Introduction

The Inaugural Address of 1864 has been described as the rough draft of a political economy of labour, and right upon its publication, some authors drew attention to Karl Marx’s argument that only a nation-wide system of producer cooperatives created with State aid could give rise to a socialist system. Marx, Marxists and other critics of the existing social order concordantly rate political democracy as merely formal when power remains firmly in the hands of capitalists, in other words when capital the economic power is holding everything in its sway. The system of producer cooperatives envisaged by Marx was a market system that made workers ‘their own masters’ and deprived capital owners of the power to make decisions in matters of production. The extent to which the notion of revolution as the establishment of a new production mode represents a dominant in Marx’s thought necessitates the conclusion that Marxism is a theory of revolution.