Free Association of Producers

Marx's account

In Capital Volume 1, chapter 1, section 4, Marx presents an association of free human beings as the contrasting case in his explanation of commodity fetishism. In that community the means of production are held in common, individual labour is applied consciously from the outset as part of the combined social labour, and production and distribution are regulated according to plan. Because the products of labour do not take the commodity form, no retrospective adjustment through value and price is required.

The passage is not a blueprint for a future society but a foil for defining capitalism. Two requirements are nonetheless stated in it: common ownership of the means of production, and conscious democratic control by the producers themselves.

Distinguished from state ownership

The second of these became the crux of twentieth-century argument. The question is whether control by producers is established along with the transfer of the means of production into state ownership, and Marx himself criticized in the Critique of the Gotha Programme the view that equates nationalization with socialism.

It was in this context that Marx attended to the workers' cooperatives of the Paris Commune. Among the Commune's measures he treated the takeover of closed workshops by workers' associations as a question of the form of social production. Later discussions of self-management socialism and of cooperatives took this point as their ground.

Contemporary inheritance

Since the later twentieth century the concept has been taken up again in efforts to move beyond the dichotomy of market and plan. Erik Olin Wright's work on real utopias surveyed non-capitalist economic forms arising inside capitalism and offered cooperative market socialism as one of them, using democratic control by producers as its criterion of assessment.

Related lines of work include empirical research on worker cooperatives, models of participatory planning, community wealth building strategies, and the discussion of digital communism. What they share is the recognition that changing the form of ownership does not by itself secure control by producers, so that the institutional form of that control has to be designed separately.