Workers' self-management

"Workers' self-management" (WSM) describes situations where the workers of a productive enterprise such as a factory or a farm control it themselves.

In a Rebelion article entitled "A brief history of the movement for workers' self-management in the 20th and 21st centuries," James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer write that: WSM is a truly liberating experience, both in the sense of freeing the working class from capitalist abuse and insecurity and providing them with the freedom to create new forms of social relations of production and distribution. Briefly stated, WSM provides the workers with the decision-making power to:  decide what is to be produced and for whom safeguard employment and/or increase employment set priorities in what is produced define the nature of who gets what, where and how combines social production and social appropriation of profit creates solidarity of class at the factory, sectoral or national/international level democratizes the social relations of production.  

Workers self-management occurred in some enterprises during the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, the German Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, Titoist Yugoslavia, Algeria under Ahmed Ben Bella, the Nicaraguan Revolution, the fábricas recuperadas movement in Argentina, the LIP factory in France in the 1970s, the Mondragón Cooperative Corporation which is the Basque Country's largest corporation, AK Press in the United States, and the Venezuelan Revolution.