ABSTRACT
Socialism conceived as a self-governing society implies that there exists no particular class of owners of the means of production, either individual or collective. In terms of social relations, productive property implies command over the labor of other members of a class-structured society. Economically, social property implies the negation of the very essence of property in presocialist societies— the appropriation of income from property. The economic aspect of social property has been, and continues to be, equally often misunderstood as the social one. Industrial democracy, like any democracy, is a political concept. A business firm run by workers is not only an economic organization but also a political organization. The maximization of democracy may be defined to mean that the opinion of each member of a work community is weighted exclusively by its objective importance for the decision at hand. Self-management is a radically new social organization. People raised in and conditioned to another system cannot change overnight.
