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Sections (Content) :
• 1
The more completely successful work makes a personality self-sufficing and self-governing, the more this personality tends to find its pride and joy in itself alone, in the consciousness of its own force and its own ability.
• 2
Systems of unaccountable power do offer some choices to citizens. They can petition the king or the CEO, or join the ruling party. They can try to rent themselves to GE, or buy its products. They can struggle for rights within tyrannies, state and private, and in solidarity with others, can seek to limit or dismantle illegitimate power, pursuing traditional ideals, including those that animated the U.S. labor movement from its early origins: that those who work in the mills should own and run them.
• 3
...social democracy, as its name implies, is the application to industry, or to the social life of the nation, of the fundamental principles of democracy. Such application will necessarily have to begin in the workshop, and proceed logically and consecutively upward through all the grades of industrial organization until it reaches the culminating point of national executive power and direction. In other words, social democracy must proceed from the bottom upward, whereas capitalist political society is organized from above downward.
• 4
I quite agree that the sources of life, and all the natural wealth of the earth, and the tools necessary to cooperative production, must become freely accessible to all. It is a positive certainty to me that unionism must widen and deepen its purposes, or it will go under; and I feel sure that the logic of the situation will gradually force them to see it.
• 5
...it is the declared principle of industrial unionism that the wage-workers have no interests in common with capitalists; that, in fact, their material interests are in conflict, and it is its declared purpose to abolish the wage-system, and supplant it by a system of industrial cooperation in which the workers themselves shall have full control for their own benefit...
• 6
The workingman today does not understand his industrial relation to his fellow-workers. He has never been correlated with others in the same industry. He has mechanically done his part. He has simply been a cog, with little reference to, or knowledge of, the rest of the cogs. Now, we teach him to hold up his head and look over the whole mechanism. If he is employed in a certain plant, as an Industrial Unionist, his eyes are opened. He takes a survey of the entire productive mechanism, and he understands his part in it, and his relation to every other worker in that industry. The very instant he does that he is buoyed by a fresh hope and thrilled with a new aspiration. He becomes a larger man. He begins to feel like a collective son of toil.
Then he and his fellows study to fit themselves to take control of this productive mechanism when it shall be transferred from the idle capitalist to the workers to whom it rightfully belongs.
• 7
The union is educating the workers in the management of industrial activities and fitting them for cooperative control and democratic regulation of their trades...
[Section: Trades-unionism.]
• 8
Who is to say whether industry is to run or stand idle? Who is to decide what is to be produced and where that product is to go? Who is to decide what services are provided and to whom? These are the important questions.
Should modern industry be controlled by a handful of business managers?
Should it be administered by politicians?
Or should it be run by those who do the work?
It must be one of the three.
• 9
The great body of the people make all the money; do all the work. They plow the land, cut down the forests; they produce everything that is produced. Then who shall say what shall be done with what is produced except the producer?
• 10
The same human nature is at work now as always. The same everlasting passion for tyranny and the same everlasting passion for liberty still in the same everlasting conflict. To-day the struggle is a step higher than one hundred years before. Then it was as to the right of men as men to a voice in the management of that industry we call government,-dealer in forts, coinage, courts, harbors, postage stamps. Now it is the right of men as men to a voice in any other industry which has become of supreme social importance, for the right of the people to be free from taxation without representation in any business which has so great a power over us that it governs us, to have a voice in any industry so great that those who own it own us, to a vote in any property so great that it is a government, whether it be the control of the railroads or the light of the cities, or the supply of the necessaries of life, like coal, oil, salt, steel, or anything else.
• 11
[We demand...] Abolition of private property in land, in raw materials and the instruments of labor, so that no one shall have the means of living by the exploitation of the labor of others, and that everybody, being assured of the means to produce and to live, shall be truly independent and in a position to unite freely among themselves for a common objective and according to their personal sympathies.
• 12
If the peasants and carriers, etc., refuse to supply goods and services for nothing, and demand payment in money which they are accustomed to considering as real wealth, what does one do? Oblige them by force? In which case we might as well wave goodbye to anarchism and to any possible change for the better. Let the Russian experience serve as a lesson.
["Revolution in Practice," by Errico Malatesta, from Umanità Nova, n. 191, October 7, 1922. Section 3.]
• 13
Capitalism, indeed, cannot be annihilated by a change in the commanding persons; but only by the abolition of commanding. The real freedom of the workers consists in their direct mastery over the means of production. The essence of the future free world community is not that the working masses get enough food, but they direct their work themselves, collectively. For the real content of their life is their productive work; the fundamental change is not a change in the passive realm of consumption, but in the active realm of production.
• 14
Common ownership demands common management of the work as well as common productive activity; it can only be realized if all the workers take part in this self-management of what is the basis and content of social life; and if they go to create the organs that unite their separate wills into one common action.
• 15
It is the council system that is the true workers' democracy.
• 16
...whoever does the work has a chief vote in regulating the work.
• 17
What did the CNT pursue? The economic and political emancipation of the working class through revolutionary expropriation and self-management in all spheres of life. Could they achieve that legally? No.
• 18
Worker administration increases and expands participation in the local economy and makes the economy more accountable to those directly affected by it.
• 19
The promise of industrial democracy is that -- given the scope of activity and the continuous attention of participants in close physical proximity in the work place -- this ideal might be translated into meaningful participation by individuals in critical decisions that control their lives. The ideal is at once powerful and dangerous.
Chronology :
April 14, 2020 : Self-Management -- Added.
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