Don Marxists believe in workers control?
As we discussed in the last section, anarchists consider the usual association of state ownership with socialism to be false. We argue that it is just another form of the wages system, of capitalism, albeit with the state replacing the capitalist and so state ownership, for anarchists, is simply state capitalism. Instead we urge socialisation based on workers’ self-management of production. Libertarian Marxists concur. Some mainstream Marxists, however, say they seek to combine state ownership with “workers’ control.” This can be seen from Trotsky, for example, who argued in 1938 for “workers’ control . . . the penetration of the workers’ eye into all open and concealed springs of capitalist economy . . . workers’ control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalised industry when the hour for that eventuality strikes.” This, it is argued, proves that nationalisation (state owne
