Why does a choice have to be made between private capitalist--or even private cooperative--ownership on the one hand and state ownership <albeit a democratic state> on the other? This is to presuppose that property is one thing and must be vested whole and entire in one kind of social actor or another. But *social* ownership should rather be seen as involving a rejection of this assumption. The concept of property involves a *range* of rights and enjoyments, which under a system of *social* ownership would be *disaggregated* and distributed to various social actors, as against all of them being vested in private individuals *or* public agencies. Some property rights in the means of production could be be given to democratic collectives of workers--rights to use, to management, to income <including net enterprise profits>, but with no right to alienate or decapitalize the assets they employ. Other rights could be assigned to a variety of operationally independent but still publicly accountable investment agencies which would be funded by taxing the capital assets employed by individual enterprises--rights of control over the allocation of new funds for investment in specific firms, and the right to oversight of the use of previously invested funds. Other rights could be vested in democratic political bodies, such as local, state, or national legislatures--the right to decide on broad priorities in the aggregate level and composition of investment and public spending, the right to regulate firms, and the right to oversee investment agencies. In addition to such forms of social ownership, there could also be small businesses run as private cooperatives with full ownership rights over the capital assets, considerable scope for individual self-employment, and large industries run as fully nationalized concerns along the lines of recent West European practice. But the key in all cases would be: no income simply from private ownership of capital, and the continuous subjection of the market to democratic forms of planning, regulation and redistributive taxation and spending. Peter Burns [EMAIL PROTECTED]
