yves Clot and the sociologist Michel Gollac express, in their own way: “ordinary work seems to be becoming more and more directly political because the dilemmas of the job raise increasingly civic questions”46 ; or the psychologist Christophe Dejours: “de facto, a company’s production, be it commercial, industrial or agricultural, always has political implications”, especially because nowadays “the ideological presentation of the firm”, this “dimension of the company’s activity which goes beyond that of production and pushes it into the sphere of politics”47 has become central. Just as demands to participate in deliberation, decision-making and the organisation of collective action are an expression of political expectations with regard to work, so it would be wrong to separate, a

43 Ibid., 296. 44 Ibid., 306–307. 45 Ibid., 298. 46 Clot, Yves and et Gollac, Michel. 2014. Le travail peut-il devenir supportable ? Paris:

Armand Colin, 219. 47 Dejours, Christophe. Le choix, op. cit., 216.

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priori, workers’ demands for greater power in the company from their aspirations to participate, through their work, in the reproduction or transformation of society. We will now analyse the contemporary form of alienation with regard to workers’ ability to exercise power both over the organisation of their work and, by means of this work, over the whole of society.

2.2

New Alienations and Neo-Managerial Organisation of Work: The Challenge of Democratic Power

Neo-managerial organisation of work is based on a set of tools (softwarebased, project-based or competence-based management, individualised evaluation, total quality standards, benchmarking, personal development training, etc.) which organise workers’ tasks according to segmented goals. To accomplish the work, managers and low level workers must actively participate and must themselves adapt their behaviour and modulate their tasks. Recent studies in the field of critical sociology of management have shown that behind the rhetoric of “autonomy” lie new forms of social control of workers, which aim to intensify their subjective commitment to work and to increase productivity with the active participation of all employees. We will argue that, rather than the categories of domination or ideology, it is the category of alienation48 that best explains the effects of these new forms of organisation on the social experience of workers, insofar as it highlights the dispossession of their power in the firm. The category of alienation, whose theoretical core lies in the idea of a “dispossession”49 of agency linked to a process of “de-objectification”,

48 Concerning the alienation of workers by the new managerial methods from the 1970s onwards, see Braverman, Harry. Labor and Monopoly Capital. The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. 1974. New York: Monthly Review Press, for example 39. Concerning the relationship between domination, alienation and exploitation in the context of a Marxist critique of the contemporary organisation of work, see Deranty Jean-Philippe. Travail et expérience de la domination dans le néolibéralisme, art. cit., 84. 49 See Haber, Stéphane. 2007. L’aliénation. Vie sociale et expérience de la dépossession. Paris: PUF.

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like a “loss of the link with the world”,50 makes it possible to grasp the specific socio-political logic in the recent transformations of work. As the philosopher Emmanuel Renault points out, alienation explains in particular “the conjunction of an intensification of work and increasing precariousness, the contradictions felt between the demand for autonomy and responsibility, on the one hand, and the reality of situations where, most of the time, there is no room to manoeuvre, on the other hand”.51 In this section, we will analyse the “new alienations”52 in the neomanagerial organisation of work by articulating its subjective, social and objective dimensions, the latter of which can be referred to by means of the category of reification53 . Following the previous analyses of the antidemocratic character of the neo-managerial organisation of work, we will show that alienation can be understood here, in a specific sense, as the impossibilisation of the democratic exercise of power at work. Alienation at Work, a Democratic Issue Let us first mention a few examples of neo-managerial programmes that can be said to alienate workers in the specific sense of making democratic activity in the company impossible. Individualised performance evaluation systematically registers and records every work function in the form of computerised data for evaluation by the hierarchy. It also organises competition between workers, thus impeding discussion and cooperation amongst workers. Total quality standards regulate labour processes by means of codes, rules and accounting statistics, thus replacing collective discussion of work activity with the prescription of standardised acts detached from their practical purpose. Government by flows, which consists in the hyper-segmentation of labour processes driven by flows of information, stocks and goods in permanent circulation and accelerating rythm prevents any collective activity regarding the reorganisation of work processes. Lastly, personal development training as well as coaching and 50 Fischbach, Franck. 2009. Sans objet. Capitalisme, subjectivité et aliénation. Paris: Vrin, 14. 51 Renault, Emmanuel. 2006. Du fordisme au post-fordisme: dépassement ou retour de l’aliénation ? Actuel Marx 39, 95. 52 See the whole issue “Nouvelles aliénations” in Actuel Marx 39, Ibid. 53 See Chanson, Vincent, Cukier, Alexis and Monferrand, Frédéric (eds.). 2014. La

réification. Histoire et actualité d’un concept critique. Paris: La Dispute.

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consulting practices, particularly when their aim is to counteract “resistance to change”, force or encourage employees to accept procedures and forms of organisation that they disapprove of and in whose formulation they cannot participate. Following on from the aforementioned examples, let us clarify the way in which the critique of neo-managerial work organisation needs to be analysed within the context of the alienation of workers’ power. In her analysis of professional training in a computer company called “Enterprise of the Self”, the sociologist Hélène Stevens demonstrates that the function of “personal development” programmes can only be understood in the context of structural transformations in the company characterised by the decline of workers’ control over the organisation of their activity. The aim is to facilitate a restructuring plan,54 by seeking to impose on employees in the R&D department of the firm, a change of activity from computer engineering to customer service. The accompanying discourse of “entrepreneurial culture” is therefore inseparable from a professional context in which workers’ control over the production process has been constantly disputed: For fifteen years, workers have been confronted with job cuts, restrictions on professional training and career moves, with a major revamping of their activity and work teams, and with the imposition of organisational and commercial logic in the definition of their professional knowledge and practices. As a result, they now feel more subject to the uncertainties of the labour market, to the company’s decisions, to the demands of customers or to the whims of the sales staff. Deprived of the structural, organisational and professional support that constituted their power and autonomy, they find themselves isolated and weakened”.55

So, in the long term, the aim of such a managerial system can only be understood in the context of reorganising employees’ power in the company, thereby reducing their capacity to regulate their work, to negotiate the working framework and its rules and to organise their work 54 See another example of such neo-managerial devices aimed at facilitating a restructuring plan: Roy, Yvan. 2009. Orange stressé. Le management par le stress à France Telecom. Paris: La Découverte. 55 Stevens, Hélène. 2012. Management par le développement personnel et injonction à l’autonomie. In Les métamorphoses du contrôle social, ed. Romuald Bodin, Paris: La Dispute, 158.

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themselves. It is not just a case of encouraging workers to accept that responsibility for the success of their tasks should be individualised, but also, by replacing discussion, decision and collective action regarding work organisation, this managerial system deprives them of the resources that would allow them to collectively develop a democratic grounding to their job. In his article “Les outils contemporains de l’aliénation du travail” [“The contemporary tools of alienation at work”], the sociologist JeanPierre Durand explicitly uses the category of alienation to criticise “the confinement in which most employees find themselves in their work activity” within the “post-Fordist production model”,56 and takes as an example the imposition of just-in-time management in the automobile industry.57 The author analyses the way in which employees are forced into it by specific forms of organisation—e.g. project management, groupware, workflow, based on the control and coordination by computer software of the activity of work collectives without direct communication—to follow the pace of information circulation in order not to “break the flow” between the upstream and downstream segments. It is no longer machines alone that dominate the labour process, but the entire managerial organisation of information, materials and workers that systematically redirects the latter’s attention towards the downstream stage, which results in both intensifying their efforts in the task at hand and preventing them from discussing, deciding and organising their activity collectively. This management of work by flows is completed by the tools of quality management, continuous improvement (kaizen) and preventive maintenance (“total productive maintenance”), all of which “enclose the employees in an ever shrinking creative space, thereby considerably limiting their real autonomy”.58 Individual evaluation over the course of a career is the final piece in this productive discipline jigsaw puzzle, the aim of which is to ensure the loyalty of workers to the principle of just-in-time management. “Alienation thus appears as the crystallization in the individual of a system of collective action—or of 56 Durand, Jean-Philippe. 2009. Les outils contemporains de l’aliénation du travail. Actuel Marx 39, 107. 57 See Durand, Jean-Philippe. 2004. La chaîne invisible. Travailler aujourd’hui, flux tendu et servitude volontaire. Paris: Le Seuil. 58 Durand, Jean-Philippe. Les outils contemporains de l’aliénation du travail, art. cit.,

115.

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social practices, if one prefers—within which he or she is virtually trapped; the need to comply with it and even more the need to deny that this system simply exists is part of the alienation process”.59 The new productive model thus makes it impossible for employees to discuss, decide and act collectively to solve the problems production presents them and to transform the framework of their activity. Danièle Linhart draws a similar conclusion from, firstly, a large body of sociological research into “modernisation” in public services (notably the national Post Office, préfectures (County Halls) and Local Education Authorities) and, secondly, the introduction of organisational forms linked to the principles of kanban (just-in-time flow management) and kaizen (quality management following a process of “continuous improvement”) in small and medium-sized firms.60 She particularly insists on the fact that post-Fordist work organisation “has dismantled collective powers which, despite their limits, gave each of its members an identity, an ethic and a common project to hold on to” and by individualising the relationship of employees to their activity “has restricted them to carrying out management’s objectives and nothing more”, so much so that “the struggle to achieve these objectives becomes an experience based on anxiety, fear, and sense of failure”.61 So, the psycho-social aetiology of suffering, individualisation and feelings of powerlessness—which form the intuitive core of the idea of “subjective alienation”— refers to the process of employees being stripped of any chance of participating in the organisation of their work. From Subjective Alienation to Social Alienation In a general sense, subjective alienation refers to “what happens when the power of openness to objectal reality that defines the individual self is distorted in at least one way or another”.62 The use of the category of alienation for the critique of labour first appeared in the section “Alienated Labour and Private Property” of The Economic and

59 Ibid., 122. 60 Linhart, Danièle. Travailler sans les autres?, op. cit., 81–125 and 162–174. 61 Ibid., 178. 62 Haber, Stéphane. L’aliénation. Vie sociale et expérience de la dépossession, op. cit.,

238.

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Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In the Paris Manuscripts, Marx closely associates the subjective dimension of the alienation of labour with its social and objective dimensions. Subjective alienation concerns the labour process, the worker’s relationship to the product of his activity (“the object which labour produces—labour’s product—confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer”63 ) and to his activity itself (“External labour, labour in which man alienates himself, is a labour of self-sacrifice, of mortification”64 ). Social alienation concerns work organisation, the relationship to the world and to the practical and collective conditions of its activity: “It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life […] In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species-life[…]”.65 Objective alienation concerns the “actual economic fact”66 of the alienation of workers (labour “becomes a power on its own confronting him”67 ), whose causes Marx will further locate more clearly in the State (and in particular private property) and the division of labour in The German Ideology. How does this alienation function in the neo-managerial organisation of work today? Let us examine a concrete case. In “Aliénation mentale ou aliénation sociale ?” [Mental Alienation or Social Alienation?],68 the psychologist Marie Pezé examines the case of Agathe, an assistant nurse who left the intensive care unit of the public hospital she had worked in for twentyfive years and presented symptoms of paranoia. In the course of the diagnosis, the author traces the subjective alienation—in this case the psychic suffering and the loss of cooperation between colleagues—to a form of social alienation, itself caused by changes in the conditions and work organisation of the intensive care unit in question. “The analysis of how degradation of working conditions damaged the mental health

63 Marx, Karl. 2010. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 3. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 272. 64 Ibid., 274. 65 Ibid., 277. 66 Ibid., 271. 67 Ibid., 272. 68 Pezé, Marie. 2010. Ils ne mouraient pas tous mais tous étaient frappés. Paris: Flammarion.

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of the work team”69 allows her to establish the following facts: the non-replacement of retirees which also meant the end of moments of mutual aid and discussion, as the author points out; the multiplication of procedures to be read and carried out, and the fear of possible lawsuits; recurrent sick leaves linked to a general state of burnout in the work team; work reorganisation aimed at compensating for this decline in the workforce and an increase in the workload, which isolated Agathe from her colleagues; and, last but not least, the claim that she was to blame for the disorganisation of work linked to this situation. All of this led, on the one hand, to the work collective using her as a scapegoat and, on the other hand, to Agathe suffering from an episode of psychotic decompensation. This sequence thus shows that a clearly alienating work arrangement only produces subjective alienation through the mediation of social alienation. This social alienation can take various forms—particularly exacerbated in this case—such as systemic mistrust and competition and an impossibility to perceive and transform the reality of work. Between subjective alienation (the loss of control over one’s own activity) and objective alienation (the impossibility of transforming working conditions) lies social alienation, which designates the dispossession of control over the organisation of work through collective discussion, decision-making and action. These analyses are based on the psychodynamics of work, which also makes it possible to examine the articulation between subjective alienation and social alienation in the contemporary worlds of work. In “Aliénation et clinique du travail” [“Alienation and the Psychodynamics of Work”],70 Christophe Dejours proposes to update the category of alienation at work by demonstrating that the specific pathologies of work today (in particular those of overload: burnout, karôshi, musculoskeletal disorders…, and the pathologies of harassment: depressive syndromes, confusional disorders, psychosomatic disorders…, leading up to the resurgence of suicides in the workplace or directly linked to professional situations)71 cannot be understood if disconnected from the destabilisation of work collectives

69 Ibid., 117. 70 Dejours, Christophe. 2006. Aliénation et clinique du travail Actuel Marx 39. 71 See Dejours, Christophe. 2000. Travail, usure mentale. Paris: Bayard.

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by the implementation of managerial systems, in particular the individualised evaluation of performance.72 These changes are the cause of, on the one hand, the generalisation of “mistrust between individuals in a group that has lost the constituent frame of a work collective”73 and, on the other hand, a form of alienated participation of workers in the organisation of their activity: “it must be emphasized that this control is not passive, but presupposes the collaboration of the employee, who must periodically or continuously enter data on his or her activity into the terminal or computer”.74 On the basis of the above arguments, alienation is not so much a state as a process, which the author designates as “social alienation”: it is essentially a matter of “non-recognition (by others who submit to the law of silence and obedience to managerial domination) of the quality and veracity of the relationship that a subject has with reality”.75 According to the author, social alienation in the contemporary world of work thus covers two processes: the dissimulation of the reality of work by an organisation of power that encourages its denial among the workers themselves. In other words, managers adopt managerial descriptions of work that bear no relationship to the work actually done, and low level workers can no longer perceive and control the emotional, material and social reality of their own work. This is how we can understand the effects of alienation linked, on the one hand, to managerial policies of fear, in particular through the systematic use of individualised evaluation and the threat, overt or covert, of dismissal, as well as of replacement by precarious jobs or downgrading, as a means of management and organisation76 ; and on the other hand, to managerial policies of deceit (politiques managériales du mensonge), implemented by means of the systematisation of total quality standards which leads low-level employees to cover up what they actually do and what possible dysfunctions exist, and managers to falsify figures or to

72 See Dejours, Christophe. 2003. L’évaluation du travail à l’épreuve du réel. Critique des fondements de l’évaluation. Paris: Inra Éditions. 73 Dejours, Christophe. Aliénation et clinique du travail, art. cit., 130. 74 Ibid., 134. 75 Ibid., 129. 76 See Dejours, Christophe. 1998. Souffrance en France. La banalisation de l’injustice

sociale. Paris: Seuil, 1998, 50 ff.

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implement internal propaganda tools in order to conceal the reality of work. The aim is thus to neutralise “any hint of self-organisation that would compete with the prescribed organisation of work”,77 by making deliberation, collective decision and action impossible, and more generally hinder any shared relationship with the reality of work, thus deactivating the very possibility of a democratic activity at work. In short, “new alienations” at work concern the relationship of individuals and collectives to the power of transformation and development of their activity: they generate a subjective alienation, an individual powerlessness to cooperate and a social alienation, a collective powerlessness to democratically reorganise this cooperation. Reification as the Impossibilisation of Democratic Activity at Work So, subjective alienation and social alienation indeed depend on objective factors: neo-managerial systems, the functioning of institutions (the firm, the State, the market) and the correlative forms of the division of labour, which can be criticised in terms of objective alienation. For Marx, this allows for the indictment of capitalism as a process whereby “Capital comes more and more to the fore as a social power, whose agent is the capitalist. This social power no longer stands in any possible relation to that which the labour of a single individual can create. It becomes an estranged, independent, social power, which stands opposed to society as an object, and as an object that is the capitalist’s source of power”.78 It is this theme that Georg Lukács proposed to designate as “reification” (Verdinglichung ), which, in History and Class Consciousnes s, refers to “the fact that a relationship, a relation between people, takes on the character of a thing and, in this way, of an ‘illusory objectivity’ which, by its own system of laws, albeit rigorous, entirely closed and rational in appearance, conceals any trace of its fundamental essence; i.e. the relation between men”.79 Our aim is here to update this category of reification, understood as the impossibilisation of the democratic exercise of power, in order to

77 Dejours, Christophe. Aliénation et clinique du travail, art. cit., 141. 78 Marx, Karl. 2010. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3. In Marx Engels

Collected Works, vol. 37. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 263. 79 Lukács, Georg. 1960. Histoire et conscience de classe. Essais de dialectique marxiste. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 110.

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criticise the processes of objective alienation linked to the neo-managerial organisation of work.80 Let us examine, for example, the case of financial work, a sector at the forefront of reification processes at work today. In financial companies, there is an “intense bureaucratic activity made up of calculations of ratios and indicators, constantly updated forecasts, perpetual reporting, written reports, validation of rules, compliance with standards, carrying out evaluations and audits”,81 due in particular to the generalisation of total quality standards (e.g. the “International Financial Reporting Standards” for finance in Europe). Three types of outcomes of these reifying mechanisms can be distinguished.82 The first is the abstraction of the labour process: the multiplication of risk management standards and the separation of activities break down operations and compartmentalise them, thereby rendering them reproducible. The second is the standardisation of work organisation: the increasing juridification of the financial sector is reflected in the multiplication of rules of conduct for day-to-day dealings with clients, journalists and competitors, which organise the work of employees. And the third is the hyper-specialisation in the division of labour: the increasing technicalisation, computerisation and complexity of activities are such that most workers in the sector do not master the ins and outs of operations in which they participate, and can only with great difficulty modify their course. Next comes the process of constituting financial tools in specialised firms (bank fiduciary departments, rating agencies, hedge funds, etc.) that can be described in terms of reification. The economist Eric Pineault illustrates this in relation to securitisation, which can be seen as the paradigm of these new financial techniques whose “power rests essentially on the reification of underlying economic relations”.83 It involves producing

80 See Cukier, Alexis. 2014. La réification: pour une réactualisation à l’heure du management et de la finance. In La réification. Histoire et actualité d’un concept critique, op. cit. and Cukier, Alexis. 2015. Réification et critique du capitalisme aujourd’hui: éléments pour une réactualisation. In Le capitalisme des philosophes, ed Stéphane Haber. Nanterre: PUPO. 81 Hibou, Béatrice. 2012. La bureaucratisation du monde à l’ère néolibérale. Paris: La Découverte, 29. 82 Ibid., 46 ff. 83 Pineault, Eric. 2015. Quand la finance réinvente l’aliénation et la réification.

Terrains/Théories 1.

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financial capital that can be valued and exchanged in the space of financial circulation, on the basis of private debts (essentially mortgages and bank loans) which, combined with more traditional financial products, are clustered into specific financial products: securities (or “asset-backed securities”, i.e. securitised debts). The “reification” here lies in the fact that, as Lukács defines it, a “relation between persons”—the debt obligation— “takes on the character of a thing”, i.e. a debt-backed security. More specifically, Pineault shows that the financial reification of debt obligations follows four stages. Firstly, there is massification: a financial company builds a portfolio of claims from various household debts and transfers them to a specialised management entity that accumulates them (which is called “pooling”), so that the specific claims are “depersonalised” and transformed into a generic legal entity. Secondly, there is abstraction: the clustered debt obligations are broken down into abstract properties (risk, return, maturity, etc.) which, in their relation, for example, with the central bank’s key rates (the bankruptcy and default rate or the expected exchange rate), constitute the value of the financial product. The next step is virtualisation: these depersonalised and abstract entities are recombined and evaluated using mathematical tools. They are then validated by rating agencies before receiving a rating that represents the risk assigned to the financial product as a whole. And lastly comes financial circulation: the security is placed in a financial investment portfolio, enters the market and is purchased, if necessary by means of another bank loan—this “securitisation squared” concluding the reification process of the initial private debts. All of these procedures of quality assurance, risk management, performance calculation, auditing, etc., initially developed in the financial sector, have now become commonplace in the public sector. For example, benchmarking—a procedure for quantifying activity that is set up to compare companies or internal sectors of the same company with a view to maximising the productivity of a work collective—84 has become widespread in the public administrative sector, by means of the Organic Law on Public Finance [Loi organique relative aux lois de finance, LOLF] and the French General Review of Public Policies [Révision générale des politiques publiques, RGPP], recently renamed Modernization of Public

84 Bruno, Isabelle and Didier, Emmanuel. 2013. Benchmarking. L’État sous pression statistique. Paris: La Découverte.

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Action [Modernisation de l’action publique, MAP]. Although benchmarking is “adorned with the trappings of technicality, objectivity, and impartiality”, a critical sociological analysis shows that its function consists in “defusing any attempt at protest by administering proof that one can do better; depoliticizing negotiations by normalising (and neutralising) the issues at stake”.85 This is also the case of the “hospital-cum-company” syndrome in France whereby public hospitals have been transformed by the introduction of activity-based pricing, privatisation of financing and the reorganisation of services by hospital directors trained in the major management schools. In all sectors of activity today, there are similar examples of “inability to act, to decide or to undertake projects”, which is all the more apparent because “the promises of self-realization, freedom and autonomy come up against a reality that systematically denies them”.86 In the next chapter, I will analyse in more detail the ways in which the interactions between the financialisation of the economy, the managerial reorganisation of companies and the neoliberal reforms of State institutions (in France via the New Public Management [Nouveau management public]87 ) have led to a systematic decline in the capacity of employees (managers or low level workers) to take initiatives or control at work, be it in public administrations or private companies. In order to highlight the political significance of the contemporary critique of work, this chapter has put forward a synthesis and interpretation of the everyday criticism of—and protest at—neo-managerial work organisation. It has also presented critiques which make use of or refer to the category of alienation. Each of these analyses reveals, on the one hand, the democratic expectations of workers with regard to the process, organisation and division of labour—i.e. the wish to participate in discussion, decision-making and collective action in order to solve the problems that their jobs confront them with. These expectations cannot be reduced to what is usually understood by “workplace democracy”, insofar as they also concern the social purpose of work, transversal cooperation with other individuals and groups concerned by work, and institutions other than 85 Ibid., p. 195. 86 Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2014. Gouverner par la dette. Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires,

152. 87 See in particular Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian. 2009. La nouvelle raison du monde. Paris: La Découverte, 382.

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the company, notably the family and the State. On the other hand, these analyses demonstrate that the typical tools of neo-managerial organisation (individualised evaluation, total quality standards, personal development training, benchmarking, etc.) are, in fact, from the point of view of these expectations, anti-democratic. And we have suggested that they are best criticised by using the concept of alienation, in the specific sense of the impossibilisation—in its subjective, social and objective dimensions—of the democratic exercise of power at work. This critique of the “new alienations” must, however, be framed in the wider context of the economic, social and political issues at the heart of the passage from one period of capitalism (post-war period to the mid1970s, usually described as Fordist) to another, which has emerged in the last three decades, which can be called “post-Fordist”, “advanced capitalism”, “late capitalism”, “neocapitalism” or “neoliberalism”.88 Generally speaking, this new period can be seen as a counter-offensive and reconquest of capitalism against labour. The causes of these “new alienations” at work cannot be understood without analysis into the financialisation of the economy and the company sector, the dismantling of social protection and labour law, and the ways in which gender, race and class have evolved in contemporary capitalism. In the third chapter, we will show that the aim of these processes is precisely to neutralise the possibility of a more democratic form of work—i.e. one which would actually fulfil the democratic expectations of workers that have been examined in this chapter.

88 See Haber, Stéphane. 2013. Le néolibéralisme est-il une phase du capitalisme ? Raisons politiques. Revue de théorie politique 52.

CHAPTER 3

Neoliberalism Versus Democratic Work

“Neoliberalism” can be defined as the economic, social and political setup of the new phase of global capitalism that began in the late 1970s. As such, it should not be considered primarily as an economic theory or an ideology; it is a political project which, as Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have shown, “expresses the strategy of the capitalist classes in alliance with upper management, specifically financial managers, in tending to strengthen their hegemony and to expand it globally”.1 Its economic objective is to guarantee and revive the process of extortion of surplus value and profit maximisation for the wealthiest class—which was under threat in the 1970s—and the most sweeping way to do this is through globalisation and financialisation of the economy, i.e. by opening up the whole world to large multinational companies and facilitating the financial sector’s domination over the other economic sectors. From this standpoint, “neoliberal” ideology is not the source but one tool in the toolkit of a “political project designed to re-establish the conditions of capital accumulation and restore the power of economic elites”.2 However, neoliberalism’s specific political target needs to be clarified and, in this chapter, we will demonstrate that it can be seen as a process 1 Duménil, Gérard and Lévy, Dominique. 2013. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1. 2 Ibid., 39.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_3

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that renders impossible what we have called “democratic work”, i.e. the expansion of democracy, from the workplace upwards. It can, of course, be argued, as Wendy Brown does, that the neoliberal project is based on an overall “de-democratisation” of society, aimed at abolishing the liberal democracy that preceded it. One of the merits of this argument is to take post-Foucauldian theories of neoliberalism out of the “relative indifference” displayed in Birth of Biopolitics towards capitalism and democracy, insofar as the author “on the one hand, neglects to take into account capitalism as a form of social domination, and on the other hand, does not analyse the effects of neoliberal rationality on democracy, its imaginary, its principles, its values and institutions”.3 It also highlights one dimension of neoliberalism which could be called the economisation of democracy,4 i.e. the transfer of democratic prerogatives to the centres of economic power. But this general argument needs clarifying if we want to understand the more specific dynamics of the financialisation of the economy and the company sector, the dismantling of social protection and labour law and the new configuration of class, gender and race relations in the new global division of labour. Neoliberalism’s aim is to reinforce the power of the capitalists against the power not of the “people” in general but of the workers. In his critique of the neoliberal political project, David Harvey emphasises the significance of work: “I’ve always treated neoliberalism as a political project carried out by the corporate capitalist class as they felt intensely threatened both politically and economically towards the end of the 1960s into the 1970s. They desperately wanted to launch a political project that would curb the power of labor”.5 It will therefore be argued that the specific process of “dedemocratisation” carried out by neoliberalism consists fundamentally in an attack on the democratic potential of work. From this perspective, we will first examine the financialisation of the economy, then—in the European Union—the dissolution of social protection and labour law within the framework of competition law. Following this, we will then analyse the political logic of neo-managerial work

3 Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge: MIT Press, 86. 4 See ibid., 17. 5 Harvey, David. Neoliberalism is a political project, art. cit. See also Harvey, David.

2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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organisation in the context of company financialisation and, lastly, neoliberalism as a structure of social relations of gender, class and race aimed at neutralising the possibilities of democratic work.

3.1 Financialisation of the Economy and Political Management of Public Debt The financialisation of the economy6 can be defined as the structural transformations of the economy in capitalist societies since the 1970s, organised around the generalisation of mass savings, the supply of consumer credit, as well as the setting, by the stock markets, of production and circulation objectives, as well as objectives of capitalist valorisation for companies. On the macroeconomic level, it can be characterised by three main factors. Firstly, the large companies in the productive sector acquired their own financial capacities. Secondly, banks increased their loans to households and their speculation in the financial markets, and thirdly, households were structurally involved in the activities of the financial sector as debtors or holders of financial securities.7 Alongside these developments in the financial sector are the associated transformations of international regulatory institutions in the context of globalisation, and the changes in the company sector, linked to the growing demands of shareholders. Beyond this economic definition in the strict sense, it is important here to analyse the political logic of these transformations. In this respect, the general thesis of Cédric Durand’s book Le capital fictif is a useful guideline: financialisation consists of “the accumulation of drawing rights on the value that remains to be produced”,8 in such a way that financial institutions and asset markets “direct capital and in this way constitute the real steering centre of economic development”.9 It is this role of organising capital accumulation that helps us understand the “appropriation of the future” by finance capital, the global

6 For a precise definition in relation to neoliberalism, see Duménil, Gérard and Lévy, Dominique. The Crisis of Neoliberalism, op. cit. in particular 111 ff. 7 See Lapavitsas, Costas. 2013. Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. London: Verso. 8 Durand, Cédric. 2014. Le capital fictif. Comment la finance s’approprie notre avenir. Paris: Les prairies ordinaires, 10. 9 Ibid., 126.

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logic of which is most directly visible today in the double-bind of “public debt/structural reforms”: The aim of austerity measures that degrade public services and encroach on social rights is to guarantee regular interest flows from governments, while structural reforms are aimed at supporting the profitability of firms – and thus their capacity to pay dividends, interest and generate capital gains – by lowering the price of labour and opening up new spaces for their operations. The responses of governments to the crisis are a perfect example of the logic of dispossession demanded by sovereign finance”.10

This logic of dispossession is also visible in the “profits of alienation”, insofar as household debt constrains economic behaviour and student debt restricts students’ chances of finding a job. It can also be seen in the “betterment levies” on the productive sector, which select productive activities according to their profitability for financial capital. So, it is in society as a whole that the financialisation of the economy leads to “the abdication of the freedom to organise the future through deliberation and its corollary, the possibility to revise this planning as the unexpected unfolds”.11 In other words, the financialisation of the economy constitutes a powerful instrument of “de-democratisation” of the economy in that it dispossesses workers of the chance to decide the ends and means of production. This anti-democratic process of financialising the economy is, however, inseparable from the neoliberal public policies that enabled its implementation. In particular, the political management of public debt has been central to this new articulation between the capitalist institutions of the market and the State. As Wolfgang Streeck has shown: “In reality, the construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of public debt are closely associated with the triumph of neoliberalism over post-war capitalism this triumph is accompanied by the political sidelining of mass democracy”.12 This analysis is based on a periodisation of the relationship between democracy and capitalism in post-war “democratic capitalist societies”.

10 Ibid., 190. 11 Ibid., 187. 12 Streeck, Wolfgang. 2014. Du temps acheté. La crise sans cesse ajournée du capitalisme démocratique. Paris: Gallimard, 85 (French translation of Streeck, Wolfgang. 2014. Buying Time. The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso).

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The “fiscal state” of the 1950s–1970s, which was a “class compromise” between capital and labour by means of a State policy of planning and redistribution, was followed in the 1970s by the “debtor state”, reflecting the economic and political onslaught of capital against labour by means of, among other things, lower tax revenues vis-à-vis public spending, the deregulation of finance and the weakening of State planning. The last period is that of “State consolidation”, referring to public finance policies of consolidation and containment of State debt by means of “structural reforms” aimed at removing the mechanisms of liberal democracy which allowed citizens to participate in the fundamental choices concerning redistribution policies. In this periodisation, Streeck insists in particular on the political consequences of this transition to the debtor state and then to the consolidation state. His first observation is the decline in the public’s democratic participation, particularly among the working and middle classes, which reflects a feeling of resignation in the face of the impotence of public policies, thereby making it possible to stabilise this neoliberal turn.13 However, this decline in participation does not entirely prevent the risk of democratic “interference” in the political economy of neoliberalism. So, the conditions for “immunising the markets against democratic corrections” can be guaranteed through ideological or military means, but must be “implemented primarily through incremental “reforms” of political and economic institutions. These reforms can come in different guises, such as: shifting to a rules-based political economy, independent central banks and fiscal policy immune to electoral outcomes; through the transfer of economic policy decisions to regulatory apparatuses and committees of so-called “experts”; through golden fiscal rules formally enshrined in constitutions, and legally binding States and their policies for decades, if not forever”.14 The first term of Alexis Tsipras’ government (January– September 2015) in Greece epitomises these components of neoliberal policies. When voters turn away from neoliberal parties, it is through the “noose” of public debt and monetary blackmail that “structural reforms”, the disregard of democratic choices (expressed notably in the referendum of 5 July 2015) and the drastic restrictions on parliamentary prerogatives—in this case enshrined in the third memorandum signed deliberately

13 Ibid., 88. 14 Ibid., 97.

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by the Greek government in the summer of 2015—are imposed by undemocratically elected supranational bodies, in this case the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.15 The neoliberal political economy of public debt is used as a tool to dismantle representative democracy and to neutralise the possibility of ordinary people intervening in economic policies. More specifically, what kind of “democracy” would be made impossible with this shift towards the “debtor State” and then the “consolidation State”? It’s not simply a question of restricting the prerogatives of the institutions of liberal democracy, but more fundamentally of undoing the class compromises of the previous period, of consolidating the “appropriation of the future” by shareholders and creditors and of curbing the possibilities of democratic control of the economy. But, as Streeck shows, this mixed bag of objectives was inherited from the very specific socio-political context of the 1960s–1970s, which neoliberalism aimed to undo. In the face of “ever new waves of strikes, with workers and trade unions sticking to their demands” and while “capital saw its room for manoeuvre in terms of concessions shrinking”, the shift to the “debtor state” corresponded to a decision to “abandon the social contract that had been adopted in the post-war period” in order to “evade the planned and programmed future reserved for it by democratic politics”.16 In the period of the “consolidation state”, it is therefore now a question of radicalising this logic in order to make the “utopia of a democracy without capitalism”17 impossible, and to do this “to put an end to the democratic dimension of capitalism by erasing any economic dimension of democracy”.18 In other words, neoliberal policies must be understood in the context of this political objective, i.e. to prevent any chance of democratising the economy that existed, at least potentially, in the previous period.

