Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy: The Commons and Transformative Politics in the Age of Planetary Crisis

Capitalism’s crisis is planetary. It is a system upending nature and society, causing many to live and work in despair. So far, the left has been incapable of inspiring a practical challenge to it. In Worker Cooperatives and Deep Democracy, Vishwas Satgar and Michelle Williams map a new transformative politics arising from inspiring worker cooperative systems that advance planetary care from below and that have the potential to undermine the capitalist status quo.

Based on over a decade of research across 15 countries, the authors examine case studies that explore transformative approaches to social reproduction, public power, nature, and territorial expansion in opposition to global hegemonic power. They also uncover the power of solidarities engendering emancipatory, utopian imaginaries in the global north and south.

They show how, against all the odds, people are experimenting with deep democracy and building systems of care to live differently and exit the planetary crisis.

Vishwas Satgar is Professor of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the editor of the Democratic Marxism series, Principal Investigator for Emancipatory Futures Studies in the Anthropocene and a veteran activist. He has worked extensively on post-apartheid cooperative development in township communities and has co-founded the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign and Climate Justice Charter Movement. He is the author of A Love Letter to the Many - Arguments for Transformative Left Politics in South Africa.

Michelle Williams is Professor of Sociology at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on democracy, transformative projects, alternative development, and women’s participation in political and economic spaces. She is the co-author (with Thomas Isaac) of India, Building Alternatives: the Story of India’s Oldest Worker Cooperative, and the co-editor (with Vishwas Satgar) of Destroying Democracy: Neoliberal Capitalism and the Rise of Authoritarian Politics.