How can one oppose self management and be a communist?

[Jacob Cliff]

This isn't meant to be provocative for debate, but I seriously am not understanding how one can be a communist and reject self management. Isn't that the point of communism? To liberate the working class and allow them to manage their own affairs? If not, what change would the manager undergo in communism?

I read that Bordigists in particular oppose self management and state capitalism, but what is the alternative to self-managing workers ownership of the means of production? In other words what is socialism without self management? If there is none - if all planning and decisions are made by the state - isn't that state capitalism?

[BIXX]

It is seen as managing your own misery. This critique mostly comes in my experience from the noncommunist radical scene and the more insurrectionary communist scenes, however I will acknowledge that some regular old leftists view self-managment in the same way.

[#FF0000]

Self-management isn't necessarily the same thing as worker's control over the means of production. Self-management is usually talked about in reference to worker-owned co-ops and things like this, and it's usually criticized because self-management actually perpetuates the internal logic of capitalism, even without managers. "Self-management means self-exploitation".

There's also the issue of what self-management means in a broader context -- production needs to be organized and coordinated across society, meaning factories can't just be allowed to make their own decisions on what and how to produce at the point of production.

[ckaihatsu]

Self-management isn't necessarily the same thing as worker's control over the means of production. Self-management is usually talked about in reference to worker-owned co-ops and things like this, and it's usually criticized because self-management actually perpetuates the internal logic of capitalism, even without managers. "Self-management means self-exploitation".

There's also the issue of what self-management means in a broader context --




production needs to be organized and coordinated across society,


Yes.





meaning factories can't just be allowed to make their own decisions on what and how to produce at the point of production.


But how would 'production organized and coordinated across society' *affect* each particular factory and its workers -- ?

At face-value it sounds like just another top-down scheme to exploit workers, since things would be well-coordinated at the *societal* level, for production to benefit consumers, but there's nothing indicating how self-determination, or any kind of *bottom-up* processes, would be included.

Revolutionary leftists can oppose 'self-management' (under capitalism) *from the left*, meaning that if local productive control is to be achieved it has to be done within a larger social context of *generalized* workers' control, *beyond* the context of production for profit -- since the result of producing for profit is self-exploitation at the workplace level.

So, from the left, we can call for *collective* self-management, in a massively 'bottom-up' way, that *generalizes* to society-wide organization, for the sake of producers and humanity ourselves.

[#FF0000]

At face-value it sounds like just another top-down scheme to exploit workers, since things would be well-coordinated at the *societal* level, for production to benefit consumers, but there's nothing indicating how self-determination, or any kind of *bottom-up* processes, would be included.

Yeah this is where a lot of people get hung up on it (I think it's a disconnect between theory and rhetoric -- self-management sounds like something we'd be for but what self-management means is something more specific).

[oneday]

So, from the left, we can call for *collective* self-management, in a massively 'bottom-up' way, that *generalizes* to society-wide organization, for the sake of producers and humanity ourselves.

A good question to ask ourselves though, is if it is realistically possible that any 'bottom-up' way could ever be universalized into society-wide organization? I believe there is some merit to discussing what the central organs will look like, not having faith that they will organically grow from the bottom.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

I would hope question on RL provoke discussion, otherwise we're just stroking each others' egos.

Now, as mentioned, "self-management" or "autogestion" generally means that the workers of a capitalist enterprise elect "their" managers, as dependent peasants in Yugoslavia sometimes elected their "village prince", or otherwise participate in the management of "their" enterprises. This doesn't solve anything, needless to say. The problems of capitalism are structural problems; they do not depend on the malice of individual managers. By taking on the responsibility for administering a capitalist enterprise, workers simply take on the responsibility for overseeing their own exploitation.

What people on Rl generally seem to mean by "self-management" is this vision of the socialist society as composed of autonomous enterprises managed by "their own" workers. Probably the most famous advocates of this approach were the Group of Internationalist Communists, although they at least understood the need for social bookkeeping. But this is not what workers' control means - it means either the workers of a given production unit having oversight over managers, something that is possible in capitalism as well, or it means the working class as a unit controls the means of production, as a unit. The only way in which this is possible, as far as I can tell, is for the means of production to increasingly come under the control of a society ruled by the working class - leading to a society where the production process is overseen by human society that has transcended class division, the Social Man of Marx and Bordiga.

