To liberate itself from subordination to dominating classes, workers must seize control of the places where they work and directly manage all of the industries. Workers self-management needs to be part of a coordinated system of production geared to producing for direct human benefit, not private profit — self-managed socialism.
Self-management means that people control the decisions to the extent they are affected by them. The basic building blocks of a self-managed society would be assemblies of workers in workplaces and of residents in neighborhoods. A self-managing society needs a governance structure through which the people make and enforce the basic rules of the society and defend working class power.
Because the state is always an institution of class domination, self-emancipation requires that the working class replace the state with a governance structure rooted in the direct democracy of the assemblies and its extension in the delegate democracy of federations of the base organizations.
We envision congresses of delegates elected by the base assemblies that would have the basic power of making decisions about social rules and society-wide priorities. For important or controversial decisions, there should be a right of those at the base to force the proposal to be sent back to the base assemblies for decision.
The hierarchical professional military should be replaced by an egalitarian people’s militia. During the process of social transformation, we are opposed to any armed bodies that are not under the direct control of the working class mass organizations. The working class needs to make sure that when the dust settles there’s not some top-down armed power that can be used by an elite to defend some new system of boss power. The transformation of society that we seek isn’t limited to breaking down the power of dominating classes. The revolution must also unravel the state, patriarchy, white supremacy, and imperialism.
Replacing jobs with socially useful labor and getting rid of dangerous or polluting technology will be priorities in a social transformation that aims at human liberation and ecological survival. Liberation from class domination means systematically developing the potential of all working people, and dissolving the power of the bureaucratic managerial hierarchies. To ensure that everyone can effectively participate in decision-making, jobs need to be completely transformed so that conceptual and decision-making tasks are integrated with the tasks of doing the physical work.
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