Occupy Production: A Vision for Democracy at Work

(by: Richard D. Wolff, Truthout | Op-Ed) 

Photo: Bill Ruhsam / Flickr

As the Occupy movement keeps developing, it seeks solutions for the economic and political dysfunctions it exposes and opposes. For many, the capitalist economic system itself is the basic problem. They want change to another system, but not to the traditional socialist alternative (e.g. USSR or China). That system, too, seems to require basic change.

The common solution these activists propose is to change both systems’ production arrangements from the ground up. Every enterprise should be democratized. Workers should occupy their enterprise by collectively functioning as its board of directors. That would abolish the capitalist exploitative system (employer versus employee) much as our historical predecessors abolished the parallel exploitative systems of slavery (master versus slave) and feudalism (lord versus serf)…

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