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importance of workers’ control of their own enterprises and in-
stitutions both for the survival of the young socialist regime as

well as for the very materialisation of the objectives of socialism:
the liberation of man.

Recognising the centrality of class struggle in history, socialists
seek to organise the logical winners of the struggle for the even-
tual showdown with their oppressors. For them, therefore, there
cannot be any ‘participation’ of workers with capitalists — there is
only struggle. Control of the instruments of production by the
working people subsequent to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie is
therefore essential if such instruments are to be used for the
working people and if the emergence of classes or strata with
monopoly power over resources is to be avoided.

Workers’ control is therefore part and parcel of the class
struggle. As such, however, it is very much connected with the
structure of power in society as a whole; class struggle has its
logical conclusion in the struggle against the state itself — which
is nothing but a product and a tool of antagonistic relations among
people. In the well-known words of Engels:

We are now rapidly approaching a stage in the development of
production in which the existence of classes not only ceases to be a
necessity, but becomes a positive fetter on production. They will fall as
inevitably as they arose. With them the state will inevitably fall. The
society that will reorganise production on the basis of the free and equal
association of the producers will put the whole machinery of state where
it will then belong: into the Museum of Antiquities by the side of the
spinning wheel and bronze axe.?’

Secondly, workers’ control is essential because socialism rejects
the inhumanities that are part and parcel of the division of Labour
as it is arranged under capitalism. For one, this division subjugates
people, placing them into narrow confines not only in terms of
their activities but also in terms of their world outlook and in-
tellectual development. It deforms their all-round development.
Compressing people to the demands of narrower and narrower
jobs, this division of labour mutilates them intellectually. In the
words of the Communist Manifesto:

Owing to the extensive use of machinery and the division of labour,
the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character and con-
sequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the

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