Muldoon - Council democracy : towards a democratic socialist politics

Council Democracy

The return to public assemblies and direct democratic methods in the wave of the global squares movements since 2011 has rejuvenated interest in forms of council organisation and action. The European council movements, which developed in the immediate post-First World War era, were the most impressive of a number of attempts to develop workers councils throughout the twentieth century. However, in spite of the recent challenges to liberal democracy, the question of council democracy has so far been neglected within democratic theory. This book seeks to interrogate contemporary democratic institutions from the perspective of the resources that can be drawn from a revival and re-evaluation of the forgotten ideal of council democracy.

This collection brings together democratic theorists, socialists and labour historians on the question of the relevance of council democracy for contemporary democratic practices. Historical reflection on the councils opens our political imagination to an expanded scope of the possibilities for political transformation by drawing from debates and events at an important historical juncture before the dominance of current forms of liberal democracy. It offers a critical perspective on the limits of current democratic regimes for enabling widespread political participation and holding elites accountable.

This timely read provides students and scholars with innovative analyses of the councils on the 100th anniversary of their development. It offers new analytic frameworks for conceptualising the relationship between politics and the economy and contributes to emerging debates within political theory on workplace, economic and council democracy.

James Muldoon is a lecturer in political science at the University of Exeter. His main research interests are in democratic theory, socialism and the history of political thought. His work has appeared in History of Political Thought, Political Studies, Theory, Culture & Society, Constellations and Critical Horizons.

Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory

Edited by David Chandler and Paulina Tambakaki (both University of Westminster)

Advisory Board: Benjamin Barber (City University of New York), Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing Societies), Bhikhu Parekh (House of Lords), Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame), John Keane (University of Sydney) and Chantal Mouffe (University of Westminster)

Democracy is being rethought almost everywhere today: with the widespread questioning of the rationalist assumptions of classical liberalism, and the implications this has for representational competition; with the Arab Spring, destabilizing many assumptions about the geographic spread of democracy; with the deficits of democracy apparent in the Euro-zone crisis, especially as it affects Greece and Italy; with democracy increasingly understood as a process of social empowerment and equalization, blurring the lines of division between formal and informal spheres; and with growing demands for democracy to be reformulated to include the needs of those currently marginalized or even to include the representation of non-human forms of life with whom we share our planet.

Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory publishes state of the art theoretical reflection on the problems and prospects of democratic theory when many of the traditional categories and concepts are being reworked and rethought in our globalized and complex times.

The series is published in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster, London, UK.

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Vasilis Grollios

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Stephen Acreman

Council Democracy

Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics

Edited by James Muldoon

Council Democracy

Towards a Democratic Socialist Politics

Edited by James Muldoon

First published 2018

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2018 Taylor & Francis

The right of James Muldoon to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Muldoon, James, 1985 editor.

Title: Council democracy : towards a democratic socialist politics / edited by James Muldoon.

Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Routledge advances in democratic theory ; 8 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018009637| ISBN 9780815383697 (hardback) | ISBN 9781351205627 (webpdf) | ISBN 9781351205610 (epub) | ISBN 9781351205603 (mobipocket/kindle) | ISBN 9781351205634 (master)

Subjects: LCSH: Works councils. | Labor union democracy. | Direct democracy. | Socialism.

Classification: LCC HD5650 .C68 2018 | DDC 322/.2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018009637

ISBN: 978-0-8153-8369-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-351-20563-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Out of House Publishing

Contents

James Muldoon

Donny Gluckstein

Gaard Kets and James Muldoon

Gabriel Wollner

Nicholas Vrousalis

Michael J. Thompson

Christopher Holman

Shmuel Lederman

Benjamin Ask Popp-Madsen

John Medearis

David Ellerman

Dario Azzellini

Dario Azzellini is a visiting research fellow at the Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School, Cornell University and holds a PhD in political science and a PhD in sociology. His teaching, research and writing focuses on democracy, Labour Studies, worker and local self-management, social movements, Global Studies and Latin American Studies. He has published several books, journal articles and documentaries. His latest books are Communes and Workers Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below (Brill, 2017) and Vom Protest zum sozialen Prozess: Betriebsbesetzungen und Arbeiten in Selbstverwaltung (VSA, 2018). He has also co-authored They Cant Represent Us: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (Verso, 2014). He is co-editor of The Class Strikes Back: Self-Organised Workers Struggles in the Twenty-First Century (Brill, 2018) and Ours to Master and to Own: Workers Control from the Commune to the Present (Haymarket, 2011), and the editor of An Alternative Labour History: Worker Control and Workplace Democracy (Zed Books, 2015). Azzellini is a founding member of workerscontrol.net. As a documentary filmmaker he has filmed in Latin America and Europe. Together with Oliver Ressler he produces