Socialist Mode Of Production Puns

What are the best works of political economy concerning the socialist mode of production?

If there are any sources on this, I'd love to read them. If they're writings by Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin it would be even better but any source is appreciated.

I mean, the kids can't own the place, though they may be empowered to write its rules. Same for the caregivers, no?

We cannot have constructive debate before we can settle on the simple issue of what it actually is we're talking about - if we're all just going about with different utopian ideas about what we want society to look like, we will only talk past each other.

Increasingly it has dawned on me, although I'm attempting to repress it, that on this subreddit, nobody is interested in a constructive debate about what capitalism is, how it functions, and the implications of the society we live in, but all seem to rather be interested in their own special brand of liberal or socialist ideology, most of it build on utopias of what their ideal society looks like in their heads... and most importantly, on weird ideas about how the other sides ideal society looks. And all sorts of political arguments about taxes and laws and such... what relevance do they have?

Should we not attempt to divert our attention from these ill-defined ideas of future society, and try to settle into a debate about the aspects of what capitalism is, which, in extention, will enable a discussion about what socialism is, as it is, also as shown in the sidebar, most effectively and broadly defined in opposition to capitalism.

I'm new to socialism and I wanted some reading to read to better understand it. I'm interested in how Marx's insight applies to today's economic system as the socialist mode of production is still very much in place. If you were to look at Marx's critique of capitalism (as is often done) you would be forced to make a few broad observations.

Firstly, Marx claimed that capitalism is inherently self-defeating. That is, as Marx himself noted his own position was contradictory to the state of things. The state of things was described by Marx as having two aspects, the political aspect and the economic aspect. However Marx didn't make the same distinction between the political and the economic. The political aspect of the state is the capitalist mode of production which is the source of all the inequalities and conflict.

Secondly, Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production is built upon the capitalist mode of production. This meant that it is at the very least based upon the capitalist mode of production.

So to answer your question, should we consider today's economic system in the same way that we did Marx?

Capitalism is the term coined to describe the modern mode of production that developed between 300 - 500 years ago in Western Europe in contrast to Feudalism. Obviously, what one considers "essential features of capitalism" or "what makes a mode of production capitalist vs. something else" is a matter of more thorough analysis. To my knowledge there is no analysis of said system that claims or presumes it requires 100% private ownership, because, as defenders of capitalism are quick to point out... there has never been a case where such has existed.

As such, the capitalism which they refer to is a purely idealist conception which developed much later than most analysis of the system for which the term was coined. There is no disagreement among anyone that I'm aware of that this idealist mode of production has never existed. Consequently, their argument is purely semantic.

This can be contrasted to socialism which historically began as an idealist conception. That is, the idealized form preceded the analytical form (and therefore the existence of a system to be analyzed).

Prior to Marx, "socialism" and "communism" had only idealist or utopian conceptions, none of which were realized. Beginning with Marx, "the communist mode of production" was differentiated from "a capitalist mode of production" again, not by coining or re-coining the term to describe what had come into existence, but by laying an analytical foundation for what would constitute a negation of the mode of production under which he lived (which was already labeled capitalism), i.e. what would be required for the mode of production to no longer be capitalist.

As such, Marx's presentation of a socialist or communist mode of production differed from the aforementioned idealist / utopian conception in that it was not based on how Marx believed the mode of production should operate, but how a mode of production would need to operate in order to no longer function as the currently existing mode of production (capitalism) did. This was done not by creating some detailed blueprint for a future society, but by heavily critiquing and analyzing the already existing mode of production which had already been deemed "capitalism."

Now, of course, you don't have to accept Marx's analysis of how capitalism works and therefore what would constitute its negation, but capitalism, unlike socialism/communism, at least was an existing mode of production. If you claim that modern society is "no l

Once the socialist mode of production is reached, what is the class struggle that will result in the transition into the communist mode of production? Who is the struggle between once the laborers own the means of production? Between the laborer and the leaders of the unions? Or between the laborer and the government? Isn’t the socialist mode of production supposed to correct the disparity between the economic power held by the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and make the proletariat the dominant class? Wouldn’t this make the laborer exploiter that would result in a communist revolution? Then who would be exploited by the laborer?

Or can we know yet?

One of the biggest flaws I inherently see with marxism is that the workers basically lose everything if their cooperative fails. Not only do they lose their place of employment, they also lose their investment or what they had a share of the profits in through their labor. They possibly also wear the debts as well.

But in a capitalist society, the workers can own a slice of other companies and if the private company fails that they work for the owner/employer takes the loss, and the workers lose their job, but their access to ownership of the means of production or profits is still in tact as you don't also lose your shares in other companies if you hold any.

Alternatively, if a private business you have invested in goes bust you still have you job.

