Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik documentary film AI-pedia

Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik (German for "Every Acre, Every Factory" or "Every Field, Every Factory") is a political documentary film directed by German filmmaker Johanna Schellhagen. The film was developed and produced as a collaborative project between Labournet TV, a Berlin-based media collective dedicated to recording and archiving international labour struggles, and AngryWorkers, a militant workers' inquiry collective originally formed in the United Kingdom.

The film serves as the direct thematic sequel to the 2022 documentary Der laute Frühling (The Loud Spring). While the earlier film analysed the failure of capitalist market mechanisms to halt global environmental degradation and argued for revolutionary social change, Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik addresses the constructive and institutional questions that follow such an analysis. Specifically, the film asks how a post-capitalist, ecologically sustainable society could be structured, administered, and run by working people on a practical, daily basis.

Taking its title from a historic syndicalist slogan demanding that working people seize direct democratic control of their workplaces, the film rejects both market capitalism and authoritarian, state-directed planning models. Instead, it combines interviews with frontline workers in vital infrastructure—such as agriculture, healthcare, power generation, and transportation—with the political theories of council communism, syndicalism, and democratic economic planning.

Background and Conception

In 2022, Labournet TV released Der laute Frühling, which examined the contemporary climate crisis through the lens of class struggle and the critique of political economy. That film argued that the internal logic of capitalism—namely, the structural necessity for capital to continuously accumulate and expand profits—makes a genuine, market-based "green transition" mathematically and ecologically impossible. Der laute Frühling concluded that the climate movement must join with the industrial and service working classes to overthrow capitalist relations of production if catastrophic global warming is to be averted.

During the screening tours and public discussions that followed the release of Der laute Frühling across Europe, audiences and political activists consistently raised a fundamental question: what would replace the capitalist economic system after its abolition? Many viewers noted that radical critiques of capitalism often remain abstract, providing clear arguments against existing systems while offering few details regarding how food would be grown, how healthcare would be staffed, or how power grids would function without market incentives or central state coercion.

To answer these questions, Schellhagen and Labournet TV partnered with AngryWorkers. AngryWorkers is a political collective known for practicing "workers' inquiry"—a method derived from Italian operaismo (workerism) where political organisers take ordinary wage jobs in key industrial and logistics centres to observe workplace dynamics, build rank-and-file organisation, and produce structural analyses directly from the shop floor. The collective had previously spent years organising inside large food processing plants and warehousing hubs in West London, documenting their findings in the 2020 book Class Power on Zero Hours.

The collaboration between Labournet TV and AngryWorkers aimed to bridge high-level economic theory with the lived experience and technical knowledge of frontline workers. Production on Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik began with the goal of exploring whether democratic, bottom-up planning could handle complex, modern supply chains without resorting to bureaucratic state planning boards like the historical Soviet Gosplan.

Theoretical Framework

Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik relies on several historical and theoretical concepts from the anti-authoritarian left. To understand the film's narrative, several core concepts must be distinguished.

Critique of Green Capitalism

"Green capitalism" is the proposition that market mechanisms, private enterprise, and technological innovation can resolve ecological degradation while maintaining endless economic growth. Common examples include carbon credits, emissions trading schemes, subsidies for electric vehicles, and corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) criteria. The filmmakers argue that these tools merely create new financial markets and shift environmental damage to poorer regions. Because capital must yield a return on investment, private companies cannot prioritize long-term ecological stability over short-term profitability.

Council Communism and Syndicalism

The film grounds its political alternative in council communism (Rätekommunismus) and revolutionary syndicalism. Council communism is a branch of socialist thought that emerged in Germany and the Netherlands in the 1920s through figures such as Anton Pannekoek, Otto Rühle, and Paul Mattick. Unlike Marxist-Leninism, which advocates for a vanguard political party to take control of the state apparatus, council communists argue that the working class should exercise power directly through democratic workers' councils (Arbeiterräte) established directly within workplaces and neighbourhoods.

Syndicalism similarly proposes that trade unions and industrial workplace assemblies should form the basis of both the fight against capitalism and the eventual administration of a socialist society. The slogan "jeder Acker, jede Fabrik" comes from early 20th-century syndicalist agitation, emphasising that social transformation does not occur in parliament, but by workers expropriating and managing the physical points of production.