15 See on this subject in French Kouvélakis, Stathis. 2015. Greece, Syriza and Neoliberal Europe. Entretiens avec Alexis Cukier. Paris: La Dispute, and Cukier, Alexis and Khalfa, Pierre (eds.). 2015. Europe, l’expérience grecque. Le débat stratégique. Paris: Le Croquant. 16 Streeck, Wolfgang. Du temps acheté, op. cit., 55. 17 Ibid., 238. 18 Ibid., 149.

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3.2 Dismantling Labour Law and Anti-Democratic “Governance” in the European Union An analysis of the social and economic policies implemented by the European Union over the last three decades sheds light on the relationship between the objectives of dismantling national labour rights and the neoliberal project of neutralising the foundations of a possible labour democracy. The social and economic policy directives of the European institutions—such as increasing the “flexibility” of the labour market, “wage moderation” and “lowering the cost of labour”, privatising public services and shifting collective bargaining from the sectoral branches to the company level—must be understood in the context of a project to neutralise the potential for democratic labour in the social legislation of the member states. Here again, it is crucial to recall the initial context against which the neoliberal project was conceived. In his analysis of the “attempt by the financial elite to seize political power”19 in the European Union, the economist Robert Salais recalls that the “path to a Europe for workers” was reopened in the 1970s following the social movements of the previous decade, as shown in France, for example, by the Sudreau report in 1975, which defended “the participation of employees in economic decisionmaking, going so far as to recognise the right to individual and collective expression and to propose employee representatives with voting rights on boards of directors and supervisory boards”20 . Employment policies in the European Union since then have not only been aimed at securing the conditions for the extortion of surplus value and accumulation but also at preventing such an empowerment of workers. This is what flexibility policies in particular aim at, be it in their “defensive” forms: i.e. “lowering wages, reducing obstacles to dismissals or abolishing the legal thresholds of labour law”, or in their “offensive” forms whose aim is to

19 Salais, Robert. 2014. Le viol d’Europe. Enquête sur la disparution d’une idée. Paris: PUF, 357. 20 Ibid., 316–317. See on this subject, Chatriot, Alain. 2012. La réforme de l’entreprise. Du contrôle ouvrier à l’échec du projet modernisateur. Vingtième Siècle. Revue d’histoire 114.

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“come up with, by means of the crisis, a new wage relationship”.21 This is also how we should understand, for example, the policies of “activation”, which aim to increase competition on the labour market by dismantling the employment protection of salaried workers and individualising the return to work of the unemployed22 ; of “valuing work”, which encourage an increase in the difference between earned income and social23 minima; and of “flexicurity”, which aims to combine the employability of workers, the granting of minimum social protection rights and the flexibility of the labour market and labour relations. In the construction of the European Union, the imposition of the “market order”, to use the term coined by ordoliberal theorists, has always been the political compass.24 In the assertion (2015) of the then President of the European Commission that “There can be no democratic choice against the European treaties”,25 we must therefore not only see a defence of the undemocratic institutions of the European Union, nor, primarily, a yearning to destroy the “democratic sovereignty” of the Nation-States, but more fundamentally, a plan to “de-democratise” the economy, by consolidating a large competitive market sheltered from any political intervention by workers. Let us recall some of the recent stages in the dismantling of labour law reinforcing this counter-democratic competitive order. After an initial phase creating the political and legal tools of this European internal market project (from the 1957 Treaty of Rome mentioning the “principle of free and undistorted competition” to the 1997 Treaty of Amsterdam establishing the single market and monetary union), the 2000s was a phase of acceleration and consolidation of this undertaking to build a neoliberal competitive market. Thus, the “Lisbon Strategy” of 2000

21 Mazuyer, Emmanuelle. 2013. Les mutations du droit du travail sous influence européenne. Revue de la Régulation, 13. 22 Ehrel, Christine. Politiques de l’emploi: la tendance à l’activation donne-t-elle une place accrue à l’accompagnement ?. Informations sociales 169. 23 See in particular Council of the European Union, Recommendation on the Broad

Guidelines for the Economic Policies of the Member States and the Union. Part I of the Europe 2020 Integrated Guidelines, Brussels, 30 April 2010. 24 See Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian. Ce cauchemar qui n’en finit pas, op. cit. especially 118 ff. See also Cukier, Alexis and Gallo-Lassere, David. 2017. Les crises de la construction européenne: approche interdisciplinaire. Noesis 25–26. 25 “Interview with Jean-Claude Juncker”, Le Figaro, 29 January 2015.

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provided for a “modernisation of social protection systems” explicitly directed against the forms of social contribution, socialisation of wages and corresponding economic redistribution present in national economic policies. But from the mid-2000s onwards, labour law became the main target of the European neoliberal project: “Modernising labour law to meet the challenges of the 21st century”.26 The overall approach of the document follows from this principle: “The modernisation of labour law constitutes a key element for the success of the adaptability of workers and enterprises”.27 In order to achieve such “flexicurity”, the document particularly insists on the need to “adapt the classic employment contract with the aim of promoting greater flexibility for both workers and companies”.28 The aim is to generalise and introduce “nonstandard” employment contracts (fixed-term and part-time contracts, “zero hours” contracts, temporary work contracts, etc.) but also to harmonise “standard” contracts from the bottom up, and in this perspective “to evaluate, and if necessary review, the degree of flexibility provided for in standard contracts with regard to notice periods, costs and procedures for individual or collective dismissal, or the definition of unfair dismissal”.29 These objectives provided the backdrop for the amputation of the Labour Code by the French Labour Laws (“Lois Travail”), a move that was explicitly advocated in a “recommendation” of the Council of the European Commission of 14 July 2015: “France should take decisive action to remove regulatory thresholds in labour law and accounting regulations that limit the growth of its companies”, in order to “reduce labour costs and improve profit margins for companies”.30 They were also the basis for both “negotiations” between national governments and the European institutions, and the principles of recent rulings by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). This is the case, for

26 See Commission of the European Communities, Modernising Labour Law to Meet the Challenges of the 21st Century, Brussels, 22 November 2011. 27 Ibid., 3. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 3–4. 30 Council of the European Union, Recommendation on the National Reform

Programme of France for 2015 and Opinion of the Council on the Stability Programme of France for 2015, Brussels, 14 July 2015.

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example, of the Viking and Laval-Vaxholm rulings (condemning collective action by workers to prevent relocation in the first case and “social dumping” in the second) and Rüffert (declaring invalid a law obliging public works companies to apply the sector’s collective agreement when awarding public contracts) in 2007. The ECJ can now “limit trade union action and employees’ rights in the name of freedom of trade”.31 More widely, the whole body of European Community law on labour has been built up to resemble a war machine against national labour rights32 —and more specifically, against what these rights meant in terms of support, not only for limiting economic exploitation, but also for facilitating genuine worker participation in company and economic life.33 At this point, it is easier to understand the intrinsic relationship between the destruction of national labour legislation supported by the European Union (institutionalisation of “Zero Hours Contract ” in the UK, “Agenda 2010” and Hartz Laws in Germany, destruction of the collective bargaining system in the memoranda in Greece, “Jobs Act” in Italy, etc.) and the anti-democratic project of “European governance”,34 which, as Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval argue, “reduces public life to management or administration by eliminating politics, conflict and deliberation on common values or ends”.35 It is a question of combining a process of “de-democratisation” of economic decisions and “economisation” of political decisions, in order to substitute the neoliberal competitive order for democratic legitimacy as a principle of economic organisation. Weakening workers’ power is the common political objective of the financialisation of the economy, the transnational management of public debt, of a-democratic “governance”, and the dismantling of labour law in Europe.

31 Khalfa, Pierre. Le droit européen contre l’Europe sociale. Libération, 15 April 2008. 32 For a critique from the point of view of labour law in France, see in particular Lyon-

Caen, Gérard. 1995. Le droit du travail. Une technique réversible. Paris: Dalloz, notably 88 and Supiot, Alain. 2007. Critique du droit du travail. Paris: Puf, notably, 33–34. 33 See on this subject Cukier, Alexis. 2016. Exploitation, Marxisme et droit du travail. Contretemps (Online), 13 October 2016. 34 See European Commission, European Governance, a White Paper, Brussels, 25 July 2001. 35 See Dardot, Pierre, and Laval, Christian, Ce cauchemar qui n’en finit pas, op. cit., 128–129.

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Financialisation of the Company and New Managerial Power

These analyses make it possible to clarify, in turn, the socio-political logic at work in the neoliberal construction of the “financialised managerial enterprise”.36 In this respect, and contrary to what a certain contemporary critical doxa maintains, we should not confine ourselves to the diagnosis of a pure and simple capture of corporate power by finance. First of all, it is specific to companies that manufacture financial products (e.g. by specialising in securitisation), assess value (e.g. “rating agencies”) and operate the financial markets, for example by means of the “leverage buyout ” mechanism.37 But above all, the financialisation of the economy is inseparable from a transformation of the balance of power between labour and capital in the company sector. Indeed, the predominance of shareholder value is not built up against but, rather, with the help of managers: “the importance of shareholder value can be seen in a set of formal and informal rules which guide the conceptions and actions of the various members of the company, first and foremost the managers, and in the mechanisms aimed at ensuring compliance with these rules”.38 More specifically, it is up to management to set up the instruments of valuebased management which “make it possible to impose the constraints of financial profitability at the very heart of company management”.39 In other words, the financial mechanisms can only be implemented through a specific work organisation; for example, the “return on investment” targets cannot be reached without the measurement tools for employee performance and planning production that value-based management prescribes. So, rather than finance taking over a company, the “financialisation of a company” can be defined as replacing a model oriented towards the productive value of the company with one oriented towards the maximisation of financial value. It is based on specific internal management standards, which together make up what is known as “corporate 36 Weinstein, Olivier. 2010. Pouvoir, Finance, Connaissance. Les transformations de l’entreprise capitaliste aux XXe et XXI e siècles. Paris: La Découverte, 178. 37 The “Leverage Buyout (LBO)” is a type of legal and financial arrangement for the purchase of a company through “leverage”, i.e. debt. 38 Ibid., 101. 39 Ibid.

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governance”, “the criteria of which relate to the board of directors; voting procedures at general meetings; the separation of the positions of chairman and chief executive officer; the existence of specialised independent committees responsible for executive remuneration and internal audits, accounting standards, the information required by shareholders, anti-takeover measures and adherence to a code of good conduct defining relations between executives and shareholders”.40 These abstract criteria, disconnected from the productive activity of a company, should make it possible to assess the extent to which any one company is ready to maximise its shareholder value. However, this “management by criteria” requires the active collaboration of top managers, who are responsible for producing these indicators, on the one hand, and putting them into effect in terms of production, on the other. The financialisation of any company implies the active participation of top managers and company management, whose principal function is to align its work organisation with the criteria of its financial management. This is why radical criticism of traditional economic theories of the company sector (and their exclusively macrological vision of financialisation) is needed, as it is also needed for the now dominant sociological theories of the neo-managerial work organisation (and their exclusively micrological vision, centred on organisational systems). On the one hand, the idea is not to reject the conception of an ancillary management, subordinated to shareholder power, which can take two forms: “the dominant shareholder theory”, according to which managers are only the representatives of shareholders, and the theory of “stakeholders ”, presented as an alternative according to which managers are in the service of a set of actors involved in the activity of a company whose role would therefore be to ensure compromises between them.41 In this respect, the theory of “agency” in particular—which is an ideological justification rather than an explanation for the collaboration of managers with shareholders42 —should also be questioned.43 But on the other hand, 40 Ibid., 217. 41 Ibid., 65. 42 Ibid., 99. 43 This type of theory of the firm pits the interests of the “principal”, the shareholder

as owner of the means of production, against those of the “agent”, the firm that exploits these means of production at the shareholder’s request. See in particular Jensen, Michael C. and Merckling, William H. 1983. Corporate Governance and “Economic Democracy”:

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there is a need to move away from a micro-sociological vision exclusively centred on neo-managerial systems considered as sui generis forms of power, an approach particularly popular in post-Foucauldian approaches to management based on the “technologies of the self”.44 In order to analyse the mutual causality between the financialisation of the economy and that of the company sector, we need to consider the changes in the relationship between the “inside” and the “outside” of companies, which also facilitates understanding of the anti-democratic character of neoliberal work organisation. On the one hand, there has clearly been an “externalisation” of power in some large companies, insofar as the function of the neo-managerial organisation of work is to guarantee the control of new external financial actors (venture capital firms, pension funds, hedge funds, firms specialising in LBOs, etc.) over its functioning, with a view to ensuring the domination of shareholder value. It can therefore be considered that “insider managerial power has been replaced by a new structure of outsider power, based on a new type of company directors and investment fund managers”.45 But on the other hand, this process is not simply financial power dominating managerial power. The “financialisation of the company” can be seen both in “the rise in power of new financial players from outside the company” and in “the increasing predominance of financial criteria in company management”.46 In large companies, “corporate governance”—linked in particular to the multiplication of autonomous profit centres (strategic business units ), most often grouped around a senior manager—and to the various forms of controlling business by financial indicators—does not therefore weaken managerial power, but transforms its structure and functions. The work of top management, in charge of “strategy”, is organised by profitability criteria and focuses on sales and acquisitions, whereas the job of middle management, in charge of “organisation”, is to manage the company according to competitive objectives. In medium-sized companies, this predominance of financial An Attack on Freedom. In Proceedings of Corporate Governance. A Definite Exploration of the Issues, ed J.C. Huinzenga. Los Angeles: UCLA Extension. 44 See, for example, McKinlay, Allan and Starkey, Ken (eds.). 1997. Foucault, Management and Organization Theory. From Panopticon to Technologies of Self. Thousand Oaks: Sage. 45 Ibid., 126. 46 Ibid., 88.

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management criteria also concerns the managers, who may become partners and be directly involved in implementing these criteria within the framework of work organisation. So, while it’s possible to maintain that “managerial power is less accountable” to the company—as reflected, in particular, by the fact that “financial irregularities are increasing and executives’ salaries are exploding”—paradoxically, the “primacy of shareholders ” has in fact “strengthened the discretionary power of managers rather than limiting it”.47 The hegemony of shareholder value should be understood not as a question of financial power replacing managerial power but, rather, as the creation, within the company, of a power bloc of shareholders and managers set up to counter the power of subordinate workers. The mutual causality between the financialisation of the economy and the financialisation of the company sector is a reflection of Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy’s thesis of the “tripolar class perspective”,48 according to which capitalism in the twentieth century was reorganised around the emergence of a new social class of managers, socially situated between that of the capitalists and that of the popular classes of employees and workers. The authors rightly emphasise the central function of the “managerial classes” in the implementation of neoliberalism: “In reality, imposing neoliberalism would have been impossible without a new alliance at the higher levels of the social pyramid, between the owners and management”.49 Similarly, analysing this change of alliance by the middle class—originally allied with the employees and workers in the post-war class compromise and then with the owner class in neoliberalism—provides a useful general framework for the analysis of the political logic at work here. However, rather than an attempt to increase the power of the managerial class,50 the financialisation of the company sector can be seen as one

47 T. Moore Marc and Rébérioux Antoine. 2007. The Corporate Governance of the Firm as an Entity: Old Issues for a New Debate. In The Firm as an Entity. Implications for Economics, Accounting and the Law, eds. Yuri Biondi, Arnaldo Canziani, Thierry Kirat. Routledge: London and New York, 357. 48 See for example Duménil Gérard, and Lévy, Dominique. 2014. La grande bifurcation. En finir avec le néolibéralisme. Paris: La Découverte, first chapter. 49 See Duménil, Gérard, and Lévy, Dominique. The Crisis of Neoliberalism, op. cit.,

77. 50 See ibid., 78 ff.

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of neoliberalism’s steps towards de-democratising the economy. That is, it’s basically a question of preventing workers’ initiatives by financially controlling their work. By realigning managerial power with the objectives of the owner class, the aim is to prevent any risk of workers’ democratic control over production taking shape.

3.4 Gender, Race and Class in the Neoliberal Division of Labour Neoliberalism can be used to refer, more generally, to the contemporary situation of class, gender and race relations in the international division of labour. It has, of course, never been possible to separate the capitalist mode of production from either the patriarchal (or domestic) mode of production or the racial division of labour. But “neoliberal globalisation prolongs, while also transforming, these three major systems of domination and exploitation”.51 By neoliberal division of labour, we mean the way in which the entwining of class, gender and race relations today distributes inequalities and domination in access to employment, job allocation, working conditions and position in the hierarchy of work organisation. On the one hand, “gender is a key organiser of neoliberal globalisation”, insofar as “women are both a crucial workforce for paid and unpaid work, a source of profit, and simultaneously one of the most active social groups in the analysis and organisation of struggles and alternatives to this globalisation”.52 What we now need is a discussion of the transformations of the racial and capitalist division of labour in the light of gender relations. On the other hand, the racial division of labour, i.e. the forced distribution of tasks in the production process between categories defined on the basis of their “race” or ethnicity, but also of their nationality or legal status, also constitutes an essential framework for the analysis of neoliberal globalisation. So, our aim is to study “the complex ways in which racism covertly structures the institutions, practices and ideologies

51 Falquet, Jules. 2006. Hommes en armes et femmes ‘de service’: tendances néolibérales dans l’évolution de la division sexuelle et internationale du travail. Cahiers du Genre 40. 52 Falquet, Jules, Hirata, Héléna, Kergoat, Danièle, Labari, Brahim, Le Feuvre, Nicky and Sow, Fatou (eds.). 2012. Le sexe de la mondialisation. Genre, classe, race et nouvelle division du travail. Paris: Presses de Sciences Politiques, 13.

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of the neoliberal era”.53 This section will highlight the fact that neoliberalism opposes any attempt at “democratic emancipation” whose aim is to “prevent processes of racialisation and sexualisation”,54 and will examine the specifics of the anti-democratic nature of this neoliberal division of labour. Let us look at two specific processes that capture the effects of the neoliberal division of labour: the feminisation of economic migration and the subordination of women care workers—both intrinsically linked in neoliberalism—which “coincides with a specific process of feminisation of migration on an international scale and the “creation” of a female-migrant labour force”.55 These processes have been made possible in particular by the commodification of the personal services sector, in the context of an increasing demand for household and care work by the white middle and upper classes in the cities most integrated into neoliberal globalisation. They have been the subject of a great deal of recent sociological research, notably in the United States, Brazil, Japan and France,56 which emphasises that care work is now a vital condition of reproduction in neoliberal societies and one of the main indicators of the contemporary entwining of social relations between gender, class and race. The congruence between racist categorisations and professional hierarchies also concerns men and other sectors of activity. In a sociological study of building sites in the 2000s in the Ile-de-France,57 Nicolas Jounin highlighted the “informal racist classifications” used by employers and site managers. Management positions were filled mainly by Portuguese employees, North Africans occupied the less qualified permanent positions, and black Africans worked as labourers in the most precarious positions. However, such a racial division is also combined with the sexual

53 Davis, Angela. 2012. Recognizing Racism in the Era of Neoliberalism.. In The Meaning of Freedom and Other Difficult Dialogues. San Francisco: City Lights, 168. 54 Eisenstein, Zillah. 2004. Against Empire. Feminisms, racism, and the West. London and New York: Zed Books, 91. 55 Farris, Sarah. 2013. Neoliberalism, Migrant Women and the Commodification of

Care. Vacarmes 65. 56 See in particular Guimarae, Nadya, Hirata, Helena, Sugita, Kurumi, 2014. Care et travail du care dans une perspective comparative: Brésil, France, Japon. Regards croisés sur l’économie 15. 57 Nicolas Jounin. 2004. L’ethnicisation en chantiers. Reconstructions des statuts par l’éthnique en milieu de travail. Revue européenne des migrations internationals 3.

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division of labour in the case of care work, which is highly feminised, as illustrated by this typology of professional hierarchies in a hospital in the United States. At the top of the hierarchy, the doctors are white men, then come the registered nurses (white women), then the nursing assistants (mostly racialised women) and finally, at the bottom of the pyramid, the maintenance staff (mostly racialised men) as well as the care assistants and nursing aides (mostly racialised women).58 This mix takes particular forms in France, due to the history of colonisation and French economic migration policies. This “hierarchical division of labour according to race and gender”59 is more than a simple distribution of individuals and groups between the different professions; it is also built around daily issues in the power relations between employees. This is what Pascale Molinier shows, for example, in relation to a retirement home in the Ile-de-France region. The racist categorisation of “white women who manage black women and North African women”,60 according to which, for example, “North African women are strong-headed, leaders, and lack respect for the hierarchy, whereas black women are submissive and kind”,61 is consistent with the unequal access to resources that enable work organisation to be controlled. In a different organisational context, that of homeworkers employed by associations in the Paris region, Christelle Avril also highlights the use of racist stereotypes in the division of labour implemented by white female employers, but also the way in which the professional context liberates racist speech among the homeworkers themselves.62 We can see that the contemporary mix of gender, race and class relations functions as a factor in neutralising solidarity between female workers. The gendered and racial division of labour is a major anti-democratic factor in that it weakens the political solidarities that could be built up between men, women—racialised and non-racialised—and within each of 58 Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. 2009. « De la servitude au travail de service: les continuités de la division raciale du travail reproductif payé», in Sexe, race, classe. Pour une épistémologie de la domination, ed. Elsa Dorlin. Paris: Puf, 46–47. 59 Ibid., 46. 60 Molinier, Pascale. 2013. Le travail du care. Paris: La Dispute, 22–23. 61 Ibid., 22–23. 62 See Avril, Christelle. 2014. Les aides à domicile. Un autre monde populaire. La Dispute: Paris, 158 ff.

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these groups. Thus, Evelyn Nakano Glenn shows that the intertwining of gender and race relations also facilitated the internalisation of social conflicts within the women’s group. For example, “gender conflict is redirected to clashes between women” over workload, task distribution and working conditions. This also happens in health organisations where “the racial division of labour allows some of these tensions to be redirected in such a way that friction arises between registered nurses and care assistants over task allocation and supervision”.63 This neoliberal division of labour divides the class of women, with white women discovering that the ability to delegate domestic and care work, alongside its economic devaluation, is a form of emancipation in the antagonistic relationship with the male class. On the contrary, because “the division between ‘skilled’ and ‘unskilled’ jobs is played out precisely where racial division is situated”, the struggle against racial and gendered division of power would also be one against the capitalist division of labour: Addressing the problems faced by women of colour working in the service sector would involve a radical critique of the concept of a hierarchy of values; it would involve demanding the right of all workers to a decent income, regardless of skills or responsibilities.64

It is precisely this democratic potential of the critique of labour that neoliberalism’s rekindling of the racial and gendered division of labour aims to neutralise. Feminist studies have long shown that while protest against capitalist exploitation of workers and the oppression of women must be distinguished in terms of analysis, they come together in the practice of real social struggles.65 While it is doubtful that the perspective of a “caring society” or a “caring democracy”66 is sufficient to imagine a social organisation that would result from the promotion of such democratic work, the analysis of care work helps us to go beyond a conception of work centred on the individual transformation of matter or on the 63 Nakano Glenn, Evelyn. De la servitude au travail de service: les continuités de la division raciale du travail reproductif payé, art. cit., 59. 64 Ibid., 63. 65 See for example Kergoat, Danièle. Se battre disent-elles…, op. cit., p. 27. 66 See in particular Molinier, Pascale. Le travail du care, op. cit. and Tronto, Joan.

2013. Caring Democracy. Markets, Equality and Justice. New York: New York University Press.

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production of economic value, in favour of a democratic conception of work, centred on the production of the material and social conditions of the reproduction and transformation of society. They also suggest that it is not only the organisation and division of labour that can be challenged in this way, but also the social relations of domination that are constructed throughout society on the basis of work. Taken together, these studies suggest that because there is a real possibility that women as a class may further the aims of democratic work, neoliberalism’s campaign of “de-democratisation” first targeted racialised women. This is what Jules Falquet has shown, for example, in his research on Indian women in Mexico. These women are the primary targets of neoliberal policies not only because they constitute “the most important segment of the workforce for the neoliberal system of accumulation – as well as being the ones who actually carry out the work” but also because they are at the forefront of an “alternative political project which they trying to build, not without difficulty, between the siren calls of persuasion and the brutal repression aimed directly at them”.67 The author highlights the fact that democratic work could only be achieved by abolishing these relations of domination and by dismantling the institutions (national and international) that “organise the distribution and exploitation of labour within and outside the family, people’s mobility, their access to citizenship, rights, alliance, transmission and resources” and thus “shape the borders, alliances and oppositions of gender, ‘race’ and class”.68 Faced with this institutional drive to dominate aimed at stifling the democratic potentialities of racialised women’s work, the critical analysis of the capitalist, racial and patriarchal division of labour allows us to present an alternative plan of democratic work, which should be essentially focused on dismantling neoliberal institutions.

67 Falquet, Jules. 2012. L’État néolibéral et les femmes. In Le sexe de la mondialisation, op. cit. 68 Falquet, Jules. La règle du jeu. Repenser la co-formation des rapports sociaux de sexe, de classe et de « race» dans la mondialisation néolibérale. In Sexe, classe, race, op. cit., 85.

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3.5

Conclusion of Part I: Democratic Work and the Political Centrality of Labour

So, there is indeed a democratic norm of the contemporary critique of work, which concerns not only the organisation but also the division and process of work—and therefore the whole of society—and a specific political issue of the various processes grouped under the heading of neoliberalism: making the democratic activity of workers impossible. This is the basis for the idea behind a possible form of “democratic labour”, i.e. a joint process of democratisating work and the institutions. In conclusion to this first part, we need to examine in more detail some of the theoretical issues involved in creating this democratic work. The main issue concerns the political centrality of work, which can be understood in (1) the metaphorical sense of a positional centrality; i.e. work is a central political issue in our societies; (2) in the structural sense of a constitutive centrality; i.e. work grounds, structures and organises the whole of social life; or (3) in the practical sense of a dynamic centrality: i.e. work is at the heart of the reproduction and transformation of social relations. Let us examine more precisely the issues at stake in each of these three senses, which have emerged in the course of the analysis of the norms of the critique of work in the neoliberal regime. Generally speaking, the phrase “centrality of work” makes use of a geometric or physical metaphor, in which society is represented by a figure or a body, within which work occupies the main position: The conceptual content of this metaphor is based on the following statements: work occupies a significant place in our lives; it influences the part of our lives that does not directly concern work; the value of individual and collective life depends on work either directly – because work is itself a decisive normative issue – or indirectly because the ability to cultivate values specific to life outside of work, itself depends on work.69

Nowhere is this positional sense more evident than in the analysis of the democratic norm that can be seen in the critique of work as well as in the anti-democratic character of neoliberalism. In this way, the political centrality of work implies that the shared control of the

69 Renault, Emmanuel. 2012. Dewey et la centralité du travail. Travailler 28, 125.

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process, organisation and division of labour is a determining condition for democracy. From this point of view, the question concerns the interpretation of this conditionality, which can be understood in the sense of a means— the need to reorient the work process in such a way that it allows for the democratic transformation of society—or of the removal of an obstacle—it is impossible to democratically transform society without first transforming the division of labour that today hinders this process. This is the first question that requires an answer: given the specific form of antagonism between the neoliberal regime of work and democratic expectations, how can we comprehend precisely the possible democratic function of work, that is, the way in which the democratisation of work can contribute to the democratic creation of institutions? On the other hand, the thesis of the constitutive centrality of work in the political domain, whether formulated in terms of structuring, foundation or architectonics, posits that the political practices of a period are essentially defined by the contemporary forms of the work process; that political institutions are mainly organised according to the model of the organisation of work; that political institutions are ultimately structured according to the division of labour. These three aspects have also been referred to in the course of our analyses. For example, questioning the contemporary ways in which workers have been dispossessed of their work’s “social purpose”, in favour of financial logic, implies that work activity should constitute a political practice; the critique of the “corporate governance” of the State actualises the idea of political organisations being modelled on labour organisations; and the analysis of class, gender and race relations in neoliberalism involves the idea of structuring neoliberal institutions along the lines of neoliberal division of labour. However, this constitutive dimension of the political centrality of work should be understood in a deflationary sense. It is not a question of returning to a metaphysical interpretation of this idea, as put forward, in particular, by Georg Lukacs, for whom “what we call the social being of man and which has as its essence human teleological intervention, i.e. work”.70 The “New Public Management ” critique, for example, does not have a normative base built around the importance of work, the political 70 Lukács, Georg. 2011. Ontologie de l’être social. Le travail - La reproduction. Paris: Delga, 200.

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consequences of which would be somehow prevented or distorted today. However, it does take note of the predominance of the “work-form”71 in social, economic and political relations and challenges the specific, antidemocratic form that it takes today in the company sector and the State. More generally, as Franck Fischbach shows, it is a question of avoiding two errors that would amount to an “absolutisation of work”: The first mistake would be to limit the centrality of work to its capitalist incarnation; in other words, the mistake would be to absolutise its specifically capitalist form. The second mistake would be to attach the same importance to the thesis of the centrality of work as that to of a metaphysics of work.72

What these two forms of absolutising the thesis of the centrality of work have in common is that they render the critique of work inoperative and the perspective of democratic work inconceivable. There is a risk, for example, as with the cooperative movement, of believing that a simple, democratic reorganisation of society is enough to democratise society as a whole. Or, similarly, as do Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, for example, to consider unilaterally the existing work process (e.g. “immaterial work”) as an already established force for the democratic transformation of society. This critique of the constitutive understanding of the political centrality of work raises a second obstacle for the democratic work perspective: how to envisage collectively, without considering work to be essential, the democratic transformation of the process, organisation and division of labour? Lastly, the centrality of work can be understood in a dynamic sense, according to which work is an efficient tool for the reproduction and transformation of institutions and social relations. This interpretation explains how, for example, neo-management creates the conditions for the alienation of employees and citizens (or the financial dispossession of wealth) and, more widely, accounts for the fact that there are institutions such as the company sector and the market (but also the family and the State) at work in creating social domination. This understanding does not imply that work is or becomes absolutely “central” to all these 71 See Bidet, Jacques. 1995. Le travail fait époque. In La crise du travail, eds. Jacques Bidet and Jacques Texier. Paris: Puf, 246–247. 72 Fischbach, Franck. Le sens du social, op. cit., 192.

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institutions, but rather that it is that from which it is possible to act (in the sense of “physical dynamics”). Nor does it imply the idea that work constitutes the foundation or structure of the whole of society—as is the case with the metaphysical interpretation of the constitutive centrality of work thesis—but rather that it is one of the best ways of transforming its various components and setting them in motion over time (in the sense of “molecular dynamics”). As Jacques Bidet summarises the centrality of work in Marx: The historically decisive feature of work as a mode of activity is not due to the fact that its place is socially central, or that it constitutes the “basis” of any social structure (in this respect ethnology has valid arguments to counter Marxism). It is because – especially by virtue of its productive capacity – it has cumulative effects, which go way beyond the end targeted in the act of production, and as a result, it constantly transforms the subsequent conditions of human intervention in the environment, and, thus, those of all social life.73

In terms of politics, analysing the dynamic centrality of work helps clarify the problematic conditionality of the relationship between work and democracy. Is a “real institutional democracy” a necessary precondition for the democratic reorganisation of work—as argued by the “class struggle” model, which contends that institutional locks exist preventing the democratisation of work—or is the latter a necessary precondition for the democratisation of society, as defended by the “industrial democracy” model? This is the third and most wide-ranging question that we will attempt to answer: what theoretical models and political issues (Part II) and what democratic experiments at work (Part III) would enable the conception and implementation of democratic work? The answers to these questions will allow us to clarify the second meaning of the concept of democratic work: i.e. no longer that of the political norm as in today’s critique of work, but that of a project for the democratic transformation of work and the democratic creation of institutions that could be achieved tomorrow.

