Autogestion

Correcting the History of Self Management

Abstract

This article describes the history of the origins of the important principle of autogestion (autogestion in French, autogestión in Spanish, generally self-management in English) and straightening its often-confused origin story. Based in an examination of mid-twentieth century French scholarship, journals, and political documents, this article argues that the term did not arise out of Yugoslavia of the 1950s, or the French student movement of 1968, but from a collective of Algerian revolutionaries at the point of Algeria’s independence 1962-1965. Furthermore, the article corrects some English translations of the word in historical documents that have further confused its history and had an impact on how the principle was adopted in the English-speaking world. The origin of the term is important because within its grammar is the most important shift in leftist social movements of the twentieth century: the shift from “worker” or “peasant” as the revolutionary subject to a variety of collective selves in the “new” identity-based social movements of the 1960s and beyond. To recuperate autogestion’s origins as North African is to recuperate a portion of the importance of Global South activists and political thinkers to the 1968 student movements that have been so defining of our contemporary political landscape.