Participatory Economics and the Self-emancipation of the Working Class
by Tom Wetzel; March 31, 2003
A slogan that has been popular among quite a few syndicalists, anarchists, and Marxists was Flora Tristan's saying from 1843:
The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the workers themselves.
This slogan assumes that it is possible for the working class, through its own collective action, to create an economic system where workers are no longer a subjugated and exploited class. I am assuming here that class is to be understood as differentiation that is caused by the existence of power relations over the system of social production. Social production I take to be the system by which humans create goods and services for each other. The "self-emancipation of the working class" thus assumes that a classless society is possible.
How is this possible? My take on Participatory Economics is that it is an attempt to specify, in an economic program, what the necessary conditions are that would need to be achieved to have a sustainable economic system in which workers are no longer an exploited, subjugated class; that is, Participatory Economics is an attempt to specify the structure of a classless economic system, and thus an economic program for the "self-emancipation of the working class."
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=3359
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