Starbucks Union

Workers’ Liberation and Institutions of Self-Management

by Tom Wetzel

February 27, 2006

[This is a reply to the article “We Are More than We Eat” by Odessa Steps in The Northeastern Anarchist #10. These articles are part of a debate on participatory economics at http://nefac.net/en/taxonomy/term/28 .]

We live under a system with a series of oppressions woven together: domination and exploitation of workers by elite classes of owners, managers and professionals; a system of gender inequality that disadvantages women; a racial hierarchy that places people of color at the bottom; oppression of gay people by a rigid heterosexist culture. And over it all, protecting elite interests, is a top-down state apparatus, not really controllable by the people even in so-called “democratic countries.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Humans have the capacity to control their own lives. We can think ahead and develop plans of action, to self-manage our own activity. This is the human potential for self-management. In the plans that we might develop, inspired by our own aspirations, many of the activities would inevitably require the help of others or involve common work for common benefit. Through communication and the back-and-forth process of giving each other reasons for proposed courses of action, we have the ability to coordinate and cooperate with each other, to self-manage together. In fact humans have not only the potential but the need to self-manage their own activities, to fulfill their goals through activities they plan out and control themselves.

But in both the capitalist and Communist countries, working people are forced to work to fulfill the plans of others, exploited for the benefit of elites. This is the denial of our human need for self-management. As class struggle anti-authoritarians, we propose to replace the existing systems of domination by a new arrangement that gives people free scope to develop their potential for self-management, to control their lives. Not only in social production but in all spheres of life. In what follows I focus mainly on eliminating the class system. We need to keep in mind that class is not the whole story about oppression.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=9811

Bookmark/Search this post with:
| | | | | | | |