[wubbert]

"Ownership" is an "ideal". I'm talking about material conditions. If the material conditions of a few mega corporations owning the means of production are identical to the material conditions that are said to result from the workers owning the means of production, then what is the difference?

[claudiawerner]

This is a gross misunderstanding of 'material conditions' in Marx and other philosophers. 'Material conditions' does not mean simply what is - for instance, no socialist would say that the capitalist welfare state is 'socialist' because people have the 'material conditions' of receiving welfare.

The 'material conditions', at least as far as socialist/communist/anarchist authors go, refers to the mode of production and the relationship of workers to the means of production. It is not 'measured' in terms of wealth, nor in terms of poverty levels.

It is also a mistake to say that socialism 'revolves' around material conditions. Marx himself took swift action to point out that people being happy and well-fed is by no means a 'socialist' society. This is, after all, assuming you subscribe to the theory of historical materialism - which several prominent Marxists today (and in the recent past) do not, at least strictly.

[manicdee]

What do you mean by material conditions? The point of socialism is that there is no third party extracting profit from the workers’ labour, only the workers themselves. The workers decide what gets done, how it gets done, and how any profits are disbursed.

A corporation owning the means of production doesn’t meet the basic definitions of socialism since the workers have no power and it is only by the grace of the employer that their voices are heard if at all.

I appreciate that you love capitalism and want it to be the perfect system but it’s not, and you can’t make capitalism look like socialism by dressing it up in welfare and democracy.

[monkeydreams]

In socialism, worker-based ownership leads to better conditions. In this vision of capitalism, workers have no control over their conditions.