ABSTRACT
Workers’ control and workers’ self-management have manifested themselves in all kinds of crises and historical changes. They proliferated in revolutions and anti-colonial struggles, during political, economic, social, and cultural crises, and as a response to capitalist restructuring. The chapter discusses workers’ self-management in the context development. First, it looks at the origins of workers’ self-management, cooperativism, and workers’ control, and explains different terms and concepts. Then the chapter analyses workers’ control in peripheral and semi-peripheral states in the 20th century. In the Global South workers’ control was especially present in anti-colonial and postcolonial emancipation efforts from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. The third part of the chapter consists in a brief analysis of workers’ recuperated companies as a contemporary form of workers’ control.
