834707464

European countries. The idea was accepted by the student movement, a lot of the New Leftists and some other categories of intellectuals, especially representatives of the so called »intellectual proletariate«. Thus, the workers movement converged with that of the leftist intellectuals on the idea of workers self-management.

If we want to give a short explanation as to why workers self-management has become the topie of the day in the workers move-ment, among left-wing intellectuals, and even in the progressive part of the liberał middle class, we can list the following reasons:

1.    With the discovery of the »human factor« in industrial produc-tion, modern sociology and social psychology have dedicated innu-merable theses to the problem of workers’ and employees motivation in production, and, quite independently from Marxism, have stressed the need for participation in decision-making in industrial enterprises. From participation to self-management there is only one (revolution-ary) step.

2.    After the workers syndicates through collective agreements have achieved the right to participate in some decision-making in industrial enterprises, (Mitbestimmungsrecht, joint consultation, comite d’enter-prise), chiefly as regards working conditions and employment, the next step was naturally the demand for a transition from quantitative rewards (inerease of salaries) to qualitative rewards (broadening of participation up to self-management). Since 1968 these tendencies have been especially strong in France.

3.    The development of tertiary activities, the formation of the in-tellectual proletariat, the syndicalism in technologically highly dev-eloped industries with new forms of integration of manuał and intel-lectual workers, the inereasing anonimity of the corporative Capital (the so called »manager revolution«), all this brought about the im-position of the idea of self-management as a logical consequence of the democratization and normalization in the management of industries.

4.    As the dictatorial and despotic character of statist socialism became morę and morę obvious, as evidenced by penalties for oppos-ing views, absence of civil rights, confinment in lunatic asylums of critically disposed scientist, antisemitism, the occupation of Czecho-slovakia, etc., a need arose for an alternative to this kind of socialism, which would not lead into bourgeois democracy, i. e., social-demo-cracy, but into a truły new form of socialist democracy.

5.    Ther is a growing conviction that the highly developed countries that have found themselves under the impact of statism and central-ism, i. e., a inereasing centralization of social decision, will try to find a way out in forms of participative or direct democracy. The scientific and technological revolution along with the development of cybernet-ics, automatization, and modern means of communication makes pos-sible far morę decentralization than was the case in undeveloped Systems. At the same time, technolog is becoming the »infrastructure of society« freeing it from its economic and technical determinism and providing greater possibilities for the organization of society in ac-cordance with man’s real needs.

3 PRAXIS 377