Social Property

Marx’s conception of the property structure in the future society. As for social property, Marx had many different expressions, respectively “modern socialist common ownership”, “property of the associated social individual”, “common ownership”, “community of property”, “all production is concentrated in the hands of associated individuals”, etc., generally speaking, social property is different from the property structure of the pre-capitalist and capitalist stage, is a form of property structure in the communist stage of development of human society. It mainly takes “common ownership” as its basic feature, takes public property in the means of production and social and individual property in the means of life as its basic connotation, and is distinguished from the property structure of “private ownership”.

In the history of mankind, the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia once implemented social property. The Basic Law on Management of State Economic Enterprises and Higher Economic Associations by the Workers’ Collectives, passed by the Federal Assembly of Yugoslavia on 26 June 1950, provided that “the factories, mines, communications, transport, trade, agricultural, forestry, municipal and other state economic enterprises, as national property, are to be managed by the workers’ collectives, in the name of the community, within the scope of the state economic plan.” According to this law, Yugoslavia implemented social property in the means of production and transformed state economic enterprises into socially property enterprises. Yugoslav scholars held that social property, different from state property, collective property and group property, was a system in which the means of production belongs to the whole society, a form of property of the whole people at a higher than state property. Its basic features are: the workers are directly combined with the means of production, and the means of production are directly managed by associated workers or by workers’ committees elected by them; the enterprises are responsible for their own profits and losses, coordinate production plans from bottom to top, and the results of labor are distributed by the workers according to social interests; the enterprises have the right to dispose of the accumulated fund for the expansion of reproduction; the amount of the personal income of workers is directly coupled with the income of the enterprise.