8. The Management of the Economy

We have spelled out the implications of workers’ management at the level of a particular enterprise. These consist of the abolition of any separate managerial apparatus and of the assumption of managerial authority by the workers themselves, organized in Workers’ Councils and in General Assemblies of one or more shops or offices, or of a whole enterprise.

Workers’ management of the economy as a whole also implies that the management of the economy is not vested in the hands of a specific managerial stratum, but that it belongs to organized collectivities of producers.

What we have outlined in the previous sections shows that democratic management is perfectly feasible. Its basic assumption is the clarification of data and the mass utilization of what modern techniques have now made possible. It implies the conscious use of a series of devices and mechanisms (such as the genuine consumer “market,” wage equality, the new relations between price and value – and of course, the plan factory) combined with real knowledge concerning economic reality. Together, these will help clear the ground. The major part of planning is just made up of tasks of execution and could safely be left to highly mechanized or automated offices, which would have no political or decisional role whatsoever, and would confine themselves to placing before society a variety of feasible plans and their full respective implications for everyone.

This general clearing of the ground having been achieved, and coherent possibilities having been presented to the people, the final choice will lie in their hands. Everyone will participate in deciding the ultimate targets “in full knowledge of the relevant facts,” i.e., knowing the implications of his/her choice for himself/herself (both as producer and as consumer).

Once adopted, a given plan would provide the framework of economic activities for a given period. It would establish a starting point for economic life. But, in a free society, the plan will not dominate economic life. It is only a starting point, constantly to be taken up again and modified as necessary. Neither the economic life of society – nor its total life – can be based on a dead technological rationality, established once and for all. Society cannot alienate itself from its own decisions. It is not only that real life will almost of necessity diverge, in many aspects, from the “most perfect” plan in the world. It is also that workers’ management will constantly tend to alter, both directly and indirectly, the basic data and targets of the plan. New products, new methods, new ideas, new problems, new difficulties and new solutions will constantly be emerging. Working times will be reduced. Prices will fall, entailing reactions of the consumers and displacements of demand. Some of these modifications will only affect a single factory, others several factories and yet others, no doubt, the economy as a whole.[24] The “plan factory” would, therefore, not only be called upon to work once every five years; it would daily have to tackle some problem or another.

All this deals mainly with the form of workers’ management of the economy, and with the mechanisms and institutions that might ensure that it functions in a democratic manner. These forms would allow society to give to the management of the economy the content it chose. In a narrower sense, they would enable society to orient the economy in any particular direction.

It is almost certain that the direction chosen would be radically different from that proposed by the best intentioned ideologists or philanthropists of modern society. All such ideologists (whether “Marxist” or bourgeois) accept as self-evident that the ideal economy is one which allows the most rapid possible expansion of the productive forces and, as a corollary, the greatest possible reduction of the working day. This idea, considered in absolute terms, is absolutely absurd. It epitomizes the whole mentality, psychology, logic and metaphysic of capitalism, its reality as well as its schizophrenia. “Work is hell. It must be reduced.” The rulers of modern society (East and West) believe that people will only be happy if they are provided with cars and butter. The population must therefore be made to feel that it can only be happy if the roads are choked with cars or if it can “catch up with American butter production within the next three years.” And, when people acquire the said cars and the said butter, all that will be left for them to do will be to commit suicide, which is just what they do in that “ideal” country called Sweden. This “acquisitive” mentality which capitalism engenders, which helps capitalism live, without which capitalism could not exist, and which capitalism exacerbates to frenetic proportions, might just conceivably have been a useful aberration during a phase of human development. Socialist society will not be this absurd race after percentage increments in production. This will not be its basic concern.

In its initial phase, to be sure, socialist society will concern itself with satisfying consumer needs, and with a more balanced distribution of people’s time between productive work and other activities. But, the real development of people and of social communities, will be socialism’s central preoccupation. A very important part of social investment will, therefore, be geared to transforming machinery, to a universal and genuine education, to abolishing divisions between town and country, and between mental and manual labor. The growth of freedom within work, the development of the creative faculties of the producers, the creation of integrated and complete human communities, will be the paths along which socialist humanity will seek to find the meaning of its existence. These will, in addition, enable socialism to secure the material basis which it needs.