Opposition to private property and slogans (instead of policies) to stay in power are from the communists' point of view a good new beginning after the collapse of central planning. But in the end, they must come up with some positive agenda if for no other reason to give their creed some content. It is very well for Marx to have said that it would be unscientific to produce a blueprint for a future society, but a political movement must have some idea of what it is going to do if it wins.
Very soon after 1989, criticism of the attempted passage to capitalism began in some East European countries. It was suggested that the reforms imposed by failure of planned economies should lead to self-management instead. One of the sources of this re-discovery was the Economics Department of the European University College in Florence, Italy, which churned out a series of pamphlets on the subject. A remarkable products of this department was the doctoral dissertation by Milica Uvalic, supervised by Professor Mario Nuti (formerly head of the Florence Department, now London Business School). This dissertation (Milica Uvalic, Investment and Property Rights in Yugoslavia: The Long Transition to a Market Economy, Cambridge University Press, 1992) pretends to show by a series of non-sequiturs that self-management has never been tried (in Yugoslavia it failed abysmally) and that it should be turned to now.
Nobody should prevent scholars from researching economic systems, but they should not indulge in simple wishful thinking. They should answer straightforward questions, which Dr. Uvalic's book does not.
Milica Uvalic and Mario Nuti are members of the International Association for the Economics of Participation, formerly the International Association for the Economics of Workers' Management, which also includes Branko Horvat, Jaroslav Vanek, and Saul Estrin, all well known believers in self-management. Since some of them are also well known members of communist parties, the danger is that a link with the post-communists' movements exists and that there will be attempts at luring some people away from down-to-earth market economics by dangling in front of them the illusion of a self-management utopia.
Together with attacks on private property and populist slogans the illusion of a self-management "third way" may keep post-communists in power or at least preserve a respectable following for them at the expense of the standard of living of their countries.
In fact, hostility to private property (maybe only if non-communists are owners) appears to be a firm point, all the rest is tactics which have always played an enormous role in communists' activity. It is known as Leninist strategy and tactics and mainly consists in deceit: conceal the real goals and try to attract the "masses". What the real goal is at present is difficult to know, except that in principle the communists want power even if it requires violence. At the moment they are too weak for violence but it must not be excluded in the longer run, if the communists regain a strong position.
For the time being, they play the game which was, some time ago, known as the "popular front", later on as the "Liberation front" and implies accepting democratic principles in words but trying to be dominant in deeds. The problem is that after so many years of communism, other parties that combine with the communists and let themselves be dominated by them, in the end lose. This happened to left-wing Liberals in Hungary and to Christian Democrats in Slovenia. The observed aversion of East European electorates to vote for non-communist parties that then collaborate with communists may make popular front tactics difficult to sustain.