As part of the activities of the Philosophy of Work Network, Jan Kandiyali (Durham University) and Barry Maguire (University of Edinburgh) will offer a presentation entitled: “Socialism and Collective Ownership of the Means of Production”.

The activities of the Philosophy of Work Network are open to researchers and graduate students with research interests in this area. Please write to the organizers, Denise Celentano (denise.celentano@umontreal.ca) and Pablo Gilabert (pablo.gilabert@concordia.ca), to receive the zoom link.

Abstract

Historically, socialism has been identified with collective ownership of the means of production. However, in the face of the failure of central planning, and influential arguments about the necessity of markets and private ownership, many contemporary socialists have sought to sever the link between socialism and collective ownership. The socialists we have in mind define socialism exclusively in terms of a set of values, usually some form of robust equality of opportunity, and then see the question of what form of economic organisation realises those values as entirely separate. In this paper, we reject this decoupling of socialism from collective ownership. Our argument has two steps. In the first, we outline an important but nowadays underappreciated value, namely that of solidarity or mutual care, understood as the positive counterpart to productive alienation, and argue that this, rather than robust equality of opportunity, is the heart of the socialist ideal. The ideal of solidarity is one in which we all care about one another, and care that we care about one another. In the second, we show that solidarity is partly constituted by collective ownership of the means of production.