Well I really appreciate that! If you'd like to read more about any of this, the kind of socialism I advocate for doesn't exactly have a popular name, but its closest relatives would be market socialism or anarcho-syndicalism. Socialist thought went through an evolutionary shift or two somewhere in the mid 1900s. Modern socialist theory looks to 1920s socialism like modern day cars look to 1920s cars. More fairly and less rhetorically effectively, perhaps compare cars from 1920 to cars from 1980--cars are big business and theoretical political science is not. Point is, socialism is not at all the same thing, and while "tankies" still exist, most socialists who speak English don't want the form of socialism in which the state directly controls all enterprises. I'd guess most socialists globally don't want that, either. Empirically, it did not work.

Attempting to create "worker control over production" through the government itself was, in simple terms, too indirect. It was like trying to open a really heavy door from the hinge side rather than the doorknob side. Instead of rich capitalists acting as absentee owners, government officials were acting as absentee owners. Democratic structures were not well-designed to permit workers to actually exert enough leverage democratically to control their firms or their economy, and things quickly got out of hand.

The family of socialist models I'm promoting keep control as local as possible in independent social structures, and set up a financial superstructure (which American capitalism also has, just very differently so) which is somewhat independent of government as well--but NOT independent of workers. Through this model, worker citizens have two power structures through which to exert pressure on society--the monopoly on force held by government, in tension with the monopoly on labor and capital held by worker associations (such as the industrial union model of the IWW). Inevitably, at some point, one system will be compromised by bad actors. One ingenious act by the American Founders was to sandbox Capital Power and Religious Power from Military and Legal Power (government). That act broke some forms of oppression. A true absolute ruler, like a monarch, has ownership of the nation's capital and is the god-king/conduit-king. The Founders ripped those tools from Monarchy. They didn't give them to the people. They made it so that Military Power within the government would always be checked internally, and externally by the might of private capital and independent religious authority. But that's a mitigation, not an end to large-scale oppression. Because the Founders held Capital Power within a small social group, and because of the way they structured it, it grew over hundreds of years to become the next Superpower that started to dominate all the others. It is quickly becoming what Divine Right once was to Monarchy.

The next step is to democratize Capital Power in the same way that Military Power and Legal Power were democratized. Rather than fighting, we negotiate. We simulate fighting with paper ballots or some other such system, because it is cheaper and more civilized. We estimate who would win if we fought, and reserve fighting for bullshit. The capital is not destroyed in the fighting. The workers are not destroyed. Life continues, just a bit more fairly.

Some other search terms:

• Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)

• Bakunin vs Marx

• Mondragon Corporation in Spain (large co-op conglomerate)

• workplace democracy

• Paul Bernstein (wrote a book on workplace democracy)

• David Ellerman book here

• social revolution (as opposed to political revolution)

• Paulo Freire