The recently released documentary film Every Acre, Every Factory - Ideas for a Necessary Revolution aims to collectively contribute to the discussion around revolution and systemic change. To do this, the creators of the film spent eighteen months interviewing dozens of contemporary workers, who are currently toiling in vegetable fields, on the underground, in power plants, car factories, hospitals, docks and more, as well as veterans of historic revolutionary movements. All together, they try to piece together how a revolutionary movement may emerge, what challenges it would face, how a new society may be constituted, and what we will need to know to make it a reality.

In this article, we interview Marco Bauer, one of the militant filmmakers behind Every Acre, Every Factory.

NFBThanks for speaking to us Marco. As we understand it, your background as a militant is not in film, but rather in the projects of working-class self-organisation that could be described as closely linked with the ideas of “workers’ inquiry” and “class composition”. Could you briefly explain your history of political activity, and how do you see these traditions relating to the Every Acre, Every Factory film project?

MBIn the 1990s I participated in a collective in Germany called Wildcat, whose main reference points are the various political expressions of workers‘ autonomy and Operaismo in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. We tried to combine time on the dole for political work with periods of employment and intervention in industries that seemed relevant to us.¹ In the early 1990s many of us worked and intervened in the booming construction sector, where we discovered a new composition of migrant workers who arrived in Germany after the collapse of the former Eastern Block. In the late 1990s call centers mushroomed in the German rust-belt and we tried to understand what happens when you proletarianise office work through new technologies and work organizations. Our local collective Kolinko worked in a dozen different call centers and intervened wherever possible, both at work and within the political milieu, proposing workers’ inquiries on an international level.² More recently I participated in the political efforts of AngryWorkers in the logistics sector in west-London³ and the current attempt to create a political forum in our local hospitals and beyond, as part of Vital Signs magazine. The method remained the same: don’t start from historical concepts of organisation or struggle, but from the actual conditions today.

In the 2010s we wrote an article called Insurrection and Production, which tried to take the concept of class composition as a starting point in order to develop a pragmatic view of a revolutionary transition. We focussed on core sectors that are necessary to reproduce society materially and to change social relations at the same time - or, to put it differently, we asked how collective productive intelligence and class power relate to each other.

I think if we hadn‘t worked in distribution centers and large food processing plants at the time, we would not have developed a similar degree of urgency and clarity to write that text. The text Insurrection and Production also entered a previous film project by comrades from Labournet TV, called The Loud Spring. The film largely deals with the question of climate change, the impossibility of green capitalism and the dead-ends of symbolic climate activism. The final part of that film consists of an imaginary scenario of revolutionary transition. With the current film Every Acre, Every Factory we want to deepen the debate about a transition, based on actual experiences from what we now commonly call “essential industries”. It seems like a very basic idea, but we wanted to force ourselves and the audience to face the question together: what do we actually mean by these old and often mystified terms of revolution and communism?

Every Acre, Every Factory refers to Der Heimliche Aufmarsch [The Secret March], a traditional song of the communist movement in Germany: “Workers, peasants, pick up those rifles, take those guns into your hands! Annihilate the fascist bandit armies and set every heart ablaze! Plant your red banners of labour on every [acre] field, on every factory! Then shall arise from the ruins of old society the Socialist World Republic!” We certainly see a lot of rubble and cinders that the current society produces, but we have difficulties to see the new that may arise from it. The question of political hope and strategy is paramount.

In Every Acre, Every Factory we wanted to avoid two common reactions to the crisis of the revolutionary communist movement: on one hand, a turn towards old certainties and traditions, for example in the form of the re-emergent Stalinism or its soft version, Kautskyism; on the other hand, a search for a new utopianism, either in the form of liberation through technology or through small-scale social experiments. Instead we try to relate our proposals to experiences and thoughts of comrades who drive trains, build energy grids or harvest courgettes today. What connects our conditions and struggles today with the moment of revolutionary transition is the concept and practice of worker control: the daily struggle for more direct influence over work and life. Still, in order to anticipate and walk through the whole process of revolutionary transition we also rely on contributions from the past. For example, the council-communist model of labour time accounting which assists debates on a planned economy from below; or the lessons from the defeat of the last cycle of struggles in the 1970s which contributes to debates on revolutionary strategy.

NFBOn this topic, why did you decide to use film, rather than more traditional formats (such as the written word) for this project?

