Abstract

The notion of “workers’ control” has been used to cover a wide range of phenomena, from limited workers’ supervision of working conditions to a full workers’ management of the social relation of production. Insofar as it is used within Marxism, the notion is utilized in this chapter in opposition to the most hegemonic forms of Marxism in the twentieth century to trace the conceptual genesis of a vision of communist society based on Marx’s notion of a “society of free and associated producers”. The chapter illustrates the extent to which the idea of “workers’ control” finds different expression in Marx and some of the Marxist theorists between 1871 and the February Revolution.