Deepening democracy means answering an elementary question: Who decides the conditions of our shared life? The notion of self-management asserts that those who produce and maintain society should collectively determine its direction. In their contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Jörg Nowak and Gabriel Teles explore self-management as the core of a radical transformation of society.
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The contemporary crisis of democracies is not merely institutional. It is structural. The intensification of inequalities, ecological devastation, and the concentration of economic power reveal a historical limit: the coexistence between political representation and economic heteronomy. Even where elections and formal guarantees exist, the decisions that shape collective life remain subordinated to the logic of accumulation.
If democracy seeks to become deep, it cannot remain confined to electoral procedures or constitutional guarantees. It must reach the space where social life is materially organized: production, circulation, and social reproduction. In this context, self-management is not just an administrative technique; it is a radical reconfiguration of social relations.
Beyond participation and co-management
Many proposals for democratic renewal rely on notions such as participation, expanded deliberation, or co-management. These initiatives may broaden consultation and make processes more transparent. However, they rarely alter the structural separation between those who decide and those who execute.
To participate means to integrate into a structure whose ends are already defined. Co-management allows partial influence over means, while preserving ownership and strategic direction. Even so-called workers’ control, when conceived as supervision of external decisions, does not abolish wage labor or the logic of value.
Self-management introduces a qualitative rupture. It begins when producers collectively determine both the means and the ends of production. It is not an internal mechanism of capitalism, but the principle of another historical form.
Democracy and its historical limits
Representative democracy is a specific form of capitalist modernity. It presupposes the separation between the political and the economic sphere, between state and civil society, between rulers and ruled.
This separation is not neutral. It corresponds to a society structured by classes and mediated by the market. Expanding representative devices does not dissolve this foundation. A democracy deepened only at the institutional level may remain compatible with economic domination.
For democracy to be truly deep, it must address the external influence of market forces and bureaucratic apparatuses on collective life. In this sense, self-management is not supplementary to representative democracy. Rather, it points toward the overcoming of representative democracy.
Self-management as a foundational social relation
Drawing on the self-management tradition associated with Yvon Bourdet, self-management can be defined as a generalized social relation in which associated producers consciously direct production and social coordination.
Under capitalism, dead labor dominates living labor through the mediation of value. Self-management reverses this relation. Living labor decides its own conditions and the destination of its products. As a result, the separation between economy and politics tends to dissolve.
Self-management is not limited to the workplace. It involves territorial assemblies, federated councils, and planning mechanisms organized through councils. The administration of things replaces the rule of human beings separated from the collectivity.
Preparing society through the self-management of struggles
A decisive strategic dimension lies in the form of present struggles. A self-managed society does not emerge from hierarchical structures. Movements that concentrate decisions in permanent leaderships tend to reproduce the separation they seek to overcome.
Self-management of society is prepared through self-management of struggles. Sovereign assemblies, recallable delegates, the rotation of functions, and horizontal coordination are not just organizational details. These are practices that cultivate the collective capacity to make decisions and take responsibility.
Deep democracy requires social learning. It presupposes subjects capable of deliberating on energy infrastructure, logistics, housing, and the reproduction of life without subordination to private profitability.
Self-management and civilizational crisis
The convergence of ecological crisis and economic instability highlights the irrationality of production oriented toward profit. Current technical capacities allow conscious coordination on an expanded scale. The obstacle is social, not technological.
Self-management does not offer a closed model. It indicates a historical direction. As an anticipatory concept, it expresses a possibility emerging from the contradictions of capital itself.
To deepen democracy means to answer an elementary question: who decides over the conditions of common life? Self-management responds that those who produce and reproduce society must collectively decide its course.
This transformation would not reform what exists. It would inaugurate another form of social organization.
Dilemmas and challenges
This proposal faces challenges that have proven difficult to resolve throughout the history of self-management.
1. How can such a project ensure the reproduction of horizontal relations, or in other words, prevent the return of vertical forms of organization, without establishing an institution similar to a state itself? The examples of ‘surveillance’ within the Soviet model serve as reminders of how this challenge was confronted in the past.
2. How can the interests and needs of different regions and cities, and different economic units, be coordinated without concentrating economic power in a central planning institution or, at the other extreme, falling into sectarianism among more developed regions or more productive units that accumulate resources? The unresolved regional inequalities in former Yugoslavia were among the factors that led to the outbreak of war between these regions and the new states founded in the early 1990s.
3. How can an assembly of different productive units ensure large-scale processes, such as the ecological transition and shifting from overproducing goods to an economy that is more service-oriented, with a greater emphasis on education, care, and health services?
In sum, these three questions address the concentration of political and economic power and the coordination of resource allocation. The key question is how to maintain political stability and economic coordination without concentrating power, resources, and authority in institutions that are unlikely to remain accountable to the majority of the population.
Lessons, warnings, and possibilities
The dilemmas posed by self-management and deep democracy accompany every historical attempt to overcome the separation between political decision and the material organization of social life. They never arise as theoretical abstractions. They emerged in concrete contexts shaped by class conflict, material urgency, and specific correlations of forces. The Paris Commune, the October Revolution and other twentieth-century experiences confronted, each in their own way, the problems of large-scale coordination, the defense of horizontal relations, and the containment of the concentration of political and economic power.
These experiences demonstrate that self-management was never an ethereal ideal. It appeared as a living practice in workers’ councils, territorial assemblies, factory committees, and embryonic federative forms. At the same time, they revealed profound limits. The pressure of civil war, the bureaucratization of workers’ organizations, international isolation, inherited regional inequalities, and the need to secure immediate material reproduction continuously strained the horizontal forms that had been constructed. In many cases, coordinating structures became permanent, paving the way for new hierarchies and the autonomization of political power in relation to society.
These processes do not invalidate the horizon of self-management. They indicate that the transition toward a society founded on collective self-determination is traversed by real contradictions that vary according to historical context. Some answers were found in partial, provisional, and situated ways. Others remain open. History offers lessons, warnings, and possibilities. It does not provide transferable models.
A historical direction
The question of economic coordination without authoritarian centralization, the overcoming of territorial inequalities without political fragmentation, and the conduct of structural transformations such as the ecological transition continue to challenge any project of radical democracy. These challenges gain renewed density in the present, marked by unprecedented technical capacities and by a civilizational crisis that places the reproduction of life at the center of political debate.
In this sense, self-management remains less a ready-made answer and more a historical direction. It expresses the refusal of heteronomy, of the subordination of social life to logics external to producers and communities themselves. Its concrete content can only emerge from real struggles, from organizational forms constructed in the daily confrontation with relations of domination.
Deep democracy is not instituted by decree, nor stabilized by institutional design alone. It takes shape in process, in social experimentation, in collective learning, and in the capacity to continuously revise its own structures. Past experiences reveal both the power and the fragility of this path. The future remains open. Only concrete historical practice, situated in the struggles of the present, will indicate how far society can advance in collective self-determination over its own conditions of existence.