i’m trying to learn here, this is an honest question.

some people say that “workers should own the means of production” (in other words, the company). if you agree with this view, then i have a question: how do new companies get made? i.e. if you aren’t already employed somewhere, you will maybe look for work. and if all companies already have enough workers, then where do you work? how does a new company come into existence? (who provides the startup resources and who takes the risk if the company fails and the startup resources cannot be recovered?)

  • TheOubliette@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    Workers owning the means of production is not an overly prescriptive idea. It means the bourgeois have been deposed or substantially oppressed such that workers actually dictate production. This is only really possible for a society after a revolution, as the bourgeois ruling class will not allow themselves to be deposed or substantially oppressed otherwise.

    This is one of the more flexible and interesting ways in which socialists can experiment. Experiments have ranged pretty widely. Some subgroups tried forms of primitivist agricultural communalism, though this can only exist for any significant duration under the protection of an industrialized state. In the context of industrialized production it can look like co-ops or state-run enterprises or various forms of oppressed bourgeois or all of the above simultaneously at different levels of productive forces (start more bourgeois and get stripped of it as production becomes so developed it can be more easily run via planning). Chile wanted to experiment with cybernetics developed with Stafford Beer before being murdered by US-backed fascists, the left leadership murdered in the tens of thousands following this. Can’t stress enough the importance of that revolution part - Allende rose via liberal democratic means and capitalists asserted the true basis of their rule, which is violence and coercion.

    So to answer your question, it would probably look petty bourgeois at first (individuals incorporating a business) under most near term circumstances, and does in countries run by socialists, but what to do as the enterprise grows varies. And sometimes a state may coordinate production even early on. For example important technologies may be developed by university researchers and to enter production they are state-funded and forced to collaborate with other researchers, with a petty bourgeois payoff (salary, ownership that dwindles until it enters a certain tier, etc). The latter also happens under capitalism but the profits are entirely privatized, capital feeds off the state funding, whereas the point of this industrial policy in socialist states is to either build missing productive capacity, to socialize much of the gains, and eventually turn over to co-ops and state-run enterprise, etc.