Dans le cadre des activités du Réseau de philosophie du travail, Jan Kandiyali (Durham University) et Barry Maguire (University of Edinburgh) offriront une présentation intitulée: « Socialism and Collective Ownership of the Means of Production ».

Les activités du Réseau de philosophie du travail sont ouvertes aux chercheur.es et aux étudiant.es diplômé.es ayant des intérêts de recherche dans ce domaine. Merci d’écrire aux organisateurs, Denise Celentano (denise.celentano@umontreal.ca) et Pablo Gilabert (pablo.gilabert@concordia.ca), pour recevoir le lien zoom.

Résumé

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.