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Title: The subversive weed Author: Amedeo Bertolo Date: 1979 Language: en Topics: self-management Source: Retrieved on 17th May 2021 from https://autonomies.org/2021/04/amedeo-bertolo-the-subversive-weed/ Notes: This text was presented at the “Self-management” studies conference in Venice, 28–30 of September, 1979, and was subsequently published in Interrogations, nº. 17–18, 1979.
The temptation is strong for the anarchist: “self-management” is a new
word for something old, better, for many old things, because this word
also, as with almost all of the economic, political and social
vocabulary, can mean more than one thing.
In its broadest, “extremist” sense, self-management is synonymous, if
not with anarchy, with self-government (a term from the old anarchist
lexicon). It is what Philippe Oyhamburu defends, for example, when he
confronts the claims of those who advocate “self-management” with the
thought and achievements of anarchists and anarchism, highlighting the
fact that the self-management movement not only takes up the greater
part of the themes of the later, but arrives at the point of repeating
them word for word. Furthermore, the Yugoslavian term samoupravlje, from
which “was born” the translation to the word “self-management” at the
beginning of the 1970s, looks like a Serbo-Croatian variation on the
Russian samoupravljanje, already used by Bakunin, which can be
translated either as self-administration or as self-government.
In its more limited meaning, self-management is synonymous with
co-management, that is, the subaltern participation of workers, that is,
inter-classist collaboration, that is, deception. Between one extreme
and the other, there exist all of the possible intermediate nuances of
meaning and of the theoretical-practical choices of socialism, from the
libertarian to the authoritarian, from the revolutionary to the
reformist.
Therefore, there is a strong temptation to finish with the matter, above
all because of the inflated and mystifying use of the term, which can
only irritate us (we are offered “self-managed” vacations,
“self-managed” televised electoral propaganda by parties …). However, we
believe that, behind the success of the word, there exists more and
something more important than an umpteenth mystification and a subtle
recuperation, with a new terminology, of the anarchist tradition. The
very effort at mystification and recuperation, in itself, signifies a
social “demand” to which mystification and recuperation refer to.
The fact is that self-management was before all else a widely diffused
demand and social practice over the course of the last decade.[1] The
self-management boom is perhaps, from the anarchist point of view, the
most important cultural phenomenon of this post-war. And by cultural
phenomenon, I do not mean the flourishing of texts about
self-management, which I see more as an effect rather than a cause of
the boom, but to the multiplication of practices in social conflicts,
above all since 1968, but already foreshadowed in the preceding years.
A growing desire for individual and collective self-determination
manifested itself over the length of this period (sometimes clearly,
more frequently, confusedly and contradictorily, but always “readable”)
in a thousand ways: from hippie communities to factory occupations, from
student struggles to the feminist movement, from the refusal of
delegation to the search for different interpersonal relations … Between
the “on fabrique, on vend, on se paie”[2] of the LIP[3] and “the body is
mine and it is I who control it”, there is continuity. The social
pursuit of self-management in fact exists in a multiplicity of ways and
at every level, which translates into a de-structuration of power in all
of the macro and micro-systems where power manifests itself: from the
family to the State, passing through the factory, the neighbourhood, the
school, the hospital, the labour union, the political party …
Is this a rejection of power or a pursuit of power? Reformists and
authoritarian revolutionaries prefer to qualify this social pursuit as a
pursuit of power: but is it still power when there is no desire to
become a faculty of “command and obedience”, but rather a faculty for
deciding autonomously? The aspiration to self-management seems to us to
be the libertarian equivalent in terms of power, parallel to the
egalitarian socialist aspiration in terms of property. In this instance,
what is required is the socialisation of power.
Now, a socialised power, that is, one not concentrated in specific
social roles (and therefore in individuals and dominant classes), but
diffused throughout the whole social body and in its articulations as a
universal and equal function, may correspond to a close approximation to
anarchism. If this is not the case for the
anarchism-of-the-absence-of-power (a limit concept like geometric
forms), it may at least hold for that dynamic compromise between the
ideal model and the bonds to material contexts and cultural givens,
which we could call “possible anarchism”. But a socialised power can
also be understood, conversely, as an abominable instrument of
omnipresent authoritarian control, in which power becomes a universal
though unequal function (graded from the top to the base), in a
continuous change that involves all of the roles of reciprocal
oppression. Brrr …
A profound and serious approach to the theme of self-management
configures two useful possibilities – to my mind, fundamental – for
anarchists: 1) to reflect on the contents and the more advanced forms
(in egalitarian and libertarian terms) assumed by contemporary social
conflicts and, at the same time, on the responses given by the dominant
classes; 2) to reflect on the problems of “possible anarchism”, that is,
on the problems of the social reconstruction, of the global
restructuring of the communitarian fabric according to non-hierarchical
models.
I believe accordingly that the debate around self-management can be an
important occasion for anarchists. If the demand for self-management is,
in a certain measure, a “demand for anarchy”, it is not necessary to add
a pair of slogans to our repertoire of words of order, but to extract
from it indications for our action. If sociologists, economists,
philosophers, psychologists, urbanists, increasingly use the
self-management key for a quasi-anarchist approach to the human sciences
and propose quasi-anarchist solutions to social problems, it is not
enough for us to congratulate ourselves for the phenomenon, much less
claim priority over the method. We must work seriously to propose
ourselves as the point of credible libertarian cultural reference here
and now … If politicians and bureaucrats and technocrats prattle on
about self-management, or worse, are in the process of elaborating and
realising partial or distorted versions of it, it is useless to shout
out, “thief!” We must rather demystify their game with convincing
arguments and exemplary struggles.
Self-management should not be, of course, a simple pretext for
“refreshing” our “beautiful ideal”. Very much on the contrary, it is a
matter of carrying out a real renewal of our cultural baggage and of
acting in a more useful manner, that is, 1) from real instances and not
only from an individual or movement demand that is ours, 2) organising
our reflection around a concept which constantly reminds us of the
consistency of the organisational forms.
I do not wish to say with this that all of the theoretical-practical
work of redefining the anarchist project be reduced, in a simple way, to
the category of self-management. The concept of self-management in
itself can in no way substitute the very rich problematic of the means
and ends of anarchism, something which is sustained by a vast conceptual
range of an ethical, aesthetic and scientific order …
In fact, the ambit specific to self-management is not that of ends, nor
of means, contrary to what may appear, sometimes, in its individual
manifestations in social conflicts. It falls rather in the intermediary
ambit of method, the ambit of the relations between ends and means. Even
while participating in both, self-management is not an end (or a sum of
ends), nor a means (or a sum of means), but a way to seek and express
the coherence between them in organisational terms and in relation both
to the theoretical-practical critique of what exists and the proposal of
alternative social structures.
To define self-management as an organisational method may seem
restrictive. In truth, what this means is that we attribute to it a
central importance. Significantly, the great fractures at the heart of
the socialist movement were verified not with regard to ends, which
seemed to be the same, but over method: over the choice of means and
over their coherence with chosen ends. To define self-management as a
method also means denying it the neutrality of a simple technique, good
for all occasions, to attribute to it a specific functionality in
relation to the values of freedom and equality adequate to it.