MBI think the experiences of comrades from Labournet TV who screened and discussed The Loud Spring in over 150 locations was decisive. By reaching out to approximately 50,000 activists they were able to bring a radical rejection of state idealism into the strategic debate of the climate movement in Germany. Besides outreach, film is also a more collective medium. We sold around 3,500 copies of our book Class Power on Zero-Hours, and every now and then we hear that people use it for reading groups or as an inspiration for new workplace initiatives, but this is not a very collective process. Watching a film together allows a sizable group to enter into a discussion together afterwards. People can also organise their own screenings and discussions. The collective aspect is an advantage of film, even though having to compromise on depth and detail is quite painful. We had to reduce fascinating life stories to single phrases, but the fortunate thing is that over the coming months we can make the full-length interviews available on Labournet TV - from stories about anti-colonial underground struggle in Mozambique and Portugal to tales from occupied aeroplane factories in Essex in the 1970s.

To produce a film and screen it in many places requires a structure that comrades from Labournet TV have built up over years and I think this collaboration for Every Acre, Every Factory shows that the efforts of building up our own structures and developing our own ideas have to intersect in order to build up our movement.

NFBIn the film, you make an effort to connect the struggles of the 1970s to the task that faces us today, interviewing militants who were involved in the revolutionary movements of that era before moving on to interviewing workers struggling today. Why did you think it was particularly important to focus on this era within the film?

MBWe come from situations like at the Bakkavor food factory,⁴ where adult workers on the lines felt too powerless and insecure to ask for toilet breaks on time. We see working class patients who internalise their condition as failure, who disregard themselves, suffer from individualisation and become terminally sick over it. They grew up in an ever more polarized class society whose political caste and intellectual henchmen were able to convince many that classes and social commonalities don’t exist anymore - thereby creating a mass pandemic of mental and physical health issues.

In this situation we wanted to start by reminding ourselves and younger comrades that our class used to have social power. We resurrect from social amnesia that organised workforces were able to act autonomously outside of their workplaces and entitled themselves to reduce transport prices, to occupy social centers or to intervene in the debate about the nuclear power plan of the government - in Italy, the anti-nuclear power movement was initiated and led by energy workers! Workers were not only asking for more money and less work, but developed a social critique and a political perspective independently from their main official institutions. Or as our comrade Emilio puts it succinctly in the film: it was about confronting the bourgeois law with a proletarian law.⁵

But then it is primarily about the question of defeat. How was the ruling class able to defeat a class movement that had developed such levels of social power and cohesion? The answer in the film remains necessarily short, we had not enough time to really go into the details of the counterrevolution of the 1980s, which ranged from relocation strategies to the socialization of stock markets and home ownership to academic ideology production.

In many ways the 1970s are also still with us. They can partly explain why a factory closure by GKN in Germany or the UK does not even generate resistance from the workers who are directly concerned, while in Italy, workers from the same company manage to create a class movement around the occupied factory. The idea that workers can organise autonomously and that they can intervene in the political sphere on the basis of a class programme has survived and been passed on, whereas in Germany and the UK it would have to be rediscovered.

NFBThe film interviews an impressive range of workers, from hospitals to car factories, from docks to farms. However, some large and quite unionised workforces in Europe are absent from the film, such as education and local government. What factors influenced the sectors from which you chose to interview workers for the project?

MBWe wanted to speak primarily to worker comrades who have experiences in sectors that reproduce our lives materially and who are employed in workplaces that are usually underrepresented within the left milieu. Teachers and social workers also occupy a difficult position within the disciplinary regime, which would have been an additional aspect to cover. The public sector or local government employment would have to be analysed in detail: which jobs maintain the state hierarchy and bureaucratic machinery and which jobs help coordinate and maintain social reproduction. Many of the jobs we refer to in the film are made invisible: even many leftists think that most of the material activities necessary to reproduce our lives now take place in China or by pressing a button in the home-office.

These are issues which are often raised after the film: “but there are only few industrial jobs left nowadays”. That is true, but this is not primarily a quantitative question. At the peak moment of the Industrial Revolution in England, the symbolic period for ‘factory labour’, the sector which employed most people was domestic services. The industrial working class only made up a tiny section of the labouring classes during the Russian Revolution, but they nevertheless managed to create a new political horizon and unify a social movement around it. Yes, today ‘services’ seem to have grown at the expense of ‘industries’, but even in ‘services’ we see forms of industrial concentration: our hospital in Bristol employs 10,000 people, large call centres replaced bank branches and Amazon distribution centres are sites of mass labour. The ‘essential sectors’ still employ around 30 to 40% of the total social workforce and structurally they are at the centre of any fundamental social change.

NFBThe topics covered by the participants in the film, such as the role of military repression or alternative labour-time accounting that could be required for a post-revolutionary communist society to function, are very impressive, both in how serious they are to confront for any revolutionary to succeed, and in how eloquently they are discussed by the film’s participants. However, these questions risk appearing abstract to those of us organising in workplaces today in Britain, where, despite some upticks in trade union membership and strike activity, working self-organisation is at a relatively low ebb. Why did you think it was important to emphasise these questions and how may people use the discussions around them in the film to influence their approach to organising within the working-class today?

