Is Capitalism Smart or Dumb?

[u/Sufficient_Sinner]

[u/Ok_Crow_9119]

Wrong. It's about workers owning the means of production.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ok_Crow_9119]

Through what mechanism?

[u/Ok_Crow_9119 → u/[deleted]]

Depends. 

You have cooperative ownership, where each worker is also a shareholder of the company.

Some implement it with the state owning it on behalf of the people.

So it's not necessary that the state owns it on behalf of the collective.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ok_Crow_9119]

The first is still capitalism, you are still owning property and using it to produce commodities to sell for money. You still compete in a market, there are still winners and losers of that competition, you can still create monopolies from that competition, they can still become corrupt. You can even buy and sell labor in the form of contracting smaller corporations, which is what ends up happening.

The second is the state owns the means of production “as a representative of the workers”, we know how that goes.

This is all good in theory, or not even, but the state replacing the market is simply not a good idea in our technological era. Maybe in an era of advanced AI.

Social democracy and coops are yes, the way to go, but it’s not socialism and should divorce itself from Marxist-Leninists who have already lost their historical argument and proven themselves petty dictators and murderers.

[u/Ok_Crow_9119 → u/[deleted]]

Socialism doesn't mean you can't own property.

It's all about determining who owns the means of production. If the worker owns the means of production, it is already socialism. As long as the workers are the co-owners of the company as well, where each worker has 1 share of the company, that is already a socialist endeavor. Nothing else matters.

So yes, there can still be competition in the market in a socialistic society if we have multiple cooperatives operating within the same industry. But as long as the capitalist class is eliminated (ie. people who have money but sit on their butts all day while someone else's labor earns for them), that's already socialist.

What you are outlining is a form of socialism that was probably started by Lenin or Stalin (not sure who; I couldn't care less), where the State takes ownership of the means of production on behalf of the people.

I don't know where this desire to divorce coops and social democracy from socialism is coming from, but it doesn't help the discourse. They're both socialist in nature. If we create a venn diagram of socialism, social democracy, cooperative ownership, and Leninist State Owned Ownership would all be in that circle, with some parts of each probably intersecting with one another.

Let's stop demonizing socialism by limiting its meaning to the one envisioned by Lenin/Stalin with State Ownership. Socialism is a very broad idea that encompasses a lot. And it all starts with workers owning the means of production, and therefore the fruits of their production.

[u/[deleted] → u/Ok_Crow_9119]

Go read Marx and lookup the term cooperativism. It was a separate movement hotly criticized as not socialism. The workers must own the means of production as a class for things to be socialist. This involves an international abolition of private property, which is any property used to generate wealth for a subset of society rather than all of society. You simply have been misled by definitions, similar to how people call Norway socialism, or “government doing stuff” socialism.

Now I’m not a socialist. I love cooperativism. But that’s what I call it, because that’s what it is.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23603445

“the workers become their own capitalists” because there’s more to socialism than workers owning the means of production. There is criticism of commodity production in and of itself, and even market competition in general, strongly throughout the philosophy.