First there was my shaking hands with Thatch. Then there were the disagreements about common ownership of the means of production. Now I’ve been linked by the Adam Smith Institute’s blog. My dad’s never going to talk to me again.
20Dec06 — 3
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Re your Dad’s “Maybe I’m naive, but what kind of socialist buys shares” Comment. (that this comment here is linked to).
Surely if a worker buys shares then they are taking hold of the means of production – especially if they work in manufacturing and buy shares in their own company.
Ask your Dad, What could be more socialist than that?
If that’s all it takes then a man with his own bag of tools is a revolutionary.
There’s the John Lewis Partnership and the Co-operative Society for a start—or if you want Communism then there’s open source.
Doh! It was a pure, simple, example (couched in slightly tongue in cheek terms).
Obviously to be effective then it needs more than one worker to purchase a few shares – However if a group of workers were to purchase sufficient shares – and agree on a policy to vote them – then they would have a real influence if not outright control over the company. Possibly even on the road to becoming a workers co-operative in the right circumstances – and – dare I say it, in the co-operative tradition.
The point I was making was that you don’t have to be a Cuban cigar smoking, robber baron, capitalist to own shares, with special patented hobnailed boots for grinding the worker underfoot 😉 (see union pension funds).
…And yes the co-op movement is an excellent example of benign social and socialist thinking. But I wasn’t comparing the co-operative movement to share ownership. I was pointing out that the idea of workers controlling the means of production (Produktionsmittel) was a basic socialist concept and share ownership could be used as a mechanism to accomplish this.