Labour-Time Accounting (Arbeitszeitrechnung)

A central economic theory examined in the film is labour-time accounting (Arbeitszeitrechnung). In market economies, prices set in currency coordinate the distribution of resources, guided by profitability. In state-socialist models, central planners assign production quotas using physical units or arbitrary prices.

Labour-time accounting, by contrast, proposes calculating production and distribution using units of socially necessary labour time rather than money. This concept was systematically formulated in 1930 by the Group of International Communists (Groep van Internationale Communisten, or GIK) in their text Grundprinzipien kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung (Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution).

Under this model, the cost of any product or service is calculated by the actual average hours of work required to produce it, including the labour time embedded in raw materials and equipment wear. Workers receive certificates or credits proportional to the hours they contribute, allowing them to draw an equivalent value of goods and services from the social product, after deductions are made for public services (such as medical care, education, and social infrastructure). Because these certificates do not circulate as capital and cannot accumulate interest or exploit others' labour, the mechanism is intended to prevent the resurgence of a capitalist market while eliminating the need for a bureaucratic planning state.

Structure and Content of the Film

The documentary is organized around functional sectors of the economy rather than abstract philosophical arguments. It blends explanatory animations, archival footage, and extended workplace interviews. Rather than consulting academic economists or political figures, the filmmakers primarily interview wage workers, maintenance engineers, and technical personnel who understand how critical systems operate day-to-day.

Economic Sector	Key Issues Examined	Proposed Post-Capitalist Solutions
Agriculture & Food Systems	Industrial monocultures, soil depletion, reliance on fossil-fuel fertilisers, exploitation of seasonal migrant labour.	Agroecology, communal land stewardship, collective crop planning based on nutritional need rather than commodity market prices.
Healthcare & Care Work	Chronic understaffing, commercialisation of patient care (diagnosis-related groups), high burnout rates, gendered division of labour.	Self-managed clinics and hospitals, nurse-to-patient ratios set by workers, socialisation of reproductive labour, elimination of administrative billing waste.
Energy & Utilities	Centralised fossil fuel grids, private corporate monopolies, carbon leakage, safety hazards in deregulated infrastructure.	Worker-administered renewable energy transitions, regional grid federation, prioritizing baseline human energy needs over industrial excess.
Logistics & Transport	Fragile "just-in-time" supply chains, hyper-exploitation of warehouse staff and delivery drivers, inefficient freight transport driven by market competition.	Consolidated public freight systems, prioritisation of rail and water transport, elimination of redundant and socially useless shipping, free public transport networks.

Agriculture and Food Production

The agricultural section examines the industrial food system in Europe, highlighting the precarious condition of seasonal migrant workers in countries such as Spain and Germany. The film shows how monoculture agriculture exhausts topsoil, depletes aquifers, and requires heavy inputs of synthetic fertilisers derived from natural gas.

Workers and agricultural activists interviewed in the film discuss how farming could be restructured without commodity speculation. The documentary highlights agroecology—farming methods that work alongside natural ecological systems without synthetic chemical inputs—and community-supported agriculture (CSA). The workers argue that shifting away from intensive meat and cash-crop production requires significantly more people working on the land, which is only feasible if farm work is decoupled from poverty wages, seasonal precarity, and physical degradation.

Healthcare and Reproductive Labour

In the healthcare segment, the film shifts focus to reproductive labour—the work necessary to sustain human life and maintain the workforce, such as nursing, elderly care, childcare, and cleaning. The film interviews hospital nurses and care workers who describe the impact of modern healthcare marketisation, including the diagnosis-related group (DRG) system, which categorises hospital visits into flat-rate payment codes to cut costs.

The filmmakers address a common criticism of classical communist theory: its historical tendency to prioritize industrial manufacturing over care work. Care workers in the film explain that nursing cannot be automated or accelerated like an assembly line without compromising human dignity and safety. In a planned economy based on labour-time accounting, care work must be valued equally with physical production, giving healthcare workers direct control over hospital staffing levels, daily schedules, and clinical priorities.

