Análise micro-económica de uma economia autogestionária

The Firm in Illyria: Market Syndicalism, por Benjamin Ward, publicado por The American Economic Review , Vol. 48, No. 4 (Sep., 1958).

Versão aberta[PDF]:

The discussion of the feasibility of socialism has long been closed with apparently quite general agreement that an economy will not inevitably collapse as a result of nationalization of the means of production. On the theoretical side the clinching argument was probably made by Barone shortly after the controversy began [2]. Probably the best known of the arguments on the other side of the question, that of Mises[15], was published twelve years after Barone's paper and gave rise to a new set of arguments, among them those of Taylor, Lange and Lerner [11] [12]. Lange in fact explicitly (though perhaps with a touch of irony) developed market socialism as a counterexample for Mises' assertions. (...)

These (...) questions are of special interest today as one watches some Eastern European countries groping toward a less centralized form of economic organization, and as one watches Western European socialists struggle with the implications for democracy (and efficiency) of further nationalization. In the present paper a few of the implications of one possible alternative form of industrial organization are explored. In this model the means of production are nationalized and the factories turned over to the general management of elected committees of workers who are free to set price and output policy in their own material self-interest. The nature of the resulting price and outputdecisions are investigated and compared with those obtained in the competitive capitalist (or market socialist) model. The assumptions of the model bear a close resemblance to the legal status of the industrial firm in Yugoslavia in recent years. Consequently some of the organizational arrangements of a "market syndicalist" economy can be described most conveniently by citing laws on the statute books in Yugoslavia, as is done in Section I. Toward the end of the paper some comments are made as to the extent of deviations of firm behavior in Yugoslavia from that of the theorems of our model. It seems that Illyria is in fact an alternative to the existing system in Yugoslavia as well as to those in Western and the rest of Eastern Europe.

[Algumas coisas parecem um pouco estranhas se nos esquecermos que se trata de um artigo de 1958]