Self-management understood as an end seems to me to derive from – and/or
lead to – a terribly limited and limiting concept of society and of
human beings. Self-management understood as a means lends itself to
mystifying uses. It is susceptible, in a more or less insignificant form
of decentralised power, to appropriation in new “participatory”
techno-bureaucratic systems. Both can give way to new and obscene forms
of “interiorised” power, that is, to an “induced” self-control”, a
“piloted” self-discipline in a hierarchical society, to a kind of
self-exploitation, a “consensual” domination.
Contrariwise, conceived as a method and placed in a position of
juncture, not only between means and ends, but also between theory and
social practice, self-management can express all of the wealth and all
of the difficulty of anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic conflict
and thought. In this condition, it can become a formidable logical and
operational instrument; a subversive instrument not vulnerable to social
and conceptually classist systems, because irreducibly libertarian and
egalitarian.
Such wealth is moreover verified in reality, that is, in the
multiplicity of self-management demands expressed in social struggles
and, furthermore, in the thought of the theoreticians of generalised
self-management who, though in the majority Marxists, arrived not by
chance at the substantially anarchist positions of the rejection of the
State and of all hierarchy, of the party and of any vanguard …
The fact is that self-management, as we were saying, is only a
libertarian and egalitarian methodology if all of its presuppositions
and implications are fully accepted in depth and extension. That is,
when the conditions necessary for any individual to be truly the subject
and not the object of choices which affect them are studied and when, by
necessary coherence, the field of application of self-management of the
limited microcosm of business is extended to all spheres and to all
levels of social life. Generalised self-management thus becomes a
cultural dimension, in which can be found: individual and collective
revolts against all and any form (economic, political, sexual, ethnic,
ideological …) of relation of domination; efforts (great or small,
revolutionary or marginal) and experiences (extra or anti-institutional)
to re-establish, on new bases, collective life; tensions of ideals and
emotive drives not reducible to recognised necessities and more or less
satisfied by the large hierarchical systems; efforts to re-think
society, and therefore, human beings, to find new approaches and/or keys
to the reading of history.
Does not this generalised self-management organise itself, or tend to
organise itself, more like a true and proper system rather than a
method? For example, as an alternative model of global society with
socialised power, does it not end up as that possible anarchism that I
spoke of earlier? Yes, but because in this system, in this model, in
this cultural dimension, are introduced criteria of judgement (values)
and cognitive criteria (modes of selection and organisation of facts so
as to transform them into information) which, even though derived or
extracted from the organisational method, they are no longer just
method, they are no longer just about self-management. And because
self-management is not a neutral method, that which derives from it
either by induction or deduction has the anarchist seal, or better, is
that much more anarchist the greater is its depth and extension.
Generalised self-management therefore may well be another way of saying
libertarian socialism. Is it nothing new? On the contrary: it is rather
libertarian socialism rediscovered, or better, reconstructed in the
struggles, in the experiences, in the scientific and technical
innovations, in a word, in the culture, of these last two decades.
Generalised self-management is a theory still in construction, as any
living theory should be, but which has already defined references that
correspond to our own references. This is something which is not
surprising given that it followed, more or less, the same logical
itineraries we did, but it followed them today, whereas we did so
yesterday.
General formulations, such as the “first principle of self-management”
as defined by Bourdet (refusal of the delegation of power, revocability
of all mandates at any moment), give anarchists, who always theorised
and practised them, the impression of a discovery … an obvious
discovery. We cannot and should not however limit ourselves to viewing
the phenomenon with suspicion or with satisfaction, but yes, before the
pillage – more or less voluntary – and the recycling of our ideas
becomes irreversible, we should accelerate the restructuring of our
theoretical capital. The latter is an obsolete capital, not in its
general formulations – which also rightly confirm themselves as valid in
the debate on self-management – but in all of its intermediate
articulation and in its operational instruments.
Ecology, alternative technology, anti-authoritarian pedagogy and
institutional analysis cannot simply be added to anarchist thought,in
the same manner that occasional fragments of the social and human
sciences, from anthropology to economics, from psychology to sociology,
cannot be mechanically added to it. The operation that I desire is much
more complex. The old and solid trunk of anarchism is still vigorous,
but it must be energetically pruned so that young branches can sprout
and develop and so that it may receive new grafts without rejecting or
suffocating them. The blossoming of the practice and theory of
self-management seems to me in fact to be a good occasion to prune and
graft. From the debate on self-management, we can extract elements to
decide what to prune and what to graft.
Without undeserved inferiority complexes, but also without illusory
superiority complexes, anarchists can hope for, in the debate around
self-management, a precious contribution of openness in the direction of
what is new and different, of creative stimuli, of admonition against
hiding its own unresolved problems behind ready to hand formula. For
their part, anarchists can bring to the debate the precious contribution
of the collective memory of a movement that lived consciously (conscious
also of its own contradictions) the whole problematic of self-management
through victories and defeats, joys and sufferings, struggles and daily
life, through the hearts and minds of hundreds of thousands of
militants.
The debate on self-management moves first of all from the field of what
is by definition most proper to it: from the analysis of collective
decision making mechanisms, that is, from the reflection on how, in
hierarchical organisational structures, power is determined and on how,
inversely, it is possible concretely to organise the egalitarian
participation of all in decision making processes. It is a reflection on
the themes of authority and freedom and a reflection that leads directly
to the fulcral points of direct democracy and the division of labour.
In fact, it is easy to (re)discover from this perspective that the
fundamental distinction, common to all class societies, is that between
who holds power and who bears it, between who governs and who is
governed, and that the cause of this dichotomy is not the private
ownership of the means of production, which is one of its historically
determined juridical-economic forms. It is easy therefore to
(re)discover that the root of domination is the hierarchical division of
social labour and that, as a result, self-management is an empty shell
if it does not presuppose the integration (to recall Bakunin and
Kropotkin) of manual and intellectual, executive and organisational
labour.
Without this recomposition, self-management is already impossible at the
level of a business company, because the effective possibility and
capacity of all workers to operate and decide knowingly is absent (which
is the second of the two fundamental principles of self-management,
according to Bourdet). Without such a recomposition, there can be no
egalitarian participation based on knowledge and responsibility and
there is no, therefore, self-management, but rather asymmetrical
co-management between managers and subordinates, even if everyone is
formally a partner or member, or even if the first are formally
“dependent” on the second, following the Yugoslavian formula.
It is an unsuspicious witness of the regime (Milojko Drulovic) who tells
us that according to sociological studies, the frequent conflicts
between management and representative organs of the workers express an
“acute antagonism, a true struggle over the sharing of power and
authority” and one of the causes would be, oh look, the extravagant
pretension of the workers to “interfere in the domain of management”
based on a “primitive conception according to which self-management
would suppress the division of labour”. More truthfully, the integration
should be extended to the whole of society, because the hierarchical
division of social labour is not a phenomenon that can be simply reduced
to the sphere of businesses, nor even to that of economics, but it
refers to the whole of social functions. And even remaining within the
economic sphere, it is necessary to recognise in exploitation not only
the quantitative aspect, but also the qualitative, which consists in
reserving for a small minority the more gratifying types of work, while
to the majority fall the more thankless, exhausting, frustrating kinds
of labour. The cleaner of sewers continues to be a cleaner of sewers
even under self-management. The urban planner continues to be an urban
planner even under self-management. We can very well imagine a
self-managed collective of porters and a self-managed collective of
doctors; we can even imagine (it is a difficult abstraction, I admit)
that they exchange their labour on a level of equality: one hour of work
of the one is paid for by one hour of work of the other. But the
exchange will remain unequal, the qualitative exploitation persists.
