Richard Müller, a leading figure of the German Revolution in 1918, is unknown today. As the operator and unionist who represented Berlin’s metalworkers, he was main organiser of the ‘Revolutionary Stewards’, a clandestine network that organised a series of mass strikes between 1916 and 1918. With strong support in the factories, the Revolutionary Stewards were the driving force of the Revolution. By telling Müller's story, this study gives a very different account of the revolutionary birth of the Weimar Republic. Using new archival sources and abandoning the traditional focus on the history of political parties, Ralf Hoffrogge zooms in on working class politics on the shop floor and its contribution to social change. First published in German by Karl Dietz Verlag as Richard Müller - Der Mann hinter der November Revolution, Berlin, 2008, this english edition was completerly revised for the english speaking audience and contains new sources and recent literature.

As the influence of labor unions declines in many industrialized nations, particularly the United States, the influence of workers has decreased. Because of the need for greater involvement of workers in changing production systems, as well as frustration with existing structures of workplace regulation, the search has begun for new ways of providing a voice for workers outside the traditional collective bargaining relationship. Works councils—institutionalized bodies for representative communication between an employer and employees in a single workplace—are rare in the Anglo-American world, but are well-established in other industrialized countries. The contributors to this volume survey the history, structure, and functions of works councils in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Canada, and the United States. Special attention is paid to the relations between works councils and unions and collective bargaining, works councils and management, and the role and interest of governments in works councils. On the basis of extensive comparative data from other Western countries, the book demonstrates powerfully that well-designed works councils may be more effective than labor unions at solving management-labor problems.

The German council movements brought down the German monarchy, founded several short-lived council republics and dramatically transformed European politics. This book reconstructs how participants in the German council movements struggled for a democratic socialist society.

" 'Workers' councils' does not designate a fixed form of organization, elaborated once and for all and for which all that remains is to perfect its details; it concerns a principle, that of workers' self management of the enterprise and of production. The realization of this principle can never occur through a theoretical discussion concerning the best means of execution. It is a question of the practical struggle against the apparatus of capitalist domination." - Anton Pannekoek The Council Communist Reader is a collection of selected writings from a few council communists. Council Communism emerged in Holland and Germany in the 1920's as an alternative to Bolshevik and Marxist-Leninist thought up to the Third International. Council Communist theory was derived from workers' experiences in the German Revolution of 1918, the early years of the Weimar Republic, and the study of the early council movements in Russia in 1905 and 1917. They sought not to impose a kind of organization upon the workers' movement, but instead to uplift the form of "councils" as spontaneous and self-emancipatory for the working class. This was a throughline for the council communists to connect back to Marx's understanding of proletarian revolution in maintaining "the emancipation of the working class is the task of the workers themselves." Council communism was not to be a new ideology for the working class, but to take a critique of state socialism back to the roots of self-emancipation towards theoretical coherence which can combat all forms that hinder emancipation and move this theoretical coherence into practice. From this, and their understanding revolutionary consciousness develops as a result of crisis, revolution is not a choice but a necessity. The works included in this book have been chosen to reflect the developments of Council Communism over decades; this is not an exhaustive, encyclopedic collection of all councilist texts, but a collection of key texts. This book in the Radical Reprint series from Pattern Books is made to be accessible and as close to manufacturing cost as possible.

How the European Union handles posted workers is a growing issue for a region with borders that really are just lines on a map. A 2008 story, dissected in Ines Wagner’s Workers without Borders, about the troubling working conditions of migrant meat and construction workers, exposed a distressing dichotomy: how could a country with such strong employers’ associations and trade unions allow for the establishment and maintenance of such a precarious labor market segment? Wagner introduces an overlooked piece of the puzzle: re-regulatory politics at the workplace level. She interrogates the position of the posted worker in contemporary European labour markets and the implications of and regulations for this position in industrial relations, social policy and justice in Europe. Workers without Borders concentrates on how local actors implement European rules and opportunities to analyze the balance of power induced by the EU around policy issues. Wagner examines the particularities of posted worker dynamics at the workplace level, in German meatpacking facilities and on construction sites, to reveal the problems and promises of European Union governance as regulating social justice. Using a bottom-up approach through in-depth interviews with posted migrant workers and administrators involved in the posting process, Workers without Borders shows that strong labor-market regulation via independent collective bargaining institutions at the workplace level is crucial to effective labor rights in marginal workplaces. Wagner identifies structures of access and denial to labor rights for temporary intra-EU migrant workers and the problems contained within this system for the EU more broadly.