Legal Types of Property and Ownership Guarantee

In their constitutions, socialist countries have established the state planned economy as their economic system and the socialist property as its foundation. The socialist property of the means of production included the two forms of state and cooperative property. Besides socialist property, the countries experienced so-called personal property, which included “earned income” along with consumption goods, household plots and (partially) real estate. The earned income was supposed to secure the individual’s share of the national income following the principle of the distribution according to labor performance. This share was established from the macroeconomic view within planning, by distributing the national income to the so-called accumulation and consumption funds.1 The special consumption fund for remuneration according to labor performance, which represented the sum of labor incomes, was distributed through the division into pay scales and determination of wages (and bonuses) and therefore allocated individually. In the form of his earned income, the individual was entitled to a consumption determined by planning. This individual entitlement, which started on the earnings side of national income, represented the counterpart of the socialist property of the means of production as the foundation for the output side. The collective property of the means of production therefore opposed the individually determined consumption income.