Expropriating the Expropriators

Socialism/communism is not about taking away people's personal possessions. That's just a scare story put around by those whose property socialism will take away: those who own and control the means for producing goods and services (farms, mines, factories, etc).

And they won't be bought out, but simply expropriated without compensation when a majority decide democratically to make the means of production the common property of all, so they can be used to provide for the needs of all instead of to make profits for a few. We are merely expropriating the expropriators. All wealth comes from the application of human labour upon the raw materials in conditions of waged slavery and absolute, actual, or relative poverty for the majority, with privileged access to the means and instruments of producing and distributing this wealth by and for the minority capitalist class. The reason for their capital accumulation rather than intelligence and superior or intelligent application of opportunity. The richest 1% probably are just as likely to have their economic affairs managed for them. Generally if one is born poor, one will die poor and the converse if one is born rich, one will die rich.

Nor has socialism anything to do with government ownership. It's about common ownership, which is the same as non-ownership. The means of production won't belong to anyone or any institution, not corporations, not rich individuals, not governments. They will simply be there to be used under democratic control to provide for people's needs in accordance with the principle "from each their ability, to each their needs". All companies and corporations (which are only legal entities created and maintained by the state) were dissolved or that all stocks and shares, bills and bonds, etc were declared null and void. They'd then just be pieces of paper. Then no one and no legal entity will be able to exert enforceable property rights over means of production. They would belong to nobody or everybody (the same thing). Imagine if, tomorrow, it was made illegal to be an employer (to use terminology from British law, to be the ‘Master in a contract of service’).  That would render almost all capital worthless at a stroke, and the only way in which labour could be secured would be through voluntary co-operation. When material conditions change so to do social relationships, we've had the former not the latter. The productive forces are out of sync with social relationships. Every time too much of anything is produced, capitalism goes into 'crisis'. Too many houses, too much food, while people starve.

The great bulk of economic activity in the formal sector of the capitalist economy is completely and utterly useless from the standpoint of meeting human needs. Such activity occurs simply and solely to enable the system to operate on its own terms. The only aim of any capitalist concern is to make profit. If in making that profit they meet human need and or desire, so be it, if in making that profit it meets no human need or desire again that is immaterial.

The only realistic model of a totally non-market socialist (or communist, if you prefer) economy would be one which would be very largely self-regulating and decentralised. We see this in embryonic form today in the system of physical accounting - stock control - that exists alongside the system of monetary accounting linking business enterprises along a supply chain. Socialism will dispense with monetary accounting but will retain the physical accounting aspect of this relationship There would be no economic exchange in the quid pro quo sense since this necessarily implies private property and hence the absence of common ownership.  It would be very wrong to deduce from the mere existence of numerous planning bodies the existence of private property as such.

"Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning" - Critique of the Gotha Progamme