This is masked by the fact that normally – and not by chance –,
quantitative exploitation is superimposed on it. Yet when the
paradoxical norm, according to which to the more unpleasant jobs
correspond the lower salaries, is contradicted, the qualitative
dimension of exploitation becomes evident. For example, today a street
cleaner earns more than a secondary school teacher, but the result is
not any tendency on the part of the teachers to be contracted as street
cleaners …
The hierarchical division of social labour is therefore charged with
non-egalitarian meanings: exploitation, privilege and, above all, power.
The ideologies of power (whether they are capitalist or
techno-bureaucratic) justify the hierarchy with the organisational
necessities of complex societies. They shuffle the cards because they
falsely mix two things which are not necessarily tied. It is undeniable
that with social-economic structures more articulated than those found
in a tribe of hunters and gatherers that the social and technical
division of labour is not, to a certain degree, eliminable. It is
undeniable that these structures, from the business company to the local
community, and so on, to the broadest social systems, must articulate
themselves by functions. But it is by no means necessary that the
functions become fixed roles: rotation, for example, permits reconciling
division with equality. Furthermore, certain functions can very well
become collective, others still can be performed with a revocable
mandate, others, lastly, will completely disappear because they are only
useful and necessary to the hierarchical system; a system which
generates them in large quantities and continually so as to preserve and
justify itself.
What is there to prevent, for example, that in a hospital all of the
workers discharge manual and intellectual functions by rotation (that
all be, in different periods of the day, the week or the year,
doctors-nurses-auxiliaries), that the management be collective, with
administrative tasks attributed temporarily, along with internal and
external coordination? There is no real motive for this, but only the
false motives of a rationality internal to the logic of power, that is,
a deliberate, created and artificially maintained relative scarcity of
intellectual competencies used to justify the monopoly of a knowledge
class and, therefore, a hierarchy.
The objection that it would be a waste to underuse the minds of the
intellectuals, obliging them to dedicate a part of their time to manual
labour is repugnantly imbecilic. What to say then of the enormous waste
of creativity, intelligence and imagination of nine out of ten people,
mutilated in their capacities and condemned to a stupid and
disheartening routine in factories, offices, in domestic labour, such
that only one person can grow, think, invent? And why do we not also ask
ourselves how much the very intelligence of this person was impoverished
due to the privation of the stimuli that come from manual activities,
that is, from the direct contact with material reality?
From this perspective, the recent phenomenon of mass schooling acquires
a particular significance, with its demands for the right to study, with
its shoving against, a little ambitiously and a little demagogically,
the economic and meritocratic barriers placed in defence of privileged
knowing. Beyond the individual aspirations to a social promotion by
means of a diploma and a university degree, as a global phenomenon, as
the objective sum of individual motivations, what is at issue here is a
generalised search for intellectual labour, a search, which because it
is generalised, cannot be satisfied except through the negation of the
social pyramid and the non-egalitarian distribution among everyone of
either manual or intellectual work. And it is perhaps not a fortuitous
coincidence if self-management made a thunderous eruption, as a demand
and as a practice, in May 68, a popular explosion unleashed by the
Parisian students …
The integration of intellectual and manual work determines a condition
of equality in the effective possibilities and capacities of decision
making. However, it does not exhaust, but only introduces, the discourse
about direct democracy, as the division between manual and intellectual
work does not exhaust the discourse about power. In effect, not all
intellectual workers, on the contrary, only a minority among them, are
integrated into the dominant class. Neither scientists, for example, nor
doctors, neither professors nor engineers exercise, as such, functions
of power. They do so only if they occupy positions of control and social
management, if and while they exercise functions of “hetero-management”,
that is, management over other human beings.
Whatever its apparent origin and its justification (property ownership
or organisational capacity, merit or competence), whatever the manner by
which it was conferred or legitimised (mercantilist mechanisms or
meritocratic selection, investiture from on high or “democratic”
delegation from below), the power of rulers is always obtained by
confiscating it from society, that is, by negating the fact and the
right to all others of the faculty of individual and collective
self-determination.
The delegation of power that is expressed in representative democracy,
or indirect democracy, is perhaps the most subtly mystifying device for
legitimising hierarchy. It therefore threatens to be a Trojan horse of
power in the practice and thought of self-management, as historical and
contemporary experiences, from Spain to Yugoslavia, from the cooperative
movement to labour union bureaucracies, demonstrate. Presented as an
organisational technique, it is, on the contrary, a functional,
organisational mode of hierarchical power, incompatible with
self-management.
Let it be noted though that we are not here making any consideration
about the fact that, in a parliamentary democracy, elections are not a
means to nominate the political leaders, but only a very small part of
the formal representation of political power. And we omit the facile
irony about the mystifying nature of “electoral” choice. The socialist
himself, Giorgio Ruffulo, current candidate to the European elections,
defined three years ago the voting mechanism as an “applause-o-metre”
(an applause-o-metre flawed, we add, by the current sophisticated
techniques of public opinion manipulation). What we are interested in
highlighting here is that even if, in the abstract, all of the functions
of social management were elected, these same elected managers would
constitute themselves as a dominant class, by the very objective logic
of the delegation of power.
The astuteness of extending to the economic and business domain a few
measures of representative democracy (in the form of co-management or
technocratic “self-management”) is an even fairly transparent attempt at
recasting the consensus around productivist alienation in the face of
the bankruptcy of capitalist ideology. Even though representative
democracy already shows signs of wear in the political field and has
increasing difficulties in masking its true oligarchic nature, its
renovation in an economic frame can perhaps still exercise some
attraction because it is based on cultural values deposited in the
collective unconscious. The rejection of delegation is still a
relatively new “effervescent” social phenomenon that arises in times of
crisis.
… and direct democracy
If the delegation of power opens a fracture in the social body, between
“managers” and “managed”, self-management can only be recognised and
realised in direct democracy, that is, only on the condition that power
remains a collective function, that it is never separated from the
collectivity as a superior authority, not even if elected. Direct
democracy does not mean, reductively, assembly based democracy. Even if
the assembly is its fundamental organ, the subsequent articulation of
direct democracy draws on other formulas such as revocable mandates,
beyond the delegation of power. There is delegation of power when
someone is charged with taking imperative decisions over the
collectivity, in the name and on behalf of it, relative to a broad range
of questions and with ample discretionary power. If, on the contrary,
the mandate is specific and temporary, with limited and defined margins
of discretionary authority, and above all, if it is revocable at any
moment by the constituents, that is, by the collectivity that expressed
itself through the representative, then this latter does not replace or
substitute the collective will, nor can it freely interpret it (an old
trick of representative democracy), because its actions are subject to
permanent verification.
In general terms, direct democracy may be defined by a sovereign
assembly, revocable mandates and, lastly, the constant rotation (at more
or less long intervals, according to their nature) of all permanent
functions of coordination, of all “leadership” functions not
collectively exercised. And this is how popular democracy expressed
itself when, episodically and temporarily, it could manifest itself
without excessive objective and subjective constraints. The Spanish
libertarian collectives were so organised. And so are the numerous
Israeli kibbutzim still organised, in which, according to Rosner,
approximately some 50 percent of the members participate in committees
and management functions by rotation. And do not revocable mandates go
back to the Paris Commune? And do we not find revocable mandates and the
sovereign assembly as demands and as praxis in the workers struggles of
the last ten years? Direct democracy is already social practice, even if
only episodic and fragmentary.
