Annotation
The pamphlet was first written in 1957 for Socialisme ou Barbarie, offering a detailed blueprint for how workers could manage production without bosses or bureaucrats — pricing, planning, allocation, wages, all reimagined from below. Castoriadis was not writing utopian fiction. He was writing a manual, complete with formulas for calculating production costs and distributing surplus. When the British group Solidarity republished it in 1972 with a new preface, Castoriadis added this prediction: that before the century ended, millions would face the practical question of self-management. The confidence was understandable. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the high-water mark of workers' insurgency in the postwar West. May 1968 in France had seen factory occupations on a massive scale. The Italian Hot Autumn of 1969, the British miners' strikes, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 — Castoriadis could point to real events where workers had, however briefly, taken control of their workplaces. The trajectory seemed clear: capitalism was producing a crisis of meaning and authority that would force the question of who actually runs production.
What Actually Happened
The question was never asked. The late 1970s brought Thatcher, Reagan, and the neoliberal counterrevolution. Trade union membership collapsed across the industrialized world. The factory occupations, workers' councils, and rank-and-file movements that Castoriadis had theorized — and that had briefly flickered into existence — were dismantled by deindustrialization, globalization, and the deliberate destruction of organized labor. By 2000, the very concept of workers' self-management had vanished from mainstream political discourse. The millions Castoriadis imagined confronting these problems were instead confronting something he diagnosed elsewhere: the rising tide of insignificancy — privatization, apathy, withdrawal into consumption. The manual he had written so carefully was never opened.