Basically the diversification a market economy provides gives the people some added insurance and safety for the working class. You don't lose it all as all your eggs aren't in the one basket.

How do you avoid the free-rider problem? How do you decide what to produce and who gets what? Do you still have trade in a socialist society? And if so, what will be the main restrictions on trade?

It’s hard to imagine a system where you don’t get compensated for doing an extra effort. How do you incentivize people to do shitty, but necessary jobs?

Do you have any real examples of a working socialist society? How did they get shit done?

Who should have access to the most sought-after and scarce resources like apartments in the the best neighborhoods?

I am truly open to understanding how a socialist state would run, please don’t blow off these questions, they’re not rhetorical. I just honestly don’t understand how a socialist society can provide anything for its inhabitants.

Edit: Thank you for many good discussions. You have been helpful in helping me understand how socialism works in practice. There is a lot of variation in what you think socialism, a lot of you don't agree with each other. Some of you I agree with more than others. I really appreciated that none of you were rude or snarky. I'm turning off notifications on this post now because I feel like I have my answer now and I don't want to start arguing with people in the comments. All the best.

So imagine the following: a company owns a website that has a billion dollars in revenue every year.

Its workers work from home as there is no office. Employees get sent a company laptop and have a stipend for work related expenses.

The servers are hosted by another company that has a lot of its infrastructure outside the country. Additionally, there is an external company that acts as a content delivery network (CDN) that does have infrastructure in your country to speed up and prevent connection issues.

The code is the intellectual property of the company and the website is owned by the company.

In this country the socialist dream has been realised and workers now what to steal/seize the means of production. So what exactly will be seized?

Just some more data:

1. This scenario covers most of Silicon Valley. Most new online business do not purchase for their own infrastructure.
2. Only 14% of the current economy is to do with industrialisation or manufacturing.
3. Potentially all knowledge, some creative and some service sectors can move to the above scenario.

Conclusion: It's pretty difficult to "seize the means of production" when the things you are trying to seize are not on (your) land, but in "the cloud".

Personally, I prefer a decentralised planned economy in a socialist society. What do leftists think about the exact organisational structure of a socialist planned economy, applied to the material conditions of modern individual nation-states.

This is a question I met during some of my debates defending Socialism and each time I seem to retreat to conjecture about how Socialism is "only" about worker control of the modes of production and so we could imagine some sort of wealth created off the goods that are produced (even though that seemed to be contradictory with the idea of Surplus Value being distributed among the workers in Socialism instead of taken away from them as in Capitalism). So yeah, how is wealth created in Socialism ? (My understanding of how Socialism operates concretely is quite limited. "The Capital" is waiting for me on my desk, but I heard it only described how capital developed, so are there any books or sources you guys would like to recommend for understanding Socialism and how it works)

Would a capitalist business model even be viable in a socialist mode if the former is powered by coercing the worker and the latter defangs capital?

I'm premising this question on the Star Trek series Deep Space 9. While it feels stupid to base a theory question on fiction, the show did make me wonder if Quark's bar was even feasible within the logic of the show. In the episode where his brother unionizes the establishment, it's shown how easy it is for workers to defect. This is given that all their basic needs are met and the station provides a guarantee of more fulfilling work. Since all the checks in capitalism to keep the worker precarious don't exist in the federation (except for a largely unaccountable imperial military BUUUUUUT), why wouldn't all workers simply jump ship to fully-automated luxury space communism?

Extrapolating this, how would it be possible to maintain a capitalist institution within communism?

(Bonus jab: liberals like to point to the lack of socialist institutions within a capitalist mode, but I believe socialism - if widely adopted - would make capitalism obsolete in the same way wage labor phased out previous forms)

In a recent interview with Plant Based Business Hour, 10/13/21, the founders of No Evil Foods claimed to be "cancel culture" victims. "You've got social media, which is you know, a cancel culture, it's full of lies, it's full of half truths, it's full of distortions, um, very convenient narratives that fit the poster's agenda," Sadrah Schadel (co-founder) said. "We've seen a lot of that going around. We've also seen more reputable newscasts, um, radio programs, that left us less than 24 hours to provide a statement. At that point the news segment is already full produced, their mind is already made up, they had no intention of including our story, and allowing us to share our voice on it. Why that happens, I really don't know. It was very very disappointing to see news outlets that we trusted as sources of real information to respond to us in that way, or to not respond, to not give us - you know, they barely did their due diligence, there was zero fact checking, insinuations that, you, just - crazy."

Mike Woliansky, No Evil Foods CEO, added: "There is a lot out there, particular in digital, that is biased or agenda driven. That is unfortunate, but it's not objective reporting."

