Today, I saw a friend who wanted to know a lot of things and raised this question after the article "A Brief Introduction to Economic Principles III: The Theory of Two Subjects":
"It's easy to understand that workers are separated from the means of production and that asset owners appear. However, there is still something to be understood about the common ownership of the means of production and the emergence of the ownership of labor. Because at the present stage of development, production is inseparable from collaborative enterprise production, the means of production are either owned by individuals or shareholders, or publicly owned, the first two are capitalist property rights, while the latter is the virtual ownership of the lack of subjects in the past practice, and the exercise of power is an agency system, and the agent has the requirements of maintaining and increasing the value of the entrusted less reliable property rights in addition to the possible personal interests. According to the principles of labor economics. This part of the power should be exercised collectively by the laborers, and the laborers should only obtain the consumption value needed by themselves and their families in the distribution of the fruits of their labor. Then the surplus should remain in the enterprise as the accumulation of the means of production. The question is, what is the internal mechanism of the laborer's determination of the consumption value and the accumulation and distribution of the means of production?Second, how is the flow of the factors of the means of production formed?
The questions involved in this comment are:
1. Why does the public ownership of the means of production require labor ownership?
2. Why is there a lack of subject or virtual ownership in the existing practice of public ownership?
3. What is the relationship between property rights and labor rights under the labor rights system?
4. How to distribute the amount of new value formed by enterprises under the labor rights system?
5. What is the internal operating mechanism of the enterprise under the labor rights system?
6. How to flow or allocate the means of production under the labor rights system?
This article now answers the fifth question: What is the internal operating mechanism of enterprises under the labor rights system?
The so-called economic mechanism is the mode of expression that embodies the particularity of the movement and the objective laws of a certain economic organism. This objective law is transformed into a certain type of income fluctuation through the appropriate economic activity reflection system, which then acts on the relevant stakeholders to produce economic behaviors that regulate economic activities, while the corresponding management system reflects the requirements of the stakeholders and changes the state of economic activities. And when there is a change in economic activity, the same system of reflection will turn this change into a kind of income fluctuation, which in turn will cause new adjustment behavior. This is how the economic mechanism works.
In addition to the role of the market mechanism, commodity economic activities also have the role of the corresponding enterprise management mechanism. The capitalist economy develops under the mutual influence and interaction between the market mechanism and the mechanism of distributing enterprises according to capital. The mechanism of distribution according to capital is a kind of enterprise management mechanism that has been developed and sound, and a concrete understanding of this mechanism will help us to establish a sound and effective distribution mechanism according to work. Now let's take the capitalist shareholding system as an example to analyze the distribution mechanism according to capital.
We know that the boss of a capitalist joint-stock enterprise is the owner of the assets and the shareholder, the management system is the general manager's responsibility system under the leadership of the general meeting of shareholders and the board of directors, the distribution is a standardized distribution system according to capital in the form of stocks, and the production result of the enterprise is the amount of surplus value in the form of profits. Therefore, the operating mechanism of joint-stock enterprises, that is, the mechanism of distribution according to capital, is essentially the mode of expression and the process of action of the law of surplus value.
The operating mechanism of joint-stock enterprises is, first of all, through the system of distribution according to capital, the results of the production and operation activities of the enterprises are expressed as fluctuations in the amount of surplus value, and such fluctuations act on the main body of production -- asset owners -- shareholders of the enterprises. If the profits obtained by shareholders can meet their interest requirements, they will affirm similar production and operation behaviors, on the contrary, if the profits obtained cannot meet their interest requirements, they will change the production and operation activities of the enterprise through the management system of the general meeting of shareholders and the board of directors. However, when there is a change in the production and operation activities of an enterprise, the distribution system according to capital will re-manifest the changed result as a fluctuation in the amount of new surplus value. This fluctuation in turn causes a new round of action processes. This is the process and mode of expression of the law of surplus value, and it is the basic principle of the operating mechanism of joint-stock enterprises.
So far, the 20-year-old mechanism of production is the only mechanism of distribution according to work in socialist practice. Due to the establishment of a distribution system according to work in the basic form of labor division, the labor income of members can not only reflect the difference in the amount of labor input of members, but also reflect the changes in the production and operation conditions of the production team. Since the fluctuation of labor income strongly affects the members as the main body of production, the interests of the members are tenaciously expressed under the effect of the division of labor system. Therefore, the production team model is the only form of public-owned enterprise with an effective operating mechanism in socialist practice since the October Revolution.
We are familiar with the distribution model of the production team, that is, "compensate for consumption, pay enough to the state, keep enough for the collective, and the rest is our own", which is the same as the distribution model under the conditions of the responsibility system for agricultural production. Here, what emerges as a production purpose is the quantity of consumption value, which is the consumption value. Therefore, in the process of production and operation of the production team, the basic economic law that plays a decisive role is the law of consumption value. That is to say, the operating mechanism of the production team is essentially the manifestation and action process of the law of consumption value. This is the essential difference between the operating mechanism of socialist public-owned enterprises and the operating mechanism of capitalist enterprises. Since this mechanism shows the production and operation status of enterprises as fluctuations in labor income through the distribution according to work system, we call this mechanism the distribution mechanism according to work.
In capitalist enterprises or private enterprises, the object of the operation mechanism of the enterprise -- that is, the main body of production is the owner of assets, and the main body of production of the production team is the members, and the members here do not appear as the owners of the assets, but as the owners of labor. As we mentioned earlier, the mechanism of operation of the production team is caused by the effect of fluctuations in labor income. Of course, labor income can only cause the economic behavior of the labor owners to regulate the production and business activities of enterprises. Therefore, although the members of the production team can also have the status of the common owner of the means of production, in fact, the members appear as the owners of labor.
Another important difference between the operating mechanism of the production team and the operating mechanism of joint-stock enterprises is that it reflects that the basic system of the production and operation activities of the enterprise is the system of distribution according to work, rather than the system of distribution according to capital. In joint-stock enterprises, under the condition of establishing a property rights system, the distribution of the production results of the enterprise is to fix the value of labor in advance and pay it in advance at the time of distribution, so that the production and operation conditions of the enterprise are manifested as changes in the value of the means of production, the profit and loss; on the contrary, in the process of distributing the production results of the production team, the priority is to compensate for the consumption of the means of production, and the production and operation status of the enterprise is expressed as the fluctuation of the consumption value. This distinction is the fundamental difference between the system of distribution according to work and the system of distribution according to capital.
Generally speaking, the distribution mechanism according to work is the manifestation and process of the law of consumption value, and its income fluctuation is manifested in the fluctuation of the amount of value consumed by laborers, and the main body of this fluctuation is the labor owner, and the management that reflects the interests of the laborers, and the management that regulates the production activities of the enterprise is embodied in the management system that embodies the ownership of labor, that is, the staff meeting and the employee management committee corresponding to the general meeting of shareholders and the board of directors, and the system that reflects the results of the production and operation of the enterprise is the labor division system corresponding to the shareholding system.