Center for InterAmerican Studies

We are cordially inviting you to our next IAS colloquium on Tuesday, 14 May 2024, from 18 to 20hrs (CET). Room: Building X, B2-103.

"Council democracy in Latin America? Local self-government and workers control"

Dario Azzellini (Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico)

The struggle of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, revitalized strongly the idea of communal and council local self-government practices based on communal democracy, with a leftist and socialist perspective. Since then, similar practices of social, political, and economic organization surfaced in different regions of Latin America, including Guerrero and Oaxaca (Mexico), Venezuela, and Bolivia. The self-organized communities include often also the collective administration of the means of production. Moreover, workplaces taken over by workers over the past two decades with production under workers’ control (mainly in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Venezuela) are organized in ways similar to the council democracy of the early twentieth Century. The talk sums up the main principles of council democracy, looks at historical experiences of “commune” in Latin America, and then focuses on different contemporary Latin American experiences of commune-like local self-administration and production under workers' control, that resemble characteristics of council democracy.

See full program here.