A free public lecture and video screening

Dario Azzellini is an Italian/German scholar, author, filmmaker and political activist who lives in Berlin and is an assistant professor at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. He holds a PhD in political science from the Goethe University in Frankfurt (Germany) and a PhD in sociology from the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (Mexico).

(co)Author of:

 In February 2016, a dozen former workers of a small woodworks plant in the small Greek town of Patrida, some 60 kilometers from Thessaloniki, had had enough. Since 2008 they had been tricked by the owners. With a promise to pay back everything soon, the bosses did not pay the workers their full salary anymore, reduced working hours and announced bankruptcy without making it official. But the situation never improved and the workers never saw their money. Finally, in December 2015, the plant closed.

Oliver Ressler, born 1970, lives and works in Vienna and produces installations, projects in public space, and films on issues such as economics, democracy, global warming, forms of resistance and social alternatives.

In Communes and Workers' Control in Venezuela: Building 21st Century Socialism from Below, Dario Azzellini offers an account of the Bolivarian Revolution from below. While authors on Venezuela commonly concentrate on former president Hugo Chávez and government politics, this book shows how workers, peasants and the poor in urban communities engage in building 21st century socialism through popular movements, communal councils, communes and fighting for workers' control.

Commons is determined by the wish of stakeholders to govern a resource together, a principle which contests property rights on this resource. Nevertheless, the term resource is misleading, since the commons depends on activity, on using and taking care, agreeing on rules and finding systems to regulate use and access in order to create a sustainable common. Therefore, there is no commons without commoning (Linebaugh 2008).

In their series of films and installations “Occupy, Resist, Produce”, Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler focus on the occupation and recuperation of factories in Europe as a deliberate step towards workers’ control. In the three exemplary factories in Milan, Rome and Thessaloniki the workers took the initiative and became protagonists, building horizontal social relations on the production sites and adopting mechanisms of collective decision-making.

Dario Azzellini: "Crisis and workers' control":

Vio.Me. in Thessaloniki used to produce industrial glue, insulant and various other chemically derived building materials. In 2010 the workers agreed to be sent on unpaid leave every 4-6 weeks. Then the owners started reducing the workers’ wages, assuring them that it was only a temporary measure and they would soon be paid what they were owed. The owners’ main argument was that profits had fallen by 15 to 20 per cent. When the owners broke their promise to pay the back wages, the workers went on strike demanding to be paid.

Desde el 15-M de 2011, son muchos los acontecimientos que han puesto de relieve la existencia en España de una corriente de reivindicación política y social imaginativa y contestataria, que responde a demandas de sectores de la ciudadanía desengañados con las formas convencionales de representación y con la gestión política de las instituciones. Esta corriente no es exclusivamente española, sino que enlaza con un reverdecimiento en todo el mundo de vías para expresar la disconformidad en formatos que tienen mucho de utópicos.

During the first decade of the current century, workplace recuperations and production under workers’ control seemed to be limited mainly to South America. It was beyond the imagination of most workers and scholars in industrialized countries that workers would or could occupy their workplaces and run them on their own. Nevertheless, the crisis that started in 2008 put workers’ control back on the agenda in the northern hemisphere where several companies from Greece to Italy and the US have been taken over by workers.

Officine Zero, former RSI (Rail Service Italia) was dedicated to the maintenance and repair of sleeping cars. When in December 2011 Italian train services decided to stop the night train service and invest in fast track trains, RSI closed. Some 20 workers out of the almost 60 employees strong work force did not accept the closing and took up the struggle. They found support among the activists from the nearby social center, “Strike.” In February 2012 they occupied their work place.