About Self-Management

Contribution to the Abolition of Work and Wages.

The attempts at self-management (or the moments when it appeared as a possible solution) that took place during the May events are interesting only because they constituted a critique of current forms of management based on hierarchical and functional (or supposedly functional) organization. But they are insufficient, and raise the problem of the critical analysis of self-management, its “replacement” in a more global and radical framework.

Indeed, any attempt at self-management that isn't based on a radical critique of the existing world can only help to reinforce it by helping it to resolve its own contradictions, and consequently to win greater support from its willing victims. The existing world is totalitarian; it tends to encompass as many forces and energies as possible, so it tends to integrate them. In this perspective, the ideal of a totalitarian regime is to be managed by its own victims, so that they become more than willing...

Self-management, when conquered by the masses (through struggle or the necessity of survival), enables the masses to demonstrate their powers, to emancipate themselves.

But if this process does not involve (destroy) the dominant ideology to which these masses have adhered by force of coercion, education, information and introjection, the values of this ideology are reinforced, because they are then assumed, accepted as realities, and instead of having made the revolution, repression has been reinforced, even by destroying the class that was fundamentally linked to this ideology, and we risk seeing nothing of it. Because, in fact, every individual's life, on a daily basis, is shaped more or less completely by this ideology.

When the Assurances Générales Françaises set themselves the problem of self-management, they set themselves the wrong problem: they should have set themselves the problem of their own disappearance, because after all, what does the phenomenon of insurance development mean?

It's not a question of self-managing anything. Of course, given the process followed by this company, it's possible that it could have gone beyond simple self-management, but who's going to ask, without anguish, the problem of the meaning of its profession, of its usefulness, when the principles on which the dominant ideology rests is that of justifying life through work.

And then, if the entire service sector followed the same process, we'd find ourselves with the self-management of Bureaucratically Organized Survival, and so on.

Clearly, any revolution must involve an ideological critique of the entire system to which the ideology relates, and the destruction of that ideology. (State, Work, Productivity, Family, Homeland...). Revolution is thus the privileged time and place for critique, and revolt finds its dimension and justification there. Outside this time, revolt has no way out, and ideological critique remains a discourse, but both are still necessary.

Some Characteristics of the Dominant Ideology.

importance of Work as justification, as morality, as a means of survival (“you have to work to live”, “if nobody works, who will work?”, “if work wasn't compulsory, nobody would like to work, nobody would work”, “you can't be happy working”, ...),

the importance of economics: economic development, increased production, productivity, economic laws, etc.

the importance of numbers, the measurable, the quantitative, averages, categories, indices, etc.

importance of well-being-comfort-happiness, linked to spectacular consumption (spectacle is favored over action, action is seen) (others do it), to the introduction of automation into daily life to reduce effort, to the automaticity of gestures, words... which reproduce the spectacular universe on offer, to the reduction of being (ourselves) to having, to appearing, to distancing ourselves from hierarchical models... (reification process),

importance of the notions of care, education, help... which implies the existence of a superiority relationship, a leader-directed relationship, elite-mass, actor-spectator, teacher-pupil, father-son... Charity and socialism, for example, are ideologies whose function is to maintain this relationship through giving, or the bureaucratized granting of happiness or parcels, which implies, in return, that the receiver leaves it up to the giver to define what he will give, in fact that the receiver renounces his own responsibility... At the root of these ideologies lies the belief, overt or otherwise, in the natural or (and) social inequality of human beings, and the belief that there will always be rulers and ruled. In the same way, we find these beliefs linked to that of a certain fatality: “men are evil”, “men need to be educated to become good”...

the importance of doing, of action for action's sake, and the multiplication of domains in which action can take place, and consequently of appearance-based organizations (extension of useless and fake jobs) that camouflage these actions behind fragmented ideologies. It's not even a question of exercising power or acquiring signs of power, it's a question of playing a “society game” for adults, and having the impression of contributing to general happiness and fulfillment,

importance of the State, of centralization: it is the State that must do, act, give, etc. This corresponds to the substitution of an impersonal logic for randomness and arbitrariness in human relations, which are always ambiguous (always “men are evil”, but the opposite belief is also well defended and gives rise to a new ideological form, humanism),

the importance of the Values of Safety, Foresight and Organization. The fear of the void, of the unorganized, of anarchy, of anguish in all its forms, is used in all fields,

the importance of property as power over a portion of space and time, over beings or things...

etc.