73 Bidet, Jacques. Le travail fait époque, art. cit., 246.

PART II

Theoretical Models and Political Issues

Looking ahead to what democratic demands on work could look like today, and to oppose the neoliberal “de-democratisation” of work with a positive alternative, the following question needs to be updated and answered: in what way can workers bring about democratisation in the work place and in society as a whole? Such an approach is opposed to statist conceptions of democracy— which “consider that challenging oppressive and alienating subordinate work is utopian”1 —but it will also allow us to broach another issue which contemporary social sciences have always avoided. In order for work to be seen as the principal tool of political activity and not only as one of its objects, we need to address the ways in which a democratic politics of work could contribute, to what Bruno Trentin describes as “the conquest of ever new spaces of freedom and participation in decisions, in order to be able to submit all forms of hetero-direction to an effective control”. 2 By way of a response, this section examines some of the theoretical resources that make it possible to envisage forms of democratic work that combine democratising work itself and society as a whole. This perspective differs from the contemporary debates around “workplace democracy” (see above, in the Introduction), which do not respond to the criticism that Marx addressed to the utopian socialists of his time 1 Trentin, Bruno, 2012. La Cité du travail. Le fordisme et la gauche, Paris: Fayard, 320. 2 Ibid., 405.

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(Owen, Fourier, Saint Simon, Cabet, etc.); that is, in what way could reorganising work facilitate both State democratisation and social transformation beyond the workplace? In an attempt to answer this question, a series of arguments have been put forward since as early as the nineteenth century, highlighting the need for a democratic transformation not only of work organisation but also concerning the division of labour and its economic and political institutions, outside the workplace. In Marx’s view, the class struggle led by the workers within the institutions was the best way to democratise labour. It was then a question of abolishing State obstacles, and firstly private ownership of the means of production, which prevented democratic control of labour. But how can this first paradigm of democratic labour, that of the class struggle, eschew the tendency to abandon the democratic control of labour in favour of the more urgent political struggle in the political sphere? Conversely, from the perspective of industrial democracy, the democratic transformation of labour organisation must precede the democratisation or abolition of the State. This is what Proudhon, for example, advocated. He believed, amongst other things, that work should be part and parcel of the democratic exercise of power, as did Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the founders of the notion “industrial democracy”,3 and John Dewey. This second paradigm of democratic labour, however, is confronted with another problem, in which Marx was one of the first to address: doesn’t such a project overlook the need to dismantle the State institutions of labour alienation? The relationship between labour and democracy in the democratic labour project, and hence the dynamic meaning of the political centrality of labour, can be understood in two ways. The reorganisation of labour can be seen either as the result of, or as the condition for, the democratic transformation of institutions and social relations. In the first paradigm, that of class struggle (Chapter 3), the revolutionary transformation of social relations is the condition for the reorganisation of labour whereas, in the second paradigm, i.e. that of industrial democracy (Chapter 4), the reorganisation of labour and industry is the condition for the democratisation of society. In these chapters, we will focus on the relevant analyses of Karl Marx, on the one hand, and John Dewey, on the other, both of whom defend 3 Webb, Beatrice and Webb, Sidney. 1897. Industrial Democracy, 2 vol. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green and Company.

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the argument of the centrality of work but whose conceptions of the relationship between the transformation of work organisation and the democratic transformation of social relations diverge.4 By exploring these two paradigms, we will show, with reference to the work of Karl Korsch,5 how these two approaches to democratic work can converge. However, in order to democratise work, the relationship between work collectives and political institutions needs to be modified, alongside transformation of the transversal social relations that regulate this relationship. This is the case of gender relations, which divide labour between women and men and, subsequently, all social institutions. Drawing on the analyses of the sexual division of labour by materialist feminism, which places the transformation of labour at the heart of feminist struggles, we will then be in a position to question the definition of labour, by integrating domestic labour and the labour of social reproduction. It also avoids two classic pitfalls of the aforementioned centrality of work thesis. Firstly, economism,6 which absurdly transforms the notion of the constitutive centrality of work into one in which “the economy is king”,7 and, secondly, ahistoricism, which turns it into an anthropological invariant without questioning the historical context and the political stakes. At the very least, conceptualising democratic work should thus broaden and radicalise the spectrum of the aforementioned paradigms by incorporating feminist struggles. The issue can be summarised as follows (Chapter 5): what new conception of the labour process, integrating the analyses of domestic labour and the labour of social reproduction, is required by the perspective of democratic labour? On the other hand, democratic labour is not conceivable today without taking into account the urgency of an ecological revolution in view of a new system of production that is no longer destructive of the health of

4 See Renault, Emmanuel. 2012. Dewey et la centralité du travail, Travailler 28 and Renault, Emmanuel. 2011. Comment Marx se réfère-t-il au travail et à la domination. Actuel Marx 49, as well as Cukier, Alexis. 2016. Deux modèles de la centralité du travail. In Enjeux politiques du travail, eds. Alexis Cukier and Emmanuel Renault, Travailler 36. 5 See in particular Korsch, Karl. 1980. Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte. In Gesamtausgabe, Band 2:Rätebewegung and Klassenkampf. Frankfurt-am-Main: Europäische Verangestalt. 6 Literally ‘economicism’: in French the belief that the economy is the principal dimension of any society. 7 See on this subject Delphy, Christine. 2013. L’ennemi principal, Economie politique du patriarcat. Paris: Syllepse, 23.

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human beings and of ecosystems. So political ecology analysis is a seminal contribution to the design of a democratic politics of work (Chapter 6). In some of its versions, particularly those of ecosocialism, the critique of productivism, extractivism and the environmental damage produced by capitalism does not in fact call into question the dynamic centrality of labour, but on the contrary leads to the claim that “workers and their organisations are an essential force for the radical transformation of the system, and for the establishment of a new socialist and ecological society”.8 And from a theoretical point of view, when political ecology points to an internal contradiction in capitalism between the relations of production and its environmental conditions, it sheds light on one of the main blind spots in the classical paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy; i.e. the socio-ecological dimension of the relationship between the process of labour and the division of labour.

8 Löwy, Michaël. 2011. L’écosocialisme. L’alternative radicale à la catastrophe écologique capitaliste. Paris: Mille et une nuits, 32.

CHAPTER 4

The Class Struggle: Revolutionising Institutions to Democratise Labour

Let’s start with the paradigm of class struggle in Marx’s writings which, regarding the problem of the political centrality of labour, is paradoxical; that is, Marx argues that the control of labour is indeed the central issue of social conflict, but a democratic reorganisation of labour is necessarily conditioned by a prior transformation of political institutions. For Marx, the class struggle is not only a concept pertaining to historical theory but also a political theory, including a specific conception of what a labour policy should look like. In a letter of 5 March 1852 to Weydemeyer, Marx stresses this point: if it is not him but “bourgeois historians” (notably François Guizot, Augustin Thierry and FrançoisAuguste Mignet) who can claim to “have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them”,1 he has on the other hand given this term a specific meaning, which concerns the relationship between labour and the State. On the one hand, Marx revisits the historical meaning of the concept by pointing out that (1) “the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production”.2 But on the other hand, this new conception

1 Marx, Karl. 2010. Letter to Weydemeyer. 5 March 1852. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 30. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 62. 2 Ibid., 62–65.

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is also normative and concerns the finality of a process of political transition out of capitalism. It is also a question of demonstrating “2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat ; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”3 For Marx, the class struggle must therefore aim, beyond the period he questionably calls the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, at the abolition of social classes and the State. By examining Marx’s class struggle paradigm, our aim is to reconstruct and question the political stakes of this conditioning relationship between labour and democracy and the foundations of the “government of the working class”4 project.

4.1

Marx, Labour and Revolution

From the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 onwards, Marx progressively demonstrates that the cause of labour alienation lay in the division of labour and the capitalist mode of production. However, if labour is to be understood not only as a productive activity but also as a social relation that runs through the whole of society, the prospect of a democratic system of labour organisation could come about immediately. The condition for this is revolutionary, institutional change and in particular the abolition of private ownership of the means of production which required a specific political intervention by the workers. Let us recall some of Marx’s arguments in favour of this thesis, according to which revolutionary institutional change conditioned the emancipation of workers and the democratisation of labour. First of all, Marx criticises the socialist position concerning the defence of labour as a new principle of social organisation. Certain points are very clear in this respect: “the socialist organisation of the total labour” can only “arise from the revolutionary process of the transformation of society”,5 and not vice versa. Even if social relations were structured by the

3 Ibid. 4 Marx, Karl. 2010. Drafts of The Civil War in France. In Marx Engels Collected Works,

vol. 22. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 500. 5 Marx, Karl. 2010. Critique of the Gotha programme. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 24. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 93.

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capitalist mode of production, the reorganisation of labour is the consequence, not the condition, of the process of social transformation. Let’s be clear; for Marx, the everyday form of the class struggle is indeed situated within the economic sphere and this is the case, for example, of the “struggle for the normal working day” in the eighth chapter of the first book of Capital. But at the same time, the class struggle necessarily leads, beyond the sphere of work, towards a revolutionary transformation of political institutions without which a generalised democratic organisation of labour was impossible. This line of argument contradicts any narrow economistic reading of Marx’s view of social transformation which, in the final analysis, was grounded in the domination of the economic sphere over political struggle. It also avoids unilateral opposition between the perspectives of emancipation through labour (i.e. liberation from an activity; young Marx) and emancipation beyond labour (mature Marx), which are sometimes summarised in the contradiction between the analysis of labour in terms of activity and in terms of social relations.6 Thus, in Poverty of Philosophy, for example, Marx criticises the Proudhonian conception of craftwork as a form of emancipation, a means of reappropriating the labour process and a principle of organising a fairer society. Proudhon’s (and John Gray’s) mistake is in their wish to “reform society by transforming all men into immediate workers exchanging equal quantities of labour”.7 One of the main arguments was that the division of labour in society could not be reduced to the hierarchical social relations in a company. This is why social transformation could not be modelled on the workshop model, even if it was reformed according to socialist precepts, which could, according to Marx, only result in an authoritarian and anti-democratic form of social organisation. In other words, “The organisation of revolutionary elements as a class supposes the existence of all the productive forces which could be engendered in the bosom of the old society”, but developing “already acquired productive powers” is not enough to transform “existing social relations”8 : a specific political activity is needed, starting from within but also beyond the workplace. 6 See for example Artous, Antoine. 2003. Travail et émancipation: Marx et le travail. Paris: Syllepse. 7 Marx, Karl. 2010. The Poverty of Philosophy. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 24. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 138. 8 Ibid., 211.

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The condition for revolutionary social transformation was not the reorganisation of the labour process but rather, political conquests favourable to the workers’ interests. In Capital, Marx argued that in order to understand capitalism, it was necessary to shift focus away from the place of production insofar as the capital/labour relation is also a global social relation; the analyses of value and abstract labour show that it is at the level of society as a whole that the various forms of work can be compared to one another through the medium of commodities. At the end of the chapter “Machinery and Modern Industry”, Marx insists on the need for factory legislation to be generalised which would allow the contradiction between the demand for workers’ protection and the demand for equal conditions of competition to be expressed politically. So much so that it can be said of this legislation—the result of class struggle waged by the working class—that “By maturing the material conditions, and the combination on a social scale of the processes of production, it matures the contradictions and antagonisms of the capitalist form of production, and thereby provides, along with the elements for the formation of a new society, the forces for exploding the old one”.9 Here again, it is only by being willingly prolonged outside the factory and translated into political activity by class struggle that the existing changes in labour organisation can lead to a “revolutionary evolution”10 in social relations, allowing, in return, to democratically transform labour, i.e. to guarantee the power of the workers over their production. It’s true that Marx’s class struggle paradigm is anchored in a sociohistorical theory of the centrality of labour in relation to other institutions. But this theory also allows us to clarify the political significance, from a normative point of view, of the conflict between the proletarian class and the bourgeois class: “In the condition of the proletariat, those of old society at large are already virtually swamped. The proletarian is without property; his relation to his wife and children has no longer anything in common with the bourgeois family relations; modern industry labour, modern subjection to capital, the same in England as in France, in 9 Marx, Karl. 2010. Capital, vol. 1. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 35. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 504–505. 10 To use an expression of Marx’s in an address to the League of Communists, see Marx, Karl. 1973. Minutes of Central Committee Meeting of 15 September 1850. In Karl Marx, The Revolutions of 1848. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 341.

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America as in Germany, has stripped him of every trace of national character”.11 So, all the bourgeois institutions (in this case, the family and the State), because they are already called into question in terms of proletarian working conditions, must be overthrown by the class struggle at the political level. In other words, democratic control of production by the working class does not need any ideological justification, but simply the immanent norms of proletarian experience. Achieving this control then requires these norms to be translated and imposed at the institutional level and this would entail, in particular, the abolition of private property which must be conquered through a political struggle between the workers and the State. This is the main reason for Marx and Engels’ opposition to “criticalutopian socialism”, exemplified in the third part of the Manifesto of the Communist Party by the systems of “Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others”, which, even though they took into account class antagonism, did not see “any historical initiative or any indépendant political movement” on the part of the proletariat.12 So, the main criticism concerns the depoliticisation of the class struggle concept by the utopian socialists; faced with the perspective of a political conquest of workers’ autonomy, these utopian socialists prefer “small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure”, so that their action ultimately is “to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms”.13 In the fourth section, the Manifesto instead situates revolutionary activity in the socio-political rather than the economic sphere and emphasised the strategic aim of abolishing private property: “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time”.14 The aim of class struggle by political means has to be, therefore, the destruction of the economic institutions of labour alienation.

11 Marx, Karl. 2010. Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 6. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 514–515. 12 Ibid., 515. 13 Ibid., 516. 14 Ibid., 519.

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The question is, however, whether the prospect of such a revolution, described in the last lines of the Manifesto as “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions”,15 tells us anything about a conceivable contemporary democratic labour?

4.2 Class Struggle and Working-Class Government Some of Marx’s political and historical texts help clarify the implications of this class struggle paradigm concerning the specific question of the forms of democratic work. In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, there is a strong critique of the narrative that reduces the political stakes of labour to the sole question of the distribution of wealth and the assertion that emancipation must face up to the problem of the organisation of production and the real-life conditions of labour. However, it does not follow that asserting the political centrality of labour will turn the democratic reorganisation of production into the means of social transformation. For Marx, this would mean neglecting the political struggle in favour of maintaining the current State structure and existing social relations. This is why he rejects, for example, the proposal of State aid to the producer’s cooperative societies which he saw as both a regressive fixation on local working conditions, enterprise by enterprise, and a renunciation of the class struggle for emancipation. Such emancipation would require, as he pointed out, “converting the state from an organ superimposed upon society into one completely subordinate to it”.16 Creating cooperatives is ultimately only of value for social transformation insofar as they indicate the possibility of political autonomy for workers. Thus, for example, Marx, in The Civil War in France, presents “cooperative production” as an essential element of communism, but adds that, in order to “supersede the Capitalist system”, it would have to be able to “regulate national production upon a common plan”,17 so generalising cooperatives would depend on a radical modification of political institutions.

15 Ibid. 16 Marx, Karl. Critique of the Gotha Programme. Op. cit., 94. 17 Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. Op. cit, 335. See on this subject Robelin, Jean.

1989. Marxisme et socialisation. Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 24.

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As early as in the “Inaugural Address of the Congress of the Working Men’s International Association”, after presenting the English law restricting working hours as a first victory of the “political economy of the working class”, Marx points out the political limits of cooperative experiments. If on the one hand “The value of these great social experiments cannot be over-rated”, it was as an assertion of a practical norm, that of workers’ autonomy: “they have shown that production on a large scale, and in accord with the behests of modern science, may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands”.18 However, it is precisely this perspective of general social transformation that revealed the limits of the cooperative movement: “however excellent in principle and however useful in practice, cooperative labour, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries”.19 If the cooperative organisation of production is insufficient to emancipate the workers, this is because emancipation had to affect society as a whole through a political transformation of the State, without which a radically democratic reorganisation of labour is impossible. This is why “To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes”.20 On the Paris Commune, Marx also writes: “Its true secret was this. It was essentially a working-class government, the product of the struggle of the producing against the appropriating class, the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economical emancipation of Labour”.21 In other words, the workers can only emancipate themselves and democratically organise their labour by having conquered, through class struggle, the political power to govern beyond the workplace. In the third section of The Civil War in France, however, Marx stresses that this “government of the working class” is not tantamount to simply taking over State institutions as they were:

18 Marx, Karl. Inaugural Address of the Congress of the Working Men’s International Association. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 10. London: Lawrence & Wishmart, 11. 19 Ibid., 11–12. 20 Ibid., 12. 21 Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. Op. cit., 334.

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‘The proletarians of Paris’, said the Central Committee in its manifesto of March 18, ‘amidst the failures and treasons of the ruling classes, have understood that the hour has struck for them to save the situation by taking into their own hands the direction of public affairs…. They have understood that it is their imperious duty, and their absolute right, to render themselves masters of their own destinies, by seizing upon the governmental power.’ But the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes”.22

But what happens to the State then? In answering this question, Marx, paradoxically, clearly clarifies what “democratic labour” could mean in the class struggle paradigm. The fundamental idea is as follows: the “centralized State power, with its ubiquitous organs of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy, and judicature – organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labour”23 which ruled in the old society in the service of the bourgeois class, has to be replaced by the Commune, i.e. an acting body, “executive and legislative at the same time”,24 composed mostly of workers and making up therefore the commanding body of the civil servants. In other words, the work of State officials is to be replaced by democratic work, under direct control of citizens as a whole and doing justice to their decisions. Thus, the members of the Commune council are considered to be workers, elected by universal suffrage, but who could also be recalled, and receiving a salary excluding “he vested interests and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of State”.25 Similarly, for example, “Instead of continuing to be the agent of the Central Government, the police was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune”,26 as well as all magistrates and judges. In this way, “From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be provided at a workman’s wage”.27 Even if this is a post-Commune theorisation of 22 Ibid., 328. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., 331. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid.

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a process that was not allowed to happen, Marx’s text indicates what— based at least on the experience of the Paris Commune—“the destruction of the State power”28 was to mean in his view; i.e. its replacement by a system of public employment combining election and subordination to the command, not of capitalists or their State servants but of the people’s civil servants. The latter were themselves revocable and accountable to— and one might say employed in this way by—the whole of society. As Marx noted, universal suffrage would then become a recruitment procedure for such democratic work: Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.29

We should emphasise a paradoxical aspect of this argument which is based on a distinction between workers belonging to what we would call today the private sector and the “civil service”, the latter being characterised essentially by subordination to the decisions of the Commune and by the principle of election. We can imagine that, for Marx, this new type of civil service would eventually constitute the whole of democratic labour, thereby replacing wage labour. In any case, the principle of such a replacement of wage-labour and labour performed within the framework of the State considered as a “parasitic excrescence”30 is clearly established, starting with the example of the Commune: The political rule of the producer cannot coexist with the perpetuation of his social slavery. The Commune was therefore to serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute.31

28 Ibid., 332. 29 Ibid., 333. 30 Ibid., 332. 31 Ibid., 334–335.

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This passage summarises the Marxist approach to two forms of possible democratic labour. On the one hand, the class struggle paradigm clearly aims at the political domination of workers—who replace the “demos” of democracy while continuing to designate the whole of society once class antagonisms have been removed—and at the replacement of State and wage labour by “democratic labour”, whose democratic control of the division of labour Marx essentially emphasises. But on the other hand, this transitional democratic labour, designed to revolutionise political institutions, is itself aimed at creating an “emancipated labour”, without class and without the State. In this respect, we would agree with Jean Robelin that “Marx and Engels are confronted with two images of socialism, which they fail to connect”,32 and which can be summarised under the simple headings of nationalisation (“from above”) and socialisation (“from below”) of the economy. But our approach to Marx’s class struggle paradigm is a different one; it is a question of knowing to what extent a revolutionary process at the political level would facilitate a transition from the second meaning of democratic labour (workers’ creation of democratic institutions), to the first meaning (democratic organisation of the whole productive system). Let us summarise some of the general consequences of this class struggle paradigm with regard to the question of the political stakes of labour today. Firstly, a movement of emancipatory social transformation cannot emerge from new forms of labour organisation without a specific “political form”33 that enables revolutionary views of workers to penetrate the political institutions. Clearly, this “political form” has to be set up in opposition to the machinery of the State, the dismantling of which is not only necessary but also one of the main tasks of democratic labour (understood here in the second sense, which Marx stresses, i.e. that of a political activity carried out by the workers). Secondly, democratic experiences in the workplace under capitalism are valuable in terms of the process of class struggle rather than being anticipations of a post-capitalist society. As Marx puts it, what is important in cooperative experiments,

32 Robelin, Jean. Marxisme et socialisation. Op. cit., 25. 33 Marx, Karl. The Civil War in France. Op. cit., 334. See on this subject Kouvélakis,

Stathis. 2015. Marx et la forme-politique. In Marx politique, eds. Jean-Numa Ducange and Isabelle Garo. Paris: La Dispute.

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for example, is the exemplary and inspiring force engendered by victories of the “political economy of labour”34 over capitalism. Lastly, even if there is probably no sense in defining a generic instrument of class struggle independently of specific historical conditions, it would seem that the separation between the political functions of the trade union and the party is irrelevant, since democratic work consists precisely in articulating the processes of conquering margins of autonomy in the workplace and of taking political control in the institutions. The Marxist conception of the class struggle leaves the following political question open (and it is reasonable to assume that, in each instance, only revolutionary practices can help provide an answer): in what ways can transforming the criteria and aims of production, setting up workers’ self-organisation and participation in economic planning, as well as in the control of political institutions, be articulated?

34 Marx, Karl. Inaugural Address of the Congress of the International Working Men’s Association. Art. cit., 11.

CHAPTER 5

Industrial Democracy: Democratising Work to Transform Institutions

The paradigm of “industrial democracy”1 is the second theoretical and structuring matrix of a potential system of democratic labour. While the class struggle narrative maintains that it is necessary to transform political institutions in order to democratise labour, industrial democracy maintains the opposite, i.e. labour must be democratised first in order to transform all society’s institutions. This paradigm, of course, has various versions and uses and is more difficult to unify than that of the class struggle. The phrase “industrial democracy” may refer today as much to cooperatives, self-management or councilism, as well as to the activity of trade unions (in its various forms and scales) or to company democracy as in work collectives. However, in the minds of its nineteenth-century creators (notably Joseph Proudhon and Beatrice and Sidney Webb),2 and later for early twentieth-century theorists (notably John Dewey and Karl Korsch), “industrial democracy”, had very different meanings from those used today by industrial relations or management science theorists, for whom it refers to the democratic 1 For an overview, see Poole, Michael. 1992. Industrial Democracy. In Concise Encyclopaedia of Participation and Co-Management. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter. 2 See mainly Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. 1865. De la Capacité politique des classes ouvrières. Paris: E. Dentu Libraire-Editeur, and Webb, Beatrice and Webb, Sidney. 1897. Industrial Democracy, 2 vol. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green and Company.

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procedures of work collectives (e.g. low level workers involved in management) and of whole companies (e.g. the role of work councils in German “co-management”).3 More specifically, this term came out of two distinct theoretical and political strands; the first was mutualist socialism, which expanded in France at the time of the 1830 and 1848 revolutions and the second was the creation of the Fabian Society in England in the late nineteenth century. The industrial democracy paradigm is inseparable from the idea that labour, not the State, should be the motor of democracy and that only a revolution in production can bring about a political revolution. This is both the keystone of the industrial democracy paradigm and the central question it raises (including, as we shall see, in Karl Korsch’s version, which attempts to articulate it with the class struggle paradigm): to what extent and by what means could a democratic government of labour democratise both the whole economy and the State?

5.1 Dewey and the Normative Foundations of Industrial Democracy Dewey’s analysis of the relationship between labour and democracy in industrial societies was directly influenced by the Fabian approach to industrial democracy,4 and could be seen as an analysis of the psychosocial and normative foundations of Fabianism. From his first writings on the relationship between ethics, work and democracy in the 1880s, up to his work on economic and political intervention in the 1930s, Dewey the philosopher (elected president of the League for Industrial Democracy in 1939) never consistently examined the political stakes of labour. Thus, as early as “The Ethics of Democracy” in 1888, he asserted that “democracy is not in reality what it is in name until it is industrial, as well as civil and political”.5 And it was also his analysis of the incompatibility between the

3 See Müller-Jentsch, Walther. 2008. Industrial Democracy: Historical Development and Current Challenges. Management revue 19. On the relationship between industrial democracy and what would become co-management in Germany, see Naphtali, Fritz. 1928. Wirtschaftsdemokratie. Ihr Wesen, Weg und Ziel. Berlin: Verlagsgesellschaft des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes. 4 See on this subject Westbrook, Robert. 1993. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornel University Press. 5 Dewey, John. 1969. The Ethics of Democracy. In Early Works, 1882–1898, vol. 1. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 246.

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Taylorist work organisation of his day and the democratic norm that led him to develop his own version of the “industrial democracy” model,6 i.e. the democratisation of labour as the first step towards the democratic transformation of social life as a whole. Dewey had a particular conception of the industrial democracy paradigm in several respects. Firstly, it was closely linked to an ethical approach to the economy, whereby laws should be subservient to individual development: “all industrial relations are to be regarded as subordinate to human relations, to the law of personality”.7 This is why it was necessary, among other things, to carry out systematic studies into the working conditions of women and men in the industrial society of his day, into the methods employed in inter-capitalist competition, into the relationship between control of industry and political government, and into the best ways of addressing these evils of contemporary society, in order to provide an “education which is to be a factor in bringing industrial democracy out of industrial feudalism”.8 Although, on the one hand, the demand for universal and free education necessarily implied embracing industrial democracy, on the other hand the latter was seen as inconceivable without an education for democratic work: “Only as modern society has at command individuals who are trained by experience in the control of industrial activities and relationships, can we achieve industrial democracy, the autonomous management of each line of productive work by those directly engaged in it”.9 More generally, the notion of industrial democracy is a guiding thread throughout Dewey’s analysis of labour, including in writings that do not use the phrase. In the section “Work and Leisure” of Democracy and Education, for example, his critique of the Taylorist organisation of work and the division between manual and intellectual labour is part of his refusal to accept that there is a contradiction between democracy and

6 See especially Dewey, John. 1980. The Need of an Industrial Education in an Industrial Democracy. In Middle Works, 1899–1924, vol. 10. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. 7 Ibid., 246. 8 Ibid., 142. 9 Dewey, John. 1982. Creative Industry. Review of “Creative Impulse in Industry, a Proposition for Educators”, by Helen Marot. New York; E. P. Button Co’, The New Republic, 2 November 1918. In The Middle Works 1899–1924, vol. 11. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 335.

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autocracy: “In what is termed politics, democratic social organization makes provision for this direct participation in control: in the economic region, control remains external and autocratic”.10 Dewey thus argues that a project to extend political democracy to all dimensions of human activity should be based on individual capacities for intelligent institutional reorganisation, the development of which is the primary purpose of education but also of work. A democratic enterprise must thus give workers “desire and ability to share in social control, and ability to become masters of their industrial fate”11 and thus would contribute decisively to the achievement of political democracy and “its belief in the right of individual desire and purpose to take part in readapting even the fundamental constitution of society”.12 In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey elaborates on this conception of democracy in terms of individual activity: “From the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups to which one belongs”.13 From a critical perspective, this means examining the various ways in which the economic organisation of industrial societies impedes not only individual development but also “the effective investigation of existing social institutions and conditions”.14 And from a constructive perspective, Dewey envisages the possibility of “functional communities”,15 organised by trade organisations and trade unions, becoming the focus for the constitution of a democratic public capable of intelligently solving social problems. If, as this text suggested, it was the local neighbourhood communities that should be the main focus of democratic life, the question then was: under what conditions could work become a vehicle for democratic social transformation? It was in this context that several less well-known texts also addressed the problem of industrial democracy. In “Psychology and Work”, and

10 Dewey, John. 1980. Democracy and Education. In The Middle Works of John Dewey. 1899–1924, vol. 9. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 269. 11 Ibid., 330. 12 Ibid., 310. 13 Dewey, John. 1984. The Public and its Problems. In The Later Works of John Dewey, Volume 2, 1925–1953. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 327–328. 14 Ibid., 346. 15 See for example ibid., 368.

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on the basis of his observations in 1920s USSR factories, Dewey examined the positive effects of being “partners and co-constructors of general plans coordinating industrial development throughout the country”16 and defended the principle of workers’ participation in social planning. After his trip to Soviet Russia, the pragmatist philosopher described the Soviet system17 in enthusiastic terms, which he then seemed to consider “was evolving towards the type of democracy he had envisaged in The Public and its Problems ”.18 And in Individualism, Old and New, he pointed out the pathological effects of Taylorist work organisation—in particular the “withdrawal of individuals from reality into an essentially internal world”19 —which hindered workers’ ability to learn from the experimental method designed to guide democratic activity. Yet, it was precisely through technical learning and work experience that workers could appropriate and develop these capacities. The urgent need to democratically transform industrial civilisation thus required a reappropriation by workers of social control over finance and industry, in a system he referred to here as “public socialism”.20 He had, in fact, already referred to this political model in Lectures in China a few years earlier when he promoted a socialism based on trade unionism and “guild corporations” which would allow for “voluntary associations of individuals who govern their own economic activities”21 to be formed independently of the State. For Dewey, it would then be a question of making these “groups of communities of interest the central elements of political organisation”,22 thereby guaranteeing that private appropriation of common goods by economic and political elites would be impossible.

16 Dewey, John. 1986. Psychology and work. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925– 1953, vol. 12. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 237. 17 See the collected texts in Dewey, John. 1964. Impressions of Soviet Russia and the Revolutionary World. Columbia: Teachers College Columbia University. 18 Westbrook, Robert. John Dewey and American Democracy. Op. Cit., 477. 19 Dewey, John. 1984. Individualism Old and New. In Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 5.

Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 122. 20 Ibid., 98. 21 Dewey, John. 1973. Lectures in China, 1919–1920. Honolulu: The University of

Hawaii Press, 123. 22 Ibid., 124.

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It was mainly in two later works, however, Liberalism and Social Action and “The Economic Basis of New Society”, that Dewey developed the political implications of this model of industrial democracy. In the former, he argued that the “sanctity of private property”23 must be tackled and one should “socialize the forces of production, now at hand, so that the liberty of individuals will be supported by the very structure of economic organization”.24 Only economic democratisation could guarantee the political autonomy of citizens, so a society had to be built “in which industry and finance are socially directed in behalf of institutions that provide the material basis for the cultural liberation and growth of individuals”.25 Reorganising work was seen as the condition for the creation of institutions that would enable democracy to spread throughout society as a whole. In “The Economic Basis of the New Society”, Dewey directly examined “the question of production”26 and its political stakes from the perspective of the method of democratic social control. The text begins with a diagnosis of the incompatibility between, on the one hand, workers’ aspirations and their attempts to participate in determining the means and ends of their activity and, on the other, “the totality of the existing industrial system, which tends in large measure to nullify the effects of such efforts, even when they are made”.27 Therefore, the industrial democracy paradigm had to be able to respond not only to the demands of democratically organised labour, but also to the need for institutional transformation of the division of labour, through a policy of economy-wide democratic planning. Such planning would not be in opposition to democratically self-organised workers; on the contrary, it would be inseparable from it. In Dewey’s words, it should build not “a planned society” but rather “a society in the process of continuous planning”.28 Thus, as he also argued in Liberalism and Social Action,

23 Dewey, John. 1987. Liberalism and Social Action. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 11. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 26–27. 24 Ibid., 62. 25 Ibid., 40. 26 Dewey, John. 1988. The Economic Basis of the New Society. In Later Works, 1925– 1953, vol. 13. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 319. 27 Ibid., 169. 28 Ibid., 321.

