I am curious as to this board's thoughts on this particular point.
What is the difference between ownership and control? Can you own something and not control it? Which is actually our enemy? To much private property in too little hands? Or too much control over resources in too little hands? Which is the actual problem?
Does ridding the world of "ownership" actually stop any problems? What if no one "owns" anything, but someone at the top "controls" it all?
I will start by saying that I think too much control of resources in too few hands is the actual problem. But based on this, ending "ownership" technically does very little by itself.
Obviously if you own something you have control over it but having control over something doesn't mean you own it. Likewise a succesfull capitalist own many companies yet he isn't in direct controll of them. Instead he employs managers who do the work for him. I would say both. Yet the biggest root of the problem is in ownership. That wouldn't be a problem given the people at the bottom can exert power of those on top. Which in my opinon is a thing the Soviet model failed at in many ways.
Charles Anderson
To what extent? Many things one "owns" they have no control over except maybe the right to sell it. Think owning a stock in a company. What control do you have? Only the right to sell it basically. The CEO and board actually control it all whether they own any of it at all. Also, people own all sorts of stuff that they only have limited control over because of the laws of society. If I own land in my little town and it's within city limits…I am not allowed to grow crops on it. Just an example from my area. To me, in theory, this is the case in almost every system. What makes not owning anything more likely to let people exert their power on the top? Yes for sure. The problem is that control was in the hands of actually a smaller percentage of people in the soviet system than in an ownership system. The soviet leaders controlled it ALL. Even in the USA of Fascism I can control a few things with the little "ownership" I have.
I guess I get caught up, because I think semantics are used to rule over us. You can "own" all you want, but if you don't control it, does it matter?
Trump "owns" a lot of stuff. That doesn't hurt me too much. But his CONTROL over the system and it's vast resources really fucks me over hard.
Leo Powell
They determined output quotas, directed employment, and so on. It's not like they profited from the laborers in the factories. The MoP were socialized in socialist countries: owned by the populace, controlled by the state.
Matthew Morris
But "profit" implies ownership. So of course they didn't "profit." However Stalin lived the high life eating steak, living with servants, and generally just lived it up. He controlled everything. He wasn't "profiting," he was just enjoying all the surplus! What's fucking difference?
Christian Foster
Ownership is an abstract concept that can be useful. Control is a practical reality. You can measure the value of ownership by how much control that ownership grants you. Ownership in itself is still good ideologically though. Workers should think of their workplace as their property for a number of reasons, including being more willing to defend their control over it and feeling more of a self-interest in maintaining it.
Camden Miller
This is along the lines of what I want to hear more about. I think the left has great ideas, but they lose people because of terminology and semantics. Good points.
David Lee
A way to look at it is that ownership reifies control into a legal, moral and cultural framework that lends legitimacy to the power exerted by the upper class, like "chosen by the grace of god" in the past. Without it any control exerted needs to be justified democratically and should be challenged when acting against the interest of the general public. Private property allows the ruling class to hide themselves behind the sanctity of ownership to prevent threats to their position of power in the form of democratic control of the economy.
Oliver Bennett
Nothing in my view. That's why I don't believe the way the SU was structured was right. To say the workers didn't have any rights and it was state capitalism is for the illiterate, to say it was a workers paradise is in more than one way denial.
Well this is wrong. If the theory of state capitalism and surplus held true the wealth inequality would be much higher in SU.
James Bailey
It was far less pronounced than under capitalism, which is why the nomenclature favoured and facilitated the return to capitalism, they saw how far better the elites in the west had it and they wanted that for themselves.
If it's wrong, it's only semantically wrong. Stalin lived the high life. So did Kruschev and any Soviet leader. I have spent plenty of time reading their diaries and memoirs. Hell, Kruschev openly talks about how everything was better for him pre-revolution. He says that he made more as a laborer pre-revolution than he did running the entire plant afterwards. Now, Krushchev is a fake and fraud. But this lends to my point in a way. Fraudsters and hucksters and scum seem to always rise to the top in any system. Removing "ownership" seems to do very little to stop it by itself. The next revolution needs to be more focused on dispersal of control. It will end up the same as the others if we don't get past simple "ownership" as being the problem.
Colton Perry
I left out, of course then Krushchev rose to the top and he had it WAY BETTER than he ever had it and way better than anyone else no matter how important they were to the revolution.
Nathaniel Brown
There's a pretty big problem on the left with reading a lot and forgetting the difference between mainstream or specialist ideas, words, and definitions. It's called the "curse of knowledge" when you have trouble imagining what other people don't know that you do. Lots of us are pretty autistic too so that doesn't help. Even worse you'll have different left tendencies using the same words to mean different things and talking past each other.
See Yes, you could call that "nominal ownership." If you own something but don't meaningfully control it then in what sense do you own it? For example, consider "public land" in a country. In theory it's owned by the citizens but if you try to go use that land you may have law enforcement stopping you, revealing that the property relations are not simply that you are an owner. I'm not sure how useful the distinction is in this exact context. Generally the capitalist owning the factory vs controlling the factory mean about the same thing. If you want to draw a distinction here, I think it's more useful to point out that while the capitalist "owns" the property, the workers are the ones using it and in practice could exert control over it if they chose to (seizure, sabotage, strike, etc). If you make the distinction between ideology (ownership) and material reality (control) it would tend to lead you toward the conclusion that capitalists' control per se is in large part an illusion. It's able to function because of the workers' widespread belief in it. Pic related. This is an important point and why I think considering ideology matters here. I'll draw a parallel to a different aspect of capitalism vs socialism which is actually just reframing the concept in different language. There's this idea that in socialism because you have a planned economy (sometimes called a "command" economy if you want to make it sound tyrannical) and planning can't account for all the detail of society ("economic calculation problem"). This is supposed to be an argument for capitalism on the basis that the free market will sort things out, that planning could not. The problem with this is that all economies are planned. It's just that we believe that capitalism isn't planned so we overlook the fact that the entire capitalist economy is planned. Every firm does internal planning, and they all plan for how they want the market ecosystem to behave. They simply do this in competition with each other more often than coordinating or cooperating which would be much more efficient.
