ABSTRACT
In the 1970s, Michael Albert and I came to the conclusion that the vision of a self-managed economy shared by many council communists, syndicalists, anarchists, and guild socialists was essentially sound, but, unfortunately, these economic visionaries had failed to provide a coherent model explaining precisely how their alternative to capitalism could work. Our libertarian socialist predecessors provided moving comparisons of the advantages of worker and community self-management over capitalism and authoritarian planning. But all too often they did not respond to difficult questions about precisely how necessary decisions would be made, how the democratic procedures they championed would yield a coherent plan, why there was any reason to believe the plan that emerged would be efficient, or how people would be motivated to work and innovate. But we did not believe this meant their vision was an impossible dream. It simply meant more theoretical work was required to flesh out the vision and demonstrate its feasibility.
