What does it mean for workers to collectively own means of production? Am I supposed to own only the laboratory I work at or everything everywhere? What if I decide to change a place of employment? Why doesn't owning it though the intermediary of the state and your representative in the communist party qualify?
I get that this specific picture is a stupid meme, but I see people people going "actually the workers didn't actually own means of production" all the time.
Ask them to explain what "the workers own the means of production" means to them. Then follow up with the questions you asked in your post, basic stuff like:
If they can't come up with a decent answer,
you've owned thempoint out this is a complex question to conceptually answer, let alone put in practice. Ask them if taking substantial steps toward whatever the answer might be is worth supporting now, because they and no one else have anything demonstrably better.If they are at least committed to one possible answer (maybe some combination of full employment + you directly own your immediate workplace with your colleagues, and every higher-level economic organization is governed democratically?), well, now you're having a more grounded conversation. You can match up examples with what they say they want, rather than just arguing in a vacuum.
I've had this argument before and the textbook flat answer is "everything becomes a co-op lol"
Then, of course, without changing the methods of accumulation all you have really changed is that instead of someone else exploiting you, you are exploiting yourself (from a labor value estimation).
Certainly a better option, but no less prone to cycles of accumulation and lay-off.
How does everything become a co-op without establishing some form of worker's state to keep that process happening through the transitionary stage? I feel like this whole debate just goes around and around in big, dumb interminable circles.
It does. This is because the problem is one of 'political economy', a subject that only Marxists and their ideological descendents (namely modern day academic sociologists and anthropologists who nobody reads) talk about. Political and economic structures intertwine and influence each other to such a degree that separating them into distinct categories is rationalizing at best, obfuscating at worst.
The point is ultimately to organize the international proletariat to such a degree that it becomes possible to destroy the value-form (i.e. money), a.k.a the very fetishization of commodity. One of the reasons you do this is because money, though useful in low information systems for liquid exchange, actually acts as a labor-value obfuscation system in high information systems. A very easy modern day example is how the stock market increases in 'value' despite having no relationship to actual product increases (labor-value). This obfuscation creates inherent inefficiency, and creates perverse incentives for economic and political behavior ( hence the many jokes on here about 'line go up'). Transitioning to co-ops doesn't inherently affect the value form, hence it cannot be the end goal of socialism/communism. It is still too alienated. Ironically, Walmart is closer to abolishing value-form than a series of small trading co-ops, it's just that it's interactions with larger society are more largely parasitic and capitalistic in nature than a series of co-ops.
This is part of the reason communism, imo, is so difficult for people in the West to understand, because what we understand to be more 'human' and 'societal' are organizations that harken backwards towards settler-colonial business ventures, rather than taking over and humanizing developments of capitalist industry towards societal goals. You know, 'seizing the means of production'.
a real ultra's ultra just says 'like in revolutionary catalonia' and goes back to huffing their own farts
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I would agree, but it doesn't mean that I condemn the entirety of the USSR and what it attempted to acheive.
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I feel like the focus on the economic features of socialism obscure how socialism would manifest through political process and the question of "who owns the state" - if Cuban citizens can vote on their constitution and Chinese voters can recall their elected officials, then that's more ownership of the state than many Western democracies can lay claim to.
half the time they mean co-ops competing in the market place (i.e. capitalism where workers exploit themselves). the other half of the time they mean 'the final project must be completed immediately'