>>And even that definition comes too short. There's also the self-management socialism, where government owns even less than it owns in today's capitalism, and the rest is either personal property or society's property. In the latter case, there's no actual owner, but rather a stewardship (and reaping the benefits) by those who manage it, which are those who work it (and hopefully multiply it). We had that, and it failed, though nowadays I think it had a lot of help in that. Worked really nice for a while.
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>"Society's property
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>Just love that. :) How are debts or surplus assets distributed? Amongst the society? Who manages it? All of society? Or a government body? Doesn't the government manage "society's property?"

Ah, but that's the kicker, it was left undefined to the very end. Basically, your workers' council, which was freely elected inside the enterprise, was the board of directors (by its jurisdiction) and it decided who the CEO will be. The assembly of all workers was the equivalent of the owners' assembly, likewise. The CEO, however, had the additional task of overseeing that the society's property was properly managed, i.e. wasn't sold out, damaged, sabotaged, stolen etc. Theoretically, the workers had full powers over how the profits will be used.

But. Of course there was a but. The Party always made sure it wouldn't go too far, so any vote over what to do with the profits would go towards investing in the future and less into lining our own pockets. When that didn't always work, there was taxation, laws limiting expenditures etc, all in the interest of preserving the wealth of the society and not allowing anyone to get rich on expense of others. If your enterprise had its smartest people deciding the policy, everyone was solidarily working and keeping an eye on quality, discipline and generally you were all doing your best and succeeding with it, there would be some political decision that your success was not the result of your work (which would you then be entitled to enjoy results of, as the general slogan said "from everyone by their ability, to everyone by the results of their labor"), but rather a lucky set of market circumstances, which made you make more than you really deserve, which you'd therefore pay into some solidarity fund or some such bottomless hole. Or if you were smart enough, you'd gradually raise your salaries and hidden benefits (and there were many ways for that) and invested as much as you could - but even so, the new enterprise you so created wasn't yours, it belonged to its workers and had full rights to split away. You basically staffed it initially with anyone you wanted to get rid of - party spies, anyone's moron nephews, your old boss etc. In the end, the last big political push that The Party went with was "to have the working class empowered over the wholeness of the income", which was just an empty story because it was exactly their own doing, and the laws they made, that left the self-management actually manage about 2% of the profits, the rest was regulated.

So the system worked nicely, for a while, until you saw that it's not really allowed to work. If The Party was smart enough to just let it work on its own at some point, to withdraw quietly and let their child grow, I guess we'd have the wars injected far sooner, as we'd have been the nasty role model that no sane system would want their subjects to see. Which is why its downsides were getting wide publicity (cleaning ladies in a hospital having a say in acquiring a CT scanner), while its strong points were downplayed.

I'm already too old to hope to see anything of the kind revived anywhere. What I think would be a good system is the self-managed capitalism, with no cross-ownership. You may own something where you work, and you may borrow money to anyone else but have no say there, only the percentage of the profits commensurate with the size of your loan against the total worth of it (value of labor included), for as long as it's not repaid. And I'd also gladly see a system where it's impossible to make money on ruining a business, only on increasing the value.