In The Civil War in France (1871), Karl Marx interprets the Paris Commune as “essentially a working class government.” The bourgeoisie and capitalism had been overthrown; the workers ruled. For Marx, the deep structure of a society was its class structure, and therefore everything about the Commune must be fundamentally new. It would be a mistake to interpret any of its offices, bodies, or laws that might seem familiar as if they replicated those of the previous regime. “It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterparts of older, and even defunct, forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness.”

A counterpoint–not to this passage, but to major interpretations of Marx–comes from the radical Brazilian theorist and activist Roberto Mangabeira Unger. To paraphrase loosely, Unger might say that once the workers own the government and major enterprises, it becomes possible for people to distribute both the fruits of their labor and the rewarding productive activities more fairly and to collaborative more than compete. However, a revolution does not automatically resolve problems of organization and management. It remains challenging to coordinate individuals’ behavior, to identify and reward diligence, to apply expertise without letting the experts dominate, and so on. Thus the revolution should be judged on whether it yields new forms of self-government, which is not inevitable but depends on the participants.

In False Necessity (2004), Unger writes:

The radical left has generally found in the assumptions of deep-structure social analysis an excuse for the poverty of its institutional ideas. With few exceptions (such as the Yugoslav innovations) it has produced only one innovative institutional conception, the idea of the soviet or conciliar type of organization: that is to say, direct territorial and enterprise democracy. But this conception has never been and probably never can be worked into detailed institutional arrangements capable of solving the practical problems of and administrative and economic management in large countries, torn by internal divisions, beleaguered by foreign enemies, and excited by rising expectations. Thus, the conciliar model of popular organization has quickly given way to forms of despotic governnment that seem the sole feasible alternatives to the overthrown bourgeois regimes (pp. 24-5).

Unger is making an empirical claim that may be overstated. It has been 150+ years since the Paris Commune, and there have been many experiments under state socialism (of various types) and in capitalist economies–from mini-communes to, for instance, Mondragon, which has 75,000 employees/owners today. But I do think his theoretical insight is valid: the fundamental task is to redesign specific institutions.

Source: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, False necessity: anti-necessitarian social theory in the service of radical democracy: from Politics, a work in constructive social theory. London: Verso, 2004. See also: the visionary fire of Roberto Mangabeira Unger and needed: pragmatists for utopian experiments