Socialism is about the government playing a central role in the economy to ensure wealth and resources are distributed more fairly, rather than being concentrated in the hands of corporations or individuals. Socialism can still allow for private businesses and a market economy, but key industries and services are often publicly controlled to prevent excessive inequality.
That’s state socialism, a specific kind of socialism that wants to keep the state apparatus, not realizing that it will always (re)create a ruling class. Different from Libertarian Socialism which unironically want a stateless society, not as a never to reach end goal.
This retains class, though. If your councils only have ownership of their own jurisdictions, then the members of each council are Petite Bourgeoisie. Marx specifically advocated for full centralization because chiefly it becomes a necessity anyways with increasingly complex production, but also because it gives more democratic control over the whole of the economy, not just individual bits.
So we have a factory council open to all workers in the factory to make decisions and send revocable delegates to the city council where they talk to the delegates of farmer councils, consumer councils, … If the factory council makes unfair decisions (and I assume you mean all the workers in the factory belong to the petite bourgeois since they all can attend the council), the consumer council can take collective action to counter it.
So who is the ruling class? Certainly not the bureaucracy as in liberal and bolshevik states since it doesn’t exist here. Or is it the city council? They are revocable, not elected for a given period. Like the soviets before the Bolsheviks ruined everything.
First off, bureaucracy is not a “class,” the Socialist states like the USSR were controlled by the Proletariat. The formation is described in Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or you can check this infographic if you prefer:
Anyways, back to your question. In the instance of single-unit factory councils, it isn’t so much as a “ruling class” as it is that these workers have control only within their immediate domain, and no real control outside of it. The Soviet model is different, it laddered upwards and extended equal ownership over all within it.
The Marxist critique of the cooperative model is that trade between these cooperatives will result in the resurgance of Capitalism, not the elimination of class society, as time goes on and some cooperatives swell in power and others fall under their control, without equal ownership between them. Engels elaborates on this in Anti-Dühring. Cooperatives don’t scale without administration, either, which means at that point you may as well extend ownership equally across the whole economy so that it may be democratically controlled by all, even if those more local to an issue have more of a voice.
Now, that doesn’t mean cooperatives are bad, it’s just that they only really serve to play a role of “filling in the cracks” large industry leaves behind, as said large industry should be publicly owned. Cooperatives being small can remain as such, and only make themselves able to be properly folded into the public sector when they grow to include large networks of administration, at which point they have outscaled their original cooperative nature anyways.
This isn’t true, unless you have a different conception of what “class” is from Marx and Marxists. The State is the only path to a stateless society, in that the state disappears once all property is publicly owned and planned, and thus the “state” whithers away, leaving government behind.
For Marx, the State is chiefly the instruments of government that reinforce class society, like Private Property Rights, not the entire government.
In the Marxist notion of “class,” no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.
Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.
Socialism is about the government playing a central role in the economy to ensure wealth and resources are distributed more fairly, rather than being concentrated in the hands of corporations or individuals. Socialism can still allow for private businesses and a market economy, but key industries and services are often publicly controlled to prevent excessive inequality.
That’s state socialism, a specific kind of socialism that wants to keep the state apparatus, not realizing that it will always (re)create a ruling class. Different from Libertarian Socialism which unironically want a stateless society, not as a never to reach end goal.
How would society handle critical functions such as water sanitation for millions of people without a state to enforce equitable share of the cost?
With a world wide net of councils, all connected but not centralized
This retains class, though. If your councils only have ownership of their own jurisdictions, then the members of each council are Petite Bourgeoisie. Marx specifically advocated for full centralization because chiefly it becomes a necessity anyways with increasingly complex production, but also because it gives more democratic control over the whole of the economy, not just individual bits.
So we have a factory council open to all workers in the factory to make decisions and send revocable delegates to the city council where they talk to the delegates of farmer councils, consumer councils, … If the factory council makes unfair decisions (and I assume you mean all the workers in the factory belong to the petite bourgeois since they all can attend the council), the consumer council can take collective action to counter it.
So who is the ruling class? Certainly not the bureaucracy as in liberal and bolshevik states since it doesn’t exist here. Or is it the city council? They are revocable, not elected for a given period. Like the soviets before the Bolsheviks ruined everything.
First off, bureaucracy is not a “class,” the Socialist states like the USSR were controlled by the Proletariat. The formation is described in Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or you can check this infographic if you prefer:
Anyways, back to your question. In the instance of single-unit factory councils, it isn’t so much as a “ruling class” as it is that these workers have control only within their immediate domain, and no real control outside of it. The Soviet model is different, it laddered upwards and extended equal ownership over all within it.
The Marxist critique of the cooperative model is that trade between these cooperatives will result in the resurgance of Capitalism, not the elimination of class society, as time goes on and some cooperatives swell in power and others fall under their control, without equal ownership between them. Engels elaborates on this in Anti-Dühring. Cooperatives don’t scale without administration, either, which means at that point you may as well extend ownership equally across the whole economy so that it may be democratically controlled by all, even if those more local to an issue have more of a voice.
Now, that doesn’t mean cooperatives are bad, it’s just that they only really serve to play a role of “filling in the cracks” large industry leaves behind, as said large industry should be publicly owned. Cooperatives being small can remain as such, and only make themselves able to be properly folded into the public sector when they grow to include large networks of administration, at which point they have outscaled their original cooperative nature anyways.
This isn’t true, unless you have a different conception of what “class” is from Marx and Marxists. The State is the only path to a stateless society, in that the state disappears once all property is publicly owned and planned, and thus the “state” whithers away, leaving government behind.
For Marx, the State is chiefly the instruments of government that reinforce class society, like Private Property Rights, not the entire government.
So the bolshevik state bureaucracy wasn’t a new ruling class giving themselves privileges others didn’t have?
In the Marxist notion of “class,” no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.
Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.