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Information about Workers' Councils

A workers' council is a deliberative assembly, composed of working class or proletarian members, intended to facilitate workers' self-management or workers' control. Unlike a trade union, in a workers' council the workers are assumed to be in actual control of the workplace, rather than merely negotiating with employers through collective bargaining. They are a form of "workplace democracy."

Workers' councils have arisen repeatedly through modern history with a variety of names. Notable instances include Russia during 1917, where the councils were called "soviets," Germany during 1918, Turin, Italy during 1919-1920, Spain during 1936, Hungary during 1956, France during 1968, Chile in 1973 (cordones), and Iran during 1978-1979 (shoras).

The key features of a workers' council include the phenomenon that a single place of work, such as a factory, school, or farm, is controlled collectively by the workers of that workplace. Basically a group of workers from that workplace acts as the manager. Therefore there is no real "manager," as the council itself controls the workplace.

Councils operate on the principle of recallable delegates. This means that elected delegates may be recalled at any time through a vote in a form of impeachment.

Workers' councils combine to elect higher bodies for coordinating between one another. This means that the upper councils are not supperior to the lower councils, but are instead built from and operated by them. The national council would therefore have delegates from every city in the country. Their nature means that workers' councils do away with traditional centralized governments and instead give the power directly to the people. This type of democratic order is called council democracy.

During the Russian Revolution of 1917 and German Revolution in 1918, the workers' councils replaced the old political institutions and bureaucracy which excluded people with a right-wing political alignment.

Marxists believe that workers' councils (communes) embody the fundamental principles of socialism, such as workers' control over production and distribution as well as workers' control of the state. Indeed, some have described this as "socialism from below," which they counterpose against what they see as "socialism from above" endorsed by social democratic ideology and Stalinism. According to this view, socialism from above is carried out by a centralized state run by a bureaucratic apparatus and can result in a deformed or degenerated workers' state, while socialism from below represents the self-administration and self-rule of the working class.

Most, if not all Marxists support a council-based dictatorship of the proletariat rather than pure representative democracy. Some revolutionary Marxists believe that workers' councils should be used to bring about revolution, while others believe that revolution should be achieved through a vanguard party or common front. The Soviet Union argued that "soviet democracy" had achieved a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Some notable advocates of a society based on workers' councils are the council communist movement, various anarcho-syndicalist and anarcho-communist groups, most democratic socialist especially revolutionary democratic socialists, such as the Socialist Party USA, and some Trotskyist groups, such as the International Socialist Organization, as well as the Lanka Sama Samaja Party.

See also

A deliberative assembly is an organization, comprising of members, that uses a parliamentary procedure for making decisions.

The following are common types of deliberative assemblies:
  • The Mass Meeting
  • The Local Assembly of an Organized Society

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Working class is a term used in academic sociology and in ordinary conversation.

In common with other terms relevant to social class, it is defined and used in many different ways, depending on context and speaker.
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The proletariat (from Latin proles, "offspring") is a term used to identify a lower social class; a member of such a class is proletarian.
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Worker self-management (or autogestion) is a form of workplace decision-making in which the employees themselves agree on choices (for issues like customer care, general production methods, scheduling, division of labour etc.
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Workers' control is participation in the management of factories and other enterprises by the people who work there.

The idea of workers' control is an old one. The Guild system could be seen as a form of workers' control.
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A trade union or labour union is an organization of workers. The trade union, through its leadership, bargains with the employer on behalf of union members ("rank and file" members) and negotiates labor contracts with employers.
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Collective bargaining is the process whereby workers organize collectively and bargain with employers regarding the workplace.
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Workplace democracy is the application of democracy in all its forms (including voting systems, debates, democratic structuring, due process, adversarial process, systems of appeal, and so on) to the workplace.
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History is the study of the past, focused on human activity and leading up to the present day.[1] More precisely, history is the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race [1]
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1880s  1890s  1900s  - 1910s -  1920s  1930s  1940s
1914 1915 1916 - 1917 - 1918 1919 1920

Year 1917 (MCMXVII
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For other uses, see Soviet (disambiguation).
A soviet (Russian: сове́т, IPA: [sʌˈvʲɛt], "council"
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Anthem
"Das Lied der Deutschen" (third stanza)
also called "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit"
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City of Turin
Città di Torino

Seal
Nickname: "Automobile Capital"

Coordinates:
Region Piedmont
Province
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Anthem
Il Canto degli Italiani
(also known as Fratelli d'Italia)


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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1880s  1890s  1900s  - 1910s -  1920s  1930s  1940s
1916 1917 1918 - 1919 - 1920 1921 1922

Year 1919 (MCMXIX
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1890s  1900s  1910s  - 1920s -  1930s  1940s  1950s
1917 1918 1919 - 1920 - 1921 1922 1923

Year 1920 (MCMXX
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Spanish Revolution of 1936 began during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Much of Spain's economy was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy Communist influence.
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1900s  1910s  1920s  - 1930s -  1940s  1950s  1960s
1933 1934 1935 - 1936 - 1937 1938 1939

Year 1936 (MCMXXXVI
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Hungarian Revolution[1] of 1956 was a spontaneous nationwide revolt against the Communist government of Hungary and its Soviet-imposed policies, lasting from
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1920s  1930s  1940s  - 1950s -  1960s  1970s  1980s
1953 1954 1955 - 1956 - 1957 1958 1959

Year 1956 (MCMLVI
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May 1968 is the name given to a series of protests and a general strike that caused the eventual collapse of the De Gaulle government in France. The vast majority of the protesters espoused left-wing causes, but the established leftist political institutions and labor unions
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1930s  1940s  1950s  - 1960s -  1970s  1980s  1990s
1965 1966 1967 - 1968 - 1969 1970 1971

Year 1968 (MCMLXVIII
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Motto
Por la Razón o la Fuerza
(Spanish: "By right or might")
Anthem
Himno Nacional de Chile
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19th century - 20th century - 21st century
1940s  1950s  1960s  - 1970s -  1980s  1990s  2000s
1970 1971 1972 - 1973 - 1974 1975 1976
For the song by James Blunt, see .

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Cordón Industrial (or in plural Cordones industriales; English: Industrial Belts) is an organ of popular power or of workers democracy. Cordones were established in Chile by the working class during the Salvador Allende Popular Unity government (1970-1973).
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Anthem
Sorūd-e Mellī-e Īrān ²


Capital
(and largest city) Tehran

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For other uses of "Shura", see Shura (disambiguation).
Shura is an (Arabic شورَى) word for "consultation" or "council".
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factory (previously manufactory) or manufacturing plant is an industrial building where workers manufacture goods or supervise machines processing one product into another.
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school is an institution where students (or "pupils") learn while under the supervision of teachers. In most systems of formal education, students progress through a series of schools: primary school, secondary school, and possibly a university ,
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farm is an area of land devoted to the production and management of food, either produce or livestock. It is the basic unit in agricultural production.[1] Farms may be owned and operated by a single individual, family, or community, or by a corporation or company.
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