This comes after No Evil Foods:

- Held mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions to dissuade their workers from unionizing

- Required 90 days of perfect attendance to "qualify" for temporary pandemic hazard pay and then fired workers who organized a petition to change this policy

- Waged an aggressive censorship campaign to hide their misconduct

- Paid thousands in labor board settlement money to workers who were illegally targeted

- Fired their entire production team in June 2021 without warning or severance pay, cutting their health insurance, refusing to pay accrued paid time off, so the company could outsource their jobs to a third party [with ties to the meat industry](https://discourse

Hello, this is a bit of a meta post but I have a few questions and am looking for advice regarding life in the real world as a socialist in the U.S. Or basically when you leave the life of budding leisure and intellectual freedom (college) and have to fall into the slave labor cycle in order to support basic living expenses.

Some background on myself, I have an bachelors in economics and graduated in 2015 from a decent school in the North East. I have been trying to work within research/development agencies but like many mid-level, post industrial cities in the North East, my opportunities are pretty scarce.

For young socialists..

1. If you went to college, or even if you decided that was not the track for you.. What sort of employment do you seek out that has some sort of value for you and is not monotonous living?

2. For older socialists that have been living in the professional life for quite some time...

       -Have you found it difficult to maintain a critical form of thinking when summoned to the everyday realities of labor?
       -What sort of career tracks have you taken?
       -Do you recommend picking up temp, seemingly meaningless service/data entry work while finding to find other work that appeases your tastes?
   

Appreciate your time, comrades.

How does it alter the cost of living in comparison to capitalism today? What does it do to the price of goods, products and services?

A full time $75k job under capitalism provides pretty much everything an individual needs and then some. Would that same full time job under socialism provide more buying power than under capitalism?

Could it be so good that lots of people gravitate towards the bare minimum because it provides most needs?

Let’s say that workers get paid in ownership of the business they work for. (I.e. owning the means of production) Are they allowed to sell their ownership if it benefits them?

Because as soon as these ‘shares’ become tradable. Does it matter if workers get paid in shares and sell them for cash, or get paid in cash and trade them for shares?

Pretty much the title.

I think this question is applicable to any socialist country.

I am confused about this because socialism is when workers own the means of production but it seems to me that in socialist countries the means of production are/were owned by government.

An example of means of production belonging to workers would be cooperatives.

Whereas means of production belonging to a state is an entirely different thing because government and workers are not one and the same.

I feel like I am missing something important but I don't know where I am wrong. Hence I posted this question to get educated.

Thank you for your responses!

All production is carried on only for the sake of consumption, production is never a goal but always only a means.

For example, the Soviet Union developing and investing in industry means nothing if consumers do not have basic products in the store.

Fighting for workers rights means nothing when every worker will lose infinitely more as a consumer than he may be able to gain as a producer.

Socialism deliberately places the producer interest of the workers in the foreground.

I asked a couple questions in capitalism vs. socialism because I was trying to envision the logistics behind the socialists often touted phrase that "workers own the means of production". I received a pretty large variation in the responses (I counted 8 separate interpretations of this foundational tenet of their ideology in total), many of which directly conflicted with one another. I thought everyone here might be interested in seeing the results.

Here was my first question:

1)Does every worker own the exact same % of the business in your mind? Let's take a founding member of the business that has worked at the enterprise for 5-10 years, does she own the same % as a new hire that has been working there for one week? From everything I read it sounds like the answer to that question is yes (otherwise how can you expect to solve wealth inequality).

And here are the answers I got:

>1) Workers have equal voting rights, but company ownership does not exist/is a thing of the past.

Count: 2

>2) Workers have equal voting rights and equal ownership (equity) of the company.

Count: 1

>3) The state actually owns the mean of production, not workers.

Count: 1

>4) The state owns everything in the beginning, eventually the workers own their respective firms.

Count: 1

>5) Co-ops own everything in the beginning, eventually the state takes ownership (the opposite to the above).

Count: 1

>6) Businesses are all owned by the specific community, everything is local.

Count: 1

>7) Businesses owned by customers, employees, regional members, and citizens at large, but not local like the above.

Count: 2

>8) The longer you work and the more senior your position, the more ownership you have in the business (ie owned by employees only but not equal ownership).

Count: 1

What is preventing me, in a socialist society, to pay for whoever regulates the social ownership and make it mine? Or pay people to protect it as if where my private property?

By "paying", I do not means exclusively money, maybe pay with favors, influence, power, maybe I'm a politician, or a leader in a big union, maybe I'm a Democratically elected manager, maybe a really hot woman... Don't be limited to money.

This is just me ranting about dumb people who thinks socialism is when government, seriously, how did this is taken seriously while talking so much shit about both sides.

I can understand those who like the idea of worker owning their workplace instead of being privately owned, but these statists whore, politician lovers Bernie-like socialists is something I despise. Do you all hate progressists "government-pls-give-me-free-stuff" kind of people too?

And to make so this post is not all about rant, consider the following.

