Engels's answer still holds true:
***** We have seen that the capitalistic mode of production thrust its way into a society of commodity-producers, of individual producers, whose social bond was the exchange of their products. But every society based upon the production of commodities has this peculiarity: that the producers have lost control over their own social inter-relations. Each man produces for himself with such means of production as he may happen to have, and for such exchange as he may require to satisfy his remaining wants. No one knows how much of his particular article is coming on the market, nor how much of it will be wanted. No one knows whether his individual product will meet an actual demand, whether he will be able to make good his costs of production or even to sell his commodity at all. Anarchy reigns in socialized production.
But the production of commodities, like every other form of production, has it peculiar, inherent laws inseparable from it; and these laws work, despite anarchy, in and through anarchy. They reveal themselves in the only persistent form of social inter-relations - i.e., in exchange - and here they affect the individual producers as compulsory laws of competition. They are, at first, unknown to these producers themselves, and have to be discovered by them gradually and as the result of experience. They work themselves out, therefore, independently of the producers, and in antagonism to them, as inexorable natural laws of their particular form of production. The product governs the producers.
<http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm> *****
>2) how to go about expropriating the expropriators, and 3) what in
>the modern capitalist firm is a foretaste of a better world, and how
>we might get there from here. When populists (like the analytically
>challenged folks in the Program on Corporations, Low, and Democracy
>[POCLAD] <http://www.poclad.org/>), say, rail against
>"corporations," just what are they against, and what would they put
>in their place? Are they, like Chuck0, opposed to corps because
>they're big and semi-permanent institutions? When Marxists talk
>about socializing capital, just what is the target (banks? pension
>funds? MNCs? the corner drycleaners?), and what would be done with
>them? Know the enemy and all that.
The objective for Marxists is to democratically control the allocation of social labor (who produces what, how much, how quickly, when, under what conditions, for how many hours, etc.) and the production and distribution of the surplus (who consumes what and how much, into what means of production and public infrastructure and how much of the surplus should be invested, etc.). So, whether dry-cleaning should be done by petty producers or laundry workers' collectives or whatever, to take one of your examples, has to be decided by democratic decision-making, constrained by given circumstances (inherited conditions of the environment, inherited conditions of uneven development, etc.); therefore, there is no a priori Marxist answer to such particular questions. Particulars will be decided by democratic politics in socialist society (whereas they are determined by private decisions of individuals disciplined by competition, fear of unemployment [for workers], fear of bankruptcy [for petty producers], and dislike of low profit rates, anxiety of uncertainty, etc. [for investors] under capitalism). -- Yoshie
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