On the Essence of Self-Management

This article gives an outline of the basic sources of the idea of self-management, which has become so significant for the contemporary worker’s movement. In the first part of the article an analysis of postulates of the classical organization theory (starting from Taylorist Scientific Management, over Human Relations school, to contemporary structuralist approaches) is given, and the historical context which lead Lenin to accept those postulates as adequate for a socialist organization of production is demonstrated. However, there is an ever existing tendency emphasizing spontaneity, self-management before all, m the history of workers’ movement. In that respect the name of Proudhon is probably the most important, and his ideas are extensively analysed in this article. The third part of the article presents some of the fundamental divergences between Marxism and anarchism, where anarchism stressing the necessity of decentralization as the prerequisite for socialism, whereas Marxists insist on the need of not encroaching upon the degree of centralization of productive forces reached by the bourgeois. The only episode demonstrating a phase of »decentralization« in the works of Marx and Engels is the period of Paris commune and their enthusiasm about it. Out of the 20th century authors, the author of this article pays greatest attention to Rosa Luxembourg and her ideas, deeming her ideas particularly significant for the theoretical foundation of socialism, based on self-realization of the class, and not on its subordination to the party. Self-management is, in economic sense, a free association of united producers in authors opinion, who take into their hands the function of planning too. In political terms that association has to be supported by a political association or a federation. In any case, self-management is now-a-days a concrete utopia used as the signboard of the socialist actions