Talk:Socialist self-management

Yugoslavia High‑importance

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Socialism Mid‑importance

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"Quotation to Verify" on Immanuel Ness

I'm not a hardcore wiki editor, but I borrowed the book here to check this claim and a few things come to mind:

1. Should we be quoting the chapter author instead? Which in this case is Goran Musić, not Immanuel Ness.

2. It does not seem like the source is actually from page 172, the most similar claim I can find is on page 178, but maybe they're trying to reference the chapter as a whole?

3. I have not read the full chapter in this book, but it does seem like the "nature" of self-management was itself top-down, but rather that over time this responsibility was delegated to management, since blue collar workers did not feel like they would be good at this type of decision-making. If anyone is interested in the relevant parts I found, I'll provide a quote here:

"The younger generation of party cadres was not bound by the same revolutionary experience and ideological orthodoxy as had been established during World War II, and was eager to embrace more liberal policies of free-market reform as the means of catching up with the more advanced Western societies. Yet it would be in error to conclude that the tactical alliance between the working class and liberals on the macro level, or even the identification of common interests within a single enterprise, managed to free the workers’ councils from antagonisms and provide smooth co-optation of the working class into the arena of collective entrepreneurialism. Along with the ever-increasing reliance on profitability criteria and the loosening of the budgetary character of investments, the workers’ councils came under pressure to abandon the egalitarian ethos of the initial years and, instead, to allow the professional and managerial layer the upper hand inside the self-management structures. Surveys at the time showed the actual practice of self-management lagged far behind the normative standards, with low participation from the shop-floor workers and a high degree of influence by technical staff and the director (Prout 1985, 53). The workers did not feel they had the necessary time, competence, or information to make increasingly complex market decisions, so they let management formulate the options and present them to the workers’ council. In reality, management was the only body capable of making sound business evaluations, but formally any major decisions had to go through the blue-collar-dominated workers’ councils. This process opened the door for client-patron practices, corruption, passivity, and cynicism toward self-management in general. Realizing that the workers’ councils could not be used as a vehicle for the emancipation of wage labor, the workers quickly adapted and started using their votes as a bargaining tool with management. The workers’ participation was often trivialized to the degree that a council could go on for hours discussing whether the night guard had the right to free coffee, whereas the major investment, marketing, and production proposals were simply rubber-stamped (Pienkos 1984, 63). The workers therefore preferred to cede the initiative and responsibility to specialists as long as they felt the latter’s measures were contributing positively to the company’s total income."

4. The part that reads "until they were abolished during the Yugoslav Wars" seems redundant, of course they would stop existing once they stop existing, it frames the situation as if the war "fixed" the system, when in fact the system is replaced in it's entirety. I would just remove this part, but I figured I might as well bring it up here since I'm already talking about the other stuff. ~zeppelin_spindrift (talk) 12:54, 12 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]