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supporting the principle of self-organisation was not a rejection of “organized social planning”, which should on the contrary enable “the growth of individuals” and constitute an essential moment of the “method of social action” he advocated, i.e. “freed intelligence as a social force”.29 From this perspective, industrial democracy could be seen as another name for “public socialism”, or even communism, Dewey added in a cautious twist30 : “To restore democracy, one thing, and one thing only, is essential. The people will rule when they have power, and they will have power insofar as they own and control the land, the banks, and all the agencies of production and distribution of the nation. The rantings about Bolshevism, Communism, Socialism do not affect the axiomatic truth of this statement”.31 In Dewey’s industrial democracy, the key is to articulate popular control of the economy (“planning”) with workers’ control of their activity (“self-organisation”), the only combination that can truly deliver the democratic norm to society as a whole. It still remains that Dewey’s social philosophy did not directly address the question of the transformation of State institutions, which he merely asserted should be under the control of a democratic public that includes workers as one of its central components. How can the industrial democracy paradigm respond to the Marxist critique that it structurally minimises existing State obstacles preventing the spread of democratic work experiences throughout the whole economic, social and political domain?

5.2 Korsch: Industrial Democracy and Class Struggle Through the Lens of Workers’ Councils The writings of the Marxist jurist Karl Korsch on the socialisation of labour, linked to his participation in the workers’ councils experiment in Germany,32 can be seen as the most accomplished theoretical attempt to 29 John Dewey, Liberalism as Social Action. Op. cit., 40. 30 On this caution in the US political context of the time, see Westbrook, Robert. John

Dewey and American Democracy. Op. cit., 49–50. 31 Dewey, John. 2008. Imperative Need: A New Radical Party. In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953, vol. 9. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 77. 32 See in particular Korsch, Karl. 1980. Wandlungen des Problems der politischen Arbeiterräte in Deutschland. In Gesamtausgabe, Band 2: Rätebewegung and Klassenkampf. Op. cit.

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articulate the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy. For Korsch, workers’ councils were a decisive element in the class struggle for workers’ emancipation. However, the failure of the German workers’ councils led him to propose a form of legal institutionalisation of this brief experience, which he theorised mainly in Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte. In this work, the author proposes to base the paradigm of industrial democracy on what he calls a “labour constitution”,33 the theoretical and historical foundations of which he analyses and then outlines from the point of view of a labour law that would be adequate for an industrial democracy. In Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte, Korsch borrowed the term Industrielle Demokratie from the Fabian Society—after a long stay in London in 1912–1913—and from the German social democrats who also used it but transformed its meaning. For him, industrial democracy referred to a system that articulated and radicalised workers’ participation in work organisation, trade union practices of collective bargaining and the codetermination of economic policies at the sectoral, regional and national levels. Karl Korsch’s project, however, was rooted in the analysis of the “participation rights” recently won by the German working class, in which he saw the outline of a political institution (i.e. “the labour community/Gemeinwesens der Arbeit ”) and of a “fully accomplished ‘industrial democracy’”.34 Indeed, in some of these laws, workers acquired the right to participate in the shaping of labour regulations as “company stakeholders”, i.e. “members of the labour community”.35 This specific class of “participation rights” thus recognised the relationship between employer and employee as a political one,36 which was the premise for the political empowerment of workers that industrial democracy should guarantee. Although Korsch considered the idea of a “workers’ community” to be the fundamental normative principle of Marxism,37 it also became the economic condition for a free political community that had to replace the State. So, Korsch’s blueprint for industrial democracy aimed at the full

33 See Korsch, Karl. 1968. Politische Texte: Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte. Hamburg: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 47–48. 34 Ibid., 51. 35 Ibid., 47. 36 Ibid., 48. 37 See ibid., 40.

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implementation of the democratic rights of workers as political members of company management, and from thereon, of the whole of society. Korsch’s industrial democracy therefore was not simply targeting economic reorganisation but also political revolution. Thus, in his eyes, the existing organisations capable of defending such an industrial democracy—be it the International Workers’ Association in Geneva or the workers’ guilds in the mining or electricity sectors in Germany—were not only pressure groups but also the forerunners of a future democratic “industrial constitution”.38 This intertwining of the economic and political dimensions of industrial democracy was the main reason why, according to Korsch, the class struggle paradigms and industrial democracy should not be seen as contradictory but as complementary: As far as reciprocal action between the political community and the industrial community is concerned, what should happen is as follows. The conquest of political power by the working class and the replacement of ‘bourgeois democracy’ by proletarian democracy (in the form of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’) will lead—if one takes the time to think about it—to a rapid increase of direct forms of ‘industrial democratisation’.39

However, even before developing a radical critique of the Soviet experience a few years later,40 Korsch stressed the idea that possible restrictions of industrial democracy by the workers’ State could only be provisional and limited, and that in a later phase of industrial democracy (synonymous here with “communist society”), “workers’ direct participatory rights would be given priority, in such a way that they coincided with the full ‘abolition of the State’”.41 We can see that Korsch was trying to respond to criticisms that the two paradigms, understandably, speak to each other; i.e. class struggle always risks considering the principle of workers’ autonomy to be of secondary importance, while industrial democracy always risks neglecting the need for the abolition of the State. Thus the author was also reiterating a classic Marxist critique of the Webbs’ “social-reformist” interpretation of industrial democracy; i.e. 38 Ibid., 51. 39 Ibid., 54. 40 See for example Korsch, Karl. 1938. The Marxist Ideology in Russia. Living Marxism 4 (1). 41 Korsch, Karl, Politische Texte: Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte. Op. Cit., 55.

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they failed to consider that “overthrowing State institutions of bourgeois democracy”42 was a necessary condition for industrial democracy. The central consequence of this argument was that workers’ councils should abandon their system of profession-based associations and function as “industrial federations”—for example in the banking, building, textile and trade sectors, but also with public and municipal authorities—allowing them to plan production and break the hegemony of the capitalist classes and the State.43 In this way, according to Korsch, “the workers’ councils could begin to fulfil not only their current, somewhat uncomfortable role of intermediary body, but also a revolutionary function in the class struggle, enabling a move towards the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of a communist economy and social order”.44 Thus, in order to establish the “solid foundations of industrial democracy”, Korsch’s idea was to set up a “proletarian labour constitution and thus a real system of councils”.45 It is within this perspective that the proposals of Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte should be understood concerning a new labour law which would be suited to both the method of class struggle and to his project of industrial democracy and socialisation of production.46 So, in the second part of his book, Korsch sets out the main features of a “works council law [Betriebsrätegesetz]”47 based on the political right of every worker to participate, as a member of the company, in decisions concerning the regulation and industrial choices of his/her company. With regard to the “workers’ immediate rights in the company”48 in its various decision-making bodies, the creation of which he fully supports (works councils, workers’ committees, company assembly, etc.), “the main right regarding employee status is the right to sit on the ‘representative bodies of the company’”.49 This right, which should be enshrined in the industrial constitution, would concern, in particular, “company regulation 42 Ibid., note 1. 43 See in particular ibid., 132–133. 44 Ibid., 135. 45 Ibid. 46 See ibid., 150. 47 See e.g. ibid., 139 ff. 48 Ibid., paragraph 15 ff. 49 Ibid., 424.

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on the one hand and participation in decisions concerning recruitment and dismissal on the other”.50 It should be complemented by the specific legislation of each works council, establishing their participation in the democratic control of the process and work organisation. This “bottomup control” by company workers over the production process should be distinguished from trade union activity. Provided trade unions become “industry trade unions” rather than corporate trade unions, they should form—to quote Bruno Trentin—“the real link between the councils and society as a whole with all its complex interests”51 and, in turn, become the basis for a fully developed industrial democracy from an economic as well as a political perspective. However, in Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte, Korsch does not put forward a legal-political architecture to guarantee this workers’ role in national government policy. In another text, “What is socialisation?”, he broaches this problem of the articulation between “top-down” socialisation of the economy, carried out by means of public institutions, and “bottom-up” socialisation, by means of labour. As in Arbeitsrecht für Betriebsräte, the author argues that although these two options can only be in tension with each other, they are not a priori contradictory, but should rather be combined: If it is possible to create genuine collective ownership of all means of production for producers and consumers by means of an acceptable settlement of conflicts of interest in the two basic forms of socialisation (i.e. nationalisation and communalisation on the one hand, and cooperative production and trade unionism on the other), then both forms will have proved to be suitable starting points for a socialist-communal economy [Gemeinwirtschaft ].52

In particular, the author examines the question of shared political control over the production process, which includes the decision about the quality and quantity of production, the selection of materials and production procedures and the conditions of workers’ activity. In this

50 Ibid. 51 Trentin, Bruno. La Cité du travail. Op. cit., 351. 52 Korsch, Karl. 1980. Was ist Sozialisierung? Ein Programm des praktischen Sozial-

ismus. In Gesamtausgabe, Band 2: Rätebewegung and Klassenkampf. Frankfurt-am-Main: Europäische Verangestaltp, 114.

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respect, he argues that the socialisation of the power currently held by capitalists cannot be allowed to benefit only public officials because, if that was the case “the workers, who are the most concerned and most involved in production, would continue to be unfree workers”.53 But at the same time, these decisions cannot all be taken by the workers of one branch of industry alone, as this would lead to consumers being put at the mercy of this group of workers. This is why, according to Korsch, both forms of socialisation were necessary, and industrial democracy would consist precisely in regulating this discrepancy between the respective points of view of workers and consumers.54 The main point is to guarantee the principle of “industrial autonomy”,55 which states that each tier of this industrial democracy: producers in a company, the specific industrial sector concerned and the internal bodies of the trade union of this sector, the industrial union grouping these sectors into a central body, and communities must remain autonomous, i.e. be able to deliberate, decide and act without coercion on the part of any other level.56 Thus, the democratic work which should produce and make industrial democracy work should be carried out simultaneously by the members of the company, the officials of the proletarian state and the members of the trade unions; each of these bodies must play a specific role but remain autonomous. With these conceptions of workers’ councils replacing the State, a “labour constitution” granting political rights to workers and the establishment of industrial autonomy, the paradigm of industrial democracy takes on its most radical and coherent form. However, as Korsch has demonstrated, a rigorous study of the political requirements needed for an industrial democracy to come about has shown that extending democratic experiments in production is insufficient and has to be coordinated with taking control of political institutions. This reality was taken into account, for example, in the debates on social democracy up until the 1970s, and particularly in the English Labour

53 Ibid., 117. 54 See ibid., 117. 55 See ibid., 118 ff. 56 The establishment of harmony between these various instances, Korsch points out,

is no longer the specific task of “industrial autonomy” but of educational and cultural measures (see ibid., p. 126).

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Party, which was still influenced by the Fabian Society and more particularly the Fabian Working Party for Industrial Democracy.57 On the one hand, at the Labour Party Conference of 1973, Tony Benn declared that “What I mean is that industrial democracy starts now, and we don’t have to wait for legislation. To begin with, we aim to start with a process of debate and dialogue in industry about how companies should be run and which ones should be taken over”.58 On the other hand, the 1974 General Election Manifesto stated that “we will introduce new legislation to promote our plans for a radical extension of industrial democracy in the private and public sectors. This will involve major changes in company law and in the statutes governing nationalised industries and public services”.59 But even among its most radical proponents like Karl Korsch, the paradigm of industrial democracy is incapable in itself of defining the democratic work necessary to dismantle the capitalist state and rebuild democratic institutions. The paradigm of industrial democracy remains fundamentally centred on the economic problem of organising industrial societies, as one of its proponents, Karl Polanyi, puts it: “The search for an industrial democracy is not fundamentally the search for a solution to the problems of capitalism, as is usually imagined. It is the search for an answer to the problem of industry itself”, i.e. “how to organise human life in a society of machines”.60 This is why, although the paradigm of industrial democracy gives more importance than the class struggle paradigm to the problem of democratically transforming the production process, it is not, as such, able to articulate the two meanings of democratic labour (i.e. democratic control of production and the democratic creation of institutions by the workers). Nor is it able to grasp all the political potentialities of these two meanings, the implementation of which would make labour the vehicle for democratising the company sector, the State and all the institutions in society.

57 See Radice, Gilles (ed.). 1974. Working Power: Policies for Industrial Democracy. London: Fabian Society. 58 Labour Party Conference Report (1973), 164–165. 59 Quoted in Clift, Ben, Gamble, Andrew, and Harris, Michael. 2000. The Labour

Party and the Company. In The Political Economy of the Company, eds. Andrew Gamble, Gavin Kelly and John Parkinson. Oxford: Hart Publishing, 73. 60 Polanyi, Karl. 2000. Our Obsolete Market Mentality. In Transformations of Capitalism. Economy, Society and the State in Modern Times, ed. Harry F. Dahms, New York: New York University Press, 137.

CHAPTER 6

Materialist Feminism: The Democratic Stakes of the Definition of Work

Bringing about democratic labour requires a radical critique of the separation of wage labour from domestic and socially reproductive activities that are not counted as work in our capitalist and patriarchal societies. Based on the concepts of domestic labour, social reproduction of labour power, sexual division of labour and gender relations, materialist feminism has established that the distinction, in capitalist societies, between political (State), social (family) and economic (market and enterprise sector) institutions should not lead to the opposition of these two functions of labour: the economic function of producing goods and services, and the political function of reproducing and transforming social relations.1 . This articulation of the economic and political functions of labour sheds new light on the antinomy between the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy and, from a feminist perspective, enriches the approach to democratic labour.

1 This chapter is partly based on Cukier, Alexis. 2016. De la centralité politique du travail: les apports du féminisme matérialiste, Cahiers du Genre Hors Série 4

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_6

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6.1 Sexual Division of Labour and Gender Relations: Redefining the Concept of Work Materialist feminism’s deconstruction and reconstruction of the concept of labour is not confined to domestic work and the gender of wage labour. It is not only a question of integrating women’s free labour into the generic concept of work, nor even of proposing a radical historicisation of it, but also and above all of highlighting the central political issues of modern work, i.e. the “capture of time” and the “production of life”.2 The analysis of gender relations makes it possible to broaden the analysis of the capture of time to take in that of domestic work—thereby enabling a corollary analysis on the accumulation and articulation between gender and class relations. This would bring to light the vital role of women’s work (salaried and free) in the production of life, calling into question the ideological separation between private, professional and political life. Let us first consider how the sexual division of labour and gender relations illustrate the political function of labour and its contribution to the reproduction or transformation of social relations. As Danièle Kergoat pointed out in a critical remark about the economism of some members of the “class struggle” feminist group: For many Marxists, it was the sexual division of labour that explained the gender situation. I think, on the contrary, that it is not a cause but a consequence, i.e. it describes the respective positions of males and females in relations of production (in the broad sense) and in the social division of labour. What I mean by that is, the gender division of labour stems from the issue of gender relations.3

Labour is seen as the starting point for social reproduction and transformation and as such, the principal means of exercising political power; and that is why the central issue of politics is the control of labour.4 .

2 Hirata Hirata and Zarifian Philippe. 2000. Le concept de travail. In Dictionnaire

critique du féminisme, eds Helena Hirata, Françoise Laborie, Hélène Ledoaré, Danièle Sénotier. Paris: PUF. 3 Kergoat, Danièle. 2012. Se battre, disent-elles…Paris; La Dispute, 18. 4 See on this subject the article “Dynamique et consubstantialité des rapports sociaux”,

which argues in particular that “a social relation is an antagonistic relation between two social groups, established around an issue” and that “as regards the social relation of

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The class—in the sense of a social group organised by political interests— of men, in order to perpetuate its political domination, appropriates the labour of the class of women, excluding domestic labour from the definition of labour. In other words, defining and appropriating labour is the major political issue of modern societies, because labour doesn’t only have an economic function (producing goods and services), but also, and primarily, a political function: to produce—reproduce, control and transform—social relations. This argument also sheds light on Danièle Kergoat’s (and Elsa Galerand’s) reference to Maurice Godelier’s anthropological approach to work as the “production of life in society”: Concerning work understood from a conceptual perspective of the sexual division of labour, we designate it as all human activities which produce life in society”.5 In our view, this redefinition contains a particularly subversive potential, which re-examines the critique of political economy, in line with the research that—since the 1970s—has demonstrated the inadequacy of narrow understandings of work that lead to the exclusion of all free work from studies of the wage society; i.e. household chores, work for the physical well-being of family members, care, or health,6 maintenance of friends and family networks7 and child production.8 ,9

gender, these issues are the gender division of work and the control of the sexuality and reproductive function of the women” (Ibid., 135) 5 Godelier, Maurice. 1984. L’idéel et le matériel. Paris: Fayard; Hirata, Helena and Philippe Zarifian. 2000. Travail, le concept de. In Hirata, Helena et al., Dictionnaire critique du féminisme. Paris: PUF. 6 Cresson, Geneviève. 1998. Le travail domestique de santé. Paris: L’Harmattan. 7 Chabaud-Rychter, Danielle, Fougeyrollas-Schwebel, Dominique and Françoise,

Sonthonnax. 1985. Espace et temps du travail domestique. Paris: Librairie des Méridiens. 8 Vandelac, Louise. 1981. Et si le travail tombait enceinte? Sociologie et sociétés 13 (2), octobre. https://doi.org/10.7202/001817ar; Tabet, Paola. 1985. Fertilité naturelle, reproduction forcée. In Mathieu, Nicole-Claude (ed.). L’arraisonnement des femmes. Essais en anthropologie des sexes, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, Paris, 61–85. 9 Galerand Elsa and Kergoat Danièle. 2014. Les apports de la sociologie du genre à la critique du travail. Nouvelle Revue du travail [Online] 4.

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It should be noted, however, that for Godelier, this “production of life in society” refers to a definition of work (in the modern sense)10 that once again obscures the work of physical well-being, care, health, maintenance of social relations and production of children. It is linked to the theory whereby capitalist societies have dissociated production (understood in the exclusively economic sense) from the other areas of social life,11 which excludes a priori that of domestic work that takes place in the family, and only presents this separation from the point of view of men (depoliticisation of wage labour), and not from the point of view of women (devaluation of domestic work). Clearly, defining work as the “production of social life” is more than simply finding a universal anthropological definition of work alongside the restrictive definition of the wage society. Instead, materialist feminism’s new critique of political economy is based on the acute understanding by women as a social class12 —precisely because they are exploited and oppressed—of work’s political function and, namely, the fact that it is first and foremost by working and by making people work that social relations are reproduced or transformed. This is why the class of women can also be seen as structurally better placed than that of men to lead a movement for the democratic politics of work, and in particular to point out that women’s work (whether salaried or free) may well produce social life, but not to any end; not, for example: to produce and reproduce capitalist, patriarchal and racist institutions and social relations, but rather to produce institutions and social relations that are democratic. This is the first major contribution of materialist feminism to the analysis of the political stakes of work; i.e. by redefining work from the point of view of the women’s class and demonstrating that this implies the demand to free up the democratic function of work. 10 See Godelier. Maurice. 1978. Travail et travailleur: perspectives anthropologiques et historiques, problèmes actuels. In Que va devenir le travail? Société Française de psychologie du travail. 11 For a critique of this thesis of separation, in a Marxist anthropological perspective that is more concerned than Maurice Godelier’s with the complexity of the relations between production and reproduction and the centrality of the exploitation of women’s domestic work in the passage to capitalism, see in particular Meillassoux, Claude. 1975. Femmes, greniers et capitaux. Paris: Maspéro. 12 For an epistemological and political discussion of the concept of “women as a social class”, see Juteau, Danielle. 2010. “Nous” les femmes: sur l’indissociable homogénéité et hétérogénéité de la catégorie. L’Homme et la société 176–177.

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Mode of Domestic Production and Social Reproduction

A second contribution of materialist feminism to the question of democratic labour derives from the theory of the “domestic mode of production”, in which exploited women workers—unlike in the capitalist mode of production—are not paid but maintained,13 and from the correlative analysis of the relationship between production and social reproduction. On the face of it, it may seem that Christine Delphy’s domestic mode of production theory favours an “economistic”14 approach to the concept of labour over a political one: In 1970, I formulated three theses or working hypotheses: (1) Patriarchy is the system of subordination of women to men in contemporary industrial societies (2) This system has an economic basis (3) This basis is the domestic mode of production.15

However, in the conclusion of L’Ennemi principal (lit. The Main Enemy), Delphy insists on the idea that it is the political institution of the family that allows this exploitation of women’s productive and reproductive forces, so that “to establish why and how these two exploitations are conditioned and mutually reinforcing, and possess the same institutional framework and means: the family, must be one of the movement’s primary objectives”.16 Moreover, in her critical analysis of “family exploitation”, Delphy expands on her critique of economism in the approach to labour17 and politicises the concept, explicitly pointing to the control of production as the reason for men’s domination over women: “the reason why these two groups are socially distinguished is precisely that one of them dominates the other in order to make use of its labour”.18 And this 13 See Delphy, Christine. 2013. L’ennemi principal, tome 1. Paris: Syllepse, 12–13. 14 Such a critique of Delphy’s approach is to be found for example in Barrett Michele

and McIntosh Mary. 1979. Christine Delphy: Towards a Materialist Feminism? Feminist Review 1. 15 Delphy, Christine. L’ennemi principal, tome I. Op. cit., 8–9. 16 Ibid., 51. 17 See also Ibid., 21–23. 18 Delphy, Christine and Leonard, Diana. 1992. Familiar exploitation: A new analysis

of marriage in contemporary western societies. Oxford: Polity, 258.

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critique of economism also sheds new light onto the arguments of the pioneering texts of the 1970s. Thus, for example, the explanation given in “Housework or domestic work” of the criterion that separates household work—considered unproductive—from wage labour refers to factors that are not economic but political; i.e. the type of subordination that defines the division of labour, which is itself instituted by the State and, in this case, by the National Accounts. So, in the final analysis, what needs to be explained is “how and why this body establishes this arbitrary separation”.19 If household work is free (neither paid nor exchanged), it is not because of “the nature of the services that make it up” or “because of the nature of the people who provide it” but “because of the particular nature of the contract that binds the worker—the wife—to the household, to her ‘boss’”.20 Such subordination can of course exist without an ad hoc State institution, as the author points out, but it always has to be based on a political power relationship and a social relationship of domination reinforced by institutions. Silvia Federici’s work also emphasises the political dimension of the appropriation of women’s domestic work. Drawing on feminist/Marxist theories of “social reproduction”21 (“the complex of activities and relations by which our life and labor are daily reconstituted”)22 and “reproductive labour” (“unwaged reproductive labour”, including domestic labour, being “what capitalism requires in order to contain the cost of labour power”),23 the author shows that women’s economic and political subordination in capitalism originated in a political process of violent capture of their labour power. In Caliban et la sorcière (Caliban and the Witch), by updating the concept of “primitive accumulation” from a feminist perspective, Federici examined three historical phenomena that she believed were decisive for the development of capitalism:

19 Delphy, Christine. L’ennemi principal, tome I. Op. cit., 60. 20 Ibid., 63. 21 For an overview of recent discussions, see “Social Reproduction”, the special issue published in 2015 by Viewpoint Magazine. 22 Federici, Sylvia. 2012. Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle. Oakland: PM Press, 5. 23 Ibid., 8.

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(i) the development of a new sexual division of labor subjugating women’s labor and women’s reproductive function to the reproduction of the workforce; (ii) the construction of a new patriarchal order, based upon the exclusion of women from waged-work and their subordination to men; (iii) the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers.24

The gratuitous nature of domestic labour is thus explained by the violent capture of women’s “labour power”, similar, according to the author, to the “enclosure” of communal land and, more generally, to the political process of privative appropriation of common goods. Although the issue of historical continuity and rupture between women’s oppression in pre-capitalist and capitalist societies may not be resolved by this analysis25 —nor the question of the relationship between serfdom, racialisation and gendering26 —the politicisation from a feminist perspective of the concepts of the materialist critique of political economy (i.e. labour and, in this case, value and primitive accumulation), clearly shows that the devaluation of domestic labour in capitalist and patriarchal societies took shape within a political process of appropriation of women’s labour power and control of their production. These analyses thus make it possible to shed light on the political scope of the concept of labour, as opposed to its various forms of depoliticisation, which stress its (re)production function of value over its function of (re)production of social relations by dividing social reality into arbitrary categories, and in particular by separating the domains of family and work: So, this “family-work” division, which is inherent to the labour concept itself, thus reveals one of the central political functions of the labour concept, namely, to silence the political and economic struggle that has

24 Silvia Federici. 2009. Caliban and the Witch. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 12. 25 For a critical discussion in a non-feminist Marxist perspective, see Artous, Antoine.

A propos de Silvia Federici, Caliban et la sorcière. Contretemps [Online], 10 November 2014. 26 See Guillaumin, Colette. 1992. Sexe, Race et Pratique du pouvoir. L’idée de Nature, Paris: Côté-femmes.

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historically pitted men against women for the “control” of the productionreproduction of the species, thus camouflaging sexual class relations under supposedly neutral and unitary terms.27

On the other hand, these different versions of the repoliticisation of the labour concept by materialist feminism thus closely associate the economic and political functions of labour. They facilitate an articulation between an extended critique the labour concept, the politicisation of its interpretation and the analysis of what is at stake in the political struggle of the women’s class.

6.3 The Political Struggle of Women Workers and the Problem of the State What are the consequences of this politicisation of the labour concept by materialist feminism for the relationship between the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy? At first sight, it seems that these two perspectives remain unchanged. With the class struggle paradigm, it is a question of promoting women’s political struggle as a means of seizing power in State institutions in order to liberate their labour from patriarchal oppression; as for example in Delphy’s L’Ennemi principal: “women’s liberation will not be achieved without the total destruction of the patriarchal system of production and reproduction” and this “cannot be achieved without a revolution, that is to say the seizure of political power”.28 And with regard to industrial democracy, it is first and foremost around women’s work that the reinforcement of their collective power to act must be thought out and constructed; as for example in Kergoat’s “Reflections on the Exercise of Power by Women in the Conduct of Struggles. The Case of the Nurse Coordination”, which advocates creating “models of collective counter-power concerning the whole organisation and management of work in the current economic context”.29 Yet, some studies of women’s class relations to work and the State question this opposition between conceptions of democratic work

27 Vandelac, Louise. 1981. “… Et si le travail tombait enceinte ???”. Essai féministe sur le concept travail. Sociologie et sociétés 13 (2), 24. 28 Delphy, Christine. L’ennemi principal, tome I. Op. cit., 52. 29 Kergoat, Danièle. Se battre, disent-elles…. Op. cit., 308.

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centred on the political conquest of the State apparatus or on economic self-organisation. Consider some of the arguments in Delphy’s “Where to attack the ‘unequal share’ of ‘housework’”,30 which, in a specific political setting, comes up against the problem of the relationship to State institutions. The author demonstrates that, from the point of view of women’s class struggles, three political functions of the State stand out. Firstly, it tolerates exploitation, by not granting women specific social rights (e.g. a pension after divorce); secondly, it encourages exploitation, “by failing, for example, to consider the work of self-employed women for what it is; i.e. a form of moonlighting”31 ; thirdly, by subsidising exploitation, for example by paying for housewives’ health insurance instead of their husbands who exploit their domestic work. From this perspective, the transitional political proposals put forward by Delphy in this article are organised around the demand that “the State should stop subsidising the patriarchal system”.32 As in the class struggle paradigm, when presenting her feminist emancipation strategy, the author paints an essentially negative picture of the State’s role, that is, this strategy involves abolishing the institutional locks that reinforce the domination of the male class. In particular, she emphasises the failure of the proactive public policies of opening crèches and putting women into paid work in the GDR, which did not succeed in solving the problem of women’s triple working day. So, from the point of view of the relationship to the State, she advocates promoting “not tools to change the situation overnight, but demands that could, if met, undermine at least some of the institutional pillars that underpin the construction of this private inequality”.33 We can see here that the aim is not to demand a new State mechanism more favourable to the women’s class struggle (i.e. in the sense of putting the State under the control of women), which would reiterate the classic strategy of the traditional workers’ movement, designed to benefit men. So, Delphy puts forward a different version of the class struggle by proposing to financially penalise men’s free time, i.e. it is not so much

30 Delphy, Christine. 2003. Par où attaquer le “partage inégal” du “travail ménager” ? Nouvelles Questions Féministes 22 (3). 31 Ibid., 65. 32 Ibid., 66. 33 Ibid, 48.

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a question of reinforcing the class of women by building institutions of emancipation as of attacking the economic and political foundations of the antagonistic class’s domination, in other words, of destroying the institutions of oppression. This is the destructive dimension of democratic work already highlighted in the previous sections. As a corollary, by underlining the “non-economic” conditions of capitalist reproduction, materialist feminism—when it also addresses the social relations of race—allows us to grasp “the intrinsic connection between these apparently disparate phenomena of primitive accumulation, dispossession, financial flows, migration, racialisation, labour and gender relations as crucial dimensions of the social reproduction of capital and labour today”,34 and thus also the importance of articulating the various “front lines” of social struggles for workers’ economic and political emancipation. These ideas allow us to grasp the extent of what needs to be done for democratic work to come about; i.e. the dismantling not only of the capitalist institutions of enterprise, the market and the State, but also the institutions of patriarchy—in particular the family—as well as of racism—and in particular the repressive border controls on the movement of workers. As suggested in the previous section, this all-embracing, negative model of class struggle today seems increasingly topical at a time when neoliberal policies are giving rise to growing numbers of public and semi-public bodies, whose role is to reinforce relations of gender, class and racial domination as well as control over the individual and workers’ activity. To a large degree however, Delphy’s work leaves the question of an “industrial democracy” incorporating materialist feminism—and in particular the question of the sexual division of labour and social reproduction—to one side. On the other hand, while the movement for industrial democracy, and Guildism in particular, has of course included feminist activists and theorists,35 and while the themes of autonomous time management or policies of economic support for the sharing of parental and educational work have sometimes been considered by the

34 Ferguson, Susan and McNally, David. 2015. Precarious Migrants: Gender, Race and the Social Reproduction of a Global Working Class. Socialist register 51. 35 See especially Scott, Gillian. 2005. Feminism, Femininity and the Politics of Working Women. The Women’s Cooperative Guild, 1880’s to the Second World War, Taylor and Francis e-library, especially about Margaret L. Davies (Ibid., 34 ff).

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proponents of industrial democracy, the paradigm of industrial democracy, and more broadly theories of economic democracy, have not really changed. As Carol Pateman notes: “One rarely finds an analysis of the importance of the relationship between the domestic division of labour and economic life, or of the sexual division of labour, and indeed not a single mention of the implications of the issues addressed in this essay within the industrial democracy literature”.36 And when the women’s perspective is taken into account in sociological and economic analysis, it is most often within the more general themes of transformations in class struggle or resistance to work—for example, the “self-reduction” of work rates and absenteeism37 —rather than within the perspective of a global democratic reorganisation of work. In this respect, as Christine Delphy pointed out in the 1970s, the French workers’ movement lagged behind some of Lenin’s analyses, making the struggle against the “petty domestic economy” the condition for a “real liberation” of women and criticising communist men’s indifference to their wives’ household chores and their lack of willingness to “get rid of them altogether by helping them with ‘female labour’”.38 But overall, within the theories of class struggle as well as industrial democracy,39 the question of fundamental reorganisation of the whole of economic life favouring the emancipation of the female class remains largely neglected. Materialist feminism’s ideas are central to bringing about democratic work. And despite the aforementioned shortcomings, which call for a specific research agenda, they also shed light on other related contemporary debates. First of all, they open the way to the recognition and politicisation—and possibly alternative forms of valorisation to those of the capitalist market40 —of other forms of free labour, notably that of the 36 Pateman, Carol. 2011. Feminism and Democracy. In Feminism, Democracy, Welfare. London: Routledge, 75. 37 See Gallot, Fanny. 2015. En découdre. Comment les ouvrières ont révolutionné le travail et la société. Paris: La Découverte, especially chapter entitled Les réappropriations du temps [The reappropriations of time]. 38 Quoted in Delphy, Christine. L’ennemi principal, tome I. Op. cit., 50–51. 39 See reminders, however, in Gabriel, Nicolas. 1989. L’internationale des femmes

socialistes. Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps 16 (1). 40 On this point, see Giardin, i Federica and Simone, Anna. 2015. Reproduction as Paradigm: Elements for a feminist Political Economy. Viewpoint Magazine 5.

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unemployed but also “militant labour”.41 In this respect, materialist feminism allows us not only to analyse the gendered dimension of militant trajectories, the sexual division of militant labour and the way in which gender relations are played out in the organisation of prescribed and real labour,42 but also to consider the specific relationship of the female class to the process of militant labour. Concerning contemporary economic and political proposals such as, on the one hand, the “unconditional subsistence income” (based on the principle of an unconditional payment to all citizens, i.e. a basic income that can be cumulated with other types of income)43 and, on the other hand, of a “wage for life” (based on an extension of the wage system of social payments and qualifications)44 seem, from this point of view, not only to overlook the specific issue of women’s work exploitation,45 but also to not fully grasp the radicality of democratic work. The politicisation of the concept of work allows us to open up the question of a democratisation not of income, employment or the wage system, but of work itself and its political function. Lastly, from a theoretical point of view, materialist feminism has helped to renovate the critique of political economy. In particular, it allows the concepts of work, social relations and value to be redefined on the basis of a critique of their economistic and androcentric conceptions. And in this way, it illustrates that the economy is political both in the sense that the reality of work determines the means of class struggle between workers and capitalists, racialised and non-racialised people, women and men, and in the sense that work constitutes the central issue in social relations of domination.