If you get rid of the idea of ownership as a tool for understanding and describing the shape of the economy, you make it harder to describe how these things happen. Ownership is distinct from the control itself, instead being the perceived legitimacy of exerting control. It matters insofar as people do see control being exerted and is a way of defining who should be allowed to do that. If the question of ownership is off the table, it's probably because the control is happening in the shadows and there's no practical need for a justification. Ownership to us socialists is a useful moral/ethical tool to argue for pragmatic control, so I don't see how eliminating it would benefit us either. We just have to be sure not to lend legitimacy to property law as it exists and make an argument for ownership from use or something similar (as opposed to "absentee ownership" that underpins private property).
No, I agree with you. The way controll in SU was handled was critisized by other communist in the west Leftcoms criticism don't matter. Rosa is exteremly based tho . Your second point about luxury is wrong. while the top dogs in SU had a better life than the average worker they didn't live in luxury, or rather not in the western luxury. The wealth inequality compared to the west was so much smaller. The people at the top in the west can pretty much expect to own various mansions with pools while Brezhnev lived at Kutuzovsky Ave, 26. Which If you look up at google maps is hardly luxury.
Brody Scott
physically impossible brainlet
Mason Watson
Of course, but top down organi
Lucas Diaz
My son hit reply somehow, lol.
Stalin called the shots. Of course he didn't micromanage every factory. But if he said you were gone, you were gone. This is fact. That means he had more control than pretty much anyone ever. Very few people ever controlled as much as Stalin. Which is my point. He owned none of it, but controlled a shit ton. This is the discussion we are having. You don't help by purposely missing the point.
Cooper Thomas
ITT: state = capitalism
aka. brainlet anarchist yet to read Marx
Lincoln Perry
no he didn't
Noah Smith
There is a distinction in law that has been around for centuries, that is the distinction between physical possession and legal ownership. Any combination exists: -the same person having physical possession and ownership (example: eating a snack you bought) -a person neither possessing nor owning some object X (example: guy watches a bike zipping past) -a person being the owner of something without possessing it (examples: absentee landlords, you owning a bike that just got stolen) -a person possessing something without owning it (me riding your bike)
Being physically near to some objects seems to imply at least some sort of power over it, absentee owners rule through others, and these may have their own interests. The absentee others getting informed about what's going on and sending the police or private goons requires some time. Isn't this time gap an advantage for the underdog? But the discrepancy between these concepts has become smaller with cameras and sensors and networks for remote control everywhere.
Ownership is the right to restrict access, that it appears as a right to use something is just the consequence of that (you don't restrict access for yourself). That this isn't play with words but how it really is can be shown: -not everything you legally consume has to be owned by you (like the air you breathe) -you can restrict access to what you own without need to make a case that you need it for your personal usage (owning ten houses) -you can even restrict access when others using it logically cannot interfere with your own usage (copyright and patents)
The technological developments that we see in capitalism are not the result of some autonomous tree of technology that just grows the way it does independent of whatever the social system is. Software as a service is such a big thing because the ruling class wants it to be. Modern park benches with three armrests are deliberately designed that way to prevent that homeless people sleep on them. What can you do as an individual or member of the small group in the here and now? Not much. If you program as a hobby, you can put your code under a license that allows modification (I recommend GPL3). Recently I've been thinking about locked boxes, locked doors, and whatever else can have a lock. The way a lock works is that the person with the key is a monopolist. The key gives you access. (But remember, kids: Strictly speaking, the key doesn't give you access, the lock restricts access for the rest of the world and the key negates the effect of the lock). It is also possible to have several copies of the same key, then people who have absolute trust in each other regarding how they use the locked up thing(s) can share, like siblings sharing a flat. But what to do when you have just some level of trust in a group? So I've been thinking about things like a big chest that can only be opened by simultaneously pushing two buttons that have too much distance between them for a single person and a safe with five locks that can be opened with three keys.
In socialism, individual ownership will be replaced with rights to access. That means forbidding others to use something will need justification in terms of how them using it would strongly interfere with your own usage. It means no individual will own ten houses. Nobody will own patents or copyrights, though some notion of rewarding some of the activities that today are covered by that will remain: You might get a prize, but not a monopoly that only expires after decades.
Logan Long
I've said this before: the theory of State Capitalism isn't about inequality (although it was high enough in the USSR to rival nordic countries), it's about that fact that the USSR existed in a global capitalist economy governed by the law of value, and therefore had a drive to accumulate capital in order to survive.
Wyatt Sullivan
I've thought about this as well. Imagine a society where socialism is implemented as democracy is implemented in European monarchies. You maintain the title of the owner but strip all their actual control away. Maybe give them a tiny pension. Honestly I'd have no problem with that.
Colton Baker
I don't think laws of capitalism dictated that much of USSR economy. I've seen the argument of there being labor markets, but not really since there was a labor shortage because of near 100% employment. I've seen the argument that it was state capitalist since from the 60s it considered profits in success of enterprises, but it was only one of many metrics by which an enterprise was rated. While markets existed most of the economy was planned.