Energy and Power Systems

The segment on energy production features interviews with electrical technicians, utility workers, and grid operators. The film explores the physical realities of operating high-voltage electricity grids, managing baseload power, and integrating intermittent renewable energy sources such as wind and solar.

Technicians explain why capitalist energy markets struggle to achieve deep decarbonisation: energy corporations invest where profits are highest, leading to irrational grid congestion, deferred maintenance, and the continued operation of paid-off fossil fuel assets. The film presents the case for a federated, publicly run power grid where energy is treated as a common resource rather than an exchangeable commodity, and where technicians and local communities jointly manage the retirement of fossil-fuel infrastructure.

Logistics, Supply Chains, and Transport

Drawing on the direct workplace experiences of AngryWorkers, the logistics segment exposes the interior of automated warehouses and freight distribution centres. The film analyses "just-in-time" supply chains, where corporations minimise inventory by keeping goods constantly in transit, relying on low-wage, high-stress warehouse work.

The film demonstrates that a significant portion of contemporary global transport exists solely due to market competition—such as shipping raw materials back and forth across continents to exploit wage differences, or moving duplicate commercial brands of identical products. By rationalising distribution and eliminating market-driven redundancies, the total volume of necessary freight could be substantially reduced. This would allow logistics to focus on the reliable, durable delivery of essential social goods using electrified rail rather than long-haul diesel trucking.

Key Arguments and Mechanisms

Throughout the film, Schellhagen and AngryWorkers connect specific workplace experiences back to three recurring structural arguments about how a post-capitalist society could function in practice.

1. Overcoming the Division of Labour

The film argues that a genuinely democratic society cannot retain the capitalist division of labour, in which a small class of managers, engineers, and bureaucrats plans and directs the work of a large class of manual and service workers. If workers merely elect a council to govern them while remaining tied to repetitive, dangerous tasks, a new bureaucratic ruling class inevitably forms.

To prevent this, the documentary advocates for job rotation and the sharing of administrative and manual tasks. Highly specialised technical tasks (such as surgery or electrical engineering) would still require specialized training, but general administrative decisions, maintenance work, and reproductive care duties would be distributed among all able members of society.

2. Decentralised Planning and Digital Technology

A central debate in 20th-century socialist economics was the "socialist calculation problem"—an argument formulated by free-market economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, who claimed that a non-market economy could never process the millions of individual economic choices made daily without the price mechanism.

Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik addresses this challenge by arguing that 21st-century information technology fundamentally changes the viability of democratic planning. Modern retail corporations like Amazon and Walmart already use highly sophisticated internal planning algorithms, inventory databases, and real-time tracking systems to coordinate global supply chains without relying on internal market prices. The film suggests that repurposing these logistical networks under open-source, democratic control would allow workers' councils to track supply, demand, and labour-time inputs instantaneously, without relying on private profit signals or central bureaucratic ministries.

3. Defining Socially Necessary Production

The film makes a clear distinction between production for profit and production for human use. In a capitalist economy, products are manufactured only if they generate surplus value, leading to the overproduction of luxury items, planned obsolescence, and military hardware, while essential needs like affordable housing, clean water, and preventative healthcare are neglected.

The documentary proposes that under democratic workers' control, society would distinguish between two main categories of consumption:

• Collective / Free Goods: Basic necessities such as healthcare, clean drinking water, staple nutrition, public education, public transport, and housing would be removed from market exchange entirely. They would be provided freely to all individuals, funded by allocating a dedicated portion of total social labour time.
• Individual Consumption: Discretionary goods and personal items would be acquired using individual labour credits earned through contributed work hours, preventing the emergence of exploitative wealth inequality while retaining individual choice in personal lifestyle.

Context within Contemporary Movements

Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik was produced during a period of strategic reassessment within the European left and ecological movements. Following the peak of mass climate mobilisations between 2018 and 2021—such as Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, and Ende Gelände—many climate activists encountered a political ceiling. Despite mass protests, civil disobedience, and public climate declarations, carbon emissions continued to rise, and European governments frequently expanded fossil fuel extraction infrastructure in response to geopolitical and economic tensions.