Those who want to reduce self-management to marginality, or who would
deny it any chance whatsoever, say that direct democracy can only be
applied to small scale organisations. Let us then consider the question
of dimension. Paradoxically, I am also convinced that the large scale is
the dimension of power and that the small scale is that of direct
democracy. But I draw from this conviction different conclusions:
elementary associative units (productive, territorial, etc.) can and
should be small and, between them, a web of horizontal relations should
be woven. In other words, large units and the very pernicious
concept-myth of Unity with a capital letter should be rejected. The
small units, in turn, should not be the bricks of a pyramidal structure,
but the nodes of a sort of federative network of egalitarian connections
that go from the simple to the complex, and not from the base to the
vertex.
The large private enterprise, the megalopolises, the State, should be
rejected and broken down because the “large” segregates power within and
outside of itself. Large economic and political aggregates, large social
institutions, are the field where the power of the “new bosses-managers”
is affirmed and exercised: it is here that the techno-bureaucracy finds
its vital space and its functional justifications, whether in
late-capitalist or post-capitalist systems.
There is enough experience and scientific research to know that certain
dimensional limits cannot be exceeded if direct communication is to be
preserved, which is essential to direct democracy and which is
exemplified (though not reducible to it) in the active participation in
an assembly. A decision making assembly of thousands of people is
unimaginable. Such an assembly can only approve or reject simple
proposals, proposals previously simplified. Furthermore, an assembly of
this kind risks responding, credibly, more to emotional than to rational
solicitations, following the law of the psychology of the masses.
On the other hand, if it is true that direct communication can be joined
by other forms of horizontal communication (made possible by the
appropriate use of electronic and television media, as Prandstraller and
Flecchia suggest for example), it is also true that these last should
not replace the former, but merely add to them, especially at a federal
level, because they can more easily be an instrument of control and/or
of polling than of forming and expressing popular will. Accordingly, the
first fundamental sphere of collective self-determination can be none
other than the elementary associative unit – in the same way that the
first and fundamental sphere of freedom can only be the individual – and
this unit should be “at the scale of the assembly”. The self-management
approach to the problem of scale should therefore be posed, without
inhibition, following the line of thought synthesised by the felicitous
expression of E.F. Schumacher that, “small is beautiful”. It is a matter
of inverting the logical idea, which starts from what exists and its
“objective” tendencies towards economic, political and technological
gigantism, to then prove the “necessity” of the large scale. To fall
anew into that logic would be disastrous for the theory and practice of
self-management, for one would then arrive at the demonstration of the
impossibility of generalised self-management. It would also be a
mistake, because in truth it is not technology, the economy,
rationality, that impose macrostructures and macro-institutions, but a
technology, an economy, a rationality, determined by the logic of power,
even though, in turn, by a feedback effect, they become determining,
creating a diabolical circle in which each element mutually sustains
itself with “objective” and ideological motivations.
Conversely, self-management should rethink the economy, technology,
territorial organisation, etc., starting from its demands, applying its
rationality. This may carry some reduction in efficiency, but it is a
price, if revealed to be necessary, that should be accepted. It still
has to be demonstrated however that the higher costs of the small scale,
even within an accounting framework of technical and economic
efficiency, are greater than its benefits.
On the contrary, there is a whole new current of scientific thought that
is (re)discovering the signs of some of the “economies of scale” opposed
to those until recently brandished as justifications for gigantism. As
in many other cases, here also one may begin with an apparently
unquestionable definition to infer consequences contrary to those given
as certain and culturally dominant. We have, in fact, economies of scale
when we approach the optimal scale and, inversely, we have growing
diseconomies the more we move away from this optimum. But no one has
demonstrated, nor can they, that the optimal scale tends towards
infinity. On the contrary, there are sufficient elements to believe that
beyond certain dimensional limits (which are still not those that we
would define as small, being rather, let us say, medium), that we have
phenomena of economic inefficiency and congestion incompatible with any
system, that problems of management and social control so grave are
created that they annul, even within capitalist and technocratic logic,
the advantages of centralisation.
A recent French study of computer technology applied to business
management (to hetero-management, not to self-management) suggests that
for an optimal ascendant/descendent flux of information, the dimensional
limit should not surpass five hundred employees. And in Italy, the
discovery of the small business and its virtues dates from last year:
the small business is flexible, dynamic, versatile, sensitive,
efficient… From being a sign of backwardness, an obstacle to
development, it became, thanks to the work of journalists and “recycled”
researchers of the small, the spine, as well as the enabling element, of
the economy. Before the elephantiasis of Italian style large companies
(nationalised, irizzata,[4] gepizzata,[5] imizzata,[6] assisted,
sclerotic, somnolent, ministerial), the ambitious entrepreneurialism of
thousands of managers of small scale exploitation, an Italian style
entrepreneurialism also, naturally comprised not only of imagination,
but also of illegal labour, tax evasion, ecological banditry; an
entrepreneurialism that exploits and, in turn, in an ambivalent
relationship, that is exploited by large public and private companies.
A breach therefore begins to open (finally!) in the wall of the dominant
ideology of the “big is beautiful” and a growing number of researchers
contribute by demonstrating that a different technology is possible, a
small scale technology which is the instrument of man and not of which
man is the instrument; that it is possible to respond to the energy
crisis differently, without recourse to nuclear energy and the pillaging
of natural resources, and that the use of renewable energy sources is
more effective at small scales; that pollution becomes dramatic and
costly as a large scale phenomenon; that interpersonal communication,
which is an equally important social function of production, is not
richer on the large scale, but poorer (and accordingly the poverty of
relations is not only a characteristic of “rural stupidity”, but also of
a new “urban stupidity”); that, in their complexity, large social
structures are machines of decreasing output in relation to what they
“consume”, with the growth of their size …
And so on. The field of discoveries regarding the irrationality of the
large scale, opened by a “simple” inversion of perspective, continues to
be very fecund and its exploration is only at the beginning. This
current of thought, in its more radical expressions, is antithetical to
the scientific ideology of power. In its more tempered expressions,
however, it can be useful to power, just like a vaccine is an extremely
useful tempered form of the illness. In effect, it is the very owners of
the economy and the State who, for some years now, multiply experiences
of and proposals for decentralisation, for the dismantling (not
separation) of power, in the factory and society. It is a confession of
failure, but also an effort to found a different centralisation of
power, decongesting the centre, delegating what this cannot control to
peripheral zones of power, a decreasing control of the centre to the
periphery.
This decentralisation, and the philosophy which sustains it and the
science which lends it its instruments, is not the opposite of
concentration, but the other necessary side of concentration. This
decentralisation has nothing to do with the fabric of federative
organisation in which the very concepts of periphery and centre are
surpassed, because each point is in the centre of the relations that
concern it. The geometrical metaphor of a disk has the same hierarchical
validity as the pyramid metaphor: it is the two dimensional version of
the circle and it is not by chance that it immediately recalls the
hierarchical structure of the territory, where a capital occupies the
place of the capital, to use a little word play.
