I have recently finished Peter Hudis’ book, ‘Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism‘. It is one of the most interesting and useful books that I’ve read in some time. Below, he discusses the topic of the book with reference to Occupy, worker co-ops and other contemporary responses to capital.
The audio significantly improves from one minute into the talk and his talk ends at 55 minutes when he takes questions.
Of particular interest to me is the outline his gives (around 36 mins in) of what Marx deemed necessary to eliminate the conditions of alienating value production i.e. freely associated, non-alienated labour.
- Extend democracy into the economic sphere, into the workplace.
- Workers’ co-operatives. Direct ownership stake and control of the workplace.
- Eliminate the social division of labour between ownership and non-ownership. Workers have a direct stake in the outcome of labour.
- In control of the workplace, workers would make work less alienating, less harmful.
- Co-ordination between co-operatives is needed, nationally and internationally. Democratically elected planning authority, subject to recall.
Update 29th April 2014: Here’s another talk by Hudis:
Update 16th June 2014: Another good talk to the Workers and Punks University (discusses coops and councils from around 40min onwards)