Within this context, the film reflects an emerging convergence between the radical climate movement and rank-and-file trade unionism. Known in political theory as "eco-socialism" or "working-class environmentalism," this approach argues that climate activists cannot succeed by appealing to state leaders or demanding moral lifestyle changes from working-class consumers. Instead, power is understood to reside at the point of production: the workers who operate the energy grids, run the public transit networks, and assemble consumer goods hold the structural power to shut down the fossil economy and build an alternative.

The film also connects with wider debates surrounding "degrowth" (Postwachstum). While the film agrees with the degrowth movement that aggregate material throughput and energy consumption must decline in wealthier industrial nations, it frames this challenge around working-class self-emancipation rather than individual austerity or state-imposed rationing.

Distribution and Impact

Like its predecessor, Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik was produced and distributed outside the commercial film industry. Labournet TV relies on grassroots funding, movement contributions, and independent subscriptions rather than state film subsidies or commercial distribution contracts. This distribution model ensures that the film can be accessed freely or screened publicly without copyright restrictions.

Following its completion, the film was released on a tour of decentralized, self-organised screenings throughout Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and internationally. Screenings typically occur in settings such as:

• Autonomous cultural centres (Autonome Zentren) and radical social hubs;
• Trade union offices and local rank-and-file assemblies;
• Climate protest camps, climate justice conferences, and occupation sites;
• Alternative neighbourhood cinemas and university student unions.

Screenings are structured as organizing tools rather than passive entertainment. Screenings are usually paired with moderated panel discussions, where local trade unionists, transit workers, health workers, and climate activists debate how the international and historical concepts shown in the film apply to immediate workplace campaigns and regional infrastructure disputes in their own communities.

Critical Analysis and Debates

The release of Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik generated substantial discussion within left-wing, socialist, and ecological circles, bringing several long-standing debates to the surface.

Feasibility of Labour-Time Accounting

While the film’s presentation of labour-time accounting was welcomed by many anti-authoritarian socialists as a concrete alternative to both market competition and central planning, it has faced criticism from economists and theorists across the political spectrum.

Some critics argue that measuring all economic activity through hours of labour is reductionist. Complex ecological processes—such as soil regeneration, forest preservation, biodiversity maintenance, and carbon sequestration—cannot be easily measured in human labour hours alone. An ecological economy must account for thermodynamic constraints, mineral scarcity, and biological limits that exist independently of human labour time. Critics contend that unless explicit thermodynamic and ecological metrics are integrated into the planning software alongside labour time, democratic councils could still unintentionally deplete ecological resources.

The Question of Complex Global Supply Chains

Another debate revolves around the geographic scale of democratic planning. The historical models of council communism were conceived in the early 20th century, when industrial production was largely regional or national. Modern consumer goods, such as microprocessors, medical pharmaceuticals, and modern telecommunications hardware, rely on extraordinarily complex, cross-border supply chains involving thousands of specialised suppliers across dozens of nations.

Skeptics question whether a decentralised federation of workers' councils could coordinate global production networks without reintroducing some form of international market exchange or a centralised coordination body. The film acknowledges this challenge by proposing layered federations of councils connected via cybernetic data platforms, but viewers and political commentators have noted that how this would function across distinct political jurisdictions and varying levels of regional infrastructure remains an open question.

The Transition Problem

Reviewers within the labour movement have pointed out that Jeder Acker, jede Fabrik focuses primarily on what a fully realized post-capitalist society looks like, rather than the political transition required to reach it. While the film illustrates working people running their facilities after an expropriation, modern capitalist states retain substantial police and military institutions to protect private property rights.

Critics have argued that by moving directly from present-day workplace frustrations to a post-capitalist council system, the film under-theorises the political conflicts, state repression, and international economic blockades that historical revolutions have inevitably faced. In public discussions, the filmmakers and members of AngryWorkers have responded that the documentary was intentionally designed to clarify the goals of socialist transformation, arguing that working people cannot organise an effective transition unless they have a coherent vision of what they are trying to build.

See also

• Der laute Frühling (2022 film)
• Council communism
• Workers' council
• Workers' inquiry
• Syndicalism
• Labour-time accounting
• Project Cybersyn
• Agroecology
• Eco-socialism
• Degrowth