Technical forces have virtually overtaken the production relationships that are trying to integrate them, and there is a contradiction between technical rationality and economic rationality.

Paradoxically, the development of the tertiary sector is presented in economic theory as a sign of development, progress even, but it is only a sign of the inadequacy of production relations, the perpetuation of which is preserved thanks to the growth of a sector where work is factitious: It is nothing productive, but it is the safety valve that reduces unemployment, and above all, the valve that allows us to control the population as a whole, using the new valves of Leisure, Culture and Spirituality, once technology has attacked the tertiary sector - and yes! we'll have to survive. So we'll multiply Maisons de la Culture by 100, because they're highly job-creating enterprises, or the maisons de fous, and finally we'll have hospitals (one person employed per patient, that creates jobs).

If we were to eliminate the tertiary sector and the control apparatus of the primary and secondary sectors, by changing the relations of production, we would halve the number of jobs and reduce working hours by three-quarters for each current worker.

Economic rationality is based on the logic of the commodity, its greatest diffusion. Applied to economic rationality, technical rationality introduces efficiency into the production and distribution of the commodity, but the logic of Technology calls into question Exchange Value, and can ultimately do without it: indeed, by eliminating work, complete automation would eliminate the foundation of Exchange Value.

We need to criticize the education system (content and method) in every possible way. Through the education system, the bourgeois world has perpetuated itself; through the reform it will try to make of its reformist elements, it will try to go beyond them, through participation, new disciplines such as economics, urban planning, active education methods, pseudo-maieutic techniques of seminars, discussion groups... the education of everyday life and its new gadgets (credit cards, life insurance...); it will try to precondition the members of the Society by providing them with a language of reference to which its members will be bound because they will know no other. In economics, for example, it's a question of everyone knowing what productivity is, how to balance a balance sheet... and the basics of the same language, so that we can understand each other and participate in management, and what would self-management based on the same language change?

The realization of a bourgeois world through its cybernetic form in fact implies the preconditioning of the cybernetic machine's input, after which its self-management is possible, since it changes nothing.

The process of reification is the one on which Power will always rely. We will always find a certain number of commonplaces:

“you still need leaders”,

“you have to consume to live, to become a producer”,

“you have to produce so that everyone's standard of living can rise”, “the increase in the standard of living that allows for better housing... is the determining factor that allows the family to flourish”,

“everyone, if they want to, can find what they need in society and be happy”,

“economic development has never harmed anyone”,

“What is happiness? A quiet life?

“there's never been so much entertainment in the street”..,

you name it.

These commonplaces conceal the essential point: the dominant ideology, which grows stronger every day. It is therefore necessary to make clear the extent of this process.

Any political struggle that fits into the context defined by the dominant ideology reinforces this ideology by serving to justify it and improve it, because it is obliged to use this ideology, to reveal its contradictions. Thus, at a given moment, the ideology proposes a certain image of happiness, a certain number of needs, a goal - for example, decent housing for all, sports facilities, leisure, etc,... the proponents of struggle accept this image, showing that the class in power is pursuing a bad policy and will not be able to achieve the ideal it proposes, while they will be able to achieve it. They have therefore renounced a radical critique of this ideology in favor of demagoguery and entryism.

An example of the application of the reification process: urban planning.

Urban planners, like sociologists and economists, reduce people's daily lives to an abstraction, so they consider typical needs, typical functions and categories of individuals. We'll see housing for workers, housing for executives and housing for senior executives and big businessmen, differentiated by a certain surface area and certain external signs of wealth. In this case, all we'd be doing is reinforcing the process of reification. Indeed, through this process, the urban planner reduces human reality to an abstraction that makes it manipulable because it can be quantified, so through the ideology of social justice we're only reinforcing this process.

So, “if (self-management) is not immediately and indissolubly the abolition of wage-labour, social classes and the State, then self-management, for its own sake, of the world thus inherited, by making all men the real programmers of their own death, can only, it goes without saying, complete and enhance the ongoing process of reification” (“Considérations intempestives”).

This revolutionary process must be the negative parallel of the reification process, and must therefore deny any ersatz of exchange value and wage-labour; in particular, a new definition of value based on the qualitative equivalence of working hours would only reinforce the reification process.