41 Nicourd, Sandrine (ed.). 2009. Le travail militant. Rennes: PUR. 42 See especially Dunezat Xavier. 2009. Trajectoires militantes et rapports sociaux de

sexe. In Le sexe du militantisme, eds Olivier Fillieule and Patricia Roux. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po. 43 Van Parisj, Philippe and Vanderborght Yannick. 2005. L’allocation universelle. Paris:

La Découverte. 44 See Friot, Bernard. 2014. Émanciper le travail. Entretiens avec Patrick Zech. Paris: La Dispute. 45 For a discussion of a minimum subsistence income in a feminist perspective, see e.g. Bergmann, Barbara. Basic Income Grants or the Welfare State: Which Better Promotes Gender Equality? Basic Income Studies 3.

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This is why materialist feminism makes it possible to renew the analysis of the political centrality of work, by orienting it resolutely towards a feminist, post-capitalist and democratic form of work.

CHAPTER 7

Political Ecology: What Kind of Work Does the Critique of Productivism Lead to?

Another key contribution to the contemporary critique of the labour process and the analysis of its consequences for a potential form of democratic labour comes from political ecology. In some of its versions, political ecology is not only a question of analysing the environmental disasters of capitalist production, e.g. air, water and land pollution, climate change and global warming, destruction of forests and reduction of biodiversity, multiplication of nuclear incidents, etc., but also of carrying out a systematic critique of the organisation, division and above all labour process from an ecological point of view. In its radical critique of the illusions of “green capitalism”, political ecology opens up potential answers to the questions posed by democratic work: “What goods and services do we need? What do we need to produce, how and in what quantities? Who decides? In what environment do we want to live?”1 Ecological concern for the “internal nature” of workers (including their health) as well as for the “external nature” of the environment (and in general, putting an end to and repairing the destruction of the biosphere)2 is thus not only

1 Tanuro, Daniel. 2012. L’impossible capitalisme vert. Paris: La Découverte, 19. 2 See Garrouste, Laurent. 2010. De la lutte contre l’exploitation physiologique à la

transformation écosocialiste du travail. In Pistes pour un anticapitalisme vert, ed Vincent Gay. Paris: Syllepse, especially 78.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_7

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a fundamental component of democratic work, but also a comprehensive method for outlining its means and ends. From this point of view, the strand of political ecology that is most relevant to democratic labour—and more specifically to the democratic issues of transforming the labour process—is the one closest to socialist traditions, i.e. “ecosocialism”.3 However, given the limitations of the one-sided theory of “degrowth” (e.g. new consumption practices or the “abolition” of work), an ecologist critique of work, based on André Gorz’s pioneering writings in France, needs to be complemented by the broad lines of an ecosocialist politics of work. In this section, we will first discuss some of André Gorz’s arguments, with particular emphasis on their contributions to the political critique of the labour process but also on their limitations with regard to democratic labour. We will then see how some recent studies, notably in the fields of ecological Marxism, which have highlighted points of convergence between Marxism and political ecology, shed new light on the problem of the political centrality of labour. Lastly, we will discuss ecosocialism, showing how its analyses and proposals for the democratic planning of an ecological transition help to clarify what democratic work could look like.

7.1

Contributions of and Limits to Gorz’s Critique of Work

Gorz’s political ecology differed from scientific ecology, which was content with “scientifically determining the techniques and thresholds of ecologically bearable pollution”4 and whose aim was to launch a “political attack, […] at all levels, to wrest control of operations from it [capitalism] and to oppose it with a completely different project for society and civilisation”.5 Thus, the critique of capitalism was normatively based both on the need for ecologically sustainable development and on the demand for individual autonomy—understood in an existential sense, in relation to needs, and in a political sense, in relation to institutions. This theme of 3 For a synthetic presentation and discussion, see Löwy, Michael, 2011. L’écosocialisme. L’alternative radicale à la catastrophe écologique capitaliste. Paris: Mille et nuit nuits. (See in English in Löwy, Michaël. 2015. Ecosocialism. A Radical Alternative to Capitalist Catastrophe. Chicago: Haymarket. 4 Gorz, André. 1975. Écologie et politique. Paris: Galilée, 13. 5 Ibid., 13.

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existential and political autonomy, centred on the question of needs and the “lived-in world”,6 enabled Gorz to articulate the Marxist theme of capitalist labour alienation and the ecologist critique of productivism. According to Gorz, the whole content of work, its ends but also its means, needed to be transformed ecologically and democratically. It was on this basis that he developed his analysis of productivist socialism, which was blind to the question of the socialist transformation of the labour process. In contrast to “classical” and productivist Marxism, Gorz believed that “the reappropriation of the means of production and labour presuppose[d] the end of the mega-industry and of the mega-tools characteristic of Fordism”.7 It was therefore a question of ensuring that another form of work, less alienated, led to a better and healthier life for people. But does that mean Gorz was referring to democratic work, to putting the work process at the service of democracy? On the one hand, in his writings, the need to democratise the labour process was clearly stated: it was a question of “productive cooperation and self-organised social exchanges becoming increasingly political, whereby inserting local activities into their wider context was taken into account […]”.8 However, for Gorz, the best example of this fully autonomous and democratic activity was not work but, rather, neighbourhood social life and artistic, cultural and militant activities,9 i.e. everything that people chose to do in their free time—which should, he believed, indeed be increased to gain true existential autonomy—and not only the formal and limited autonomy in which work would have to remain confined. In other words, wholly fulfilling and democratic activities had to be developed outside work. As Stéphane Haber put it, ultimately for Gorz, “work is the other of self-realisation, it implies an impoverishment of experience, a deprivation of initiative and of the capacity to experience pleasure in one’s environment”.10 This was why, for Gorz, democratic

6 On the subject of this structuring theme in Gorz, see Haber, Stéphane. 2013. Penser le néocapitalisme. Vie, capital et aliénation. Paris: Les prairies ordinaires, 300 ff. 7 Gorz, André. 1977. Écologie et liberté. Paris: Galilée, 223. 8 Gorz, André. 1977. Misères du présent , richesse du possible. Paris: Galilée, 177. 9 Gollain, Françoise. 2000. Une critique du travail, entre écologie et socialisme. Paris: La

Découverte, 225. 10 Haber, Stéphane. Penser le néocapitalisme. Op. Cit, 305.

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work—in the sense of the centrality of work in the exercise of democracy and supporting a process of empowerment and emancipation of individuals—was not possible. Consequently, for Gorz, the ecological analysis of the division of labour and social “disalienation” would not be based on regaining control over the production process, but rather on one of control and self-limitation of consumption. “The meaning of this ecological rationalisation can be summarised in the motto ‘less but better’. Its clear aim is a society in which we live better, working and consuming less”.11 This explains Gorz’s support for the proposal of a minimum living wage. The principle of an “unconditional guarantee of a sufficient income”,12 which would gradually take the form of a “universal benefit of a sufficient income”,13 was promoted insofar as it should be able to encourage voluntary, artistic, family and solidarity activities, outside of capitalism and the labour market. It would “decouple the right to an income from the having a job”,14 and should encourage a break with productivism and promote the criteria of needs and self-limitation of consumption. It should also encourage the sharing of intellectual work and activities of general interest as opposed to the selection of social activities by capitalist accumulation.15 So, from 1985 onwards, all of Gorz’s work was moving towards this decoupling of income and employment as a corollary to the demand for a reduction in working hours to unchain social activities and social needs from the grip of capitalist labour. Gorz saw these proposals as a way of democratising society: “Rebuilding a world conducive to the fulfilment of life does not presuppose an ecological modernisation of industrial society but, rather, an ecosocialist, anti-technocratic and anti-authoritarian modernisation”.16 This articulation between ecological and democratic demands is certainly a decisive contribution of Gorz’s definition of political ecology, i.e. the

11 Gorz, André. 1991. Capitalisme, socialisme, écologie. Paris: Galilée, 93. 12 See on this subject Entretien avec André Gorz, in Gollain, Françoise. Une critique

du travail, entre écologie et socialisme. Op. cit. 235. 13 See Gorz, André. Misères du présent , richesse du possible, op. cit. p. 138. 14 “Interview with André Gorz”, Op. cit. p. 235. See also André Gorz, Pour un revenu

inconditionnel suffisant, Transversales, no 3, Paris, 2002. 15 See André Gorz, Misères du présent , richesse du possible. Op. cit. 140 ff. 16 Gorz, André. Capitalisme, socialisme, écologie. Op. Cit. 108–109.

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transformation of the process, organisation and division of labour, had to be founded on ecological and democratic objectives which would, over time, become the benchmark for an increasing number of specific production processes. However, the prospect of an “exodus” of workers from the company sector—by means of a basic income, for example—or of the abolition of work, forever identified with wage labour and alienation, poses a major problem. Given that it transformed work in general into the untransformable vehicle of this economic reasoning, that it considered production of use-value which escaped productivism and capitalist valorisation to no longer be work as such, and that it embraced the Arendtian dichotomy between work and political action,17 this theory appeared to be as one-sided as the “value of labour” theory that it criticised. Contrary to Gorz’s tendency to make autonomy the absolute opposite of any possible work experience, and the claim that such autonomy only exists “on the margins of the social system, thanks to the autonomous and disinterested initiative of freely associated individuals”,18 the political demands that emerge in these practices considered as “non-economic” and those that exist in the ordinary critique of the constraints that capitalism places on company activity, follow on from each other. For example, criticism of the organisation of work insofar as it degrades the quality of the product or service can express the same type of ecological concerns as those expressed in militant activity outside of work. Of course, we must remember, as does Gorz, that autonomy must also be achieved outside of work in order to be a part of productive activity. We cannot, however agree with him when he claims, for example, that: “Autonomy in work counts for little without cultural, moral and political autonomy, which does not stem from productive cooperation itself but from militant activity and the culture of insubordination, rebellion, fraternity and free debate”.19 This division between work (forever heteronomous) and politics (always a source of autonomy) is precisely what democratic work enables us to question. And we have seen that nowadays there are many reasons to get rid of this overly simplistic alternative between alienation at work and emancipation outside work.

17 See in particular Gorz, André. 2004. Métamorphoses du travail. Critique de la raison économique. Paris: Gallimard, 2004, 30 ff. 18 Ibid., 127. 19 Gorz, André. Misères du présent, richesse du possible. Op. Cit., 72.

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Part of our democratic expectations concerns work and the deepening and radicalisation of democracy requires, more than ever, that work be democratised. It is urgent to counter neoliberal ideology which, under the cover of distinguishing between work and politics, seeks to conceal the manner in which political institutions support the de-democratisation of work. And among these reasons, there is one that directly contradicts André Gorz’s intention, and which today should be at the heart of the contemporary campaign for democratic work. This reason is simple, and political ecology can enlighten us in this respect, i.e. the magnitude of the energy transition that must be launched urgently, requires the powers of labour to work for democratic and ecological objectives. In other words, beyond Gorz—as we would now like to demonstrate—there will be no ecological transition without democratic work.

7.2 The Metabolic Rift Between Man and Nature: An Alternative Ecological Critique of Labour Most of the time, contemporary debates on political ecology simply update the terms of the opposition between the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy. On the one hand, the Marxist critique of capitalism is seen as deliberately avoiding any criticism of productivism insofar as it considers the democratisation/abolition of State institutions to be more important than the ecological transformation of the production process. On the other hand, deep ecology is seen as being unable to become truly political because it concentrates on promoting ecologically responsible practices to the detriment of a radical critique of capitalist institutions. However, the recent contributions of “ecological Marxism”20 could overcome this antinomy and look forward to a potential form of democratic and ecological labour. Let’s start by briefly recalling Marx’s contributions on this subject, which can be summarised along the lines of a rift of the metabolism between man and nature.21 As John Bellamy Foster has shown, in Capital what few references Marx does make to this rift in the capitalist mode of production are nevertheless precise. On the one hand, the labour process 20 See Guillibert, Paul and Haber, Stéphane (eds.). 2017. Marxismes écologistes. Actuel Marx 61. 21 See Bellamy Foster, John. 2000. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press,155 ff.

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is described in the following terms, in which the notion of metabolism has an explanatory significance: “Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature”.22 This metabolism basically means that man is a natural force among other natural forces, so that by transforming “external nature” he also transforms his own nature. But this notion of metabolism also has a critical significance, insofar as it allows us to explain the “alienation from nature upon which capitalism rests”.23 Indeed, the specific historical form of labour in capitalism disrupts, alienates or even breaks the “life activity”24 of labour: “on the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand, it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth”.25 These ideas bring us closer to the general idea of the need to transform the productive system according to the criterion of ecological sustainability. For example, the second book of Capital insists on the need to put an end to environmental damage—and in particular to deforestation—caused by recent industrial development, while the third book maintains, for example, that “the entire spirit of capitalist production, which is oriented towards the most immediate monetary profits-stands in contradiction to agriculture”.26 Although these points are obviously insufficient to construct a potential positive theory of democratic and ecological work, they nevertheless clearly outline an ecological critique of the capitalist mode of production, and make it possible to single out the ecological criteria needed to go beyond it. A series of recent studies has updated this ecological Marxist theory of the metabolic rift, aiming in particular to overcome the one-sided

22 Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, vol. I. New York: Vintage, 283. 23 Bellamy Foster, John. Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature. Op. Cit., 175. 24 See Marx, Karl. 2010. Economic and Philosophical Manuscriptss of 1844. London:

Lawrence and Wishart: Op. cit, especially 275, and on Marx’s “historical naturalism” in this work, see Monferrand, Frédéric. 2016. Marx: Social Ontology and Critique of Capitalism. Une lecture des Manuscrits économico-philosophiques de 1844, PhD thesis in philosophy supervised by Stéphane Haber, University of Paris Nanterre. 25 Marx, Karl. Capital, vol. 1. Op. Cit., 637. 26 Marx, Karl. 1981. Capital, Book III. New York: Vintage, 1981, 754.

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opposition between biophysical crises on the one hand and the accumulation of capital on the other,27 in order to show that the degradation of the environment is not an external consequence but an intrinsic dimension of capitalism. For example, in his recent publications, Jason Moore highlights the internal relationship between the labour process and what he calls “the reproduction of the oikeios ”, i.e. the process of interaction between human and non-human natures, which is also one of the fundamental socio-ecological conditions of capital accumulation.28 The metabolic rift therefore should not be seen as a theory of capitalism’s external limits but rather of the internal and driving contradiction of capitalist development. Thus, the problem of capitalism today is not only that it faces external natural limits, but that the opportunities for appropriating free labour—that of the forests, the oceans, the climate, the soil or human beings—are reduced, while the mass of capital travelling around the world in search of places to invest is ever greater.29 This is, according to the author, a decisive factor, for example in the financialisation of the economy, but also in the transformation of the organisation of work in companies and the reorganisation of the international division of labour. These arguments are based in particular on James O’Connor’s30 analysis of the “second contradiction” of capitalism: to the first contradiction between the relations of production and the productive forces, examined by Marx, must be added a second one, between the productive forces and the conditions of production, i.e. the workers, the urban environment and nature. In other words, capital, because of its expansionist dynamics, destroys its own conditions, and particularly the natural environment of production and workers’ lives. Moore therefore proposes to extend this theory from a “socio-ecological” perspective and to underline the contemporary stakes: i.e. the second contradiction can thus take the

27 See on this subject Guillibert, Paul. 2014. Décoloniser la nature. Période, 21 April 2014. 28 See Moore, Jason W. 2015. Capitalism in the Web of life. Ecology and the accumulation of capital. London: Verso, 2015. 2017. For a defence of the continued separation of nature and society from the perspective of an ecological Marxism, see Malm, Andreas. 2017. The Progress of this Storm. Nature and Society in a Warming World. London: Verso. 29 See for example Moore, Jason W. 2011. Transcending the metabolic rift: A theory of crises in the capitalist world-ecology. The Journal of Peasant Studies, 38. 30 See notably James O’Connor. 1991. On the Two Contradictions of Capitalism. Capitalism, Nature Socialism, 2.

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form of soil depletion or deforestation, but also of a decrease in publication education budgets or a deterioration of vital infrastructures. From this perspective, it becomes possible to jointly criticise neoliberal policies and new forms of exploitation of nature, insofar as they constitute an attempt at a coherent response by capitalist forces to the contemporary form of capitalism’s permanent socio-ecological crisis. Looking for what could be a form of democratic and ecological work to overcome this second socio-ecological contradiction inherent to capitalism will not be found simply in scientific innovations of “green technology”. Moreover, it is a problem that relates to the very definition of democracy, insofar as its social and political institutions are themselves conditioned by this metabolism between human and extra-human natures. Thus, focusing on the specific but crucial issue of oil energy and the end of fossil fuel abundance, in his book Carbon Democracy, Timothy Mitchell analyses “democracy as oil—as a form of politics whose mechanisms on multiple levels involve the processes of producing and using carbon energy”.31 On the one hand, the author updates the theory of the constitutive centrality of labour, showing that oil-based production not only imposes limits on democracy but is inseparable from “the political machinery that emerged to govern the age of fossil fuels, partly as a product of those forms of energy”.32 On the other hand, he points out that “democratic struggles” in recent decades have centred on the logic of redistribution of these socio-economic (e.g. wages) and ecological (e.g. depletion of natural resources) flows, seeking to integrate them, sometimes in the same movement, into the public domain.33 We can also recall in this respect that the use of fossil energy has been a means for capitalists to discipline labour power, so much so that some workers’ struggles have set themselves the goal of challenging it.34 The ecological perspective must therefore be fully integrated into the theory of the geometric centrality of labour and, in seeking to gain the power to structure labour, it is also the use of energy flows that must be controlled. 31 Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso, 5. 32 Ibid., 7. 33 Ibid., p. 9. 34 See on this subject Malm, Andreas. 2016. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power

and the Roots of Global Warming. London: Verso.

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Lastly, as we move towards the end of “cheap nature”—i.e. the abundance of cheap carbon energy—the theory of the dynamic centrality of work must also be updated from an ecological point of view. The question is as follows: “What kind of politics might follow from the declining flow of oil and other fossil fuels?”35 In this respect, Mitchell’s book concludes with the assertion that “e possibility of more democratic futures, in turn, depends on the political tools with which we address the passing of the era of fossil fuel”,36 without saying anything about its institutional requirements. However, these different analyses clearly underline the need to democratically plan the energy transition which is also at the heart of ecosocialism. We propose to examine “ecosocialism” with a view to clarifying its potential for a democratic and ecologist system of labour.

7.3

Ecosocialism and Democratic Work

The recognition of the ecological emergency is a powerful reason for seeking to overcome the antinomy between the two paradigms of democratic work. On the one hand, an ecologist industrial democracy would risk overestimating the radical redesign of the productive system based solely on nature-friendly technology and neglecting the need for a global transformation of political institutions. On the other hand, an ecologisation of the class struggle paradigm would not be enough to solve the problem of democratisation and/or abolition of the State, and on the contrary may view the ecological emergency as a powerful motive to neglect it.37 So how can the ecological analysis of labour help to build a democratic and ecological model of labour beyond this autonomy? The answer lies in the need to democratise the decision about the purposes of the labour process. Going beyond the issue of capitalism’s external ecological limits implies a qualitative approach to the transformation of work: it is a question of “putting an end to the monstrous waste of resources by capitalism based on the large-scale production of useless or harmful products, in order to direct production towards the satisfaction

35 Mitchell, Timothy. 2013. Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. Op. Cit., 237. 36 Ibid., 254. 37 See on this antinomy Löwy, Michael, L’écosocialisme. Op. cit, 41.

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of authentic needs”,38 in particular water, food, clothing and housing. In a similar way to materialist feminism, ecosocialist political ecology also emphasises the destructive dimension of democratic work, which must put an end to the unsustainable consumption of energy in many institutions and activities. And indeed, in a coherent ecosocialist society, large parts of the productive system would have to disappear, notably the agroindustry consuming oil, fertilisers and chemical products, services linked to the intensive use of personal cars, industrial production conveyed by long-distance trade or polluting military complexes serving the private concentration of wealth. However, beyond this abolition of harmful productive activities, and the degrowth and self-limitation of consumption practices that it implies, clearly, democratic and ecological work also involves a planned and global transition of the economy. This is why “a socialist approach—properly understood—remains the only possible framework for reversing the process of environmental degradation”.39 In other words, democratic planning of the ecological transition—even accompanied by a necessary transformation of political institutions—will be insufficient without redesigning the productive system. Equally, ecological transformation of the production process needs corollary institutional planning. Given its objectives for a global reorientation of production, it requires the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy to be articulated within the framework of an ecological and post-capitalist project. As Michael Löwy summarises: Only collective and democratic ownership would at once meet real social needs, reduce working hours, eliminate unnecessary and harmful production and replace fossil fuels with solar energy. This implies a deep change to the capitalist property regime, a radical extension of public services and of free access to them, in short a coherent ecosocialist plan.40

In real terms, ecosocialism means establishing political institutions and a productive system which allow for democratic planning. Such planning 38 Ibid. 39 Wallis, Victor. 2015. Vers le socialisme écologique. In Écologie et socialisme, ed.

Michael Löwy. Paris: Syllepse, 134. (see in English: Wallis, Victor, 2010. Toward Ecological Socialism. Capitalism, Nature Socialism, 1). 40 Löwy, Michaël, L’écosocialisme. Op. cit., p. 11 (translation mine).

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must enable everyone to participate in decisions concerning, in particular, the energy options pursued, the reorganisation of the transport system, the priorities involved in repairing environmental damage caused by capitalism, the free or subsidised sale of certain products, and more generally the means and ends of dismantling the capitalist productive system and rebuilding it on the basis of ecological and democratic criteria. So, democratic planning, defined as such, takes up the class struggle paradigm’s idea of a transformation and/or abolition of State machinery and extends it to those areas of the productive system which are incompatible with ecological planning.41 This is why what applies to the State also applies to the productive system: “it must therefore be ‘revolutionised’ by radically transforming its nature”42 so that it safeguards the environment and preserves workers’ health. Ecosocialism thus makes it possible to clarify the assertion that democratic work should be able to radically transform political institutions and the productive system at the same time.43 It also makes it possible to emphasise the need to set up specific institutions designed to resolve any contradictions “between the demands of environmental protection and social needs”, and that it is precisely “up to [eco]socialist democracy, freed from the imperatives of capital and the market, to resolve these contradictions”.44 It is also in this sense that ecosocialism is inseparable from “democratic planning”, which could take the form, in the words of Ernest Mandel, of “centralist but democratic planning under the authority of a national congress made up of several workers’ councils whose members would be, in the main, real workers”.45 It would therefore not be a question of “central planning” decided and implemented by the State, but of a new institutional architecture allowing workers to participate in all the decisions that concern them. Thus, as Löwy points out, “while the decision to transform, for example, a car factory into a bus or tram production unit would be taken by society as a

41 On this parallel, starting from the Marxian analysis of the Paris Commune, see Ibid, p. 39. 42 Ibid., p. 40 (translation mine). 43 See for example Löwy, Michael. 2015. Écosocialisme. In Écologie et socialisme. Op.

cit, 100. 44 Löwy, Michael. L’écosocialisme. Op. Cit., 42. 45 Quoted in Ibid, 55. See Mandel, Ernest. 1976. Economics of transition period”, in

50 years of World Revolution, ed. Ernest Mandel. New York: Pathfinder Press.

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whole, the internal organisation and functioning of the factory would be managed democratically by the workers themselves”.46 However, apart from the question of the type of democratic institutions that such a perspective implies (see below, Part 3), there is the problem of the division between democratic working time and nonworking time. For Löwy, exercising democracy should always take place outside production time: Democratic planning, combined with the reduction of working time, would be a considerable progress of humanity towards what Marx called “the kingdom of freedom”; having more free time is in fact a condition for workers’ participation in democratic discussion and in the management of the economy as well as of society.47

But isn’t there a contradiction in accepting this decoupling of democratic activity from work? Like Gorz, Löwy seems to believe that a central condition for democratically controlling production lies in the extension of non-working time, which should in itself allow for a richer and freer democratic life. However, while the reduction of working time is clearly an indispensable factor in the democratisation of work, it cannot be seen as the core of the democratic work project. And after all, whether it is to preserve the environment or for some other purpose, is it acceptable that a large part of our non-working time should be devoted to democratic decision-making? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable, on the contrary, to integrate democratic activity into working time, to counter the antidemocratic split between decision and execution within production itself, and to free up social time that could be allocated to something other than work and political activity? Considering democratic activity to be work does not prevent the reduction of working time, on the contrary. As political ecology illustrates, a gigantic reserve of socially available time could be freed up by abolishing ecologically harmful activities. There is no reason to think that this socially available time could not be redistributed equitably among people, divided between work time and free time by reducing the former, while work time itself could include participation in democratic decisions, primarily concerning the implementation of ecological imperatives. 46 Löwy, Michael. L’écosocialisme. Op. Cit., 60. 47 Ibid., 57.

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An eco-socialist transformation of production requires planning, and therefore political institutions to articulate workers’ autonomous decisions regarding their activity. These decisions should include the length and organisation of their working time, repairing environmental damage caused by the capitalist system and replacing the productive system along the lines of ecological and democratic criteria. It is on this condition that it is possible to imagine an ecological transition and democratic reappropriation of power over production. As Laurent Garrouste summarises: There is a dual aim to transforming the productive system. Firstly, it is to respond to the ecological crisis by reorganising economic activity in such a way as to regulate humanity’s exchanges with nature in an ecological manner. The second aim is to deal with the social crisis by guaranteeing the right to employment, the right to health and the right to free time for all, thereby overturning the direction of economic activity and the conditions and organisation of work.48

In short, democratic and ecological work should be able to combine: the democratic planning of the ends and means of production in the context of an energy transition; the transformation of working conditions and the productive system with regard to workers’ health and preservation of the environment; the reduction of working time and democratic control over productive activity. Contra Gorz’s separation between autonomy at work and existential autonomy, and with a view to solving the problem of the separation between ecosocialist democracy and production, there is a need for the democratic process and the ecological transition to be integrated into the process, organisation and division of labour.

7.4

Conclusion of Part. II. Democratic Work and Economic Democracy

However simple the idea may seem—democratising work/working towards democracy—bringing democratic work about presents several complicated problems. Among them, the questions of the future of 48 Garrouste, Laurent. De la lutte contre l’exploitation physiologique à la transformation écosocialiste du travail. Art. Cit., 78.

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the State, the type of ownership involved in democratic labour and its extension to the whole economic sector have been the subject of much controversy within the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy. In this conclusion, we will focus on the last of these issues—i.e. the relationship between the democratisation of labour and what has often been referred to in the last three decades as “economic democracy”49 —with a view to pinning down the concept of democratic labour. For each of these three problems, the difficulty lies in justifying the limitation of the worker’s political power: in relation to the State and to civil servants; in relation to property and to owners, however they are redefined; and in relation to economic democracy, i.e. to all “citizens”. The latter relationship (i.e. workers’ political power—economic democracy) is usually understood with regard to the political authority facilitating the settlement of conflicts between producers and consumers. In “What is socialisation?”, Karl Korsch expressed it thus: Whatever means are found to articulate the rights of workers and consumers, it is clear that ultimately, if a settlement of this conflict between divergent interests (i.e. a true socialisation of the means of production), is to be reached, it must be possible to link them evenly in the two different forms of socialisation (communalisation from above and socialisation from below).50

This is one way of visualising the articulation between the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy, but also of bringing together the achievements of feminism, ecology and the commons; i.e. by integrating domestic activities, metabolism with nature and the common use of things into work. The aim here would be to regulate the relationship between

49 See in particular Devine, Pat. 1998. Democracy and Economic Planning: The Political Economy of a Self-Governing Society. Cambridge/Boulder: Polity Press and Westview Press; Demirovic, Alex. 2007. Demokratie in der Wirtschaft. Positionen—Probleme—Perspektiven. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot; Weipert, Alex (ed.). 2014. Demokratisierung von Wirtschaft und Staat. Studien zum Verhältnis von Ökonomie, Staat und Demokratie vom 19. Jahrhundert bis heute. Berlin: Nora. 50 Korsch Karl. 1980. Was ist Sozialisierung ? Ein Programm des praktischen Sozialismus. In Gesamtausgabe, Band 2: Rätebewegung and Klassenkampf. Frankfurt-am-Main: Europäische Verangestalt, 116.

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“worker” and “consumer” in a different way, with a view to democratising these relationships. This debate has been revived in recent years, particularly in Germany by the historians Axel Weipert and Ulla Plener and the philosophers Michael Krätke and Alex Demirovic,51 in relation to contemporary questions concerning potential democratic control of markets and finance, and particularly the banking and monetary system. Ulla Plener, for example, has suggested setting up “social councils” around the country, composed of workers, State representatives, entrepreneurs, local authorities and consumer representatives.52 Such “social councils” would also be responsible, for example, for the democratic planning of the banking and monetary system. Among the constituent elements of what Plener understands by “economic democracy” are: the external democratic control of big business and finance; the strengthening of communal ownership under the control of citizens and workers; the prohibition of financial speculation and anti-trust regulation laws; the democratic control of employment policies; setting up public guarantee funds in case of bankruptcy; supporting the social economy in all sectors of production; reinforcing the powers of local and regional authorities; workers’ participation in companies and in the branches of industry; employee share ownership in the company; disengaging the sectors of training, health, housing, water, energy and public goods, from regulation by profit; creating social (and economic and environmental) councils in the regional commissions based on industrial branches, with consumer and worker participation in particular.53 Adapting this proposal to our own concerns, we can see that, in the financial sector, for example, such an economic democracy would put banks under the democratic control of three new institutions (see below, part IV): the bank workers in a works council, the banking sector branch workers in an economic council and all the consumers and stakeholders concerned by the activity, in an area social

51 See in particular Alex Demirovic, “Wirtschaft und Demokratie”, Michael Krätke,

“Eine andere Demokratie für eine andere Wirtschaft. Uberlegung zur institutionnellen Form der Wirtschaftsdemokratie”, and Ulla Plener, “Umfassende Demokratie in Wirtschaft und Staat als Strategue der Linken im 21 Jahrhundert. Uberlungen, These, Fragen” in Weipert, Axel (ed.), Demokratisierung von Wirtschaft und Staat. Op. cit. 52 See in particular Ibid, 13. 53 Ibid., 18–19.

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council (at the communal, regional and national or even international levels). This is a different and more complex model than Michael Albert’s “participatory economics”,54 which has been one of the main references in recent debates on economic democracy, and is similar to the “dual federalism” put forward by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval in Commun. Essai sur la révolution au XXe siècle.55 This model advocates a mixed organisation, with producers’ councils on the one hand, and consumers’ councils on the other, geographically linked to neighbourhood councils, city councils and a nation-wide council. In Plener’s version of “economic democracy” however, the fundamental principle of the class struggle and industrial democracy paradigms is maintained, i.e. the democratic control of work depends principally on the workers, while the “higher” level of the area social council should—to take the example mentioned above—only deal with the principles of sector regulation and the general objectives of the activity of the bank concerned. But the question then arises: is it really necessary for economic democracy to be based, as Michael Krätke argues, on two separate sources of legitimacy, i.e. “the parliamentary pillar, which concerns all citizens without distinction, and the council pillar, which functions as a democratic organisation within the social work system”?56 And consequently, should the fundamental issue of democratic labour be reduced to the question of how conflicts over the ends and means of activity between workers and consumers are democratically managed? In which case, the question would then be whether these conflicts should be, in the main, internalised in work organisation and in the activity itself or externalised in the democratic functioning of society as a whole. If we accept the terms of this problem, there are good reasons not to make a decision one way or the other, like Krätke who, in the same way, supports such

54 See in particular Albert, Michael. 2004. Parecon: Life after Capitalism. London: Verso. 55 This model of a “democracy of the commons” takes the form of a “double federation” articulating the “federation of social-economic commons constituted on a socio-professional basis” and the “federation of political commons constituted on a territorial basis” (Dardot, Pierre and Laval, Christian, 2014. Commun. Essai sur la révolution au XXe siècle, Paris: La Découverte, 2014, 582). 56 Krätke, Michael. “Eine andere Demokratie für eine andere Wirtschaft. Uberlegung zur institutionnellen Form der Wirtschaftsdemokratie”. Art. Cit., 66..

