The ”Fifth International Gathering on the Workers’ Economy” (Encuentro Internacional de “La Economía de los Trabajadores-Trabajadoras”) will take place July 22-26, 2015 in Punta Cardón, State of Falcón, Península de Paraguaná, Venezuela. The gathering is meant to open up a space for debate and dialogue between workers, social and political activists, academics, and intellectuals concerning the problems and potential of what organizers have termed “the workers’ economy”—based on self-management and the defence of the rights and interests of the population that lives by their work, within the rubric of today’s conjuncture of global neoliberal capitalism.

So far, four International Gathering have taken place, including the participation of people from 30 countries from the Americas, Europe, Africa and Oceania: Buenos Aires (2007 and 2009), Mexico City (2011) and João Pessoa, Brazil (2013). What has inspired and guided the debates and discussions of these past encuentros (gatherings) were the experiments of self-management forged by the people of South America, such as: the worker-recuperated enterprises of Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil; worker cooperative movements; experiences in workers’ control and co-management in Bolivarian Venezuela; and the social and solidarity economy. These encuentros have been spaces where an increasingly necessary discussion—of the old and new problems faced by the working class and updated for our times of global neoliberal hegemony—is being revived and reconstituted.

In this last meeting it was collectively decided that the next International Gathering of “The Workers’ Economy” will be held July 2015 in Venezuela (Punta Cardón, State of Falcón, Paraguaná Peninsula). The Vth International Gathering of the Workers’ Economy in Venezuela will be organized into “ideas production panels” based on, but certainly not limited to, the following areas:

Global crisis and Latin American capitalism: analysis and responses from the workers’ economy.

Debates on self-management, co-management, workers’ control, co-operatives, social production enterprises, and other ways of building the economy by workers.

Issues in and problems for constructing a political economy of labor: management, production and integration of production, technology, the legal situation, etc.

Poder popular (popular power), comunas (communes), social property, and territory.

The role of the working class in the transformation of the state.

Challenges of unionism and other forms of organizing workers within globalneoliberal capitalism.

Precarious, informal, and servile/indentured work: social exclusion or reworking of forms of labor in global capitalism?

Building an education system for workers’ participatory, protagonistic, anddemocratic self-management.

Interested workers, social and political activists, academics, and intellectuals can submit their abstracts by May 15, 2015 to quintoencuentrovenezuela@gmail.com.

For more information regarding the call for participation, please visit: http://www.workerscontrol.net/geographical/vth-international-gathering-%E2%80%9C-workers%E2%80%99-economy%E2%80%9D

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