If things are produced for need, and not out of some whim, the production units can't make decisions on what they are to produce, because unless they employ habitual spice-users, they can't know what the need for various products is, and how much other units are capable of fulfilling that need. There needs to be coordination - central, i.e. on the scale of the entire human society given the modern conditions of large-scale industrial production - to figure out targets etc. I think resistance toward this idea is largely because of the conflation of central planning with top-down planning - some latter-day Our Committee dictating targets according to whim. Planning needs to be participatory and "democratic" in the sense of being adopted by social consensus. But it also needs to be central, or global, if you prefer that phrase, in scope. One is not incompatible with the other.

And even when it comes to things that are within the purview of individual production units, it's probably a bad idea to have these matters settled just by the workers within the production unit. These units exist in definite locations, their operation affects other people as well. I would expect that if the question of how much a factory can produce is raised, the workers in that factory would be consulted - even if the engineers say the factory can produce X units in the planning period, the workers might not be willing to work that much. OK, but that's just part of the issue. Maybe people living next to the factory don't want to experience so much noise. Maybe society wants to preserve the factory as it is. Who knows. In any case you have to consult more people.

I also don't think it's difficult to have consensus decision-making and centralisation at the same time - we choose delegates according to some scheme and they approve one of the proposed production plans. If we don't like the result, we recall the delegates. It's a simplification, of course, but I think it's sound in general.

[danyboy27]

While not being completely without its benefits, self-management is one of these concepts that the Silicon valley new age libertarians are pushing foward has an alternative to genuine societal and economical change.

Its more or less smoke and mirror, beccause at the end of the day, its still the worker who get to produce for the capitalist while he get exploited.

Communal ownership with a vertical type of management will always beat
private ownership with a horizontal management.

The ideal structure would of course be Communal ownership paired with horizontal management, but the key feature of a better system is communal ownership.

[ckaihatsu]

At face-value it sounds like just another top-down scheme to exploit workers, since things would be well-coordinated at the *societal* level, for production to benefit consumers, but there's nothing indicating how self-determination, or any kind of *bottom-up* processes, would be included.





Yeah this is where a lot of people get hung up on it (I think it's a disconnect between theory and rhetoric -- self-management sounds like something we'd be for but what self-management means is something more specific).


Yeah, it's *terrific* rhetoric, or propaganda -- who *wouldn't* be for 'self-management' (since we're all each individually motivated beings at some level) -- ?

The 'specifics' of it is that it's situated in the present-day overarching profit-mandating capitalist political economy.





A good question to ask ourselves though, is if it is realistically possible that any 'bottom-up' way could ever be universalized into society-wide organization? I believe there is some merit to discussing what the central organs will look like, not having faith that they will organically grow from the bottom.


Certainly. Both.

I like to think that a worldwide socialist revolution would be a 'restart' of all social productive organizations, so that such *could* be rebuilt strictly from the bottom-up, all over the world. I think it would be a 'luxury', since it would take time and could only generalize on the basis of agreement from below.

More realistically I think the momentum of the revolution itself would set much of the tone for the resulting social organization over production, doubtlessly with much centralization pre-existing, for good and bad, relatively speaking.

[motion denied]

I think fair criticism of autogestion has been made in this thread.

However it's unthinkable that a social revolution would let intact the hierarchical division of labour within the workplace, since "the developed division of labour, as it appears accidentally within society, and the capitalist division of labour within the workshop, condition and produce each other. For the commodity as the necessary form of the product, and therefore the alienation of the product as the necessary form of its appropriation, imply a fully developed division of social labour, while on the other hand it is only on the basis of capitalist production, hence also of the capitalist division of labour within the workshop, that all products necessarily assume the commodity form, and all producers are therefore necessarily commodity producers." (source (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch01.htm)) and that "The political rule of the producer cannot co-exist with the perpetuation of his social slavery" (source (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch05.htm)).

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, yes, but an absence of the division of labour does not mean that distinct managerial functions are gone. In fact Marx talks about the labour of supervision and management as necessary in any combined mode of production. But with the division of labour and the distinction between mental and physical labour gone, that function doesn't form a separate job. Today's manager or supervisor is tomorrow's machinist or janitor or whatever.