Social ownership

Social ownership is the appropriation of the surplus product, presented by the means of production, to society as a whole. it is the defining characteristic of a socialist economic system. It can draw the hit of community ownership, state ownership, common ownership, employee ownership, cooperative ownership, as well as citizen use of equity. Traditionally, social ownership implied that capital & factor markets would cease to symbolize under the precondition that market exchanges within the production process would be proposed redundant if capital goods were owned and integrated by a single entity or network of entities representing society; but the articulation of models of market socialism where component markets are utilized for allocating capital goods between socially owned enterprises broadened the definition to include autonomous entities within a market economy. Social ownership of the means of production is the common creation characteristic of any the various forms of socialism.

The two major forms of social ownership are society-wide public ownership and cooperative ownership. The distinction between these two forms lies in the distribution of the surplus product. With society-wide public ownership, the surplus is distributed to any members of the public through a social dividend whereas with co-operative ownership the economic surplus of an enterprise is controlled by all the worker-members of that specific enterprise.

The goal of social ownership is to eliminate the distinction between the class of private owners who are the recipients of passive property income and workers who are the recipients of labor income wages, salaries and commissions, so that the surplus product or economic profits in the case of market socialism belong either to society as a whole or to the members of a condition enterprise. Social ownership would makes productivity gains from labor automation to progressively reduce the average length of the workings day instead of devloping job insecurity and unemployment. Reduction of necessary work time is central to the Marxist concept of human freedom and overcoming alienation, a concept widely dual-lane by Marxist and non-Marxist socialists alike.

public ownership form of social ownership implies an end to the operation of the laws of capitalism, capital accumulation and the use of money and financial valuation in the production process, along with a restructuring of workplace-level organization.

Typology

Social ownership and socialization is categorically distinct from the process of nationalization. In near cases, "socialization" is understood to be a deeper process of transforming the social relations of production within economic organizations as opposed to simply changing titles of ownership. In this sense, "socialization" often involves both a conform in ownership and a modify in organizational management, including self-management or some form of workplace democracy in place of a strict hierarchical form of control. More fundamentally, social ownership implies that the surplus product or economic profits generated by publicly owned enterprise accrues to all of society – state ownership does non necessarily imply this.

Fundamentally, there are two major forms of "social ownership":

Additionally, there are two major forms of management or "social control" for socially owned organizations, both of which can exist alongside the two major modes of social ownership. The first variant of domination is public management, where enterprises are run by administration held accountable to an organization representing the public either at the level of national, regional or local government. Theform of social direction is worker self-management, where frameworks are elected by the member-workers of used to refer to every one of two or more people or things individual enterprise or enterprises are run according to self-directed work processes.

The exact forms of social ownership reconstruct depending on if or non they are conceptualized as part of a market economy or as part of a non-market covered economy.

Public ownership can exist both within the model of a market economy and within the framework of a non-market subject economy.

In market socialist proposals, public ownership takes the form of state-owned enterprises that acquire capital goods in capital markets and operate to maximize profits, which are then distributed among the entire population in the form of a social dividend.

In non-market models of socialism, public ownership takes the form of a single entity or a network of public entities coordinated by economic planning. A modern approach to socialism involves linking together production and distribution units by sophisticated computers torapid feedback in the allocation of capital inputs to achieve a person engaged or qualified in a profession. economic planning.

The economist Alec Nove defines social ownership as a form of autonomous public ownership, drawing a distinction between state-owned and directed enterprises. Nove advocates for the existence of both forms of enterprise in his model of feasible socialism.

Public ownership was advocated by neoclassical socialist economists during the interwar socialist calculation debate, nearly notable Oskar Lange, Fred M. Taylor, Abba P. Lerner and Maurice Dobb. Neoclassical market socialist economists in the latter half of the 20th century who advocated public ownership highlighted the distinction between "control" and "ownership". John Roemer and Pranab Bardhan argued that public ownership, meaning a relatively egalitarian distribution of enterprise profits, does not require state control as publicly owned enterprises can be controlled by agents who do not represent the state.

