In my doctoral thesis from 1980, Capital functions and the position of the workers (in Swedish), I explored a Marxian theory of Business administration, based on a little known work by Marx: “Resultate des unmittelbares produktionsprozesses”.

I explored concepts like three levels of functions of capital: owning, administering and leading; the generalization of capital functions and hence globalization; the possibility that the workers could acquire the control (cf. Bettelheim) of lower functions of capital and hence undermining the owning of the company, This led to the hypothesis that the productive forces has not reached anywhere near its highest possible development under capitalism and hence that communism today or in our life time is a romantic dream. We should instead try to increase the productive forces within capitalism and broadening workers’ control over capital functions in order to make a future communist society possible. Only through such an expansion of actual control could the working class prepare itself for democratic (in contrast to despotic) communism.

I had left the academia in 1977 because of the resistance to my ideas. I became a practitioner, working as a management consultant, executive in large corporations and owner of small companies. Whenever I could I tried to apply my theories, with good and bad results.

One of these was the re-engineering in a subsidiary of ABB, Asea Brown Boveri, the Swedish-Swiss, electrical equipment giant. In 1988 – 1992 I developed and implemented a new business idea and the computer architecture to support it, in order to make the subsidiary more effective (ABB would not have let me otherwise) and, as a personal agenda, to extend workers’ control over leading and administrating. The results where both encouraging and limited, but still shows clearly how a work force can extend their control and the preparedness for further extension of that control.