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options as bicameralism in the company, intermediate democratic institutions between workers and citizens, or sharing prerogatives thereby creating a balance of powers. So, regarding these empirical forms, theory can probably only rely on the investigation of past or current experiments. However, the aforementioned arguments call into question this theory of the undecidability of general forms of democratic work. There is something contradictory in asserting that democracy must be based on work collectives, and, at the same time, considering it impossible to answer, a priori, the question of “who” legitimately can take part in decisions concerning an activity, an enterprise or a sector. In democratic work, based on the norms of labour criticism, it is the workers who hold the legitimacy to take decisions and implement them. So, the question is not whether it should be “all citizens, or all those who pay taxes, or all those who live in an area and have reached the age of majority”57 who decide about production, but, rather, to find a democratic solution to this problem: who is a worker? And in this respect, the most coherent and radical position is to consider that all citizens should be workers, and all workers citizens, i.e. to base democratic work on a political right to work for everyone, and on a political status—implying new democratic rights—for workers. In other words, ultimately, the abolition of the alienating separation between the figure of the “citizen” and of the “worker” is the issue here, in the context of possible democratic labour founding a system of economic democracy. Questioning this political division of labour is inseparable from both abolishing the sexual division of labour and enabling the ecological revolution of the labour process. In this respect, the paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy can be requalified. On the one hand, the paradigm of class struggle— and the option of a “working class government”—can be understood as the need for workers to become a “demos”. This process was precisely what Marx was aiming at in seeking to interpret and generalise the experience of the Paris Commune. What is at stake is the abolition of a specific political status for rulers and civil servants, and for all workers to reclaim their prerogatives without distinction of class or political status. Contrary to “democratic capitalism but also to “State socialism”, it is not a question of seeing a theoretical opposition between the status of citizen, worker and consumer, and possibly of elected official, public

57 Demirovic, Alex. Wirtschaft und Demokratie. Art. Cit., 42.

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servant and salaried employee, but on the contrary of producing new political institutions granting new democratic rights to workers, that is to say to everyone who has reached the age of majority. With this new worker status, it should be possible to abolish the division between the governing and the governed, the worker and the consumer. On the other hand, the paradigm of industrial democracy can be understood as the people becoming workers. If economic democracy is—as Alex Demirovic suggests—“a quest for the transparency of important social decisions that today are made in the private economy, so they may become available to, and empower, all those concerned”,58 then there is a need to define this democratic reappropriation of activities as the main purpose of work. In this respect, industrial democracy should not only be seen as simply a tool in the class struggle or even as a complete democratic system (as Korsch maintained), but also as a means of putting the purpose of work at the service of democracy. This would bring about this demand, i.e. to unify work and democracy. This is the conclusion we have reached at the end of this third part, one which allows us to articulate our two paradigms by associating with the decisive contributions of materialist feminism, political ecology and the political theory of the commons, i.e. democratic work requires attaching democratic rights to a new political status of the worker. In other words, in order to democratise work and work towards democracy, the figure of the democratic citizen must give way to that of the democratic worker. So, in the context of the contemporary discussion on economic democracy, our analysis rejects the classical opposition between two stances: “on the one hand the political-economic demand to take part in egalitarian decisions on the economy (regarding both production and democratic work organisation), in terms of both ability and the right of all stakeholders in society; on the other hand, the political commitment of the State, through legislation aimed at democratising the economy through public ownership, State control and a planned policy framework”.59 The paradigms of class struggle and industrial democracy cannot be updated without updating the aim that has always been their main objective: in democratic government, the State needs to be replaced by labour. This is the goal, for example, of ecosocialism based on the most democratic

58 Ibid., 43. 59 Ibid., 38.

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socialist tradition, for which “in a transitional economy where socialist democracy reigns, the workers as a whole democratically determine the choices of these priorities”.60 For labour to replace the State in terms of a source of legitimacy, as a functional entity and as the central body of democracy will require workers’ to self-organise in their company, to take part in the democratic planning of production, and to politically control the institutions, without having to decide between these three processes. On the contrary, democratic work will have to succeed—doubtless, in practice, by trial and error—in bringing them together.

60 Mandel, Ernest. Economics of transition period. Art. cit., quoted in Löwy, Michael. L’écosocialisme. Op. Cit., 56.

PART III

Work, Democratic Experiments

Analysing the democratic norms of the critique of work, as well as the theoretical models and political stakes involved, goes beyond the current discussions around corporate democracy or the social solidarity economy. The aim here is to create a radically democratic form of work built on two pillars. The first pillar is based on deliberation, decision-making and collective action shared equally within the workplace; the second is the development of productive activities (goods and services) as part of a wider project aimed at democratising the whole of society. But is such democratic work actually possible and what exactly should it look like? In this final section, we will examine some specific examples that bring into play this relationship between the democratisation of work and the democratisation of society. At first sight, these examples of democratic work can be distinguished between the “inside” and the “outside” of the workplace, and more precisely regarding the political relationship between workers and non-workers. Two “ideal-types” of such experiments involving worker’s control will be examined: self-managed work collectives, which aim to abolish the economic and political power of owners (Chapter 7), and workers’ councils, which seek to extend their political power beyond the workplace (Chapter 8). Cooperatives that are conceived as democratic experiments in the workplace can be seen as falling into either of these

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two models1 : for example, some SCOPs (i.e. most production cooperatives in France) may adopt work patterns close to the self-management tradition, while some cooperatives that have emerged from rescued businesses (notably in Latin America) may adopt models of self-management and workers’ councils as well as associating with collectives (e.g. associations, trade unions, non-institutional groups) that extend beyond the company and are composed not of only workers but also clients and supporters. Contrary to the image of a cooperativist, self-management or council movement that may be self-centred and “workerist”, the aim is to show how the real democratic experiments that are taking place—with all their singularities, limits and contradictions—can open up work collectives to democratic cooperation with groups of individuals outside the workplace. In reviewing the achievements of these experiments—alongside their limits and the problems they face—we will attempt to pin down their aim, e.g. to spread their democratic potential beyond the company walls.

1 Even if their particularities—essentially explained by their statutes and histories—may justify a specific discussion (see Chapter 8 of Le travail démocratique, which we did not include in the English edition: “Cooperatives: towards a democratic organisation of work”).

CHAPTER 8

Self-Management: Towards a Revolution in the Process, Organisation and Division of Labour

“Self-management” in the workplace refers to all democratic experiments aimed not at limiting but at eliminating the power of owners and the State over production. This understanding sees self-management as synonymous with “workers’ control”,1 and includes, on the one hand, cooperatives (e.g. factory takeovers in Latin America and Europe) which use cooperative status for self-management purposes2 and, on the other, experiments in workers’ autonomy (e.g. social struggles involving attempts at self-organisation in production).3 Rather than theories of self-management4 considered as a goal or as a method,5 we will examine the democratic potential of existing selfmanagement experiences. As in the case of cooperatives, the dynamics 1 On this term, see the introduction to Azzelini, Dario and Ness, Immanuel (eds). 2011. Ours to Master and to Own. Worker’s Control from the Commune to the Present. Chicago: Haymarket. 2 See on this subject Collectif. 2018. Autogestion. L’Encyclopédie internationale. Paris: Syllepse, 36. 3 See Alan Tuckman. 2011. Worker’s Control and the Politics of Occupation. In Ours to Master and to Own. Worker’s Control from the Commune to the Present. op. cit. 4 See Georgi, Frank. 2003. Autogestion, la dernière utopie. Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne. 5 On this subject, see Collectif. 2018. Autogestion. L’Encyclopédie internationale. op. cit., 39 ff .

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_8

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and obstacles to the joint process of democratisation of the process, the organisation and the division of labour will be considered. More specifically, we will focus on the ways in which self-management experiments have contributed to the democratisation of work by analysing three of its aspects: the transformation and politicisation of the production process, the cooperation between workers and non-workers and the relationship with institutional political activity. Let’s start with the example of Vio.Me, an industrial company that has been taken over by its workers and is now self-managed.6 The workers of Vio.Me, a building materials factory in Thessaloniki, Greece, had not been paid since May 2011, before the owner finally abandoned the factory. The workers’ general assembly then decided to occupy it and run it under the workers’ control, based on a system of direct democracy. After a year-long struggle, they restarted production in February 2013, following a widely supported campaign of social mobilisation. Gradually, the factory abandoned the production of building materials and chemical processing and now produces only certified organic household products. Despite the economic and political difficulties, the workers’ assembly meets every day. It also meets every week for strategic decisions, and every other week together with the association “Solidaires de Vio.Me”, which plays an important role in the production process, in the sale of products but also in the national and international promotion of worker’s control and self-management. Let us first examine the relationship of its workers to institutional politics. The workers who participated in the takeover of the factory were not initially political activists, nor did they have any previous experience of self-management. For the Vio.Me workers, the “priority was to keep the factory running, the question of self-management came afterwards”.7 The idea came first from the fact that during the mobilisation—in difficult conditions, with the former management no longer paying wages and having formally filed for bankruptcy and issued eviction orders— the political parties and trade unions, to which the workers first turned, only offered them legal support to negotiate better redundancy payments, and were not interested in the prospect of taking over the factory and 6 See the Vio.Me website, URL: http://www.viome.org/p/francais.html. 7 Interview with Makis Anagnostou, Vio.Me worker, in April 2016. For an account of

this visit to Vio.Me in April 2016, see Cukier, Alexis. 2016. Occupy, Resist, Produce. Meeting with Vio.Me, Le temps des Lilas [Online], www.lilas.org.

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the production. It was only after meeting the small activist circle of Alpha Kapa, which promoted self-management but had no experience in production, and then the workers of the self-managed Zanon factory who came from Argentina to encourage and advise them, that the workers fully embarked on the self-management adventure. As in many other cases in Greece,8 it was not because of a prior political commitment but rather a favourable militant environment, not because of the help of trade union or political organisations but rather their disinterest and not because of a clear initial project but rather meetings with self-management activists, that the workers eventually decided to take over the factory. With regard to the transformation of the work process, it should be noted first of all that, during the planning of a self-management project, “The movement had to face the constant machinations of the ex-employers, the empty promises of the authorities, the lack of funds to finance production, the lack of demand for the factory’s products in an economy in deep recession, and an endless bureaucratic labyrinth.”.9 Moreover, those workers who refused redundancy payments were mainly manual, unskilled workers which meant that restarting production was constrained by a low skilled workforce which could only exploit half of the resources available in the factory. The urgent need to reappropriate know-how and tools, particularly in the factory’s chemical laboratory, thus led them to call on the skills available among supporters of the project in the city, and particularly on two young chemical engineers who agreed to do their university internship there. But the most remarkable fact was the decision to radically switch production from building materials to household products. This was primarily to deal with the hostility of some of the former clients, who supported the previous boss and took their business elsewhere. But this transformation was also motivated by the demand of the volunteer network in Thessaloniki and Athens and explains why the production consists mainly of organic household products, which are sold at low prices. But this is also why members of the “Solidarity with Vio.Me” collective regularly take part in discussions on improving product quality as well as in the project, for example, to replace 8 See Kioupkiolis, Alexandros and Karyotis, Theodoros. 2015. Self-managing the Commons in contemporary Greece. In An Alternative Labour History. Worker Control and Workplace Democracy, ed. Dario Azzelini. London: Zed Books. 9 Karyotis, Theodoros. 2014. Vio.Me: Worker’s Control in the Greek Crisis. Roarmag, 1st May 2014.

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the Greek or European “organic” label certification schemes by another certification, which is itself self-managed. So here again, the challenge of reappropriating know-how and transforming the production process does not primarily involve the systematic and planned implementation of democratic work, but rather a change in the division of labour, the distribution of functions within the company, but also and above all between workers and non-workers. Lastly, Vio.Me’s transition to self-management set in motion a formidable process of decompartmentalisation of the company and cooperation between workers, members of the solidarity network and, more broadly, consumers and citizens, particularly at local level, as shown, for example, by the recent opening of a sales outlet in Peristeri, in the suburbs of Athens. Consider two recent initiatives by Vio.Me workers. In order to face the threat of State liquidation, eviction and electricity cuts and to secure the support of the local community, the workers and the association decided to multiply activities that were clearly of general interest. For example, they decided to open a self-managed occupational health clinic several afternoons a week and opened up the factory to a network of solidarity with migrants and refugees. In 2016, Vio.Me was the main storage site for the medicines and food collected by the popular solidarity campaign for migrants in the city. In this way, the slogan of the initial mobilisation for the takeover of the company: “Occupy, resist, produce” now also means a vision of the company as a common place, open to all and oriented towards social needs. So much so that the factory is now a focus not only for other self-management projects (e.g., a project for an organic bakery) but also for various militant activities in Thessaloniki. Thus, in 2016, the workers and members of the “Solidarity with Vio.Me” collective were involved in supporting other self-management projects in Greece, such as the takeover of the Roben carpentry factory in Véria, and in organising the second “Euro-Mediterranean meeting of the workers’ economy”,10 thus contributing to the ongoing construction of a self-management movement on a global level. Analysing the example of Vio.Me brings to light three hypotheses. Firstly, in terms of the political scope of self-management, the experience of Vio.Me suggests that self-management tends to do away with the 10 See Borrits Benoît and Neuville, Richard. 2016. Succès de la IIe rencontre euroméditerranéenne de l’« Économie des travailleur-se-s» à Thessalonique. Association Autogestion [Online], 24 November 2016.

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separation between the economic function (the production of goods and services) and the political function (the production of institutions and social relations) of work. Secondly, concerning the transformation of the production process, it could be argued that questioning the democratic ends and means of production takes precedence over the democratisation of work organisation. And thirdly, concerning the democratic cooperation between workers, solidarity partners and consumers, it seems that the intermediate level of the solidarity network plays a crucial role in the democratisation process of market relations and of the whole production circuit. The study of other recent self-management experiences reinforces these hypotheses, while highlighting the obstacles to these democratisation processes within and outside the workplace.

8.1

Reorganising Work and Its Purposes?

The study of various recent self-management experiments illustrates how democratically reorganising work most often tends to take a back seat to the issue of continuing the work process. What counts first and foremost is to reappropriate the production tools and know-how, that is to “run the shop” given that the bosses are no longer there.11 This was the case, for example, in the self-management experience of the watchmaking workers at LIP in Besançon in the early 1970s. Faced with the takeover of the company by a multinational which wanted to relocate the factory, dismantle the site and lay off the 1,200 employees, the Workers’ Action Committee decided to take over the stock of watches and to continue production and marketing themselves. However, as the LIP activist Monique Piton showed in her account of events, at the heart of this collective emancipation was the autonomy of the employees in relation to their work: Tasks were no longer monotonous or meaningless. Without a boss and without a manager, the workers discovered that it was by dividing up the tasks and dividing up the knowledge of the workers that bosses make themselves indispensable (…) We dreamt of a social, economic, and political

11 See also, for example, Borrits, Benoît. 2018. Philips-EGP Dreux sous contrôle ouvrier. In Autogestion. L’encyclopédie internationale. op. cit.

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system that would give back control of their work to everyone as well as providing fulfilment.12

Thus, the democratic interest of the workers was not primarily directed towards the reorganisation of work, nor even that of equal wages, although the latter was discussed but not finally accepted.13 In the case of LIP, the experience of individual and collective autonomy was rather linked to the role of the Action Committee in the company and to the increasing, cooperation, during mobilisations, with other companies and with the local population. In examples of self-management, the fact that questions of work organisation and production process transformations are rare cannot be explained exclusively by disinterest within workers’ movements. It is also linked to very real problems. Thus, among the obstacles encountered by rescued companies under self-management, a large number concern precisely the difficulties involved in democratically reorganising their activity. In an article on the fabricas tomadas (rescued companies) in Argentina, Marina Kabat points out that the vast majority of workers in selfmanagement face similar problems from the very outset: technological obsolescence, debts and difficulties in commercial relations, and sometimes the legal obligation to compensate the owners. These factors explain, among other things, the hyper-competitive behaviour of some of the rescued companies, alongside certain forms of worker exploitation or self-exploitation as well as a high level of dependence on the clientele, which is often in a position of strength in the early stages of self-management experimentation. These companies, which had been abandoned or deemed insufficiently profitable by their owners, are also often faced with difficulties related to the lack of capital to invest in new tools or infrastructure. It is also not uncommon for the owners to have deliberately emptied the sites of their equipment before going bankrupt and abandoning the factory. So, the first task of a self-managed company is often to restart and patch up the existing tools, under difficult material conditions, and sometimes to outsource the most technical part of their work process, thus jeopardising the possibilities of a reappropriation 12 Piton, Monique. 2015. C’est possible ! Une femme au cœur de la lutte de Lip (1973– 1974). Paris: L’échappée, 73. 13 Ibid, 115.

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of the whole production chain.14 Although the workers most often do manage to prolong the activity and there are always forms of collective decision-making, the conditions are rarely met for this seizure of power to be accompanied by democratic transformations in the organisation of the company’s activity. When democratic innovations do occur, they are more about the procedures for controlling activities than about their execution. Let us examine in more detail the example of the self-managed ceramic factory Fabrica sin Patron (Fasinpat), formerly Zanon.15 Three dynamics involved in democratising control of the activity can be distinguished. On the one hand, the workers set up problem-solving committees, in this case a health and safety committee (which indeed led to a reduction in work accidents), a commercial committee (whose main objective was to pay the unpaid wages of the previous period) and a communication committee, linked to the issues of publicising the conflict. On the other hand, they set up regular supervision procedures: each sector elected a coordinator in charge of monitoring production, including the compilation of daily problems, and all the coordinators formed a management council, which was also in charge of production planning, and which itself elected a general coordinator. The coordinators could be dismissed by the general assembly, which took place every month and was made up of all the workers. Finally, a rotation of tasks, and in particular of coordination posts, was also set up in order for all the workers to successively take on managerial responsibilities. However, even in this example of democratically successful decisionmaking and managerial architecture, what appears is that decisions are not so much about ways of working as about resolving disagreements between workers. In this respect, two types of situations stand out. On the one hand, when the reorganisation of the work process takes place too quickly, it often takes place on a confrontational basis. This was the case with the rescued Brukman clothing company in Argentina, described

14 See, on the metal company Diogenes Taborda and Kabat, Marina. 2011. Argentinian Worker’s Taken Factories. Trajectories of Worker’s Control Under the Economic Crisis. In Ours to master and to own. op. cit. 373. 15 On this subject, see Ibid, 379 ff.

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by the sociologist Maxime Quijoux as a case of “conflictual recomposition”.16 The tensions here were between workers from different sectors of activity, notably “jackets” and “trousers”, and were linked to the recurrent difficulties faced by other rescued companies: e.g., lack of personnel, customers to be won back, capital deficit. In other cases, reviving the production process was simpler and less conflictual but then, it was often at the price of retaining the previous employers’ (“scientific”) organisation of work, as in the case of the Nueva Esperanza, a balloon factory organised on a Fordist model. This more consensual revival can be explained here mainly by the simplification and segmentation of tasks carried out prior to the self-management takeover, the constraints of which led to the “survival of hierarchical arrangements, such as the presence of the former head of personnel, [which] allowed a rapid resumption of sustained activity”.17 However, maintaining the technical organisation of work and the authority of the personnel manager was accompanied by a renewal of individual discipline, as in the days of employer power.18 Organisational inventiveness, renegotiations and transformations of the production process do of course take place in self-managed companies, but this happens mostly within a framework set up by the previous boss and, as such, are sources of conflict between the workers themselves, as well as between their productive practices and their democratic demands.

8.2

Workers and Non-Workers: A New Social Relationship

The relationship between workers and non-workers (i.e. customers, neighbouring communities and trade union and political forces involved) is also heavily impacted by the industrial and commercial context and by the market situation of the companies under self-management. For example, the LIP experiment was stopped by the French government under President Giscard d’Estaing, which “no longer needed to send in the CRS, but only needed to cause the loss of a gigantic market: that of the dashboard clocks for all Renault vehicles; and the ‘supply strike’,

16 Quijoux, Maxime. 2011. Néoliberalisme et autogestion. L’expérience argentine. Paris: IHEAL. 17 Ibid, 202. 18 See Ibid, 213.

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in particular of quartz, on which the production of watches absolutely depended”.19 However, the main response to this type of problem linked to market dependence and State intervention is the progressive replacement of both the market regulated commercial circuit and the State administration by a network of non-working partners. This is the case, for example, of the self-management network “Fuori Mercato” (“Markets Out!”) in Italy, a production and distribution circuit built in conjunction with the network of social centres in Italy.20 It brings together a factory reclaimed by its employees in Lombardy (Rimaflow), occupied land in Tuscany (Genuino Clandestino) and small producers and migrant collectives in Calabria (SOS Rosarno), as well as mutual companies and cooperatives bringing together students, farmers and migrants in the Apulia region. The aim of the network is to meet basic individual and collective needs, from the point of view of as regards health and the environment, but also of workers’ rights. The aim is to create an “alternative to the market”, replacing it with links of solidarity and forms of democratic cooperation between workers and consumers. The principal mechanism used is the creation of self-managed channels within this network: from production (mutualisation of know-how) to distribution (socialisation of transport) to development and common use (with, in particular, “popular canteens” for food products). Some of the projects in this network also propose places of cooperation conceived as a means of taking certain productive activities out of the market. Let’s take a closer look at a larger self-management project, the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC),21 a network of self-management-inspired cooperatives initiated in 2010 with the ambitious goal of enabling its members, be they workers or consumers, to gradually do without the State, the banks and the euro. In 2015, the CIC had a budget of around half a million euros and brought together the contributions of more than 3,000 people, 70 of whom were paid full time to organise the network. Since 2010, the project has funded or facilitated the creation of, for example, two cooperative social housing units, a school with alternative teaching methods, two machine-tool workshops for common

19 Collectif. Autogestion. L’Encyclopédie internationale. op. cit. 1620. 20 See the Fuori Mercato website: www.fuorimercato.com 21 See in particular Daniel, Emmanuel. 2016. Rébellion et désobéissance. La coopérative intégrale catalane, Paris: Ateliers Henry Dougier.

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use, a central distribution hub for organic food distribution throughout Catalonia, health and research projects and a self-managed interest-free bank. It has also put into circulation an alternative currency, the Ecoop,22 which is at the heart of the network’s operations. The CIC manifesto to which all the collectives involved must adhere sets as its aims “control of the land and the means of production as a common good” and the guarantee of “all our vital needs (food, health, housing, education, energy, transport, etc.), so that they are covered by a genuinely public system, built by ourselves, based on self-management”.23 So the aim of the CIC is to initiate experiments in self-managed enterprises, but also to replace State-controlled public services by creating “cooperative public services” controlled by the workers and users. The CIC is organised around eco-networks, i.e. regional collectives that exchange services linked to their production, in particular by means of their social currency.24 Each eco-network—about forty in Catalonia— has its own alternative currency, with its own specific rules (e.g. criteria for joining the network, authorised debit, convertibility into euros, etc. At first sight, the use of these currencies seems to be centred on the needs of consumers rather than workers; however, with the exception of rare occasions (the “fairs”) when euros can be exchanged for these social currencies, these currencies are normally only used when a service or a good is produced. It is therefore the cooperators who are actually at the centre of the monetary exchange and this is visible on the online exchange platforms, where network members can see when alternative currencies are used during transactions of goods and services. However, although money is organised around the producer, the exchanges are driven by consumption: each eco-network has a “rebost”, a form of social grocery shop where members meet to collect products ordered from producers in the area, as is the case in France for the Amap.25 Although in this network

22 See ibid, Chapter 4 on the monetary alternatives. 23 “Call for an international meeting for the creation of the Bloc for the Integral

Revolution”, http://integrarevolucio.net/. 24 On “social currencies”, see Gallo Lassere, Davide. 2015. Argent et capitalisme. De Marx aux monnaies du commun. PhD thesis in philosophy under the direction of Stéphane Haber, University of Paris Nanterre. 25 AMAP (Association pour le Maintien d’une Agriculture Paysanne), are French associations for the maintenance of a peasant agriculture in France dedicates to the organisation of cooperation between (mostly urban) consumers and farmer groups.

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the term “prosumers” has replaced “consumers” and/or “producers”, it is worth noting that, depending on the projects and tools, control of the economic circuit is always either at the production or consumption end. In fact, there are two types of structures in this network, the “cooperative public services” on the one hand and the “autonomous projects of collective interest (PAIC in the original French)” on the other. The former—mainly health and education services—are largely funded by the CIC: each year, the network assembly defines the budgets allocated to each commission in charge of a cooperative public service, which must then report back to the assembly. The democratisation process is incarnated by this assembly—made up, by right, of all network members, workers and consumers—and the control it has over the work done in these public services. In contrast, the workers of the PAICs, who generally do not receive financial support from the CIC, are autonomous in their work but they can benefit from the services offered by the network as a whole (e.g., housing cooperatives, legal commission, social currency, etc.). In the case of the PAICs, democratisation of work consists in the use by workers of collective services enabling them to be autonomous in relation to the market and the State. This distinction is a good illustration of the two options available within this type of self-management network: one based on decentralised decision-making outside the workplace by means of an assembly associating workers and consumer-activists, or, one based on more centralised control of the production process by means of services that consumer-activists provide for producers to facilitate their autonomy. Whichever model is adopted, the demand for autonomy from the capitalist market and the State thus implies a refusal to disembed politics from economic practices. Let’s finally consider this other aspect of selfmanagement practices in production: how does this re-embedding relate to other forms of political activity, notably trade unions and parties?

8.3 Political Issues of Self-Management Production Although there are significant differences between countries, sectors and activist traditions, the relationship of self-managed companies to the State, trade unions and political parties is, to say the least, a distant one. On the one hand, a large number of self-management experiments are built around a desire for total autonomy from any other institution. This

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is the case, for example, of some of the self-managed social clinics in Greece,26 which have been set up from 2011 onwards in response to the humanitarian crisis and the malfunctioning of the public hospital system due to the “structural reforms” imposed by the European institutions and applied by all Greek governments since the first memorandum in May 2010. These clinics provide free care and medicines given by volunteers, decisions are taken by the General Assembly, and in the main, they do not accept public subsidies or donations from private companies. Indeed, most of this network’s members, whether or not they are very critical of the Greek government, wish to maintain as much autonomy as possible from the State and other institutional structures (NGOs, church associations, parties and unions). While this is not the case for all medical and social clinics in Greece—nor for the so-called “self-managed” refugee centres, such as City Plaza in Athens—which sometimes accept logistical support from associations close to the government’s majority party, the question of autonomy from other political organisations is at least an important factor. On the other hand, overall, the question of self-management and workers’ control is not supported by the main trade unions in the labour movement, be it in Europe or the rest of the world. In this respect, we can distinguish between two different types of political contexts, based on Anabel Rieiro’s comparison of Argentina and Uruguay over the last twenty years: In Argentina, the phenomenon of recovered enterprises appeared in a context where (i) there was a strong confrontation with classical trade unions; (ii) there was a rush of new collective subjects such as neighbourhood assemblies, new picket unions and so on, that employed new action resources and (iii) there was a political-institutional breakdown, summed up by the slogan “They must all go”. Conversely, in Uruguay there was a context in which (a) each endeavour was seen as a singular process, as becoming part of a union; (ii) the crisis was approached from the point of view of historically collective subjects within a social framework in which no large renovations in the conformation of social networks took place and (iii) there was a socioeconomic crisis that did not spill into

26 See on this subject Collectif. 2015. Les dispensaires autogérés grecs. Paris: Syllepse, and the website of the association Solidarité France-Grèce pour la Santé: solidaritefrancogrecque.wordpress.com/

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the political-institutional place, that plane remained socially stable and legitimate.27 In the very specific Argentinean context, however, there are different configurations: some self-managed companies are clearly opposed to the trade unions, whereas others, while remaining autonomous, are grouped in networks (such as the Movimento Nacional de Empresas Recuperada or the Movimento Nacional de Fabricas Recuperadas por los Trabajadores) and cooperate regularly with the trade unions. In Uruguay, on the other hand, the main grouping of self-managing cooperatives (Mesa de Coordinacion de Empresas Recuperadas) is part of the industrial sector of the PIT-CNT union. The relationship with political parties also appears ambivalent in both cases. On the one hand, most party organisations take little or no interest in the question of self-management but, on the other hand, some extreme left-wing groups play a significant role at least in the walkout phase of company rescue processes. For example, among the first supporters of the Brukman workers in the struggle to save their jobs were militants of the Workers’ Party for Socialism (PTS), who gave moral and logistical support to the workers in a conflict situation for which they were not prepared. It is also these political party members, mostly young students, who promote the self-management culture among the workers. However, even it is the case, as Maxime Quijoux believes, that “although the political parties, particularly the PTS, sought a certain political reward in this struggle, it is difficult to deny its influence in terms of factory selfmanagement, the politicisation of certain workers, and even its social function with certain employees in difficulty”.28 It should be noted, however, that this influence, no more in Argentina than elsewhere, does not usually consist in initiating these self-management experiences, but rather in training and supporting the workers. In other cases, however, experiments in self-management emerged and evolved in a context of social conflict or political change in such a way that self-management became a direct issue in the political struggle. This was the case of the self-management experiment in Ben Bellah’s Algeria in the early 1960s. It should be remembered that from 1962 onwards, 27 Anabel Rieiro, 2015. Collective Self-management and Social classes: The Case of Enterprises Recovered by Their Workers in Uruguay. In An Alternative Labour History, op. cit, p. 287. 28 Maxime Quijoux, Néolibéralisme et autogestion, op. cit., p. 45.

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thousands of Algerian farms and industrial enterprises, left vacant by their European owners, were self-managed, and that this de facto situation was institutionally recognised by the decrees of March 1963.29 In this context, a conflictual political debate opened concerning the organisation of a congress of workers in the self-managed, agricultural sector in Algeria. Who should organise this congress? The FLN, the Bureau national d’animation du secteur socialiste, the Union générale des travailleurs algériens or the Ministry of Agriculture and Agrarian Reform? The question behind that was: how could the process of institutionalising self-management be articulated with the parties, the government and the trade union? Those who supported the development of self-management in Algeria criticised the risk of bureaucratisation and therefore opted for the creation of a new trade union-type organisation that would be autonomous from State institutions. This project was intended to bring together “agricultural workers and poor peasants with a view to popular agrarian reform”, rather than merging into an “absurd organic union of ‘land workers’, technical managers and employees of the Ministry of Agriculture”.30 Despite the failure to create a union based on autonomous self-management, between 1962 and 1965 thousands of agricultural and industrial companies did function along the lines of “direct workers’ management”.31 This important episode in the world history of self-management illustrates the three main problems examined in this chapter: i.e. the relationship to political institutions, the transformation of the division of labour, and co-operation with the wider civil society.32 It was these questions that the proponents of a self-management union sought to answer at the 1964 workers’ congress in Algeria. And despite major differences in the political context, solidarity associations or informal collectives in support of self-managed companies are attempting to tackle the same problem today.

29 See in this regard Harbi, Mohammad. 2018. La démocratie autogestionnaire algérienne à l’épreuve. In Autogestion. L’encyclopédie internationale. op. cit. 30 “Document n°1. A propos du congrès des travailleurs de la terre”, in Ibid, 47. 31 See Raptis, Michel. 2018. Une démocratie autogestionnaire en gestation, in Ibid,

especially 60–61. 32 See Ibid, 62.

