Equality, Participation, Transition: Essays in Honour of Branko Horvat

I have carried on a friendly three-decade discourse on this. It is my
view that control of information is control of policy. Knowledge, distinct
from information, also has its particularities that underwrite
information differentials. To the extent that the distribution of knowledge
and information is unequal, the distribution of influence over
policy decisions will be unequal. This form of inequality, moreover,
derives neither from any sinister plot nor from any social system construct.
Shop-floor workers know more about handling shop floor problems,
for example, than do managers and should be allowed much
more discretion in this realm, while marketing managers presumably
know more about getting the product into the hands of consumers and
should be allowed more discretion in that realm. It does not violate the
principle of worker participation to allow for spheres of influence,
thereby clarifying and simplifying what would otherwise be a most
cumbersome project if everyone was supposed to decide upon everything,
as some designers of associationist socialism would have it. If
everyone tries to decide upon everything, either very little will be
decided as processes become bogged down in meetings, or top managers
will decide everything by default.
Horvat, on the other hand, contends that the ‘exercise of managerial
functions is not the task of any special class of individuals, but of the
collectivity of members of economic organizations’, as is social evaluation
and risk-taking. ‘Supervision’, he continues, ‘is a two-directional
process in which every member of the collective takes part. The remaining
function, coordination, is purely technical and as such is left to
technical experts … ’ (1969: 97). In this succinct description of selfgoverning
workers’ council, Horvat presents his organizational conception
of the enterprise within a system of associationist socialism.
1.5 The worker-managed firm
Howard M. Wachtel 7
Horvat’s sharpest departure from conventional economics derives from
his theory of self-management. Self-management and social ownership
present theoretical challenges to the standard micro- and macro- analyses
of the capitalist firm. At the level of macro economics, the workermanaged
enterprise is distinguished from the capitalist-managed firm
by its responses to economic decline. In the capitalist-managed firm,
the reaction is dismissal of employees, after some relatively brief interval
of labour hoarding. One can expect that this is not the first or even
second option for a worker-managed enterprise. If the self-managed
decision-making process works, the expectation is that labour will be