A system of self-managed firms as a new perspective on Marxism

The starting point for this paper is the finding that references to a system of self-managed firms as the future social order are quite exceptional in the published literature on Marxist thought. Despite ever more marked deviations of leftist political platforms from the centralised model of the URSS, it is clear that self-management has not taken the place of central planning in Marxist plans for the future. In contrast, the author will come up with evidence that an analysis of the self-managed firm system may offer clues for a critical discussion of major points of Marxian theory, including the labour theory of value, alienation, dialectics or the subjectobject inversion in capitalism. Accordingly, in the individual sections of this paper each of these central aspects of Marxian theory will be separately addressed in the light of insights flowing from the economic theory of producer cooperatives.