Abstract
A certain consensus exists in literature regarding human beings’ tendency for cooperation or self-management. Iñaki Gil de San Vicente refers, for example, to ancient Egypt, the Phoenicians, and Rome, and how manifestations of cooperative associations have existed since then.1 In mid-nineteenth-century Europe, the Rochdale Pioneers2 cooperative was founded with its “seven principles,” along with the attempts of Saint Simons, Owen, and Fourier to organize utopian societies largely founded on self-management.
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Notes
Cf. Inaki Gil, “Cooperativismo obrero, consejismo y autogestión socialista. Algunas lecciones para Euskal Herria,” accessed August 6, 2002.
Roberto Massari, Teorias de la autogestión, Madrid: Zero Zyx, 1995, p. 12.
Adriano Brivio, “La autogestión comunitaria,” February 2001, www.gestiopolis.com.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Obras Escogidas, Vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1982, p. 273.
This term refers to a sort of “peaceful coexistence” among classes, distant from conflicts and clashes. Obviously, the “classist” tendency takes into account the real antagonisms between exploiting and exploited classes.
Charles Fourier, Teoria de los cuatros movimientos y de los destinos generales, Madrid: Pasado y Presente, 1975, p. 64.
Referring to cooperation solely among members of the cooperative or with related cooperatives.
The IWA emerged in the heat of late-nineteenth-century workers’ struggles. Marx played an important role in its founding and activities. It perished, like similar organizations, due to divisions and the pressures of capital.
Marx and Engels, Obras Escogidas, Vol. 3, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 79–80.
Jacques Texier, “Democracia, socialismo y autogestiOn,” LaPensée 321 (2000): 32.
Cf. Jean Lojkine, “Nouveaux rapports de classes et mouvements sociaux, alternatives au capitalisme,” Actuel Marx 26, October 1999, http:// actuelmarx.u-parisl0.fr/num26.htm.
Marx, Obras Economia I, Madrid: Pléyade, 1965, pp. 1469–70.
Marx, La guerra civil en Francia, Madrid: Paydós, 1972, p. 266
Marx is describing Proudhonian socialism as bourgeois and petit-bourgeois socialism. Bourgeois, because it proposes something that already exists, or
at least, the illusion of that reality. Petit-bourgeois, because Proudhon was the incarnation of the contradiction between capital and labor, and the type of socialism he advocated was essentially based on farmers and artisans.
Here it would be necessary to address the issue that socialism and communism do not exist without planning, which implies social ownership of mercantile relations. Marx, La guerra civil en Francia, p. 266.
Cf. Jaques Texier, “Democracia, socialismo y autogestión,” p. 32.
Marx, El Capital, Vol. 1, Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1975, pp. 856–7.
Marx, “Genesis de la renta de bienes raices capitalista,” in El Capital, Vol. 3, Havana: Ciencias Sociales, 1975, pp. 170–4.
Marx, Engels, and Lenin, Sobre el anarquismo y el anarco-sindicalismo, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978, pp. 165–7.
The articles by Ifiaki Gil and Emile Armand contain a whole wealth of illustrative data about the polemic between the two tendencies.
The obshchina was a type of association in the Russian countryside that was based on collective forms of production and distribution, in which Marx saw the seeds of a form of production that was higher than capitalism. The 1917 Russian Revolution began in the urban and industrial sectors and adopted soviets as an organizational form, leaving the obshchinas in obscurity.
Gil et al. Autonomia y organización, Madrid: Debate Libertario, 1977, p. 18.
Cf. Rosa Luxemburg, “Co-operatives, Unions, Democracy”, in Reform or Revolution, London: Militant Publications, 1986.
Lenin, Socialismo y cooperativismo, Euskadi: Ediciones Cooperativistas, 1972, p. 114.
Cf. ibid., “Medidas para la transición del sistema cooperativo burgués de abastecimiento y distribución al sistema comunista proletaria.”
Lenin, Sobre la cooperación. Illtimos articulos y cartas, Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1981, p. 76.
Lenin, “On Co-operation,” in Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English edn, Vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, p. 467–75.
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© 2013 Humberto Miranda Lorenzo
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Lorenzo, H.M. (2013). Cooperativism and Self-Management in Marx, Engels, and Lenin. In: Harnecker, C.P. (eds) Cooperatives and Socialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137277756_4
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