While in decentralised authoritarianism, the centre decides over
everything that it can and delegates that which escapes it, or runs the
risk of escaping it, in federative decentralisation it is the associated
unit which decides everything that falls under its competence and,
together with other units, that which falls under a common competence,
in accordance with agreements and temporary or permanent coordinating
organs. It is not word play, but a true logical inversion. It is a
matter, for example, of considering neighbourhood assemblies as the
decentralisation of municipal administration and this latter as the
decentralisation of the State or, conversely, of considering the city as
a federation of neighbourhoods (as the medieval commune was to some
extent, with a nostalgia for the past) and these, in turn, as
federations of smaller aggregate units. Even companies which surpass
certain dimensions can be conceived of as, in this light, a federation
of parts. Which is precisely what is presupposed, even if only along the
lines of a decentralised hierarchy, by the Yugoslav structure of
self-management for large companies and what is also behind the
non-expressed logic behind the factory councils, made up of section
delegates.
There is therefore no objective obstacle to the small scale. It is also,
in addition, perfectly compatible with a rich and variegated range of
inter-human relations, because with its potentiality for disaggregating
power, their also coexists a potentiality to re-aggregate and re-combine
society.
We said that the small was necessary, we said that the small is
possible, we said, finally, that the small is beautiful. This last
affirmation leads us to a further problematic knot: diversity. The small
is, in effect, also beautiful, and perhaps above all, because the small
is diverse. The discourse about equality cannot be separated from that
about diversity.
Far from being contradictory, the concepts of equality and diversity are
complementary: paradoxically, it is in fact inequality which leads to
uniformity, to levelling, to massification. Even though the ideologies
of inequality claim to ground themselves in “natural” variations, the
only diversity which they recognise is that which is inherent to the
hierarchical division of social labour, the only diversity that they
justify is the inequality of roles.
Power, by its nature, denies everything that opposes it and diversity
opposes it insofar as it is ungovernable: no power is sufficiently
elastic to manage the infinitely diverse. Only the diverse can manage
itself. What is diverse proclaims self-management, what is diverse is
the living negation of hetero-management. Power is therefore in a
continuous war – a war to the death – with the diverse; it must destroy
diversity, or at least channel it into inequality. In particular, the
tendency towards totalitarianism of the power of our times is the
implacable enemy of diversity. For technocratic and bureaucratic logic,
the ideal world is a standardised world whose “quality” is entirely
reducible to what can be computerised, planed, predicted, controlled,
registered, machine recorded, added to, subtracted from, multiplied,
divided … For classical capitalist logic, the ideal world is a global
market in which everything and everyone is a commodity. For the hybrid
logic of late-capitalism, the ideal world is mid-way between the
capitalist and the techno-bureaucratic ideals.
For power today, from the techno-bureaucratic East to the
late-capitalist West, as well as in the greater part of the Third World
that imitates both (in Africa, for example, tribal and ethnic
differences are combated, even pitilessly, so as to construct artificial
“national” unities), diversity is even more unacceptable than for any
other kind of historically known power. Like a compressor roll, power
tends to level cultural differences, destroy ethnicities, languages,
local, regional and national customs, beyond denying, as all earlier
powers did, individual diversity (reduced to inequality, as already
said, or mortified). Like a social bulldozer, power dreams of levelling
hills, filling valleys, straightening rivers, creating an endless plain
from which rise up only, at regular intervals, control towers and the
squalid castles of its privilege.
Until now, diversity was considered in the best of cases as a fact to
respect, an object to tolerate. This however is an inadequate
interpretation and, at the limit, dangerously reductive. Diversity, on
the contrary, must not only be accepted, but exalted, sought for,
continuously created and recreated, because diversity is a human
necessity, because diversity is a value in itself. The diverse is
beautiful. As it is beautiful that there are no two identical leaves, it
is also beautiful that each house, each landscape, each city, each
dialect, each person, each nation be unique and different.
The ethnic minorities which rediscover and claim their cultural
identity, the right to their language and to their traditions, are also
an expression of the human need for diversity and in this they are
consonant with the search for self-management. Even though the
repression of diversity can generate, by reaction and similarly to
sexual repression, perverse responses (such as neo-colonialism,
neo-racism, mini-statism, etc.), these centrifugal tendencies towards
the diverse bear within themselves a seed of equality and freedom.
Diversity implies not only complementarity and, therefore, harmony, but
also conflict. This does not frighten me. A society without contrasts
never appeared to me to be an attractive model. It always gave me the
impression of being not the opposite of a totalitarian society, but its
inverse in an “affective” key. A pyramid turned upside down is not the
opposite of the pyramid, but its mirror image. The utopian ideal of a
society perfectly conciliated through fraternity (but why must brothers
always be in agreement?) seems to me to be reflectively similar to the
hierarchical utopia of coercive conciliation, equally asphyxiating, even
though without laws, regulations, police, judges, directors, priests. In
fact, the anarchist prefers to speak more of solidarity than fraternity,
which is not an insignificant nuance.
In this regard, the merely outlined interpretation by Clastres, in the
last phase of his life, of the bellicosity of primitive peoples as a
defence mechanism of the multiple (the diverse) against the One, of
society against the State, is challenging. With this interpretation of
conflict (of a certain kind of conflict), an equally positive reading is
proffered.
In effect, not all social conflict is born of inequality. On the
contrary, it may perhaps be assumed that the simplified antagonism of
interests, created by the hierarchical division of social labour,
compresses and hides a much more varied diversity of interests. It is
true that the conflict born in and of class society, a conflict which
justifies the “work” of the apparatuses of psychic and physical
repression, and which justifies a growing waste of social energy for the
creation of consensus and the containment of dissension, is an
incomparable conflict due to its intensity and devastating validity. The
conflict of diversity is not the conflict of inequality. The first does
not confront us with the insoluble problem that the second does for
inter-classist, mystifying ideologies: reconciling the irreconcilable,
that is, the interests of the bosses and of the servants. Nevertheless,
certain problems are raised.
The probable, and to a certain measure desirable, permanence of
conflicts takes us to the delicate territory of their regulation. To
affirm that contrasting interests, which are born of diversity between
equals, can and must be resolved according to libertarian modalities is
little more than to express a tautology. One has to go beyond this and
define the general lines of a new social right that guarantees the
permanence as well as the reciprocal and global compatibility of diverse
individual and collective interests, in a system of dynamic equilibrium.
A first indication of the inspiring principles for a new social right is
rightly this: it must be thought essentially as the guarantee of the
solutions of equilibrium and not as the pre-established codification of
behaviours. The liberal ideological formula for the optimal solution of
the conflict of interests through the free play of commodity and
political competition is mystifying because it is applied to a
non-egalitarian society in which the game is not free, but rather
defined precisely by the falsifying laws of the hierarchical division of
social labour. However, there is here a true kernel of anti-totalitarian
thought, for it refers in fact to a concept of the “natural” equilibrium
of contrasting interests. In reality, there is nothing less natural and
more cultural than this equilibrium. It is human beings in society who
establish the rules of the game. There is no game, nor society, without
rules: the problem lies in how and by whom these are established and
applied.
A second indication in this direction comes expressly from the theory of
direct democracy. The constitutional separation of the legislative,
executive and judicial powers – in truth, more formal than real – has
value in a system where powers are separated from society and where they
are concentrated in dominant roles: only in such a context does it
guarantee, to some extent, through a certain “pluralism of powers”, the
less arbitrary exercise of power, even if, in substance, it is always
class power. In a system where power is socialised, the functions
inherent to law should also be attributes of direct democracy and its
organs. And if the old world has something of value to teach, it is
certainly not with its tribunals and its judges and its lawyers, but
perhaps with its popular juries and arbitration.