In effect, this substitution would create an egalitarianism that would enable the fantastic realization not of the commodity logic, but of the commodity logic and technicist logic that are currently often at odds with each other. The spectacular and false wealth of goods that contradict each other would be replaced by uniformity, and goods could be defined once and for all by the simplification of the market, whose complexity is due not only to the laws of supply and demand, but also to its hierarchical structure, which divides the market for each good into sub-markets (that of the R 16, the R 8, the Simca 1000...) in turn and at the same time complementary and antagonistic. (In this way, car types would be technically defined by a time-distance-safety ratio).

So what definition of value will we use to define work? Wouldn't working time, based on the qualitative equivalence of work, be the universal standard? There has to be a standard, and it has to be accounted for if we're going to apply technical criteria, if we're going to start again, and so on. That's where the problem lies, and where it can be overcome.

As things stand, I'm torn between two solutions:

deny any universal definition of value and reduce accounting to material accounting,

establish several sectors of activity where work, its accounting and exchange relationships are different (as in many primitive societies).

Any attempt at self-management can only be a step, a seizure of power by which the masses take control of their own destiny. But if the masses see themselves as categories, then all individuality is denied. Self-management can only be transformed into generalized self-management, first and foremost of everyday life - that's what's essential, as long as we're free to shape our own lives as we wish. Generalized self-management then becomes nothing more than the search for, the provision of, and the elaboration of the means necessary to build our own lives; generalized self-management must therefore be the general provision of means, without any appropriation of these means by men, because then we'd fall back into a new despotism, all the means for a few.

For fear of despotism or anarchy, there can be no question of placing in the hands of any power, not even a democratic or impersonal one, the task of determining the shape of everyday life, its purpose...

If it is in people's interest to group together, to organize themselves into Councils and, if need be, into a Federation of Councils, it is simply to organize the means to realize the aspirations of each individual and not the finality of a group, a group ideal, an ideology. Substitution is easy, not only by the rule of majority or unanimity, but by one's own acceptance of being a member of the group, of the mass, there is a self-alienation linked to an age-old submission.

The conditions for this generalized self-management are therefore mainly:

the absence of any limitation on individual freedom, and of any form of private appropriation of human life,

the principle of self-responsibility, so that whoever wants something only has to make it himself.

It denies the existence of a separate force that determines the forms of happiness, that distributes wealth according to the abstract laws of social justice.

The process of production can be regulated in two different ways: the utility or disutility of working, and the pleasure or displeasure of working.

In today's society, the private or public appropriation of the means of production associates the usefulness of work with the need to survive, and with the miserable improvement of this survival; it therefore associates work with displeasure, in the perspective of an often illusory pleasure, if not always, but that's a matter for individuals to judge, Its ideology of happiness serves to legitimize this aberration, while the morality of joyful work tends to valorize the inversion of displeasure into pleasure, as practiced by many particularly repressed individuals who take pleasure in working and pissing others off, with arguments other than production.

On the basis of the working conditions we defined above, it is the individual himself who should determine the usefulness of his work and thus his contribution to production. It is on this basis, and on that of the development of productive detours (machines) capable of reducing the disutility of work according to the disutility actually experienced, and not technical conditions, that pleasure and work can really coincide and reduce constraints to a minimum.

There could no longer be any separation between working time and creative time, leisure time and time of constraint, and the notion of free time itself would disappear, as there would only be time built by the individual first and foremost for himself, while the notion of effort and wasted energy would be relegated to the museum of ideologies...

One of the main obstacles to the Revolution when it is launched will be the tendency of men to re-establish discipline and impose it on others. In the process imagined above, the presence of many individuals who feel the disutility and displeasure of work will encourage a few particularly repressed individuals to want to re-establish discipline and Counter-Revolution.

Insofar as the revolutionary process develops from the councils, their first task will be to learn about the production process and rationalize it by eliminating all bogus work. Once the rationalization operation is complete and well understood by all, the council's task will probably be over.

Individuals will certainly have no desire to work for the companies to which they were previously linked, and a very small proportion will remain attached to their company. The task of the Revolution is to free people from Work, not to bind them to it by a new form of dependence.

The Councils will then find in technology, and in particular in cybernetics, the means to surpass themselves, enabling the transition from company self-management to generalized self-management. The danger then arises of a totalitarian Society of Means, in which the Councils will not be concerned with improving technology, but with determining the ends of production. In this perspective, it will be up to individuals alone, as a last resort and once and for all, to choose the ends for themselves, and not for abstractions, majorities or minorities.

At that point, the realization of Art will become possible, not as a fragmented activity (paintings, sculptures...) but as a multi-dimensional art of living.

We can imagine, but then we're a little short, Fourier sometimes imagined...