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8.4 Towards New Institutions: “Work Councils”, “Economic Councils” and Producer Autonomy The very existence of work collectives and companies under selfmanagement—directed by their workers—managing despite the difficulties to reconcile production and democratisation of power in the workplace, goes towards legitimating a new company status assigning all political power to the workers. Democratic work would thus require the creation of an alternative to a board of directors—managed by the shareholders (SARL, the French equivalent of a private limited company) or by cooperative members, be they workers or not (SCOP, a French form of cooperative company)—which transfers exclusive political control of the company to the workers. This body would be called the “works council”. As Karl Korsch has also shown, this works council, made up of all the workers, should have the sovereign right to decide on the conditions of production and the organisation of work. It would be the bedrock of democratic work and the central body for the expression of workers’ new democratic rights. However, the specific economic and political obstacles faced by selfmanagement experiments in production, immediately give rise to two problems. Firstly, how can decision-making and action in the economic sector overall be organised in such a way that self-managed companies can withstand market and State pressures? And secondly, how should we act towards State institutions in order for these experiments to flourish and to remove the different political obstacles opposed to them? With regard to the first of these problems, a distinction can be made between two types of institutional proposals. The first is to internalise democratic cooperation between workers and consumers in the company, in order for this cooperation to replace the mediation of economic exchange and the market. This is the path followed, for example, by the collective work Sortir de l’entreprise capitaliste, which proposes to move towards citizen control of companies, in particular by associating consumers (i.e. the recipients of work) and, more generally, civil society with work councils or trade union struggles. This proposition, however, does not solve the aforementioned problem concerning the relations between, on the one hand, the company and the overall economic sector and, on the other, with the State. For example, as the authors note, such measures would require “public authorities to set up credible information systems on corporate behaviour so that consumers and trade unions could

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increase pressure on large multinational companies”.33 But in which institution would this problem of replacing competition between companies with non-market forms of cooperation be democratically discussed and resolved? The prospect of an association between workers and consumers within what has been called the works council would solve neither the problem of competition nor that of the heteronomy of labour activity. With closer reference to self-management experiences, we propose to create a “users’ mediation right” in a body which is distinct from the works council.34 The idea is the same in that it’s a question of breaking down market relations, in this case by creating a permanent right for users to intervene in company activity whereby they could mediate between the decisions of the workers and the needs of the whole population. This option would require a new body—the users’ “supervisory board”— which would amalgamate, but not replace, existing forms of supervision in public administrations and users’ cooperatives. Nevertheless, however interesting such a solution may be, it continues to consider the democratisation of companies on a case-by-case basis, and would be insufficient, for example, to reduce the hold of the market on production objectives and to control the latter by means of democratic planning. There is, however, another type of proposal in the tradition of industrial democracy which is better suited to respond to the difficulties and contradictions examined in this chapter, i.e. inter-firm democratic assemblies taking decisions at the level of the economic branch or sector. This was the idea put forward by the Webbs in Industrial democracy who distinguished between the local (responsible for technical expertise and working conditions), sectorial (responsible for relations with public policy) and national (responsible for labour law in particular) levels of industrial democracy. At the sectorial level, the “union of professional associations”35 should be able to take charge of adjusting production objectives at branch level with decisions at the national level. But it is above all Korsch’s proposals that are relevant here, insofar as their 33 Bachet, Daniel, Flocco, Gaëtan, Kervella, Bernard and Sweeney, Morgan. 2007.

Sortir de l’entreprise capitaliste. Paris: Le Croquant, 201. 34 See for example Borrits, Benoît. 2015. Coopérative Contre Capitalisme. Paris: Syllepse, and Coutrot, Thomas. 2018. Libérer le travail. Pourquoi la gauche s’en moque et pourquoi cela doit changer. Paris: Seuil. 35 Webb, Beatrice and Webb, Sidney. 1897. Industrial Democracy, 2 vol. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Green and Company, esp. 826.

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entire institutional architecture tends to articulate “bottom-up” and “topdown” forms of economic socialisation. In the section of what he calls “commodity chain unions” (rather than corporate unions), he talks of (as we have seen) creating an intermediate level of decision-making between the company councils and the overall political community. This type of proposal is highly topical today, at a time when, alongside a rise in workers’ democratic expectations, we are witnessing an acceleration of industrial dysfunctions linked to inter-capitalist competition and to the importance taken by financial criteria in economic planning. We propose calling this type of democratic body “economic councils ” (at the level of an economic sector) which would have decision-making control over the coordinated production objectives in each sector. So, for example, representatives of the food sector (producers, distributors, traders, etc.), elected by their work councils, could decide together on the coordinated objectives of production, distribution and marketing of food products. The economic councils would thus complement the work councils by constituting a first level of decision-making outside the company, at the level of the industrial or service branch. Several objections to this institutional proposal of the “economic council” should be anticipated. The first concerns whether the various sectors in such economic councils would have equal representation. In the agri-food sector, for example, would the distributors not be in a position to impose their conditions on the traders and producers, because of their numbers or the overall economic organisation of the sector? This problem could be addressed, for example, by providing for institutional recognition of trades in these economic councils (by ensuring, for example, that companies have a representative for each trade of the workers who make up the company). But above all, this type of objection—which may also concern the number of workers in each company, or more generally the political consequence of the unequal economic balance of power between the productive entities—indicates that the institutional duo of works council/economic council cannot solve all the problems of an economic democracy, any more than it can constitute the entirety of a democratic mode of production. A similar answer could be given to the objection that at this level of the branch—and in order to replace market coordination by democratic coordination—it would be a priori unacceptable that users and consumers could not participate in the decision. On the one hand, it will be seen

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that this user participation could have a role to play at a higher institutional level in what we will call social councils bringing together all the “worker-citizens” to decide on everything that concerns the means and the more general ends of work. Provided that these decisions take precedence over the more circumscribed prerogatives of work councils and economic councils, this objection seems irrelevant. But on the other hand, it should be noted that the idea of user participation in these economic councils at branch level poses a problem of democratic legitimacy, i.e. given that these branches are not, and could not become systematically (even in the desirable hypothesis of short channels going mainstream) attached to a region, which of the users would have the legitimacy to participate in these economic councils and how would this participation be institutionally recognised? Apart from the fact that it is necessary to go beyond the framework of the company to plan production in society as a whole, the proposal of a “supervisory board” (whether or not it is optional and subordinate to the company board) for each company encounters the same problem: is it acceptable for the democratic participation of users in decision-making to be based solely on the mobilisation resources of this or that group of users? It’s unacceptable to discuss possible democratic work institutions with the categories inherited from “liberal democracy”, i.e. a democracy whose core tenet includes inequality among citizens engaged in democratic activity. This is why the wider political problem faced by self-management experiences (i.e. their relationship to global political institutions that would allow their development), can only be solved by means of a third institutional level, that of social councils which, at various regional levels, would replace the institutions of liberal democracy in terms of labour control. This proposal is the subject of the next and final chapter of the book, which examines the councilist experiences that, despite their great diversity, share the same objective of replacing, partially or totally, the liberal parliamentary institutions with new institutions in which all “worker-citizens” could participate.

CHAPTER 9

Workers’ Councils and Council Democracy: Towards a Democratic Transformation of the Company, the State and the Municipality

What we understand by “workers’ councils” are democratic experiments in production which aim to extend workers’ control in the workplace to power in the political sphere. Rather than a particular organisational form or ideology, we are referring to a type of experimentation linked to a specific democratic demand,1 i.e. that workers’ councils take part in strategic workplace decision-making and, by extension, in society at large. The prospect of a “councilist democracy”, which would make workers’ councils (or regional councils composed of representatives of various workers’ councils), the main pillar of political government, is thus opposed to the liberal conception of democracy which separates the economic and political fields from the democratic exercise of power: [...] councilist democracy, on the contrary, extends collective selfdetermination far beyond the economic sphere. More than that, it includes all social labour as well as the social division of labour, and thus challenges the separation between economic and social policy, and between the public and private spheres, as well as the current set up of reproductive labour

1 See Demirovic, Alexis. 2015. Council Democracy, or the End of the Political. In An Alternative Labour History, ed Dario Azzelini. London: Zed Books.

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and decision-making on social issues. The aim of this opposition is the democratic reorganisation of the whole of social life and not just for the benefit of specific workplaces or regions.2

Councilist writings—for example those of Rosa Luxemburg, Max Adler, Karl Korsch, Antonio Gramsci, Anton Pannekoek or Ernest Mandel3 —share the goal of replacing the State with workers’ councils as the main institution of democracy. It is well-known that the workers’ collectives which called themselves “workers’ councils” never actually achieved this end. However, throughout the twentieth century, different socialist-communist experiments were devised as governmental bodies inside and outside the workplace. They include notably: – the Soviets in Russia in 1917 and in the post-revolutionary period, – the Betriebsräte in Germany and the consigli di fabbrica in Italy between 1918 and 1920, – the workers’ councils and then the Basic Organisations of Associated Labour (OBTA, from the 1970s onwards) set up in Yugoslavia by the Tito government from 1949 onwards, – the councilist experiments in Spain in the context of the social revolution which began in 1936 or in Hungary in 1956, in Chile between 1970 and 1972, in Portugal in 1974 and in Poland in 1980–1981, – more recently the experiments in linking forms of workers’ control in the workplace and local councils in Venezuela and Bolivia. Be it a question of workers’ councils setting themselves up as political counter-power—or as social or local councils with direct democratic decision-making rights—this is what distinguishes the “councilist form” from cooperatives and self-managed enterprises. The aim is not to limit 2 Ibid., 34. 3 On Rosa Luxemburg’s scattered texts on workers’ councils, see Sevault, Eric and

Olivera, Philippe. 2016. Révolution et démocratie. Actualité de Rosa Luxembourg. Agone, n°59, 2016. Of other authors, except Korsch (see chapter 4), see in particular: Adler, Max. 1981. Demokratie und Rätesystem. In Ausgewählte Schrifte. Vienna: Osterreischicher Bundesverlag; Gramsci, Antonio. 1920. Il consiglio di fabbrica. Ordine Nuovo 4, 5 June 1920; Pannekoek, Anton. 2020. Workers’ Councils. Stirling: AK Press; Mandel, Ernest. 1969. The Debate on Worker’s Control. International Socialist Review 30 (3), May–June.

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the power of the shareholders (or the State) in the workplace, nor to try to suppress it, but to replace the political institutions of liberal democracy (or the socialist State) regarding work and society as a whole. In the search for a democratic labour system, each of the councilist experiments reveals important insights into the potential dialectic between labour collectives, the State, trade unions and political parties.4 However, since none of these attempts ever managed to test the feasibility of a councilism-based government, this chapter will examine these experiments, often short-lived and always incomplete, with a view to learning further lessons about how to make progress towards democratic work.

9.1 Soviets, Consigli di Fabbrica, Control Obrero, Cordones Industriales … from Workers’ Control to political counter-power Let’s look at some examples of workers’ councils, against the backdrop of articulating workers’ control with taking power beyond the workplace. Among the various “councilist” experiments during the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Petrograd workers’ councils (or “Soviets”) were particularly significant and in the wake of the February Revolution, much effort was put into creating them. The workers were especially concerned about continuing production rather than transforming these councils into revolutionary instruments: “The initiatives for workers’ control of production were first and foremost attempts by factory committees to stem the tide of industrial chaos”.5 For example, in the Thornton textile mill, a strike committee was transformed into a workers’ council—elected on 26 February 1917, the day before the Petrograd Soviet was created— composed of workers and soldiers who had taken part in the insurrection. In other factories, the workers were content to choose their delegates to the city Soviet, and for this purpose formed informal committees in their workplaces. The immediate demands of most of the councils included, 4 See for example on this subject Maurice Brinton. 1973. Les bolcheviks et le contrôle ouvrier 1917–1921. L’État et la contre-révolution. Autogestion et socialisme, 24–25. On the possible role of a “revolutionary party” in this councilist perspective, see “Correspondence Castoriadis - Pannekoek (1953–1954)” on the website Workers’ control: www.wor kerscontrol.net. 5 Smith, Stephen A. 1985. Red Petrograd. Revolution in the Factories 1917–1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 146.

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for example, the demand for an 8-hour working day, a rise in wages and an improvement in working conditions, already mentioned by most of the motions adopted during the numerous workers’ meetings in March.6 However, in some companies, such as the Skorokhod shoe factory and the Petrograd arms factory, the workers began to demand official recognition of their workers’ council and the right to control hiring and firing.7 As was the case in Petrograd, on the eve of the October Revolution—and despite the employers’ counter-offensive following the Bolsheviks’ defeat in July 1917—workers’ councils did exist in many factories across Russia. These councils also supported the demand for workers’ control and positioned themselves, more or less openly, in opposition to the unstable government following the abdication of the tsar. Regarding Bolshevik strategy and even before the October Revolution, the problem for the Petrograd workers was how to move from workers’ control to political counter-power. On the one hand, Lenin explicitly supported workers’ councils and was in favour of workers controlling their own factories, so much so that, for example, the influence of the Bolsheviks at the first conference of workers’ councils in Petrograd (568 delegates from 236 factories, employing more than 300,000 workers) was at its height. The second conference also declared itself in favour of workers’ control in every factory: the “duty of the factory councils” is to “establish internal regulations, organise working time and to decide on wages, recruitment, dismissal and reassignment of workers, etc.”8 However, how could workers in control of their factories extend this control to exercising power over society as a whole? On the other hand, Lenin, despite backing workers’ councils, also clearly supported separating economic and political strategy. The opinion of most Bolsheviks was that the demands of the workers’ councils could not be met without toppling the Russian State and, as such, the workers’ councils in the economic sphere had to be entirely subordinated to the revolutionary strategy in the political sphere. Not everyone shared this position, however. For example, Trotsky believed that the insurrection should be initiated by the Soviets 6 See Ferro, Marc. 1980. Des soviets au communisme bureaucratique. Paris: Gallimard/Julliard, 115. 7 See in particular Avrich, Paul H. 1963. Russian Factory Committees in 1917. Jahrbücher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, 161–162 and Cliff, Tony. 1976. All Power to the Soviets. Lenin 1914–1917. London: Pluto Press, 223. 8 Ibid., 226.

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rather than the Party, arguing his position on the basis of reports from the Petrograd Bolshevik Council that such an initiative would increase workers’ participation in the revolutionary process.9 Despite this strategic disagreement, the workers’ councils remained active in the wake of the October Revolution. On 17 October 1917, 226 delegates representing 96 factories and workshops in Petrograd decided to form a “Soviet of Workers’ Deputies” and elected a provisional executive committee of 22 members. Although it never declared its objective was to help topple the Russian State, this Soviet—whose main activity initially was to organise the strike—took on the role of political representation for the workers.10 And subsequently, as the revolutionary movement extended to Moscow, it did indeed play a major role. However, at the second Russian-wide Congress of Workers’ Councils in October 1917, it was the Bolsheviks and their strategy of subordinating the workers’ councils to the Party that were in the majority. The Bolsheviks, who entered the Central Council in large numbers, and who in fact controlled it, seem to have deliberately undermined its role as the centre of the workers’ economic struggle. They used it mainly for the political purpose of strengthening their campaign to win over the trade unions to their cause.11

Workers’ councils in Russia may have underestimated the importance of playing a part in the overthrow of the State. They didn’t possess the means or political plan to negotiate this shift from economic control to political power and, therefore, mostly accepted the Bolshevik Party’s strategy.12 What followed is well-known: the defence of a top-down Party, mostly justified by the military situation, the repression of the Kronstadt workers’ revolt, abandoning dual power in favour of a period of “state capitalism”, etc. As Dario Azzelini and Immanuel Ness have pointed out, “In fact, the Bolshevik leadership, from the moment it took power in 1917, entered 9 See ibid., 355. 10 Anweiler, Oskar. 1972. Les Soviets en Russie, 1905–1921. Paris: Gallimard, 43–47. 11 Browder, Robert P. and Kerensky, Aleksandr N. 1961. The Russian Provisional

Government, 1917. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 726. 12 See on this subject in particular Rachleff, Peter. 1974. Soviets and Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution. Radical America, 6.

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upon a collision course with the workers’ self-management initiatives…It did not treat them as a form to build upon in the course of a transition to socialism”.13 Nevertheless, the Russian Soviets’ experience did raise the question—without providing an answer—of how to articulate economic power with political power. Indeed, it was with reference to this experience that other councilist experiments appeared, firstly during the brief revolutionary period in Europe that followed the October Revolution. Here again, the question of the relationship between workers’ councils, trade unions and political parties is central to analysing the way in which the objective of transforming workers’ councils into vehicles of political counter-power was understood and defeated. We have already mentioned the example of the Betriebsräte in 1918 and 1919 in Germany, on which Karl Korsch based his proposal for a labour law for workers’ councils.14 It’s worth remembering that workers’ councils were created in many German cities at the beginning of November 1918 based on a system of co-management with workers’ representatives set up during the war, and also facilitated by the vacuum left at the top of the State by the military surrender. However, this experience was short-lived, due to the crackdown on the revolutionary process led by the Spartakist League and the KPD but also due to many workers’ council members joining the co-management system.15 In contrast to the Betriebsräte example in Germany, the factory occupations in the form of workers’ councils (“consigli du fabbrica”) in Italy (September 192016 ) were remarkable for their political autonomy from the State, political parties and trade unions. Despite being also short-lived and limited in scale, the Italian councils proved to be more organised than the Russian Soviets and the German Betriebsräte and quickly took over production, in

13 Azzelini, Dario and Ness, Immanuel (eds.), Ours to Master and to Own. Op. cit.,

13. 14 See in particular Korsch, Karl. Wandlungen des Problems der politischen Arbeiterräte

in Deutschland. In Gesamtausgabe, Band 2: Rätebewegung and Klassenkampf . Frankfurtam-Main: Europäische Verangestalt. 15 On the subject of workers’ councils in Berlin, see Weipert, Axel. 2015. Die zweite Revolution. Rätebewegung in Berlin 1919/1920. Berlin: Be.bra Wissenschaft verlag. 16 See in particular Spriano, Paolo. 1975. The Occupation of the Factories: Italy 1920. London: Pluto Press.

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an efficient manner: “Worker absenteeism was negligible, discipline effective, militancy widely shared”.17 We can thus consider, with Gramsci, that the democratic dimension was central to the Italian workers’ councilist movement, even taking precedence over immediate economic motives.18 It should be remembered in this respect that since the general strike of 1904, workers’ committees had already existed in certain factories (Turin in particular) and had managed to force—in cooperation with the main trade unions—negotiation procedures on management. Thus, in 1919, some workers’ councils were sufficiently well-informed in industrial and financial planning to intervene effectively in factory management. And most of them backed the idea of transforming these works councils into bodies of direct control over production. However, the Italian workers’ councils were unable to move from a political role of organising strikes and insurrectionary episodes to a real political counter-power, capable of challenging parliamentary democracy. Indeed, the political autonomy towards the trade unions and the parties (especially the USPD and the PCI) was matched by the latter’s active hostility. According to Antonio Gramsci, not only did “the general strike in Turin and Piedmont meet with sabotage and resistance from the trade union organisations and the party itself”, but it also “confirmed the urgent need to challenge the whole bureaucratic mechanism of the trade union organisations”.19 Furthermore, Gramsci argued that workers’ councils (or “works councils”) should not only entirely replace capitalist labour management but also form the basis for a future communist society: Already workers should proceed to the election of vast assemblies of delegates, chosen from the best and most conscious comrades, on the watchword: “All power in the workshop to the workshop committee,” matched to the other: “All state power to the worker and peasant councils.”20

17 Ibid., 84. 18 Gramsci, Antonio. 1920. Il Movimento torinese dei Consigli di Fabbrica. Inter-

nazionale Communista, July 1920. 19 Ibid. 20 Antonio Gramsci. 1919. Democrazia Operaia. Ordine Nuovo, 21 June 1919.

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Beyond Gramsci’s references to councilism and the short-lived consigli di fabbrica, the importance placed on autonomy by the latter—in particular with regard to trade unions and parties—suggests that the Italian experience of the problems relating to a councilist democracy is more relevant than the German one. In a very different political context, the workers’ councils in Spain during the social revolution of 1936 gave rise to more lasting periods of workers’ control (around three years) and involved all sectors of the economy. One of the particularities of these workers-peasants’ councils is that they were part of a wider movement of self-organisation, made up of various committees (revolutionary committees, anti-fascist committees, neighbourhood committees, etc.), initiated in particular by the CNT: “These bodies were both an inspiration of Spain’s powerful libertarian movement and a result of the practical needs of workers and peasants faced with a Fascist military uprising and the temporary collapse of the state”.21 The Spanish experience was also remarkable because so many workers were involved. When, for example, the landowners were expropriated, the peasants opted overwhelmingly for communal property rather than for the parcelling out of individual properties. Lastly, in some large cities, almost all public services were put under the control of the workers. This was the case in Barcelona, where the workers immediately took control of the railways (soon to be run by a CNT-UGT committee), most of the industrial and public transport companies (train, bus, metro), gas and electricity, as well as, for example, the entertainment sector and restaurants.22 Printing houses were also requisitioned by the political parties and trade unions, while newspapers were run by workers’ committees composed of representatives of each category of employee. To date, the Barcelona workers’ councils were one of the most systematic and lasting attempts to democratise municipal public services. However, although the Spanish workers’ councils were in a position to make tactical choices that could have led to participation in government, they opted not to take power. A crucial moment in this renunciation of political power took place in Barcelona on 21 July 1936. The workers, who were armed and had routed the forces of the bourgeoisie, were 21 Durgan, Andy. Worker’s Democracy in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1937. In Ours to Master and to Own. Op. cit., 148. 22 See Broué, Pierre and Témime, Emile. 1961. La révolution et la guerre d’Espagne. Paris: Minuit, chapter “Les conquêtes révolutionnaires” (“Revolutionary conquests”).

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invited to take power by the President of Catalonia. The leaders of the Barcelona committee movement however, and in particular those of the CNT, decided to refuse this proposal. As one of the leaders of the anarcho-syndicalist movement explained: We could have remained alone, imposed our absolute will, declared “the Catalan State” null and void, and imposed the true power of the people in its place, but we did not believe in dictatorship when it was being exercised against us, and we did not want it when we could exercise it ourselves only at the expense of others.23

Whether one sees in this renunciation of political power a consequence of the strong libertarian tradition, a lack of strategic preparation or the result of the divisions in the workers’ movement24 —be it in Spain or Germany—the path from workers’ control to political power was not taken. There have certainly been examples of cooperation between workers’ councils and progressive governments in the twentieth century, for example in Chile between 1970 and 1972. The Chilean experience encapsulates most of the problems that the Russian, German, Italian and Spanish cases—as well as the Hungarian, Polish and Portuguese25 —had to confront. The Chilean workers’ council movement never controlled an entire city or region, but it did enjoy the support of the government led by Salvador Allende from 1970 onwards.26 The Popular Unity programme did not explicitly defend the workers’ councils, and only asserted the need for

23 Quoted in Wallis, Victor. Worker’s Control and Revolution. In Ours to Master and

to Own. Op. cit., 20. 24 See Durgan, Andy. Worker’s Democracy in the Spanish Revolution, 1936–1937. Art. cit., 168. 25 On workers’ councils in Poland (in 1918–1919, 1956–1958 and 1980–1981), see Majchrak, Kamil and Graber Majchrak, Sarah. Arbeitselbstverwaltung und Betriebsdemokratie in der Volksrepublik Polen. Ansprüche und Widersprüche. In Demokratisierung von Wirtschaft und Staat. Op. cit.; in Hungary in 1956: Anderson, Andy. 1964. Hungary 1956. London: Solidarity; in Portugal in 1974: Robinson, Peter. 2011. Worker’s Councils in Portugal, 1974–1975. In Ours to Master and to Own. Op. cit. 26 See on this subject Gaudichaud, Franck. 2015. Chile: Worker Self-Organization and Cordones Industriales Under the Allende Government (1970–1973). In An Alternative Labour History. Op. cit.

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“control by the organised citizens of political and economic power in the State sector of the economy and its general planning”.27 However, the development of workers’ councils in 1970 and 1971 was directly linked to the reforms introduced by the new Ministry of Labour, which established a majority of workers’ representatives on the boards of both private and public companies. Indeed, most examples of councilism in Chile were linked to the government’s “Area of Social Priority” (APS), i.e. the economic sector nationalised by the 1971 decree. After some hesitation, the government finally agreed that the management of nationalised companies should be mainly in the hands of a “workers’ assembly”, chaired by the leadership of the Central Unica de Trabajadores (CUT) trade union. This council was a mixed body, composed of five State representatives, five employees’ delegates and a representative of the Republic’s presidency (the interventores ) who chaired the council. However, as Franck Gaudichaud points out, with reference to Juan Espinoza and Andrew Zimbalist,28 the management was often controlled by the employees: “in practice, it is often the employees who have the majority in the board of directors because the interventores are often absent or are themselves workers in the company”.29 Moreover, there was also worker participation in the Social Area sector (i.e. National Development Council) in which workers’ representatives took part in discussions on national economic policy. However, these delegates were in fact CUT leaders, whose headquarters were a part of the new State bureaucracy. In the private sector, an increasing number of companies were either abandoned by their owners or changed management which led to occupations by the workers and attempts to take over the factory by workers’ councils: “When the factories were occupied, the workers demanded that they be incorporated into the APS. The government judged on a case-bycase basis how to proceed, depending on the coalition of forces within the

27 Programa de la Unidad Popular, 17 de diciembre de 1969, Santiago. 28 Espinoza, Juan and Zimbalist, Andrew. 1978. Economic Democracy: Workers’ Partic-

ipation in Chilean Industry 1970–1973. London: Academic Press. 29 Gaudichaud, Franck. 2014. Quand l’État chilien se proposait de construire la démocratie économique. Nationalisations, Aire de propriété sociale et système de participation des salariés durant l’Unité populaire (1970–1973). Amérique Latine Histoire et Mémoire. Les Cahiers ALHIM [Online], 28.

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UP and also on the situation at the time”.30 This type of strategy, alongside workers’ participation in the nationalised sector, led to a radicalisation of the councilist movement. Some of them came together in “industrial chains”, organised on the basis of regional coordination between dozens of factories. What stood out in the workers’ councils (private and public sectors) between 1970 and 1972 in Chile, was the interaction between workers’ self-management and the newly elected government. This constructive relationship, however, broke down before Augusto Pinochet’s coup when faced with the company owners’ strike of October 1972. It was considered that this strike, made company expropriations necessary for national economic activity to continue, but the government backed down from such a measure. The “industrial chains” opposed the government’s decision but couldn’t persuade it to change its position. As Victor Wallis put it, “it was at this point that the contradiction between the legal government and the workers’ class consciousness became decisive”.31 Faced with the risk of civil war, the PU in effect put a stop to the experiment of constructive interaction with the councilist movement. Nevertheless, even though the Chilean experience collapsed, it demonstrated that cooperation between councilism and national government was possible. And indeed, similar dynamics can be seen in other examples of workers’ councils, with or without “socialist States” openly supporting a councilist democracy. The second section examines two examples of such dynamics, in the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia under the presidency of Josip Tito and in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela under the presidency of Hugo Chávez. More specifically, it analyses the way in which workers’ councils were set up and interacted with other forms of popular participation in government—particularly at municipal level—and the obstacles they faced in both countries in the shape of State socialism.

30 Ferreira Gomez Stelko, Mariana. 2010. Entreprises sous la responsabilité de l’État au Chili 1970–1973: un regard sur la participation des travailleurs. Master’s Thesis, Paris, CNAM; quoted in ibid. 31 Wallis, Victor. Worker’s Control and Revolution. Art. cit., 23.

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9.2 Workers’ Control, the State and the Municipalities Analysing councilist experiments in the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia and in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela will help us understand the conditions needed to democratise the workplace, the State and the municipality. This analysis will also raise the issue of the ways in which workers’ political role can be institutionally recognised. We’ll begin with the experience of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia, whose government declared for three decades that its aim was to reorganise the whole social system based on the principle of “self-management”, with workers’ councils as the main driving force. According to Goran Markovic, in Yugoslavia, the main initiative for workers’ councils did not come from workers’ struggle, but from the socialist State; “It was a bureaucracy which in its own interest introduced self-management, with workers’ councils as its first organizational form”.32 In this context, it was the changing relationship between workers’ councils, company management and the State—alongside the transition from decentralised self-management under State control (from 1950 onwards) to market “socialism” (from 1965 onwards)—that helps us understand the contributions and limits of the Yugoslav model with regard to a future model of democratic work. Workers’ Councils were introduced in State-owned companies by the December 1949 directive, and there were 800 of them by 1950. Initially, their rights did not concern management or decision-making, but were purely advisory. They gave opinions on company plans, regulations and labour standards. Company managers were under no obligation to implement the Workers’ Councils recommendations and in case of disagreement, a higher-level administrative official (and member of the Party hierarchy) had the final say. So, these rights only existed at company level, not at branch or national level. As Catherine Samary points out, “Self-management was rather ‘co-management’ very subordinated to trade union and local powers”.33 Nevertheless, the law of 27 June 1950, designed to provide a legal basis for workers’ self-management, gave more 32 Goran Markovic. 2011. Workers’ Councils in Yugoslavia: Successes and Failures. Socialism and Democracy, 25. 33 Samary, Catherine. 1988. Plan, marché et démocratie. L’expérience des pays dits socialistes. Cahiers d’études et de recherche, 7–8, 27.

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power to workers’ councils. In its foreword, the aim of this legislation was defined as “progressively transferring the management of State companies and the largest economic bodies to workers’ collectives according to the socialist principles whereby the workers themselves manage socialised production”.34 In principle, therefore, labour collectives would manage State companies, within the framework of the State economic plan. The two legal bodies available to the labour collectives were the Workers’ Councils (legislative), elected for one year by the workers, and the Management Councils (executive), which were also elected and answerable to the workers, but which, in the day-to-day running of the company, effectively managed the company with its director. The organisation setup was a top-down one with collective assemblies held in the workshops (or departments); e.g. workers’ councils; company workers’ councils; management committee, etc., with the company manager at the top of the hierarchy. The workers’ councils had the legal power to approve the general economic plans of the company, to adopt internal regulations, to elect and dismiss the management board, to deliberate on particular decisions taken by the management board and to allocate part of the company’s surplus. In practice, however, the Yugoslav workers’ councils rarely had direct control over their companies. On the one hand, the lists of the management bodies were drawn up by the trade unions, and on the other hand, it was only in 1970 that the Worker’s Councils obtained the right not only to elect but also to set specific objectives which the management councils had to, in principle, implement. Beyond this legal limitation, Albert Meister notes that the “labour aristocracy” played a dominant role in workers’ councils and management boards, and that the representation of unskilled workers seemed to have been reduced significantly over the years.35 From a legal point of view, the Workers’ Councils strengthened their positions after 1950: thus, the 1974 constitution and the 1976 decree on associated labour created smaller political entities (around 300 workers) in State companies (i.e. Basic Organisations of Associated Labour: OBTAs), which had the power to take the most important decisions in their departments. The newly created OBTAs gave rise to some 34 Quoted in Markovic, Goran. Workers’ Councils in Yugoslavia: Successes and Failures. Art. cit. 35 See Meister, Albert. 1964. Socialisme et autogestion, L’expérience yougoslave. Paris: Seuil, especially 90.

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interesting experiments in company democratisation and to a renewed debate on the compatibility of this type of organisation with the objective of “self-management planning”.36 However, the decision-making powers of OBTAs were limited, and they remained dependent on regional and national bureaucracies. At the end of the day, although workers were able to take part in company decisions and their political rights were recognised, the surrounding institutional environment and lack of democratisation were such that, in practice, these rights were only partially observed.37 It is true that certain forms of workers’ councils in political institutions did exist in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. In 1953 for example, the Producers’ Council, elected by the workers and with prerogatives of economic decision-making at the national level, was established as a chamber of the Federal People’s Assembly, i.e. as part of the Yugoslav Parliament. However, this chamber had no real autonomous decisionmaking power, and was incorporated into institutions (the parliamentary chambers) composed mainly of bureaucrats. No specific economic decisions or policies were taken by these bodies representing the workers’ councils in the Parliament. And while similar councils were created at regional level in the successive constitutions of 1963 and 1974—notably the municipalities and the “republics”, i.e. federated regions within the nation state—these councils were even more directly controlled by the League of Communists party. “Workers’ Councils, therefore, had an impact on micro-level decisions, but were not able to challenge the dominance of the technocracy and bureaucracy”.38 Although they functioned quite well and produced pro-worker decisions in some companies,39 their political power was severely limited by the respective weights of the party, the trade unions and the State bureaucracy. These decades

36 See for example Bonnet, N. and Gély, A. 1978. Évolutions récentes la Yougoslavie: Tout le pouvoir aux O.B.T.A. plus la planification autogestionnaire ? Economies et sociétés, 35. 37 From the 1960s onwards, the supporters of self-management and councilism did not

fail to notice this, see for example Gauthier, Pierre. 1964. Portée et limites de l’expérience yougoslave. L’Action, October 1964. 38 Ibid. 39 See for example the extracts from the 2nd Congress of Self-Managers in 1971,

quoted in Samary, Catherine. Plan, marché et démocratie. L’expérience des pays dits socialistes. Art. cit., 36.

