Factory councils embodied a counterhegemonic worker epistemology threatening capitalist order

Evidence

In sum, there were four intellectual threads that informed and motivated the factory councils’ subversion of the bourgeois approach to knowledge in interwar Italy and Britain: the denaturalization of capitalism; the centrality of workers’ agency; praxis; and the unity of economics and politics. Th is methodological breakthrough was a powerful element of the period’s crisis of capitalism; indeed, it represented a counterhegemonic alternative to conceiving the social world. No longer did knowledge trickle down from above to bolster passive consent for the current system. Now knowledge empowered action from below. Th at the four methodological attributes found a concrete institutional realization in the factory councils amplifi ed the threat to the capitalist social order. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 539

Categorization

• XREF: Four-thread epistemology of the councils — denaturalization, agency, praxis, unity of econ/politics — connects to Gramsci’s prison notebooks and to the general theme of austerity as imposed ‘objective’ knowledge against worker-generated counter-knowledge from below. — connects to: Factory councils aimed to merge economics and politics through workers’ control — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 581; Factory councils were designed to fuse economics and politics in proletarian self-government — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 534; Factory councils broke from top-down technocratic knowledge and empowered workers as thinkers. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 579 (+1 more)
• DEFINE: Distills the factory-councils movement’s methodological core into four named attributes — a compact conceptual framework useful for later argumentation.

Broader Connections

• Factory councils were designed to fuse economics and politics in proletarian self-government #expands (0.90) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 534
• Factory councils aimed to merge economics and politics through workers’ control #expands (0.88) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 581