Occupy Production

[Dan Clore]

News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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http://www.zcommunications.org/occupy-production-by-richard-d-wolff
Occupy Production
By Richard D. Wolff
Source: Mr Zine
Saturday, December 03, 2011

As the Occupy movement keeps developing, it seeks solutions for the
economic and political dysfunctions it exposes and opposes. For many,
the capitalist economic system itself is the basic problem. They want
change to another system, but not to the traditional socialist
alternative (e.g., USSR or China). That system too seems to require
basic change.

The common solution these activists propose is to change both systems'
production arrangements from the ground up. Every enterprise should be
democratized. Workers should occupy their enterprise by collectively
functioning as its board of directors. That would abolish the capitalist
exploitative system (employer versus employee) much as our historical
predecessors abolished the parallel exploitative systems of slavery
(master versus slave) and feudalism (lord versus serf).

In workers' self-directed enterprises, those who do the work also design
and direct it and dispose of its profits: no exploitation of workers by
others. Workers participate equally in making all enterprise decisions.
The old capitalist elite -- the major corporate shareholders and the
boards of directors they choose -- would no longer decide what, how, and
where to produce and how to use enterprise profits. Instead, workers --
in partnership with residential communities interdependent with their
enterprises -- would make all those decisions democratically.

Only then could we avoid repeating yet again the capitalist cycle: (1)
economic boom bursting into crisis, followed by (2) mass movements for
social welfare reforms and economic regulations, followed by (3)
capitalists using their profits to undo achieved reforms and
regulations, followed by (1) again, the next capitalist boom, bust, and
crisis. US capitalism since the crash of 1929 displays this 3-step cycle.

In democratized enterprises, the workers who most need and benefit from
reforms would dispose of the profits of enterprise. No separate class of
employers would exist and use enterprise profits to undo the reforms and
regulations workers achieved. Quite the contrary, self-directing workers
would pay taxes only if the state secures those reforms and regulations.
Democratized enterprises would not permit the inequalities of income and
wealth (and therefore of power and cultural access) now typical across
the capitalist world.

Actually existing socialist systems, past and present, also need
enterprise democratization. Those systems' socialization of productive
property plus central planning (versus capitalism's private property and
markets) left far too much unbalanced power centralized in the state. In
addition, reforms (guaranteed employment and basic welfare, far less
inequality of income and wealth, etc.) won by socialist revolutions
proved insecure. Private enterprises and markets eventually returned and
erased many of those reforms.

Traditional socialism's problems flow also from its undemocratic
organization of production. Workers in socialized state enterprises were
not self-directed; they did not collectively decide what, how, and where
to produce nor what to do with the profits. Instead, state officials
decided what, how, and where to produce and how to dispose of profits.
If socialist enterprises were democratized, the state would then depend
for its revenue on collectively self-directed workers. That would
institutionalize real, concrete control from below to balance state
power from above.

Workers' self-directed enterprises are a solution grounded in the
histories of both capitalism and socialism. Establishing workers'
self-directed enterprises completes what past democratic revolutions
began in moving societies beyond monarchies and autocracies.
Democratizing production can finally take democracy beyond being merely
an electoral ritual that facilitates rule by the 1% over the 99%.

Richard D. Wolff is Professor Emeritus at the University of
Massachusetts in Amherst and also a Visiting Professor at the Graduate
Program in International Affairs of the New School University in New
York. He is the author of New Departures in Marxian Theory (Routledge,
2006) among many other publications. Check out Richard D. Wolff’s
documentary film on the current economic crisis, Capitalism Hits the
Fan, atwww.capitalismhitsthefan.com. Visit Wolff's Web site
atwww.rdwolff.com, and order a copy of his new book Capitalism Hits the
Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to Do about It. His weekly
radio program, "Economic Update," broadcasts on WBAI, 99.5 FM in New
York City every Saturday at noon for an hour; it can also be heard live
and in podcast archive on wbai.org. This article also appears in the
Occupy Harvard Crimson.


--
Dan Clore

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"From the point of view of the defense of our society,
there only exists one danger -- that workers succeed in
speaking to each other about their condition and their
aspirations _without intermediaries_."
--Censor (Gianfranco Sanguinetti), _The Real Report on
the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy_