Workers' self management

From ICWiki

Workers’ self-management (or autogestion) is a form of collective workplace organisation and decision-making in which the workers themselves make the decisions (for example, about general production methods, scheduling, division of labour etc.) instead of having the traditional hierarchical system with a manager or company owner giving workers orders about what to do, how to do it and where to do it.

Workers’ self management in co-operative economics

Workers' self-management is often the decision-making model used in co-operative economic arrangements such as communes, collectively owned and operated worker cooperatives, workers' councils, and in participatory economics, and similar arrangements where the workplace operates without a boss. These methods are often seen as associated with trade unions or syndicalism (or more lately eco-syndicalism and eco-socialism), or in extreme forms anarcho-syndicalism. However, some unions have historically been more committed to self management than others. It is also one aspect of Solidarity Economy.

Theory

Autogestion was first theorized by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon during the first part of the 19th century. It then became a primary component of trade unions organizations, in particular concerning revolutionary syndicalism beginning in late 19th century France and guild socialism in early 20th century Britain, both movements collapsing in the early 1920s. French trade-union CFDT ("Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail") included worker self-management in its 1970 program, before abandoning it afterward. The ideas of workers' self-management are still advanced by the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) since its founding in 1905 in the United States. In addition, within its own structure, the Industrial Workers of the World pioneered the archetypal workplace democracy model, the Wobbly Shop, in which recallable delegates were elected by workers, and other norms of grassroots democracy were applied.

Historical and present day examples

Examples of such self-management include the Spanish revolution during the Spanish Civil War, Titoist Yugoslavia, the "recovered factories" movement in Argentina (in Spanish, fábrica recuperada), the LIP factory in France in the 1970s, the Mondragon cooperatives Corporation which is the Basque Country's largest corporation, UK/US AK Press, the collectives in the Kommune Niederkaufungen in Germany, etc.

Workers’ self-management in revolutionary Spain

The most complete experience of workers' self-management took place during the Spanish Revolution (1936-1939). The Spanish Revolution of 1936 began during the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Much of Spain's economy was put under worker control; in anarchist strongholds like Catalonia, the figure was as high as 75%, but lower in areas with heavy Stalinist influence. Factories were run through worker committees, agrarian areas became collectivised and run as libertarian communes. It has been estimated by Sam Dolgoff, author of The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-Management in the Spanish Revolution, that over 10 million people participated directly or at least indirectly in the Spanish Revolution. Even places like hotels, barber shops, and restaurants were collectivized and managed by their workers. Despite the critics clamoring for "maximum efficiency" rather than revolutionary methods, anarchic communes often produced more than before the collectivization. In Aragon, for instance, the productivity increased by 20%. The newly liberated zones worked on entirely libertarian principles; decisions were made through councils of ordinary citizens without any sort of bureaucracy (it should be noted that the CNT-FAI leadership was at this time not nearly as radical as the rank and file members responsible for these sweeping changes).

External Links

Anarchopedia article - Autogestion

Autogestion in french Wikipedia

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