This book investigates the return of workers’ self-management in recent decades as responses to recurring neoliberal crises. In particular, the book homes in on worker-recuperated enterprises (WREs), a promising form of workers’ self-organization whereby workers restart troubled, bankrupt, or shuttered companies as cooperatives or other forms of democratic workplace. The book argues that WREs are prefigurative of new forms of work based on equality and sustainability. Framed by the concepts of autogestión, the labour commons, and prefigurative ethico-political practices, the book argues that WREs contribute to the construction of more directly democratic community economies. Drawing on a range of contemporary case studies from numerous countries in the Global South and North, as well as new theories of workers’ self-management, the book contributes a critical development, political economic, and class-struggle Marxist perspective to the re-emergent labour question within anti-systemic social movements, while theorizing the transformative nature of WREs for workers, work organizations, and communities. Bringing a class-analysis back into current discourses and debates concerning democracy at work and alternatives to global capital, this book will be of interest to researchers across the fields of development studies, labour studies, political economy, sociology of development, sociology of work, and political science.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Recuperating Workplaces and Community Spaces Part 1. Setting the Conceptual Stage: Recuperating Productive Life, Democratizing Work 1. Class Still Matters: Autogestión, Living Labour, the Moral Economy of Work, and the Labour Commons 2. A Conceptual Review: Workers’ Self-Management, Workers’ Control, and Autogestión 3. A Historical Perspective: Key Debates in Autogestión Part 2. Mapping the Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Latin America 4. ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’: Argentina’s Worker-Recuperated Enterprises Set the Stage 5. Between the Social and Solidarity Economy and the State: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Brazil and Uruguay 6. Cooperatives, Co-Management, and Workers’ Councils: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Venezuela Part 3. Mapping the Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Europe and the Rest of the World 7. Labour-Conflict Conversions Amid Wider Cooperative Movements: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in Italy and France 8. Workers’ Responses to Rising Austerity and Social Challenges: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in the Rest of Europe 9. Inklings of a Larger Global Movement: Worker-Recuperated Enterprises in the Rest of the World Part 4. Worker-Recuperated Enterprises as Labour Commons: Contradictions and Possibilities 10. Recuperating the Commons 11. Commonalities in the Lived Experiences of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises 12. The Dual Realities of Worker-Recuperated Enterprises 13. Worker-Recuperated Enterprises and Workplace Democracy as Labour Commons