Person A discovered a disease and he needs a kidney transplant or else he will die, person B which happens to be in the hospital has the perfect kidney matching all the criteria of person A.

Does imminent death grants person A the right to forcefully take the kidney of person B?

If not, can person A convince person Bwith money to voluntarily give his kidney, or should person A rely solely on the good will of person B donating his kidney?

If the kidney can be bought, does imminent death grants person A the right to forcefully take the required amount of money from others to subside his personal need for a transplant?

Socialism is not necessarily an economic system. A socialist country could also have a social state, where an individual citizen is given a minimum or maximum amount of money depending on their contribution to the society and there are no government officials.

Marx argued that workers would have to have their own means of production in order to have a socialist economy.

I'm sure this has been asked before, but I was wondering if you think the majority of socialists are aware of the existence of socialist countries?

Wouldn't it stand to reason that if socialism is not a system or an economy, but rather an ideology, that it would be harder for socialists to understand the full extent of the capitalist system, when it's so ingrained in our society without us knowing it?

If there is no central government, then who is to set regulations to stop big business from exploiting its workers? For that matter, if there is no central government, then who is to set limits on things like air or water pollution? If there is no central government, wouldn’t this mean that there would be no publicly run services funded by taxation such as healthcare, education, transportation, etc.? How is this any different from right-wing libertarianism?

Capitalism is killing the planet, killing people who can't afford health care and enslaving workers. We are overdue for a socialist revolution.

I am trying to envision the logistics of the idea that workers own the means of production. I am a capitalist and so I want to make my assumptions (which may or may not be true from the viewpoint of a typical socialist) clear up front:

1. I am assuming by "workers owning the means of production" that most of you are referring to a collective or cooperative ownership of the enterprise, not public or state owned ownership (otherwise you could only reasonably expect to repeat the horrors of 20th century communist and socialist ideologies).

2. I am assuming that people are free to choose where and when they want to work and aren't assigned positions by a public body like some dystopian nightmare.

Let's use a couple hypothetical businesses: a new tech startup and a restaurant.

Here are my questions:

1)Does every worker own the exact same % of the business in your mind? Let's take a founding member of the business that has worked at the enterprise for 5-10 years, does she own the same % as a new hire that has been working there for one week? From everything I read it sounds like the answer to that question is yes (otherwise how can you expect to solve wealth inequality).

2. Won't growth and innovation be disincentivized? If every new worker diluted the current ownership among workers, why would there be any incentive to keep growing and innovating? You are essentially making yourself poorer every time you come up with a great new idea or innovation that would be useful to the masses, since you then have to hire more staff to bring those ideas to fruition. This is particularly applicable in labor intensive businesses like a restaurant franchise, where the inputs required for additional output consist predominately of labor. However, this may not be true on a linear basis when we consider tech businesses, which brings me to my next question.

3. How would this solve wealth inequality? If you work at a tech business that can scale to millions of users without much more labor, won't anyone working at the tech business still be vastly wealthier than the people working at the restaurant? In other words, using a Cobb Douglas production function, the output from a tech firm experiences increasing returns to scale based predominately on additional capital inputs, whereas the restaurant's output increases nearly linearly and requires constant additional labor inputs. The tech business may make in excess of $100mm per year with only 100 employees, whereas the r

In a recent interview with Plant Based Business Hour, 10/13/21, the founders of No Evil Foods claimed to be "cancel culture" victims. "You've got social media, which is you know, a cancel culture, it's full of lies, it's full of half truths, it's full of distortions, um, very convenient narratives that fit the poster's agenda," Sadrah Schadel (co-founder) said. "We've seen a lot of that going around. We've also seen more reputable newscasts, um, radio programs, that left us less than 24 hours to provide a statement. At that point the news segment is already full produced, their mind is already made up, they had no intention of including our story, and allowing us to share our voice on it. Why that happens, I really don't know. It was very very disappointing to see news outlets that we trusted as sources of real information to respond to us in that way, or to not respond, to not give us - you know, they barely did their due diligence, there was zero fact checking, insinuations that, you, just - crazy."

Mike Woliansky, No Evil Foods CEO, added: "There is a lot out there, particular in digital, that is biased or agenda driven. That is unfortunate, but it's not objective reporting."

This comes after No Evil Foods:

- Held mandatory anti-union propaganda sessions to dissuade their workers from unionizing

- Required 90 days of perfect attendance to "qualify" for temporary pandemic hazard pay and then fired workers who organized a petition to change this policy

- Waged an aggressive censorship campaign to hide their misconduct

- Paid thousands in labor board settlement money to workers who were illegally targeted

- Fired their entire production team in June 2021 without warning or severance pay, cutting their health insurance, refusing to pay accrued paid time off, so the company could outsource their jobs to a third party [with ties to the meat industry](https://discourse