MBIt’s true that there seems to be a major gulf between the level of day to day conflicts at work and the debate about a revolutionary transition. But I think that in many ways we have reached a historical juncture in which the presence or absence of a vision for a social alternative impacts even the more defensive struggles of today. Many workers don’t even muster the confidence and cohesion to defend their own conditions, as it can seem pointless in a system that will eradicate your wins in no time: the next blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the next budget cuts for militarisation, the next inflation due to extreme weather conditions or the decision to close your car plant due to recession. The idea that we, as the working class, are not just victims who have to defend ourselves continuously, but political subjects and the main social force that can take on the responsibility to create social alternatives is significant. The workers at ex-GKN in Italy put up a valiant fight not primarily because they wanted to defend well-paid jobs, but because they knew that years of industrial cooperation and autonomous fight had turned them into a collective subject with a social role - a role that many other workers would have difficulties to play due to their more isolated status.

We hope that it becomes clear in the film that we see the struggle for a new society as deeply linked to the daily confrontations. Once we re-politicise work and start asking the question again as to why work is organised the way it is and who actually decides over it, the door towards communism is pushed open. There is a continuum of worker control that ranges from conflicts over small daily issues to larger sectorial disputes, for instance,how to handle a pandemic or whether to shift production towards rearmament. Worker control clashes with professional and sectorial boundaries and finally has to raise the question of social power.

NFBThe film interviews workers mostly living in Western Europe, where the filmmakers are based. Of course, any process of revolutionary transition would require the knowledge and struggles of billions of workers all across the world, particularly given the globalised supply chains and lean manufacturing that currently underpin production and reproduction in our society. If you could have included more workers from anywhere in the world in the filming, who would you have wanted to talk to and why?

MBThe film ends with footage from the recent workers uprising in northern India. The uprising spread from large-scale construction sites to the automobile and textile industry to call centres and even domestic servants. I had the privilege to live and work with comrades in Delhi for three years and it would have been great to include interviews with local workers into the film. In a way it would have been an update, as we already made a documentary film about local class struggles around 15 years ago! Many of these workers are migrant workers from smaller villages, so their struggles always also question the promises of urban life and relationships. In particular, the young, female workers in these struggles have questioned not only the factory regime, but social oppression in general.

NFBYou’ve been touring the film around cities in Germany for several weeks now. The point of the film is obviously not simply to be enjoyable to watch, but to make a political intervention and nurture new forms of political activity that can push us closer towards a successful revolutionary transition. What do you hope to get politically out of these screenings, and how is it going so far?

We organised around 20 screenings in different towns in September 2026 alone and it seems too early to come up with conclusions. A few things are obvious, though. Many screenings are divided into generations. In some towns most of the people in the audience are from the left trade union or peace movement, average age around 70. In other towns there are mainly younger anarcho-syndicalists, who ask polite questions. It seems that many people come to the screenings as individuals, not as part of political collectives - or to be exact, people might be part of groups, but we don’t easily come to a discussion about collective strategies. The composition is typical for the left, many people in academic or social jobs, who might be less able to relate to the sectoral focus of the film. But then we had good discussions with health workers and a small group of young trade union reps in the chemical industry in Ludwigshafen, who are currently under threat of job cuts, and who want to organise a screening. We hope that after a first round of screenings within our immediate milieu we will be able to reach young active workers like them.

We met many new comrades and we hope that the film can function as a catalyst and collective organiser. We want to organise a conference around the film in autumn 2027, where we can intensify the discussion and hopefully come to new practical initiatives.

Every Acre, Every Factory - Ideas for Necessary Revolution will be screened at venues across Britain during November, featuring Q+As with the filmmakers. You can find details of the currently scheduled screenings below:

• London - 15th November 2026, 7pm @ DNA Café Bar (101 Kingsland Highstreet E8 2PB)
• Bristol - 17th November 2026, 8pm @ Cube Cinema (Dove Street South BS2 8JD)
• Cardiff - 18th November 2026, Starting TBC @ Autonomous Social Centre
• Leeds - 19th November 2026, 6pm @ Jenkinson Lawn (The Holbeck, Leeds LS11 9QF)
• Glasgow - 30th November 2026, 6:30pm @ Broadside (123 Allison St G42 8NE)

For full, updated list of screenings, see the film’s website: https://www.jederacker.de/en

If you want to organise a screening in your town, please get in touch with: [email protected]