Velvet revolution as revival of 1968? Self-governing enterprises in the Czechoslovak economic transformation
Abstract
The paper analyses the role of the self-governing bodies in the Czechoslovak industrial enterprises during the Velvet revolution and in the aftermath. It focuses on their ambivalent position in the tumultuous years 1989 and 1990: having been established by the last communist leadership, they nevertheless proved a useful tool for the revolutionary Civic forums which aimed at dismissing the most prominent members of the communist economic bureaucracy.
This, however, did not prevent the self-governing bodies from being abolished by the first post-revolutionary government. The paper analyses the intellectual roots of the Czechoslovak self-government movement (theories of the so-called economic democracy) and tries to explain its sudden breakdown in May 1990.