Ours to Master and to Own: Workers' Control from the Commune to the Present

From the dawning of the industrial epoch, wage earners have organized themselves into unions, fought bitter strikes, and gone so far as to challenge the very premises of the system by creating institutions of democratic self-management aimed at controlling production without bosses. With specific examples drawn from every corner of the globe and every period of modern history, this pathbreaking volume comprehensively traces this often underappreciated historical tradition. Ripe with lessons drawn from historical and contemporary struggles for workers’ control, Ours to Master and to Own is essential reading for those struggling to create a new world from the ashes of the old.

Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and edits WorkingUSA.

Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director, and political scientist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz.

• Sin Patrón: Stories from Argentina's Worker-Run Factories
• Engaging Contradictions (Global, Area, and International Archive)
• For All the People: Uncovering the Hidden History of Cooperation, Cooperative Movements, and Communalism in America
• Paths in Utopia (Martin Buber Library)
• Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi
• From Notes to Narrative: Writing Ethnographies That Everyone Can Read (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing)
• Discourse on Colonialism
• Radical Unionism: The Rise and Fall of Revolutionary Syndicalism
• A Brief History of Neoliberalism
• Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW (Wildcat)