23 Facts About Social ownership

Social ownership is the appropriation of the surplus product, produced by the means of production, or the wealth that comes from it, to society as a whole.

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, so that the surplus product belong either to society as a whole or to the members of a given enterprise.

Social ownership is variously advocated to end the Marxian concept of exploitation, to ensure that income distribution reflects individual contributions to the social product, to eliminate unemployment arising from technological change, to ensure a more egalitarian distribution of the economy's surplus, or to create the foundations for a non-market socialist economy.

Marx, social ownership would lay the foundations for the transcendence of the capitalist law of value and the accumulation of capital, thereby creating the foundation for socialist planning.

From a non-Marxist, market socialist perspective, the clearest benefit of social ownership is an equalization of the distribution of property income, eliminating the vast disparities in wealth that arise from private ownership under capitalism.

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Social ownership is contrasted with the concept of private ownership and is promoted as a solution to what its proponents see as being inherent issues to private ownership.

Therefore, social ownership is seen as a component of the establishment of non-market coordination and alternative "socialist laws of motion" that overcome the systemic issues of capital accumulation.

Socialist critique of private ownership is heavily influenced by the Marxian analysis of capitalist property forms as part of its broader critique of alienation and exploitation in capitalism.

Private Social ownership has been criticized on ethical grounds by the economist James Yunker.

Exact forms of social ownership vary depending on whether or not they are conceptualized as part of a market economy or as part of a non-market planned economy.

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

Public ownership was advocated by neoclassical socialist economists during the interwar socialist calculation debate, most 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 Social 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.

However, by itself public ownership is not socialist as it can exist under a wide variety of different political and economic systems.

Yunker posits that social ownership can be achieved by having a public body, designated the Bureau of Public Ownership, own the shares of publicly listed firms without affecting market-based allocation of capital inputs.

Cooperative Social ownership is the organization of economic units into enterprises owned by their workforce or by customers who use the products of the enterprise.

Contemporary proponents of cooperative Social ownership cite higher motivation and performance in existing cooperatives.

Devine argues that this variant of social ownership will be more efficient than the other types of ownership because "it enables the tacit knowledge of all those affected to be drawn upon in the process of negotiating what should be done to further the social interest in any particular context".

Phrases "social production" and "social peer-to-peer" production have been used to classify the type of workplace relationships and ownership structures found in the open-source software movement and Commons-based peer production processes, which operate, value and allocate value without private property and market exchange.

Social ownership arises out of the course of capitalist development, creating the objective conditions for further socialist transformation and for the emergence of a planned economy with the aim of raising the living standards for everyone in society.