ABSTRACT
When Karl Marx was beginning to work on Das Kapital in the 1850s, the phenomenon of management was unknown. So were the enterprises that managers run. The largest manufacturing company around was a Manchester, England, cotton mill employing fewer than 300 people and owned by Marx's friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. And in Engels's mill – one of the most profitable businesses of its day – there were no ‘managers’, only ‘charge hands’ who, themselves workers, enforced discipline over a handful of fellow ‘proletarians’.
