"Self-management"

11. SELF-MANAGEMENT: WORKERS SELF-EXPLOITATION

If the nation state itself has become too narrow a framework for the productive forces, this is all the more true for the individual enterprise which has never had any real autonomy from the general laws of capitalism; under decadent capitalism, enterprises depend even more heavily on those laws and on the state. This is why ‘self-management’ (the management of enterprises by the workers in a society which remains capitalist), a petty bourgeois utopia last century when it was advocated by Proudhonist tendencies, is today nothing but a capitalist mystification. (see note)

It is an economic weapon of capital in that it tries to get the workers to take up responsibility for enterprises hit by the crisis by making them organise their own exploitation.

It is a political weapon of the counter-revolution in that it:
  • divides the working class by imprisoning it and isolating it factory by factory, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, sector by sector;
  • burdens the workers with the concerns of the capitalist economy when their only task is to destroy it;
  • diverts the proletariat from the fundamental task which determines the possibility of its emancipation: the destruction of the political apparatus of capital and the establishment of its class dictatorship on a world scale.
It is only on a world-wide scale that the proletariat can really undertake the management of production, but it will do this not within the framework of capitalist laws but by destroying them.

Any political position which (even in the name of ‘working class experience’ or of ‘establishing new relations among workers’) defends self management is, in fact, objectively participating in the preservation of capitalist relations of production.

Communism means the elimination of the law of value and the unification of the productive process

We have decided to publish in the International Review, the following reply to a comrade in the Voronezh region (a town situated on the Don to the south of Moscow). This is because we think that the questions raised deserve the attention generally of internationalists in Russia and elsewhere. The argumentation of the Russian comrade is very serious, even if we do not agree with all his conclusions.

Spain 1936 and the Friends of Durruti

Presentation

Anarchism today has the wind in its sails. Anarchist ideas, in the form both of the emergence and strengthening of anarcho-syndicalism, and of the appearance of numerous small libertarian groups, are getting off the ground in several countries (and are getting more and more attention from the capitalist media). This is perfectly explicable inperfectly explicable in the present historic period.

The Mexican Left, 1938: The reactionary character of nationalizations in the imperialist phase of capitalism

In issue no. 10 of the International Review (June-August 1977) we introduced our readers to the ‘Mexican Workers Group’ of Mexico, a group which emerged in the darkest period of the workers’ movement. Its appearance in the years 1937 to 1939 was not a sign of a resurgence of the workers’ movement but a last gasp of communist class consciousness against the bloody cynicism of triumphant capitalism, ready to celebrate its victory in the unleashing of World War II.

Spain 1936: The Myth of the Anarchist Collectives

The Spanish collectives of 1936 have been presented by the anarchists as the perfect model for revolution. According to them they allowed worker self—management of the economy, meant the abolition of bureaucracy, increased the efficiency of work... For our part, we find ourselves obliged, once again, to be spoilsports; the 1936 collectives were not a means for the prol­etarian revolution, but an instrument of the bourgeois counter-revolution; they were not the “organization of the new society”, but the last resort of the old which defend­ed itself with all its savagery
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