You clearly don’t understand how many countries operate. Or you’re somehow misunderstanding what “means of production” or “workers” means.
My local electricity provider, and all of it’s power production equipment, transmission lines, meters, etc. are owned by the government. So is every hospital in the country. Almost every road is public.
Means of production is any sort of capital used to build value, so things like infrastructure, buildings, factories, machinery, tools, etc.
Workers does not mean the people that work in a particular building or factory, it means the class of people as a whole.
It’s pretty obvious that if the government owns something, under a democracy that thing is is owned by the citizens of the region. Even Marx mentions that socialism would use the state for collective ownership.
OilyArena@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Yes, they may be state-owned, but you still live in a bourgeois state with capitalist ownership structure, so the state doesn’t act in the workers interest, but to uphold the capitalist order.
By the way, would you mind telling me what country that is? Most EU countries with strong state-owned infrastructure that I’m aware of have been forced to liberalize, so for example in my country lots of former state enterprises are now private profit-bound businesses that are just 100% owned by the state.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 14 hours ago
Canada
You’re stretching the realities here with your assertions. The vast majority of what the government does is in the interest of workers. It could be better, absolutely, but it’s a far cry from some dystopian corpo-state. The government could move towards more positive worker benefits, but a lot of those workers won’t actually vote for them if they did because people aren’t entirely rational. So we’re essentially getting what we deserve right now.
Profit-bound but still owned by the state would still be socialist. There’s no requirement that the means of production not generate profit to qualify as being owned by the workers.
OilyArena@lemmy.ml 13 hours ago
So you’re a Social Democrat, got it. Those are pretty out of fashion over here and gave up pretending wanting to achieve Socialism long ago. Sorry, but I don’t really think that what you’re talking about is Socialism, it’s liberal reformism.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 4 hours ago
I want Communism for Land, Socialism for Necessities, and Capitalism for Luxuries.
I don’t think that puts me into any of the existing labels to be quite honest.