User blog comment:Centrist16/SOMETHING EVERYONE MUST KNOW/@comment-3398633-20150809140026/@comment-1045231-20150811205910

1. The worker is coerced into working for an employer, because there is no way that they can make an enterprise on their own (they don't own or have the ability to create a means of production (factories, etc.) or acquire land and labor). The wages of doctors compared to cashiers (which hopefully will be able to be replaced by automation or self service) would be determined democratically by the society. I'd expect compensation to be raised until enough people become doctors in order to reach a good number of doctors in the society compared to other professions and the society agrees that it is a fair compensation for how long they spent training and such. Also, education would be free, so it'd just be time they'd be spending becoming educated. The premise is "to each according to their contribution", and the society can democratically determine that the contribution per unit time of doctors is treating that other professions.

2. Time working is probably not how compensation will be determined. And it won't be the same for all professions, because the people of a society can democratically determine that certain jobs are more intensive than others and should get more compensation. But again: you can own a company without working at it. This is what the "venture capitalists" of today do, for example. Yes, managers do valuable work. But that's completely separate from owning, and even if it wasn't, how it is possibly worth tens/hundreds/thousands of millions of dollars? Back to differing wages: In capitalism, a class of people that "own" the MoP get to decide what the wages are (an autocracy, and of course they choose to give themselves insanely high amounts of money). How is this at all better than socialism?

3. Yanis Varoufakis, then. There are few if any schools offering degrees in heterodox (including Marxian) economics. He made a competing school of economics, to some extent. Mondragon could be equally successful (and pretty much the same) in a market socialist economy. There's never been a real market socialist or syndicalist state that wasn't in turmoil due to foreign invasion or rebellion.

4. It's both. And they had the two core tenets: Social ownership of the means of production and workplace/economic democracy. Therefore, socialist. Capitalism has resulted in vast death and misery (especially if unregulated), via colonialism, poor working conditions, etc. Again: Very few "socialist" societies have actually met the criteria to be socialist. There have been none so far that are both socialist and not in turmoil due to foreign invasion/rebellion/embargo (and Cuba is only borderline meeting the criteria, and its bad aspects are heavily exaggerated by foreign media). I guess Yugoslavia could count, but they also had some authoritarian tendencies because the leaders of all cooperatives needed to be party members.

5. That form of state socialism lacked economic/workplace democracy. Social democracy lacks both of the core tenets, it's just capitalism lite.

6. Again: "No. They lacked workplace democracy and their social ownership of the MoP was just state ownership, where the state was controlled by a bureaucratic class and not democratic. Thus, NOT socialist. Again, they claimed to be socialist to legitimize their regimes. Rather, this is like calling a white person black because they listen to rap and "identify as black"."