Question for MLs

Do you consider state ownership of the MoP to be the same as worker ownership of the MoP. Or if that's not it, what makes you think that countries with state ownership of the MoP can be described as socialist (if you think they can of course). And one final thing, what else, if anything, is also necessary for a country/state to be considered socialist besides property ownership?

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The explanation I've usually heard is that if a peoples government owns the means of production, its a step in the transitionary period towards communism.

No, the state should be controlled by the workers. There are multiple ways of socialist ownership, an example would be cooperative ownership or public ownership under the influence of unions and a council system. I'm not opposed to workplace democracy like it was conceived in the DPRK for example, but it shouldn't be fetishized. How would worker control look like in your opinion?

Of course, it also includes the abolition of generalized commodity production, the abolition of wage labor and the labor market, and production that does not adhere to the law of value as it's regulator in general (planned economy).

To me, worker control would be pretty much what it sounds like: workers would pretty much be able to control everything about their workplace: who does what, how much they earn, how they organize themselves, etc. So even if technically the state is the true owner of the MoP, the workers would still control everything about them.

Not him but I’ll pitch my two cents anyway. I’m a state syndicalist, and I think that a socialist system that lives up to its promise of working class rule would allow a great deal of autonomy for workers. Essentially I would like to see a system where individual shops are largely independently operated, where the syndicate would be limited to managing payment, handing out production quotas, and keeping records for purposes of paying bonuses or doing investigations in the case of corruption/consistent underperformance (although the government would also keep these records). Each firm itself would essentially be run in the day to day as a direct democracy, and their only imposed obligations would be to meet their production quotas and follow environmental/safety etc. regulations.

I would even support a system where individuals can start their own coops within the syndicate system. The way this would work is that when current production can’t meat demand, be syndicate would announce that it is accepting new coops, and people could apply to form their own firm which would be integrated into the syndicate. In other words the creation of new shops would be in part spontaneous rather than entirely top-down.

I'm not sure they can be but for simplicity's sake they're referred to as socialist. Really this is a concern among left wing navel gazers and nowhere else. If I had to come up with a term for the post war Soviet Union I'd call it Persistent Emergency Socialism. After all it was dealing with the world historical threat of nuclear war by the only country crazy enough to use nuclear weapons on people.

State ownership is not even socialism. Only cooperatives fit the criteria of workers owning the MOP.

I never said it was, it's just that many MLs today would agree that a country where the MoP were state owned would be socialist. This thread was meant to ask as to why they believe simple state ownership is socialism to them.

But how do you organize that? Cast a ballot on how is going to clean the pipes? Elect the managers? There are many things you have to figure out, especially the possibility that workers might not be interested in micromanaging their workplace democratically. In the end, working conditions, pay, and the amount of hours matter to them. I'd say Marxist-Leninist states have several regulations in place for workers to have a say in those big issues.

I disagree with that though, and I'd say most Marxist-Leninist would get behind the definition in the first post. India has an extremly high state sector, obviously, it isn't socialist.

State ownership is not necessarily socialist ownership, but it can be. I think explained it well enough.

Are you a Richard Wolff fan?

To me (and my guess is that most Marxists and Marxist-Leninists, like the tank poster above, would agree with me on this), "worker/collective ownership of the means of production" means that the working class as a class is in command of the production of the whole society. Of course there are different ways of organizing that, with different degrees of centralization/decentralization. But the point of it is to achieve production for use, production to truly satisfy the needs of the society, not that every workplace should be an independent little co-op where workers vote on some tiny issue every five minutes.

If you interpret worker control the way Wolff does, for example, then maximum worker control is achieved when every workplace is an independent, democratic, worker directed enterprise. But in such a society you still have the anarchy of the market, you still have production for exchange ("commodity production"), you still have wage labour, etc. It has most of the features associated with capitalism except workers get to vote on who should be their boss.

Also, let's say you have 20-30 co-ops organize into some kind network of co-ops to coordinate their production to better serve the needs of their community. I would say that this is getting closer to a socialist mode of production. But once this network of co-ops makes a decision on some plan, the amount of "worker control" (according to this specific interpretation of that concept) has actually decreased, because then 10 workers at one of the co-ops can't just say fuck it and do something completely different, which means they don't have as much direct control over their workplace.

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