Did Marx underestimate the power of the middle class ?

[socialist_n_TN]

14. Well I'm not so sure that eminent domain couldn't be used....

You'd have to get around the "fair market value" aspect of it, but say, if you wanted workers to take over a shuttered Detroit plant, the "fair market value" would be relatively low.

That's also where a government OF the people would be very helpful. A government that truly had the workers best interests at heart could actually give low cost or no cost loans to cooperatives that wanted to reopen a closed and practically abandoned factory. Instead, our current government gives all the breaks, tax and otherwise, to the capitalists INSTEAD of the workers. And a capitalist won't reopen a plant unless there's a lot of profit in it. They won't open and invest just to cover costs for an unknown number of years until it becomes profitable. Those perks that only government can give are another reason you have to take political power, not just economic.

I just finished Preobrazhinski's book "The New Economics" (I hope to be able to read it again before I have to turn it in) and in it he mentioned that Lenin wrote some on cooperatives in the nascent socialist system of the USSR during the early days. I'm going to try and find those articles/writings to study next.