Education, Industrial Democracy and the State

Worker control movements have shown considerable success in Europe and the United States, but these movements are generally restricted to the plant level, particularly in the US. This essay argues that the main variable for success in worker control is worker participation, and the possibility of participation in a worker control situation depends very much on the nature of the ideology which surrounds the movement itself. Thus, we argue that the context in which a worker control movement takes place may have a great deal to do not only with its success at the individual plant level but its possibilities for becoming more general than a single or several plant occurrence. We consider that the best ideologically cohesive force available for such a movement is a political party which serves as the ideological means through which the movement expresses itself, influences worker takeovers at the plant level, and the spread of such movements to other plants.