It is not by chance that I cited arbitrations. I believe, in effect,
that a third indication of principle is that a social right, founded on
values of individual and collective self-determination, should be
thought of as a frame of reference of few and simple general norms,
within which are to be found an infinite number of free agreements
between individuals and the collectivity, at all of the levels of
articulation of a society, from the local to the international. This
social right should have then a clearly contractual nature. Only thus is
it in fact possible to cover the myriad casuistry of situations, the
interrelations of complementarity and contrast and, thus, the possible
conflicts, which no code could in any way predict.
Even in a summary examination, such as that carried out hitherto, it
becomes clear that the problematic knots of self-management correspond
to the major themes of anarchist thought and practice, and that the
self-management approach to different social and political issues
reveals itself to have affinities with – when it is not identical to –
the libertarian approach. Of course, it is as an anarchist that I
followed the logical paths of self-management, by forcing myself to
proceed not by deduction from anarchist ideology, but through the
application of self-management methods to the essential questions of
human conviviality.
Analogous affinities can be identified by addressing the problems of
self-management strategy. Generally, all of the defenders of integral or
generalised self-management agree with the fact that it is not a matter
of reforming the existing social order, but of radically transforming
it. Self-management is a revolutionary theory-praxis.
The enormous question of revolution rises up here. Ruling out the idea
that revolution is simply an insurrection, established that it is a
period (perhaps even comprised of one or more insurrectional moments) of
accelerated institutional and cultural transformations, questions are
raised about how to arrive at unleashing the destructive-reconstructive
process (In only one country? In many countries at the same time? In the
late-capitalist metropole? In the fatherland of techno-bureaucratic
“socialism”? In the periphery of the great empires? In the Third World?)
in such a way that self-management solutions can affirm themselves
successfully over authoritarian solutions.
How to avoid, as always occurred, that the spaces of freedom opened by
the rapid destruction of the old values and structures do not become
spaces for a new slavery? I am not referring here to the external
enemies of the revolution and of self-management, but to the true great
internal enemy: the mechanisms of the reproduction of power which begin
immediately during the revolutionary process and which lead to
conclusions in contradiction with the premises of emancipation. How to
avoid what René Lourau called “the Mühlmann effect” [Wilhelm Emil
MĂĽhlmann], that is, an institutionalisation that denies the social
movement? If the generalised innovating tension can only be a short
lived phenomenon, how can reasonable hopes be nourished that the tension
not limit itself to breaking temporarily the dykes of class domination
to then rapidly set out again on the course of the hierarchical division
of social labour?
Self-management as a method is, in theory, the right response, because
it implies the permanent disruption and de-structuring of power, whether
it be in is its destructive or reconstructive aspects, and therefore,
even in the post-revolutionary institutionalisation, it is, in itself,
the bearer of a continuity of the project that is not exhausted in the
extraordinary tension, but which continues in the normal everyday.
However, this remains only a general logical solution. For it to become
an operational solution, it must be made richer by much more articulated
concrete determinations.
It is obvious that the reflection on revolution develops entirely on the
basis of past experiences, through that continuous re-composition of
historical elements in function of the present, which makes history an
essential and living collective memory, just as individual memory
continually recomposes, in diverse ways, its elements on the basis of
new facts, new experiences, new necessities. In this sense,
self-management can also be a key to reading differently the
revolutionary experiences of the past, from which to take strategic
indications, a key that privileges amidst what is learned those things
inherent to the issue of organisational method.
Among all social revolutions, I believe that the richest in positive and
negative indications was the Spanish Revolution of 1936–1939, due to the
range and extent of the practice of popular self-management that it
involved. This revolution, with regards to the revolutionary problematic
that I mentioned earlier, schematically indicates the following:
capacities, they know how to find and apply spontaneously diverse and
appropriate self-management formulae, at least at the most “natural”
associative levels (the factory, the city …) and at the first levels of
coordination, when and while there is an absence of power;
anti-authoritarian, subversive convulsion, through the hetero-management
of the “great” problems (war, planning …) and, on the basis of these,
progressively returns to occupy the spaces temporarily left to
self-management;
proletarian organisations best vaccinated against it, such as
anarcho-syndicalist structures, and even in the most anti-bureaucratic
organisations, by ideology and by tradition; they can initiate
techno-bureaucratic tendencies, in perfect good-faith, due to “objective
demands”.
The Spanish Revolution – its preparation, its achievements, its defeat –
is, therefore, an extremely rich mine, still largely underused, from
which self-management thought can and should extract invaluable lessons,
above all if what is sought is not so much – as has been done until now
– the history of a war between fascists and anti-fascists, but, within
the anti-fascist camp, thehistory of a mortal struggle between
proletarians and the State, between self-management and bureaucracy. And
this even if, naturally (it should be superfluous to mention it),
self-management should think its revolution and its strategy in current
realities, which are not those of Spain in 1936 and much less those of
Russia in 1917 and France in 1871.
The strategy, far from resolving itself in the problems of the
revolutionary period, also and above all covers the route between the
immediate present and the revolution. It is a matter, as I said, of
finding a path or paths to arrive at revolution in the most ideal way,
such that it is conceivable as an accelerated phase of the journey of
self-management and not an accelerated stage of transition between one
form of hetero-management and another.
Focusing on the first of the three points which I schematised as
indications of the Spanish Revolution, a first question arises: in the
popular self-management, how much was there of “natural” spontaneity and
how much of constructed spontaneity (or merely freed?) by half a century
of libertarian propaganda, agitation, organisation? And the question
arises because it is clear that, as I have already underlined, the
attitude and behaviour of the human being in society have very little to
do with nature (or perhaps even nothing, beyond social instinct) and
great deal to do with culture. Therefore, for the revolt of the slaves
to become a self-management project, for the class struggle to become an
emancipatory revolution, it is necessary that many parts or segments of
the exploited classes develop a culture – a desire and a capacity – of
self-management, educating themselves in individual and collective
self-determination. Passivity and dependence must cease to be
psychological characteristics of the workers. Initiative and
responsibility must cease to be the monopoly of restricted elites.
The formula “towards self-management through self-management” expresses,
beyond an obvious, almost tautological, internal coherence, a
self-pedagogical demand as well. As FĂ©lix GarcĂa says, “there is no
libertarian organisation which is not a pedagogical organisation, in
which pedagogy does not cover each and every one of its pores”. One is
not educated for freedom, one educates oneself. The task of militants
who recognise themselves in the method of self-management is not
therefore to teach self-management, but to stimulate the creation and
multiplication of “situations” of self-education, that is, forms of
direct action and direct democracy, according to a lexicon that is
proper to the libertarian tradition, in which self-management is already
practiced.
The self-management of struggles was not only one of the most successful
slogans, but perhaps also the most obvious manifestation of the demand
for self-management of the last decade, and this a little everywhere.
From the more traditional spaces of the class struggle, the places of
work, to new or partially new spaces, we are witness to the expansion of
this demand, which is the refusal to be used by leaders as soldiers, as
the particular fountain of the power of institutional managers
(political parties, labour unions …) of social conflict. It expresses
the desire to decide for oneself when and how to struggle for one’s own
interests and when and how to accept the inevitable temporary
armistices.
