On Fri, June 14, 2013 8:45 am, Pidgorny, Slav (GEUS) wrote:
Strangely, it appears as though people can own, buy and sell means of production in capitalist society. On the other hand, all attempts at socialism lead to concentration of means of production under _state_ control and ownership. So you must be talking about some kind of socialist utopia.
Obviously state socialism will lead to, well, state socialism. But not all attempts at socialism are state socialism. For example, a couple of the world's more well-known worker owned cooperatives. Mondragon, Spain http://www.mondragon-corporation.com 83,869 'employees', 14.832 billion Euro revenue John Lewis Partnership, UK http://www.johnlewispartnership.co.uk/ Largest retailer in the UK 84,700 'employees', £9.5 billion revenue Bank Hapoalim http://www.bankhapoalim.com/ 13,581 worldwide, largest bank in Israel Indian Coffee House 400 site large restaurant chain in India On a another level there is the socialisation of other means of production. For example the Georgists advocate the socialisation of the site-value of land as a source for public revenue, but don't mind private ownership of capital (at least they know the difference). As a banking person, I am sure you may have heard of credit unions at some stage as well. -- Lev Lafayette, BA (Hons), MBA, GCertPM mobile: 0432 255 208 RFC 1855 Netiquette Guidelines http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1855.txt