[cookieswumchorr]

the thing is, there is no way for the workers to own the means of production, unless its a set of tools or stuff like that. But with a factory, you only have 2 options: owned by capitalists, who's goal is maximizing gain, and owned by the state, who's goal is in theory common wealth, in reality it depends on the people actually making decisions. And those people can be corrupt, or ideological lunatics, or just unmotivated clerks waiting to hit the clock at 5PM.

[rjbwork]

Why is there no way for workers to own the means of production? Do many of us software people not own shares in the companies we work for? All that needs happen is that all shares are owned by the employees of the company and, voila, the workers own the means of production. Obviously this is quite a simple and un-ideal implementation of said concept, but the practicalities of worker owned enterprises are not some kind of far fetched impossibility.

[jlawson]

Because owning something means you have the right to trade it and sell it. Most workers, if they came into ownership of such shares, would quickly sell them to a few people who would build up many such shares: Capitalists.

You can't declare who will "own" what in the long term. The people who own it decide whether they will continue to own it - not you. They will decide not to.

If you say the workers can't sell the shares of their workplace, then they don't really own those shares. In fact, it's more like the shares own them. They are forced to continue "owning" part of their workplace, which someone decided should be their workplace. Variations of this are how authoritarian communism work.

(This is ignoring lots of other such issues with worker ownership, e.g. it becomes very complicated or impossible to bring new people on even if desperately needed since existing workers/owners don't want to dilute their shares. Also how can a new worker join if he cannot afford the shares to do so?)