Ownership vs. Control
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.
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.
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.
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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.
physically impossible
brainlet
Of course, but top down organi
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.
ITT: state = capitalism
aka. brainlet anarchist yet to read Marx
no he didn't