This is a reply to the workerscontrol.net article "Spectrum, Trajectory and the Role of the State in Workers’ Self-Management", especially on its treatment of the parecon model.
Workers' management is not just a new administrative technique: it means that for the mass of people, new relations will have to develop with their work, the very content of work will have to alter.
This controversy illustrates the difference between the defeated world of ideology and the vibrant and outward-looking world of action that strives to disengage from the dominant relations.
In Argentina, the government attempted to ‘institutionalise’ the occupied factories, de- politicising the radical aspects of workers’ actions in exchange for financial and technical assistance.
Human alienation will disappear through the withering away of commodity production and social division of labour, through the disappearance of private ownership of the means of production.
These theses written in the context of the 1970s 'autonomia operaia' in Italy intend to initiate a debate on workers’ control of the factories as a 'democratic and peaceful' road to socialism.