| > from a utilitarian perspective, I think still it would be fairer for the working class to own the means of production. However attractive this might seem theoretically (it doesn't to me, but I understand it does to many people), we have run this experiment in practice and it doesn't work, at least not in the obvious sense of "workers own the means of production". The problem is that "own the means of production" doesn't help unless ownership means control; and in practice, if you have large industrial factories organized with centralized top-down control, it's impossible for all the workers to "own" it in any useful sense. So it just ends up being another vehicle for centralized power. OTOH, if "own the means of production" really means that each worker owns and controls all the tools he needs to produce, and simply trades what he produces for what other workers produce, then what you have is a free market. In other words, for "workers own the means of production" to be true in any useful sense, every worker needs to be an entrepreneur, basically owning himself and his skills and tools as a small business. I would love to see this happen, but unfortunately I don't think it's likely to on any large scale any time soon. (In some fields, though--programming as a free-lance craft is an example--it can already be true for a significant number of people.) > you still have the product of labour sold for more value than it was bought at I don't understand what you mean by this. The value of any product of labor is not determined by the laborer; it's determined by whoever is going to use that product. That's not because of an evil plot by large corporations; it's an unavoidable fact of life. Anyone who cannot produce everything they need by themselves has to trade with others; and that means being able to produce something that someone else will trade for at a price that is enough to compensate you for the labor involved, plus whatever surplus you need to obtain other things you need. There is no reason for the someone else to pay you more just because you used more labor, if the value to them is the same either way. Everybody understands this when they are the user; if you hire someone to paint your house, you're not going to pay them more if they use a toothbrush to do it. (IIRC pg used this example in one of his essays.) > there is nobody to defend property or even establish the validity of the concept of property I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. The need to defend property and property rights is inherent in the idea of trade; if we all need to trade with others, then we all need to have property and property rights, and have them defended if they are threatened. That will be true whether the average corporation is large or small, or even if corporations did not exist at all. |
The main large scale experiment I am aware of that meets the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production is the Mondragon system and similar labor cooperative ventures, which seem at least modestly successful, even when operating in a legal and political environment in which that structure is not the norm around which most rules are optimized.
There are certainly failed experiments where precapitalist states have been overthrown by regimes in which the state, run by a vanguard party acting nominally in the name of the workers, collectively, owned the means of production, which have failed spectacularly for reasons which may be related to the ownership structure (though other explanations are available), but those don't seem to be operating in anything like the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production.