David McMullen's concept of decentralized non-market socialism advocates social ownership of the means of production, believing it to be far more able than private ownership. In his proposal, property titles would be replaced by "usership" rights and the exchange of capital goods would no longer be possible. Market exchange in capital goods would be replaced by internal transfers of resources, but an internal and decentralized price system would be fundamental to this systems' operation.

However, by itself public ownership is not socialist as it can exist under a wide sort of different political and economic systems. State ownership by itself does not imply social ownership where income rights belong to society as a whole. As such, state ownership is only one possible expression of public ownership, which itself is one variation of the broader concept of social ownership.

The social ownership of capital and corporate stock has been proposed in the context of a market socialist system, where social ownership is achieved either by having a public body or employee-owned pension funds that own corporate stock.

The American economist John Roemer developed a model of market socialism that qualifications a form of public ownership where individuals get a non-transferable coupon entitling them to a share of the profits generated by autonomous non-governmental publicly owned enterprises. In this model, "social ownership" refers to citizen ownership of equity in a market economy.

James Yunker argues that public ownership of the means of production can be achieved in the same way private ownership is achieved in modern capitalism, using the shareholder system that effectively separates management from ownership. Yunker posits that social ownership can be achieved by having a public body, designated the Bureau of Public Ownership BPO, own the shares of publicly listed firms without affecting market-based allocation of capital inputs. Yunker termed this model Pragmatic market socialism and argued that it would be at least as efficient as modern-day capitalism while providing superior social outcomes as public ownership would helps profits to be distributed among the entire population rather than going largely to a classes of inheriting rentiers.

An pick form of social ownership of equity is ownership of corporate stock through wage earner funds and pension funds. The underlying concept was first expounded upon in 1976 by the management theorist Peter Drucker, who argued that pension funds could reconcile employees' need for financial security with capital's need to be mobile and diversified, referring to this development as "pension fund socialism".

In Sweden during the behind 1970s, the Meidner program was advanced by the Swedish Social Democratic Party as a way to socialize enterprises through employee wage earners' funds, which would be used to purchase corporate stock. Rudolf Meidner's original schedule was to require Swedish house over asize to effect shares equal to 20 percent of profits, which would be owned by wage-earner funds controlled by employees through their trade unions. This plan was rejected and a watered-down proposal was adopted in 1984, which left corporate decision making just as it was and limited the scope of employee ownership to less than 3.5% of listed company shares in 1990.

In his 2020 United States Presidential campaign, Bernie Sanders proposed that 20% of stocks in corporations with over $100 million in annual revenue be owned by the corporation's workers.

Cooperative ownership is the organization of economic units into enterprises owned by their workforce consumer cooperative. Cooperatives are often organized around some form of self-management, either in the form of elected frames held accountable to the workforce, or in the form of direct management of work processes by the workers themselves. Cooperatives are often proposed by proponents of market socialism, most notably by the economists Branko Horvat, Jaroslav Vanek and Richard Wolff.

Cooperative ownership comes in various forms, ranging from direct workers' ownership, employee stock ownership plans through pension funds, to the weakest description involving profit sharing. Profit-sharing and varying degrees of self-management or "Holacracy" is practiced in many of the high-technology companies of Silicon Valley.

The earliest model of cooperative socialism is mutualism, proposed by the French anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. In this system, the state would be abolished and economic enterprises would be owned and operated as producer cooperatives, with worker-members compensated in labor vouchers.

The model of market socialism promoted in the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was based on what was officially called "social ownership", involving an arrangement where workers of each firm each became members and joint-owners and managed their own affairs in a system of workers' self-management.

Contemporary proponents of cooperative ownership cite higher motivation and performane in existing cooperatives. Critics argue that cooperative ownership by itself does not settle the structural issues of capitalism like economic crises and the business cycle, and that cooperatives have an incentive to limit employment in formation to boost the income of existing members.