Possession of the means of production.

[Le Rouge]

What does it means when someone say : In communism, people will own the means of production.

Does it means that if I work in a certain workplace, me and the people who work there are owning the workplace?

[the Left™]

having democratic control over literally the means by which things are produced

[Erratus]

No, you will not directly control the means of production. The ownership will be controlled by everyone in society by means of democracy. Akin to state ownership like we have today, only there will be no state. But the basic idea is that it will be public property.

[Lanky Wanker]

Well when you work in (using a typical example) a factory making shoes, your boss owns the means of production (land, factory, machines etc.). Under communism this would belong to the workers instead, which means no fat lazy guy with a cigar can take from your labour and say "but lolz I own factory and pay bills, I deserve it". So to answer your question, yes and no - nobody "owns" any property or means of production under communism, but you would say the workers own it because they are the ones who use it and look after it. Basically, no one person has the right to claim that he owns such a thing, so we say everyone owns it instead.

[Blake's Baby]

What it means to 'own' something has traditionally been divided into 3 - usus, abusus and fructus, literally 'use', 'abuse' and 'fruit' or 'product'. So you might have the right to use something that you don't have the right to destroy or dispose of - say, a company car - or you might have the right to the product of something that you don't have the right to use - can't think of an example, but the theory would be if someone else used it and you could claim a percentage of what was made... like a rental I suppose.

I have to say that in theroy, none of what follows applies to syndicalism because in syndicalist theory (at least as I understand it), the workers precisely to do own the factory in a certain way that the other members of society don't.

Under socialism, none of these traditional rights will be vested in individuals - there will be no private property in other words - because all these rights will be controlled by society and decisions about them will be made collectively. The community will decide what needs to made, what use needs be made of the resources it has; it will decide where the products of that labour on those resources goes; it will decide ultimately what happens to the land and machines and infrastructure that it's administering. 'Communal ownership' then is an extension on private ownership to the entire population, that in its extension subverts the notion of 'ownership' (which in class societies requires some to control and some not to control) by making everyone part of the process of control.

So... in short, no you don't 'own' the workplace, not even you and your fellow workers 'own' the workplace, in that you can't decide to take all the widgets for yourselves and burn the factory down going 'fuck you it's our widget factory anyway'. We would all have a stake in your factory, and in the widgets it produces. But you and your fellow workers in the widget factory would control how you worked, what the levels of production were etc.

[Thirsty Crow]

But you and your fellow workers in the widget factory would control how you worked, what the levels of production were etc.
I don't think that workers should arbitrarily decide on the quantity of items produced precisely because communist production presupposes production for direct social appropriation, i.e. for use, and participation in planning on behalf of whole communities could be worked out (meaning that a section of free labour would have to plann production according to demand for the items they produce - that they should not temper with the "consumer" inputs in planning).

[Blake's Baby]

I was more trying to make the point that the community may need 2,000 widgets over the course of the year, but those who work in the widget factory control the rate at which those widgets are made. Too few widgets, and the entire doobry-system (that relies on widgets) breaks down. To many, and the doohickey-machines (that produce the widgets) will overload and melt. It's a problem. But the workers working in the widget factory have the most knowledge of the process, so they get to set the inputs and outputs, even if they know they're producing to a communal plan.