[dragonwriter]

> 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 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.

[pdonis]

> 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

Um, what about the Soviet Union?

(I'm not familiar with the Mondragon system but I'll look it up.)

> those don't seem to be operating in anything like the "obvious sense" of workers owning the means of production.

If you are including the Soviet Union in this category, you are rejecting the very Marxist terminology that you appeared to be using, since the whole point of the Soviet Union was that the workers would own the means of production. Yes, I know it failed spectacularly; that was my point.

[dragonwriter]

> If you are including the Soviet Union in this category, you are rejecting the very Marxist terminology that you appeared to be using

I think if you read the thread, you'll see that you are using the word "you" quite sloppily.

> since the whole point of the Soviet Union was that the workers would own the means of production.

The whole point of Leninist vanguardism, of which the USSR is obviously the first concrete manifestation, was to adapt Marxist rhetoric to be used in societies in which the perquisites Marx identified for socialism as a step on the route to communism were not met, to justify mechanism which were not what Marx and Engels pres cribed. Leninism is, itself, a substantive rejection of Marxism while adopting it's superficial structure.

That said, Marx is hardly the only thinker (even of his time) to argue for workers owning the means of production, and the indirect manner of such ownership in Marxist socialism -- and even moreso it's Leninist vanguardism adaptation -- is pretty far from the most obvious sense of workers owning the means of production.

The actual workers of individual firms controlling them directly rather than the state doing so in their name is, clearly, much closer to the obvious sense of that phrase.

[pdonis]

> I think if you read the thread, you'll see that you are using the word "you" quite sloppily.

Ah, sorry, I missed the change in who I was responding to. I did not mean to attribute to you (dragonwriter) things that someone else said. My apologies for the mixup.