quetzalcoatl wrote:
Fuck the state owning the means of production. Workers' councils should own the means of production, hire managers, and decide how much goes to workers and how much is reinvested. Workplace democracy legally enforced and protected. Worker/manager salary ratios to be legally limited. Worker councils alone to hire and fire workers and managers. No one not employed by a firm should be allowed ownership participation, and no firms should own other firms (either in whole or part) - an exception is that the state would be allowed 25% ownership position in return for start-up capital. Firms should compete in a regulated market and allowed to fail, with a base of universal benefits such that firm failure allows stranded workers to transition to other firms or create their own. State may provide capital for startups, in return for a 25% non-voting ownership participation.
EDIT: the above was off the top of my head. In thinking about it more, there needs to be some mark-to-market in order to fix a price per share. Firms with govt participation should be able to buy back their shares at this market price. Fired, quitting, or retiring workers should have their shares liquidated at market price and receive the proceeds. So let's say 10% of shares publicly available on the market, to be made available to savers and funds - they need to be non-voting so there's no possibility of leveraged buy-outs or other outrages.
While all of this is nominally unobjectionable, I often wonder -- when I see this kind of line -- why certain comrades are content to retain the status quo economics of abstract valuations, and even market-exchanges, as the material-economic system for a transitional-to-post-capitalist society.
I do understand that this whole treatment is most likely meant for the 'socialism'-phase / workers-state transitional period out of capitalist social relations, and so would resemble a workers regime of 'radical reformism' / nationalization / socialization of all economic activity, but I'd like to impress the point that the necessarily-'hands-off' market mechanism should be transcended and laid to rest as quickly as is practically possible, due to its 'realm' of exchange values. This realm of exchange values, if retained, would directly compete alongside the *socialist*-minded politics and sentiment of a societal operation based on *use* values, to supply to all human need.
In other words, even a *workers* state shouldn't be *dependent* on supplies of capital, because the collective -- by definition -- is already in a dominant political position to *de-legitimize* the *use* of capital, and money in general, in favor of discrete 'hands-on' decisions / judgments over any given social matter.
I'm really not convinced that holding onto conventional / traditional economic practices from capitalism would be advantageous to the workers state in any sort of way, at any point in time. It would be better to collectively adopt 'best practices' types of policies to cover most realistic scenarios / situations, so that a commonly understood social norm takes hold, with most decisions then being socio-politically uncontroversial and doable by just about anyone, based on prevailing revolutionary sentiments and mass-supported guidelines.