THE CENTER FOR PLACE, CULTURE AND POLITICS PRESENTS
Ours to Master and to Own
Workers’ Control from the Commune to the Present
Capitalism would have us believe we need our bosses. Tonight’s discussion reveals the history of workers who dare to disagree. 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.
A conversation with
Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini
Update: Here is the video from the event:
Wednesday October 12th 2011
6.30 PM – 8.30 PM
History Department | Room 5114
Cuny Graduate Center
365 Fifth Ave at 34th Street
Free and open to the public
Immanuel Ness is professor of political science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, and a founding member of the Lower East Side Community Labor Organization, an autonomous activist organization in New York City. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary movements, labor militancy, and migrant worker resistance to oppression. Ness has just completed Guest Workers, Corporate Despotism and Resistance, a book that examines the rise of guest workers from the global South in the US and labor opposition to employer abuses. He is also author of numerous books including an anthology of contemporary labor.
Dario Azzellini is a writer, documentary director and political scientist and lecturer at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. His research and writing focuses on social and revolutionary militancy, migration and racism, people’s power and selfadministration, and workers control, with extensive case studies in Latin America. He has published several books, among them The Business of War (Assoziation A 2002), about the privatization of military services. His latest documentary Comuna under construction (2010) examines worker councils in Venezuela.