A new question imposes itself: what social subject can spark struggles
that allow for the revolutionary growth of self-management? Who is this
subject? The working class as it is more or less traditionally
conceived? Is it a social front that runs from the student to the
technician? Is it the marginal and the “precarious”? In my opinion, the
very extension of the social demand for self-management is a sign of how
the revolutionary subject, at least potentially and as a tendency, can
be identified with numerous social strata. When revolt is a revolt
against power, it gathers together all of those whom the dominant
minority robbed of their quota of power, in a sort of class accumulation
of “more power.”
The self-management front of struggles is therefore a front which opens
up to and encompasses, or can encompass, numerous social roles: domestic
worker, tenant, student, soldier, worker, peasant, wife, son, the
unemployed, the consumer of gas … It invades, with critical theory and
practice, numerous aspects of hetero-management, in now fragmentary and
episodic ways, always recuperated by the institutions, and which, even
then, contradictorily, always returns and reappears. This is a front
that is not in reality one, because it does not possess in fact a linear
trajectory and it calls to mind, in igniting and extinguishing itself
here and there in points and moments of contestation, a diffuse
guerrilla and not trench warfare. And this is its strength, because it
does not give itself over to a frontal clash, which would be to play
into the game of the enemy still – and until the revolution – more
powerful.
Can and should this guerrilla expand, as we believe, and come to
generalise and reproduce itself more than it is recuperated, it will
arrive, sooner or later, at the heart of the organisation. Should a
self-management project create permanent structures of interconnection?
I believe so because self-management is, by its nature, a synthesis of
spontaneity and organisation and because the growth of the revolutionary
project must accompany step by step the growth in the capacity of
self-organisation at all levels of complexity. I believe however that
there should not be one form and one structure of interconnection, but a
plurality of forms and structures, in coherence with the self-management
method, in a network structure, whose density and extent increases with
the growing dimension of the project.
The self-management of struggles is, at least as a general idea, an
almost obvious concept. It is an indisputably indispensible element of
self-management strategy. Without self-managed struggles, it is
impossible to see how one can arrive at a self-managed society. But a
final question imposes itself on this subject, last in time, but not in
importance: is the self-management of struggles the only form of
self-management possible before the revolution and, simultaneously, is
it a sufficient means to prepare the conditions for an egalitarian and
libertarian revolution?
The answer is not and cannot be categorical. An affirmative answer, at
least to the first part of the question, seems to follow logically from
the general affirmation according to which: a) what exists cannot be
self-managed because it is, by its nature, antithetical to
self-management, in each of its parts and as a whole; b) on the other
hand, a partial self-management can only be a more or less disguised
co-management. Even without denying the validity of this affirmation, I
am convinced that to infer from it, in an apodictic manner, the
impossibility or the counter-productiveness of experiences of
self-management is a mistake born of logical rigidity. Applying this
thesis fixedly, one could, in effect, arrive at the impossibility of the
self-management of struggles, because they are not in fact a pure
negation, but an element of what exists, even though conflictual.
Reality is much more complex and does not allow itself to be limited by
any simple and absolute definition. Who can affirm without the shadow of
a doubt that the self-management of a community, of a company, of a
nursing home, necessarily means managing an articulation of what exists
and not, on the contrary, a contradiction to what is? If it were so, if
a specific social-economic system did not admit anything except what is
similar and susceptible to assimilation to it, the historical norm of
change could not be explained, change which is precisely antithetical:
the new is born and develops, with differing fortunes, advances and
regressions, rightly next to or even in the heart of the old. Thus was
born the artisanal and merchant city in the feudal fabric, capitalist
industry in the corporative fabric, technical-bureaucracy in the
capitalist fabric …
Objections centred on the difficulties of constituting, developing and
defending “islands” of self-management are more convincing. In this
sense, experience is rich in failures. France’s LIP is an emblematic
case because the spontaneous choice by its workers of self-management
was emblematic. In Italy, analogous experiences of self-management
undertaken by workers to free companies from the bankruptcy of owner
management normally ended up with the delay of the bankruptcy or these
became simple cooperatives with a hierarchical management and intensive
self-exploitation. There is the recent failure of the ex-Fioravanti, a
pasta producing factory which, in 1974, experienced a long period of
self-management. There is also the recent news, apparently of a very
different kind of experience, that the ex-Motta di Segrate (a
cooperative of 160 members producing pastry and pre-cooked meals for
canteens) is operating under self-management. Sick leave is down from
20–30 percent to 2–3 percent, the President claims with satisfaction. Is
this due to the work being less alienating? No: it is rather the
intensification of alienation for fear of losing their jobs in a period
of economic crisis.
Examples of self-management as a result of owner bankruptcy also seem to
be multiplying in Spain in a similar context of crisis, with very
similar consequences, at least if one reads “Ajoblanco” (nº 43, 1979).
It concludes with a melancholy review of failures, asking itself whether
“islands of self-management” are in fact possible and with a statement
from a worker: “After all of the difficulties that we faced, we are
firmly convinced that self-management can only be realised if
generalised and in a different society”.
Is it therefore impossible, if not logically, at least practically, for
self-management to survive (and with greater reason, for it to develop)
within the rules of the capitalist game and/or the
techno-bureaucratically established rules by and for the hierarchical
division of social labour? Between failure and assimilation/integration,
is there in fact no intermediate space? I have a different opinion. I
believe that it is not a matter of impossibility, but of difficulty,
even though of great difficulty. The example of the Comunidad del Sur of
Montevideo, which functioned for two decades under libertarian and
egalitarian self-management, as a community and as a mid-sized
typographical business, seems to demonstrate that “islands of
self-management” are in reality possible and that their survival is not
necessarily linked to a supposed integration or even a substantial
innocuousness. The Comunidad functioned so well that it survived various
repressive waves and it was so little innocuous that it had to be
crushed by force of arms. It could be objected that the island of
self-management was not able to defend itself. But against the Uruguayan
military-fascist dictatorship, neither the mass labour unions, nor the
armed struggle Tupamaros, succedded in resisting.
I believe accordingly that islands of self-management are possible and
that these, amidst a thousand obstacles and hundreds of failures, can
and should become archipelagos. In reality, they are always more nodes
than islands in a network that bring together self-managed units, not
only between themselves, but also and above all, with the
self-management of struggles. These latter should be, in a certain
sense, the “realised” extension of the former, in a relationship of
reciprocal strengthening which mutually exalts the potentialities of
development and the capacities of defence. It is a matter of surpassing
the threshold of rejection or assimilation by the old organism of social
hierarchy. Beyond that threshold, self-management can be neither
assimilated nor rejected.
Such a network of cooperatives, organisms of struggle, communities,
cultural associations, allows for the multiplication, in a progressive
process, of the contradictions of the hierarchical system, multiplying
all the while the pedagogical “situations” of self-management and
inversely reducing the repressive/integrative capacity of what exists.
As a subversive weed, self-management can press and pry into any
fissure, any crack, gaining root and breaking up the cement of the
system, and expanding exactly like an invasive plant, with the same
stubborn resistance to drought and poisons, with the same formidable
capacity of multiplication, with the same faculty of responding to
mutilations, regenerating a new plant with every fragment.
In this way manner, struggle becomes the life of every day and everyday
life becomes a struggle, preserving it from the symmetrical dangers of
self-marginalisation (perhaps felicitous, but only perhaps), the
realization of micro-utopias, the tiring Sisyphus like labour of
conflict functional to the system, the necessarily short, impatient,
blind forging ahead and the delays due to the intellectual separation
from reality. Developing all of its wealth of method, self-management
can bind each moment of a long journey through the “personal” and the
“political”. It can be a revolutionary strategy which, by means of the
daily and incessant de-structuring/de-struction of power, in psychic
infrastructures, institutional structures, ideological superstructures,
makes grow a libertarian and egalitarian counter-society in the
interstices of hierarchical society, until this latter breaks the global
cohesion and coherence, until it inverts the relationships of force
between the old and the new. Then, the necessity of anarchism can and
should break the shell of what denies it, and that is revolution.
