Even if they share numerous findings, Marxists were highly critical of the managerial literature. This critical reception can be explained by the ambiguities in Marx’s works. In fact, there is, when he dealt with corporations, a tension between his realistic effort to address the issue and his analytical framework. The aim of the paper is to show how he tried to integrate in his framework the changes of the “Great Industry” era, especially the emergence of corporations. To that end, I discuss the conceptual distinctions made by Marx between the financial capitalist, the industrial capitalist, the director and the manager. I demonstrate that these categories led to reappraise his theory of social classes, as it has been done by the authors dealing with the “managerial revolution” or more recently Duménil and Lévy (2011, 2018).