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saw the rise of a “bureaucratic class”, divided between managers in the company sector and State bureaucrats in political institutions. Managers and bureaucrats were indeed able to accept locally the principle of comanagement with workers’ councils, but only insofar as this did not seriously limit their power.40 These contradictions eventually led to social conflicts, including numerous strikes in the late 1960s. For example, the 1968 student movement in Yugoslavia called for the strengthening of the WCs’ power, for workers’ political power outside the workplace and for the democratisation of political institutions.41 The example of Yugoslavia was the main reference point for debates around self-management in the 1960s and 70s, notably in the journals Praxis and Autogestion et socialisme.42 By analysing the deep contradiction between the workers’ councils and the system of State planning, it facilitates understanding of the obstacles involved in replacing the political institutions of parliamentary democracy or “State socialism”. The conclusion of this analysis is a call for the creation of workers’ political rights beyond the workplace, and of political bodies allowing them to participate directly in political decision-making at all levels, from local to national. Where does “councilism” stand among contemporary attempts at democratising work? The Latin American experiments of the “Bolivarian revolution” since 2008 in Venezuela43 and the Movement for Socialism (MAS) government in Bolivia,44 are probably the closest to what could be seen as a democratic labour policy today. They include many cooperatives but also self-management experiments and workers’ councils, as well as interesting forms of exchange between these democratic experiments in production and political institutions (national and local). We will examine in more detail some of the experiments that have taken place 40 See on this subject Potts, Georg A. 1969. The Development of the System of Representation in Yugoslavia with Special Reference to the Period Since 1974. Lanham: University Press of America, 319 ff. 41 See Samary, Catherine. Plan, marché et démocratie. L’expérience des pays dits socialistes. Art. cit., 27. 42 See on this subject Georgi, Frank. Autogestion, la dernière utopie. Op. cit., 34. 43 See Guillaudat, Patrick and Mouterde, Pierre. 2012. Hugo Chávez et la révolution

bolivarienne: promesses et défis d’un processus de changement social. Ville Mont-Royal: M éditeur. 44 See in particular Garcia Linera, Alvaro. 2008. Pour une politique de l’égalité. Communauté et autonomie dans la Bolivie contemporaine. Paris: Les Prairies ordinaires, in particular 83 ff.

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in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela since the early 2000s, bringing together workers’ councils and local democracy. After the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, the government of the Fifth Republic Movement began to implement radical economic measures, including the nationalisation of latifundiums and the partial redistribution of land to local agricultural cooperatives, as well as “popular participatory democracy” schemes.45 It was not until 2002, however, that the new regime began to officially support experiments in “comanagement” in the public sector. The development of councilist-type experiments accompanied that of the cooperative movement, which had been important in Venezuela since the 1960s. The Chávez presidency also sought to develop and democratise, by means of new legislation, a specific ministry, and public missions (notably the Vuelvan Caras Mission).46 In order to understand the context of these experiments, we need to shed light on the political contradiction that arose between State initiatives to promote workers’ control and the rank and file workers’ demand for more autonomy: Even though workers’ control is the norm in Venezuela today, a contradictory, almost Kafkaesque situation has arisen, i.e., when a company is nationalised, the workers are given several months of lessons on the sociopolitical history of Venezuela, Bolivarianism, co-management and socialist workers’ councils, Simon Bolivar’s national plan, and other political topics. But when workers want to put what they have learned into practice and demand more participation in company management, the administrative hierarchy, controlled by the same institution that organises the lessons, refuses their demand. This situation has strengthened the autonomous movement for workers’ control.47

Let us consider the example of Inveval,48 a company manufacturing valves—used, in particular, in the oil industry—which was nationalised in April 2007. Following several months of confrontation between 45 See on this subject Ivanovic, Mila. 2012. La démocratie participative dans le Venezuela chaviste. Ethnographie de trois quartiers de Caracas, PhD thesis under the supervision of Yves Sintomer, Université Paris-VIII-Saint-Denis. 46 On this “new social and participatory economy”, see ibid., 71 ff. 47 Azzelini, Dario. 2016. Communes and Worker’s Control in Venezuela. Building 21st-

Century Socialism from Below. Leiden: Brill, 189–190. 48 See ibid., 202 ff.

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supporters of the Ministerial project—maintaining the status quo of the previous governance—and those of the workers’ project—who preferred that a workers’ council should manage the company directly—an initial agreement was reached. This agreement recommended sharing political power with 51% of the votes for the State administration and 49% for a workers’ cooperative. Financial and strategic management remained the prerogative of the management board (mainly composed of State representatives) who pursued with the capitalist logic of the old management. This is why the workers’ general assembly decided to transfer the power of decision to a workers’ council composed of 32 members elected by the workers’ assembly. This “workers’ management council” was accompanied by specific commissions (on socio-political, financial, and administrative, strategic, technical issues, etc.) whose role was to put forward reforms to the assembly which validated them. From 2008, Inveval thus became a State-owned company which was controlled entirely by its workers, in cooperation with the local communities. This experiment of Inveval, has been one of the successful examples of an attempt to transition to a “socialist enterprise model”,49 but also one of the driving forces behind the workers’ councilist movement around the years 2010 in Venezuela. Among the initiatives of this movement, the most interesting one— with regard to potential forms of democratic work—was that of the Socialist Worker’s Councils (CSTTs) initiated in 2007. This was a grouping of worker-controlled companies and councilist activists outside the existing trade union frameworks. From 2010 onwards, the first “grassroots” CSTTs appeared, and, subsequently, others imposed their presence at different regional levels. However, despite initial support from the presidency, local institutions and companies were opposed to these initiatives, while in public companies, State representatives tried to reduce them to a role of representing workers’ interests in negotiations with the bureaucracy. And while a decree of 30 April 2012 recognised certain demands of the workers’ councilist movement, no legislation to date has legally established their existence.50 What is more, members of nationalised companies or State institutions who proposed the creation of such councils systematically faced hostile reactions, some of them being

49 Ibid., 207. 50 Quoted in ibid., 196.

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accused—like the workers of the public television channels VTV and Avila TV—of counter-revolutionary activity. Of course, as Alberto Bonilla (sociologist and co-founder of the first workers’ council in the Ministry of Labour) pointed out, the difficulties faced by the councilist movement were not only due to bureaucratic hostility, but also the lack of democratic culture and experience on the part of the workers.51 However, these contradictions can be seen as a sign that the CSTTs have become a new space of political conflict around the question of what forms labour democratisation should take in the context of the Bolivarian revolution. A third example of a consultative initiative was the Venezuelan Corporation of Guayana (CVG),52 a State-owned company that included 17 factories manufacturing public works materials in the Bolivar region. In 2009, following a discussion forum including representatives of these factories, the “Socialist Plan of Guayana” was adopted which included the reunification of three of these workplaces into a single productive entity under workers’ control. The Presidency of the forum intervened directly by appointing some of the workers to the position of director of the 17 CVG factories. The consequences of this unilateral decision varied from company to company, but overall, most of these new presidents were not retained in their posts by the workers’ assemblies. One reason for this was the unanimous hostility of owners, local bureaucrats and national politicians to the Plan, which involved large sums of money and strategic economic decisions. The CVG was clearly a failure, but it did reveal the difficulties and the degree of social conflict with political institutions involved in creating a confederation of workers’ councils at the level of an economic sector, be it at the regional level (as in the case of the Socialist Plan of Guayana) or at the national level, as had been proposed with the “economic councils”. What is the connection between these democratic experiments in production and the transition to the “communal State” that was supposed to be at the heart of the Bolivarian process? After the failure of the Local Public Planning Councils (LPPCs),53 which were created to enable citizen participation in the development and monitoring of public policies, it was the “communal councils” that

51 See ibid., 196. 52 See ibid., 200 ff. 53 See Ivanovic, Mila. La démocratie participative dans le Venezuela chaviste. Op. cit.

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met with growing popular success in the 2000s, so much so that from 2006 onwards they were established by law to replace the LPPCs. The communal councils were designed as regional units of different sizes according to the urban or rural areas concerned, and “had to be formed from the pre-existing organisational set up, including, organising and bringing together the different committees, cooperatives and socio-cultural associations”.54 This was a space for discussion of basic community problems (health, access to common goods, etc.), whose decisions would in principle be respected at higher levels of the political hierarchy, and whose projects would be financed by the State. Chávez’s initial proposal was to set up a “confederation of communal councils at the national level”55 so the project was understood by its supporters as a real desire to replace State control of public services with direct democratic control of projects and works carried out at the local level. While there were conflicts between this level of decision-making and those of the various bureaucracies involved, it seems that the local councils in Venezuela managed to overcome the limits of “participatory democracy” mechanisms (such as CLPPs) and to involve citizens directly in the management of urban policies. In some respects, this new “communal State” policy effectively empowered citizens to become coproducers of the city. For example, the organic law of 29 December 2009 stated that the municipal banks responsible for financing municipal projects were no longer cooperatives—controlled by the members of the productive entity—but belonged to the municipal councils, thus allowing greater participation in its management.56 This revision is still too recent and unevenly implemented to draw general conclusions, but, in some Venezuelan cities, the thematic committees of the municipal councils

54 Ibid., 121. See also Tarragoni, Federico. 2008. Le peuple existe-t-il au Venezuela ?

Le cas des conseils communaux de la planification publique. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [Online], 13 February 2008. 55 Speech by Hugo Chávez in 2007, quoted in Azzelini, Dario. Communes and Worker’s Control in Venezuela. Op. cit., 93–94. 56 See Ivanovic, Mila. La démocratie participative dans le Venezuela chaviste. Op. cit.,

124.

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(concerning health, the environment, the social economy, housing, infrastructure, etc.) have indeed managed to develop, finance and implement some of their projects.57 The forms of articulation between these communal councils and the workers’ or cooperative councils present in the regions are not officially recognised and reflect the local dynamics that vary greatly from one area to another. However, we can see that these reforms and experiments raise the issue of democratic work in both its dimensions, i.e. democratising work and “working-classisation” of democracy rendering democracy more open to the working classes. Moreover, we agree with Dario Azzelini that “the struggle for workers’ control must be understood as an element of the construction of what is called in Venezuela the communal State”.58 While the current political crisis in Venezuela demonstrates that such a transition has been far from successful59 —and could be rapidly reversed—the fact remains that these experiments with workers’ councils and communal councils are interesting attempts to set up a political and economic system based on what we have called democratic labour.

9.3 Towards New Institutions: “Social Councils” and Democratic Mode of Production The perspective of a “councilist democracy” is therefore opposed to the privatisation of political decision-making by capitalist and State institutions, especially with regard to the control of labour. The aim is to remove all forms of heteronomy from activities seen as social work, so that, to quote a German councillor in 1920, “even with 57 See in particular Azzelini, Dario. Communes and Worker’s Control in Venezuela. Op. cit., 98. 58 Ibid., 14. 59 Despite all the legitimate criticisms of the regime, which concern in particular the

concentration of the president’s powers and the extension of an extractivist economic policy whose environmental and socio-economic damage is considerable (see on this subject in particular Lang, Myriam and Mokrani, Dunia (eds.). 2014. Au-delà du développement. Critiques et alternatives latino-américaines. Paris: Amsterdam), it is also this interconnection between democratic experiments in the economic and political fields that Mila Ivanovic retains among the main successes of the Bolivarian process under the presidency of Hugo Chávez. See Ivanovic, Mila. La démocratie participative dans le Venezuela chaviste. Op. cit., especially p. 327.

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a republican facade, setting up councils is in reality a tool in the socialist struggle, designed to replace the capitalist mode of production and the authority of the State based on this mode of production”.60 The aim is for the elected representatives and employees of State administrations to be gradually replaced by the workers as a sovereign political power. The first question is: who should participate in workers’ councils, and therefore who can be defined as a worker?61 From a theoretical point of view, the simplest answer is that of Anton Pannekoek: “anyone who participates in work must participate in the regulation of social work”.62 And indeed, most of the councilist experiments in the twentieth century have followed this path, i.e. wage earners—those who in the capitalist mode of production are considered to be workers—must have control over their own work. But the pitfalls of such a situation are clear: workers may form themselves into a new dominant class against non-workers (unemployed, students, consumers, people whose activities are not recognised as work)63 ; the question of consumption and exchange is not legally incorporated into the democratic process; lastly, democratic planning of the economy could, in practice, become a competition between isolated initiatives of workers’ control. It follows that aspiring to a democratic mode of production, in which work is subservient to democracy, is inseparable from a longstanding demand for the “right to work”,64 i.e. if all citizens are not workers, councilism will not solve the political conflict between workers and the State. However, rather than the traditional approach of including the right to work in the status of political citizen, our analysis suggests creating new democratic rights bringing together economic, social and political citizenship. This is a necessary condition for the foundation of a political

60 Däumig, Ernst. 2012. The Council Idea and Its Realization. In All Power to the Councils! A Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919, ed. Gabriel Kuhn. Oakland: PM Press. 61 See the discussion of this problem in Demirovic, Alex. Council Democracy, or the End of the Political. Art. cit. 62 Pannekoek, Anton. 2008. Arbeiterrät [1946]. In Arbeiterräte. Texte zur sozialen Revolution. Fernwald: Germinal Verlag, 40. 63 See Adler, Max. Demokratie und Rätesystem. Art. cit. 64 See on this subject Goblot, Jean-Jacques. 2003. Le droit au travail. Passé, présent,

avenir. Paris: Syllepse.

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community which, in the words of Max Adler, “controls its own work and its own life”65 and in which an economic democracy could be a reality. Creating the “worker-citizen” would require a specific institution and we have seen that the works council (equivalent of “workers’ council”) and the “economic council” (equivalent of attempts at a “confederation of councils” at sector level) do not guarantee everyone’s economic citizenship. Consequently, new regional, decision-making bodies would be needed to replace the municipality and the State in their current forms. Similarly, as they stand today, companies and socio-economic sectors are clearly irrelevant, and creating a new form of councilism in which all worker-citizens could legally participate—and whose decisions would concern the entire economic cycle on a given regional scale—is also necessary. We will call such assemblies “social councils”. The scales and prerogatives of such social councils, which would thus constitute the most common form of political activity in this democratic mode of production, would need to be specified. At first sight, a reasonable option would be to “re-municipalise” the economy by situating these social councils at municipal level. Indeed, this is what Ivan Meszaros—whose ideas directly inspired the notion of transitioning to a “communal state” in Venezuela66 —puts forward in Beyond capital. Toward a Theory of Transition.67 The main idea is to create municipal assemblies to organise production and consumption, leaning on the pre-existing community and cooperative organisations in towns and neighbourhoods. Based on a passage from Marx’s Grundrisse, Meszaros defines the specificity of this municipal system as one in which activity takes precedence over production as the main form of mediation in social relations: “in the communal exchange relationship, priority is given to self-determination and to the corresponding organisation of activities in which individuals are engaged”.68 To this end, these activities must be democratically set up, i.e. identified as democratic work. Social councils at the municipal—or neighbourhood—level, made up of directly elected workers’ representatives (as with economic councils) in 65 See Adler, Max. Demokratie und Rätesystem. Art. cit., 144. 66 See in particular Azzelini, Dario. Communes and Worker’s Control in Venezuela. Op.

cit., 265. 67 Mészáros , István. 1995. Beyond Capital. Toward a Theory of Transition. New York: New York University Press. 68 Ibid., 759–760.

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their works councils, should be able to organise this cycle of production and consumption by identifying social needs at the local level and thus the activities that need to be identified as work. These decisions would function as “orders” to which the works councils and economic councils would have to respond by adjusting their production accordingly. In this way, municipal social councils could help to replace market relations69 with a system of democratic planning. However, the same objective of democratising the economy as a whole clearly also requires establishing social councils at wider regional levels. Whatever the level—regional, national or even international—it is the whole social division of labour that needs to be democratically determined. One might think that at this point, a democratic division of labour between producers and consumers would be vital, if only to overcome the obstacle of a large-scale process of collective enquiry, deliberation and decision. And indeed, this is the opinion of Ernest Mandel in his work on “articulated self-management”, which should make it possible to replace the capitalist market with a non-market, self-management system. In such a system, consumers’ needs would be evaluated by a system of referendums that would regulate in advance the “supply” through the “collective demand” revealed in the referendum results. For Mandel, “The simplest—as well as the most democratic—way of adapting material resources to social wants is not to interpose the medium of money between the two, but to find out people’s needs just by asking them what they are”.70 Articulated self-management would mainly be based on two bodies (workers’ councils and “consumer congresses”) which should cooperate in the following way: In factories manufacturing consumer goods, the product mix would flow from previous consultation between the workers’ councils and consumers’ conferences democratically elected by the mass of the citizens. Various models—for example, different fashions in shoes—would be submitted to them, which the consumers could test and criticize and replace by others. Consumer referendums can be organised and on this basis the models of consumer goods can be chosen.71

69 See Azzelini, Dario. Communes and Worker’s Control in Venezuela. Op. cit., 161. 70 Mandel, Ernest. 1987. In Defence of Socialist Planning. Fourth International, 25,

17. 71 Ibid., 27.

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In terms of possible democratic work, the principle of determining social needs prior to production is fundamental. However, it is not at all clear that this division between consumers and producers is necessary and desirable for two reasons. Firstly, it is not necessary if all citizens are also workers, if their democratic prerogatives concerning production are identical, and if it is no longer the products but the social activities that constitute the measure of economic cycles. And secondly, is not desirable, because this would renew the alienating divide between workers and citizens, whereas all the democratic alternatives we have seen seek, precisely—and on their own scale—to resolve this opposition in order to guarantee democratic control of the entire economic circuit. This is why the principle of “unmixed” councils of workers or consumers is no more relevant at the regional level than at the company level. The question, therefore, ultimately concerns the type of political subjectivity implied by such a democratic mode of production based on a council democracy system. At first glance, the objective is of course the same as that of the workers’ movement: to ensure that workers “are transformed from obedient subjects into masters of their own destiny, free and autonomous, capable of constructing and organising their new world”.72 But more precisely, the aim is to transform both the “salaried worker” and the “democratic citizen”, thereby making way for the “democratic worker”, i.e. s/he who takes part during their working hours in all the decisions concerning their work (as participants in the works council), their professional sector(s) (as participants in the economic council) and social work as a whole in the political communities in which they participate (as participants in the social councils). From this point of view, the perspective of democratic work clearly implies not only breaking free from liberal democracy but also from the traditional claims of the labour movement. As we have shown, this new type of democratic subjectivity, which we propose to call the “worker-citizen”, partly already exists and partly has to be invented, based on past, current and future democratic experiments.

72 Pannekoek, Anton. Worker’s Council. Op. cit., 33.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

In this work of social philosophy, we have analysed the democratic meaning of the critique of work and questioned the theoretical models designed to create democratic work, as well as the political issues outside the corporate sector. We have also examined the experiments that seek to achieve democratic work in the “here and now” and the new institutions that could support them tomorrow. This conclusion returns to the proposals put forward for debate in the last part of the book, and sketches out the contours of what could be a successful democratic mode of production. It is therefore a question of changing the meaning and forms of work in order to put an end to the separation of citizenship and work and to make companies the basic entities of a renewed democratic system. Implementing such a democratic mode of production would require institutional innovations that could help to solve the three problems we have constantly encountered: How can the division between economic and political activities and between workers and citizens be eliminated? How can the process, organisation and division of work be simultaneously democratised? How to decompartmentalise the relations between the inside and the outside of companies and invent forms of democratic cooperation that cut across the whole of society? Today, researchers, trade unionists, activists and members of citizen collectives and/or popular assemblies who want to reflect on the future © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3_10

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of work and democracy should come together to find real solution to these problems. The new institutions outlined in the previous section, which propose to address these issues, would be attached to new democratic rights for workers and organised around legal provisions that can be summarised as follows: 1. The right to work for all on reaching the legal age of majority (e.g. 18)—and thus the abolition of unemployment—accompanied by a drastic reduction in working hours, a minimum wage allowing people to live well and the right to initial and further training. 2. A new legal status for companies which would become political institutions in which all workers would be sovereign members and each member would have an equal right to decide. 3. A new political status of the “worker-citizen”, replacing labour contracts, with in particular the right to decide in three new institutions: – work councils in each economic entity, whose decisions would be sovereign with regard to the aims of the company and the recruitment, remuneration, organisation and quality of work. – economic councils in industrial or service sectors, made up of all (or representatives) of the workers of the various companies and trades, whose decisions would be sovereign and would prevail over those of the work councils, particularly with regard to product prices and coordinated production objectives in the branch. – social councils at regional level, with the participation of all (or representatives) of the workers residing there, whose decisions would be sovereign and would prevail over those of the work councils and economic councils with regard to the division of labour and its purposes, and therefore also with regard to activities that are to be considered as non-work activities or defined as work. Should these proposals be eventually taken up by trade unions and political forces, they could—depending on the moment and the context— lead to immediate gains or medium-term objectives. Of course, their implementation would have to be accompanied by other social and institutional transformations, and be based on new struggles and social

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experiments. However, the main objective of this book is not so much to convince people of the merits of these work councils, economic councils and social councils, as to question the possibility of democratic work. With this in mind, we wish to stimulate debate on the forms that could be taken by a democratic mode of production, in which each workercitizen and each work collective could contribute equally to the process of democratising society.1 Let us extend this theory to one of its possible conclusions2 —as can be plausibly imagined—and picture a free association of such worker-citizens. What would the working day look like in such a democratic mode of production? It could last five hours a day, including one hour for rest and refreshment, on four days a week. The day and the week would themselves be organised around collective times of training, inquiring and learning, decision and action. For example, a worker in the field of car production could work on training and inquiring in ecological engineering and on analysing how best to respond to social problems prioritised in the social councils (public transport between home and the workplace, for example). S/he could participate in discussions and decisions about manufacturing processes in work councils, about improving short production and distribution channels in economic councils, and about overall economic policies in social councils. And, of course, S/he could contribute to the design of prototypes and the final manufacturing process of vehicles. Consider a second example. A teacher-worker could work on training and inquiring in his or her teaching discipline and in pedagogy, as well as looking into teaching practices with colleagues and learning methods with students. S/he could participate in discussions and decisions about the organisation of teaching in the school council, about curricula in the economic councils and about overall economic policies in the social councils. And, of course, s/he would teach and organise educational activities.

1 See the complementary arguments, aiming mainly to precise the ecological dimension of such a democratic work, presented in Cukier, Alexis. 2020. Démocratiser le travail dans un processus de révolution écologique et sociale. Les Possible, 24. 2 Compare this with the proposals for new institutions (“associations” and “districts”) to ensure democratic participation and work sharing in Dockès, Emmanuel. 2017. Voyage en misarchie. Essai pour tout reconstruire. Paris: Editions du Détour.

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After their initial training (e.g. three years for all, during which students would be considered as workers, could take part in the social councils and start working in a work collective for a few hours a week in addition to their studies), workers could benefit every three years (or according to another period decided by the social councils) from a year of training in another profession. During this training period, they would not be allowed to take part in the work councils and economic councils, but could still do so in the social councils. These working days would therefore be part of both a new division of labour that had become democratic, and a transformed society. There would be no more unemployment, no more difference between the “private sector” and the “public sector”, as all companies would be under the management of their workers. Social councils would also decide whether goods and services should be free or for sale; how to define and distribute among all workers (during their working time) the tasks that are difficult but necessary for the community; and what should or should not be defined as democratic work. The debate would no doubt be lively and sustained in these social councils, for instance on the subject of domestic work: e.g. should it be considered as an activity of the worker-citizen, or as an activity outside work? Variations in pay would be circumscribed or even prohibited by the social councils and fixed and decided by the work councils. Job creation, i.e. places in a work council, would be decided by social councils, defined by economic councils and allocated by work councils. The number of jobs for any particular occupation would be harmonised with training entitlements to a new occupation, both upstream (available places for training) and downstream (creation of jobs for workers trained in an occupation). Economic investments would be managed by each work council, quantitatively allocated by economic councils, and qualitatively allocated by social councils. In other words, there would be no more private ownership of the means of production and no more labour market, no more statutory hierarchy between managers and subordinates and no more distinction between politicians, workers and citizens. And it would no longer be the market of goods and capital but the democratic decision of all worker-citizens that would organise the economy. This sketch of a democratic mode of production may give rise to many questions, of a practical or theoretical nature. We will confine ourselves to responding to two objections of principle, which are specifically aimed at the centrality of work. The first concerns the very idea of rehabilitating it, which may not only offend certain theoretical and political feelings, but

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may also seem pointless, i.e. in this new democratic mode of production, work would lose its central role in the production of objects and goods and would take up a drastically reduced amount of individuals’ time, so why still maintain that it would remain central? To address this objection, we need to recall the specific meaning of the centrality of labour that we have defended here, i.e. the dynamic centrality of labour with respect to politics, which is the idea that it is mainly from labour that social relations can be transformed. This perspective is fully compatible with a drastic reduction of working time. In a democratic mode of production, this “people could take part in the democratic exercise of power while working, and do something else the rest of the time”. The second objection concerns the relationship between democratic work and individual autonomy. Wouldn’t maintaining a separation, within all social activities, between those considered to be work and those that are not, be a sign that work would remain subject to a social order that is heteronomous to the activity of individuals? In other words, wouldn’t the centrality of labour in such a democratic mode of production, ultimately, be incompatible with individual freedom? To answer this question, we can readily concede that even democratic labour would not be entirely free, if we mean by this the liberal idea of an action independent of any form of constraint. In the democratic mode of production that is put forward here for discussion in this short conclusion, it would still be “compulsory” to work. Of course, we would work much less than today, and not as subordinate workers but as worker-citizens. But while workers would no longer be subject to the heteronomous decisions of the capitalists or the State, they would still be obliged to respect the decisions of work councils, economic councils and social councils. In other words, from the point of view of individual workers, there would still be a form of necessity or of obligation, towards work and society. On this point, we refer the reader to Marx’s wise argument, in the third book of Capital, warning against any form of utopia which would make labour the only or the main possible path to freedom: In fact, the realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus, in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With

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his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy, which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.3

In retrospect, it’s worth reading this argument against the backdrop of a possible democratic labour. For Marx, even in a democratic mode of production—“in all social formations and under all possible modes of production”—labour would remain a necessity. In other words, it would remain constrained, by the cycles of nature and social reproduction; but also, one might add, by the creation of a true democracy. It would also be a question of political imperative, for example, to allow everyone to exercise power and share common goods, to put an end to relations of class, gender and racial domination and to bring about the ecological transition. Similarly, in the democratic mode of production, as Marx says, “Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature”, which must include planetary eco-systems, the integrity of human beings as well as their social nature. In the case of work, therefore, there can be no question of absolute freedom but only of autonomy, which the democratic mode of production would ensure is shared equally by all. However, democratic work would do more than just reify the democratic norm: it would also, unlike wage labour, be compatible with the satisfaction of social needs and with the development of people’s capacities outside work. Indeed, it would still be, but this really be, beyond democratic work that the “development of human energy which is an end in itself” could take place, that is to say the voluntary and conscious fulfilment of human beings’ potentialities, independently of any social utility. Democratic work

3 Marx, Karl. 2010. Capital. Book 3. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 37. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 897.

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should be able to free up a tremendous reserve of time, energy and intelligence for everyone, to be devoted to activities other than those of the worker-citizen, for example artistic, sporting or intellectual activities. In the words of The German Ideology: if it is democratic labour that “regulates the general production”, then outside of work (i.e. most of the time), people could also “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic”.4 Moving beyond the opposition between productive and political activities should also free up imagination and capacity for desirable and fulfilling forms of human life outside of work. But let us insist one last time; this free development of each individual’s potentialities requires full democratic control of the production of goods and services. If we want work (which is unlikely to disappear) not to be “work to death”,5 it is urgent to invent a desirable future for the living labour, starting by publicly raising the possibility of democratic work in order to develop the practical ways of achieving it.

4 Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich. 2010. The German Ideology. In Marx Engels Collected Works, vol. 5. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 47. 5 Ogilvie, Bertrand. 2017. Le travail à mort. Au temps du capitalisme absolu. Paris: L’Arachnéen.

Index

A Activist, 138, 139, 141, 147 Alienation, 21, 34–43, 45, 46, 76, 79 Association, 138, 140, 148, 150, 152 Autonomy, 183, 184 C Capitalism, 76, 78, 84, 85, 118–124, 126, 132 Capitalist, 117–123, 125, 126, 128 Capitalist mode of production, 175 Care, 103, 104 Centrality of work, 66–69 Citizen, 140, 151, 154 Class struggle, 8, 9, 11, 13, 75–82, 84, 85, 101, 102, 108–112 Climate, 115, 122 Commune, 81–83 Communist, 156, 161, 168 Community, 94, 95 Consumer, 140, 141, 145–147, 151–153 Cooperative, 80, 81, 137, 149, 151, 152

Council democracy, 14, 178 Councilist democracy, 155, 162, 165, 174 Councils, 88, 93, 94, 96–98, 153 Criticism, 21, 23–26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 45 Critique, 21, 34, 36, 38, 45, 46

D Debt, 49–52, 56 Decision, 21, 22, 24–26, 28, 29, 33, 36, 37, 40, 42, 45 De-democratisation, 48, 50, 56, 65 Deliberation, 21–23, 33, 42 Delphy, Christine, 105, 108–111 Democracy, 1, 3, 4, 7–9, 12–14, 21, 22, 33, 76, 84, 87–93, 95, 96, 98 Democratic mode of production, 175, 176, 178, 179, 181–184 Democratic work, 21, 48, 49, 64–66, 68, 69, 80, 82, 83, 85, 89, 93, 98, 99, 108, 110–112, 140, 151,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 A. Cukier, Democratic Work, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27856-3

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INDEX

154, 157, 166, 171, 174, 176, 178, 179, 181–185 Democratisation, 1, 8, 9, 11, 12, 89, 92, 95 Dewey, John, 87–93 Dictatorship of the proletariat , 76 Division of labour, 48, 61–65, 67, 68 Domestic work, 102, 104, 106, 109

E Ecological, 2, 4, 6, 12, 13, 15 Ecological Marxism, 116, 120, 122 Ecological Marxist, 121 Ecology, 8, 14, 116, 120, 129 Economic councils, 153, 154, 180–183 Economic democracy, 3, 11 Ecosocialism, 116, 124–126, 133 Ecosocialist, 125 Emancipation, 109–111 European Union, 48, 53, 54, 56 Experiments, 9, 11, 13, 137, 138, 141, 146, 147, 149, 151

F Fabian, 88, 94, 99 Federici, Silvia, 106 Financialisation, 47–50, 56–60 Foster, John Bellamy, 120

G Gender relations, 101, 102, 110, 112 Globalisation, 47, 49, 61, 62 Gorz, André, 116–120, 127, 128

I Impossibilisation, 35, 42, 46 Industrial democracy, 9, 11, 87–90, 92–99

K Korsch, Karl, 13, 14, 87, 88, 93–99 L Labour law, 48, 53–56 Liberation, 108, 111 Limits, 122–124 Lukács, Georg, 42, 44, 67 M Marxism, 2, 8, 12, 13, 69, 94 Marxist, 3, 12, 13, 34, 102, 104, 106, 117, 120 Marx, Karl, 2, 11, 13, 39, 42, 69, 75–84, 120, 122, 127, 132, 183, 184 Materialist feminism, 101, 104, 105, 108, 110–113 Metabolic rift, 120–122 Metabolism, 120, 121, 123, 129 Method, 3, 6–8, 12 Mode of production, 120, 121 Municipality, 166, 176 N Nature, 115, 120–124, 126, 128, 129 Neoliberal, 50–57, 59, 61, 62, 64–67 Neoliberalism, 47–52, 60–62, 64–67 Neo-management, 68 Neo-managerial, 21, 22, 26, 27, 34–36, 39, 42, 43, 46, 48 Norm, 25 P Party, 159, 161, 166, 168 Planning, 91–93 Political ecology, 115, 116, 118, 120, 125, 127, 133 Political economy, 81, 85 Political power, 81

INDEX

Producer, 145–147, 151, 153 Proudhon, Joseph, 87 R Reification, 35, 42–44 Revolution, 2, 6, 15, 76, 80, 108, 157–160, 162, 169, 172 Right to work, 180 Ruling class, 82, 83 S Self-management, 137–142, 144–152, 154 Sexual division of labour, 101–103, 110, 111 Social councils, 154, 176–178, 180–183 Socialisation, 93, 96–98 Socialism, 88, 91, 93, 160, 165, 166, 169 Social reproduction, 101, 102, 105, 106, 110

189

Soil, 122, 123 Solidarity, 139–141, 145, 150 Soviet, 156–160 State, 75, 76, 79–84, 88, 91, 93–96, 99, 156–176

T Trade union, 138, 147–149, 151, 157, 159–162, 164, 166–168, 171, 179, 180

W Work councils, 151, 153, 154, 180–183 Worker-citizen, 180–183, 185 Worker’s control, 137, 138 Workers’ councils, 155–168, 175 Working class, 76, 78, 79, 81, 82 Working-class, 80 Workplace democracy, 3, 9–12, 45