After the orgy of generalised participation in the pages above, I now
want to add, as a partial antidote, a brief excerpt from a presentation
by Henri Desroche at the international seminar on self-management and
workers participation in Europe (Bologna, 1970): “It is a first proposal
or a first hypothesis: the aspiration to participation is correlated
with the aspiration to gain distance. The engagement in the company is
correlated with a disengagement from the company. The propensity to be
part of the management is correlated with another propensity to be
outside of management. If this correlation is not taken into
consideration, participation runs the risk of becoming a burden or of
meeting with indifference and absenteeism. This trap may become
formidable in the eventuality of a generalised participation, […] of an
integral economic republic, in which each conscious and organised
citizen would have the right and the duty to participate in all
industrial, agricultural, financial, social, social-cultural affairs, on
which her/his life depends and, consequently, would be obliged to make
them dependent on her/his consciousness and domination. There would thus
be an invitation to not only comprehend and dominate moral relations,
but also administrative relations, budgets, the accounting of gains and
losses, etc. There would also be the complementary invitation to be
present in assemblies, meetings, commissions, committees, etc.,
naturally with the registration and qualification of that participation:
active, semi-active or inactive. One can imagine that the situation
would become very similar to laboratory experiments in which the
possibility of dreaming is taken from an individual, even in their
sleep. Before the neurotic danger of such a situation, the field of
participation could elaborate some solutions. For example, there could
be a right to non-participation, as in those places where you pay twice
as much for the right to place on the record player a silent disc to
have a brief period of time without noise. Furthermore, there could be
an integrated automation, thanks to central super-memories, of all of
those “committee-cratic” processes conceived by participatory activity
in its artisanal stage. In one case, as in the other, there would be a
participation restrained by distancing. Durkheim stated that “nothing is
good without measure”, while underlining that the two kinds of societies
with the highest incidences of suicide were either societies of
excessive individualism and insufficient socialisation, or, conversely,
societies of insufficient individualism and excessive socialisation.”
Given the nature of this text, which develops a line of thought that is
still a little tangled and some reflections written as a “chemical
reaction” to the crossing of my anarchism with the diverse / monotonous
/ rich / contradictory / stimulating/ irritating / original / deceiving
/ libertarian / crypto-authoritarian culture of self-management, I
purposefully avoided any bibliography. I list below the books that, in a
slightly disordered reading, accompanied my reflections:
Pietro Bellasi, Michele La Rosa, Giovanni Pellicciari (a cura di),
Fabbrica e societĂ . Autogestione e partecipazione operaia in Europa,
Angeli, Milano, 1974.
Alfredo Bonanno, Autogestione e anarchismo, La Fiaccola, Ragusa, 1975.
Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism, Ramparts Press, Berkeley,
1971.
Yves Bourdet, Per l’autogestione. Analisi e prospettive, Moizzi, 1976;
Teoria politica dell’autogestione, Nuove Edizione Operaie, Milano, 1977;
L’Éspace de l’autogestion, Galilée, Paris, 1978.
Pierre Clastre, La societĂ contra lo Stato, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1977.
Franco Crespi, Teoria sociologica e socializzazione del potere, Angeli,
Milano, 1974.
Henri Desroche, Autogestione, partecipazone e associazionismo
cooperativo, in Fabrica e societĂ , op. cit.
FĂ©lix GarcĂa, Coherencia libertaria (1), PedagogĂa y organizaciĂłn,
“Bicicleta”, nº 15, 1979, pp. 48–49.
Milojko Drulovic, La Democrazia autogestita, Editori Riuniti, Roma,
1977.
Piero Flecchia, La cultura della viltĂ , Emme, Milano, 1978.
Roberto Guiducci, La diseguaglianza tra glo uomini, Rizzoli, Milano,
1977; Un mondo capovolto, Rizzoli, Milano, 1979.
Michele La Rosa, Mauro Gori (a cura di), L’autogestione. Democrazia
politica e democrazia industriale, CittĂ Nuova, Roma, 1978.
Georges Lapassade, L’autogestione pedagogica, Angeli, Milano, 1973.
René Lourau, L’Autogestion comme condition du dépérissement de l’État,
“Autogestion et socialisme”, nº 41–42, 1978, pp. 145–165; Lo Stato
incosciente, elèuthera, Milano, 1988.
Roberto Massari, La teoria dell’autogestione, Jaca Book, Milano, 1974.
Noir et Rouge, Lo Stato, la rivoluzione, l’autogestione, La Fiaccola,
Ragusa, 1974.
Philippe Oyhamburu, La Revance de Bakounine ou de l’anarchisme Ă
l’autogestion, Entente, Paris, 1975.
Gian Paolo Prandstraller, FelicitĂ e societĂ , CominitĂ , Milano, 1978.
Pierre Rosanvallon, L’età dell’autogestione, Marsilio, Venezia, 1978.
Menahem Rosner, L’Autogestion industrilelle dans les kibbutzim,
“Sociologie du travail”, nº 1, janvier-mars 1974.
Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, Il piccolo è bello, Moizzi, Milano, 1977.
Leonardo Tomasetta, Partecipazione e autogestione, il Saggiatore,
Milano, 1972.
John F. Turner, L’abitare autogestito, Jaca Book, Milano, 1978.
Roberto Villetti (a cura di), Socialismo e divisione del lavoro,
Mondooperaio, Roma, 1978.
[1] The author is here referring to the 1970s. [Translator’s Note]
[2] The passage appears originally in French. This was a slogan of the
LIP workers: “we produce, we sell, we pay ourselves”. [TN]
[3] The author refers here to the well known experience of the
self-management of the LIP watch factory located on the periphery of
Besançon (native city of Proudhon) and begun on the 17^(th) of April of
1973. LIP was a solid company until it was purchased by a group of
“investors” who presented a plan for collective dismissals that reached
to 100s of workers, mostly women. The organised resistance by the
workers gave rise to a notable movement of struggle, which lasted years,
multiplied illegal actions without ever ceding to the temptation of
violence, basing itself on direct democracy and a fertile imagination.
The practice of self-management affirmed itself as a valid alternative.
[TN]
[4] A word for which there is no translation and invented by the author
on the basis of the acronym IRI (Istituto per la Ricostruzione
Industriale), a public entity created in 1933 by the Fascist regime to
finance banks and companies that had gone bankrupt during the Great
Depression. It was dissolved in 2002 [TN]
[5] A word for which there is no translation and invented by the author
on the basis of the acronym GEPI (SocietĂ per le Gestioni e
Partecipazioni Industriali), a public entity created in 1971, in which
the IRI and IMI (see following note) participated and which was
integrated into, in 1977, the Sviluppo Italia agency. [TN]
[6] A word for which there is no translation and invented by the author
on the basis of the acronym IMI (Istituto Mobiliare Italiano), a public
credit institution created in 1931 to help companies overcome the
difficulties associated with the Great Depression. In 1998, it fused
with the Istituto Bancario San Paolo di Torino to become Sanpaolo IMI.
[TN]