The Democratic Firm as a New Perspective for Marxism

References to a system of self-managed firms as the future social order are scarce in the published literature on Marxist thought. Despite ever more marked deviations of left-hand political platforms from the Bolshevik model, self-management has not taken the place of central planning in Marxist plans for the future. In this paper, in contrast, the author argues that an analysis of the self-managed firm system may offer dues for a discussion of major points of Marxian theory including the labour theory of value, alienation, dialectics or the subject-object inversion in capitalism. Accordingly, in the individual sections of this paper each of these central aspects of Marxists theory will be separately addressed M the light of insights flowing from the economic theory of producer cooperatives.