mathemachristian[he]

I thought it was only Stalin who decided to collectivice the farming.

The main point of the October Revolution was “All power to the soviets”, the workers councils. And an explicit call for the seizure of factories and land by the workers working the

This is from the second All-Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies immediately after the revolution

https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26d.htm

I can very highly recommend “Ten Days That Shook the World” by John Reed. A firsthand account of the october revolution by an american journalist. Reads like a thriller, very very exciting.

Shareholders elect the board and they can decide when to liquidate a company. You dont have the right to destroy a thing unless you own it. They can put whoever they want on the board, or no one. They own the company, they get the profit off the company, they put absolutely minimal work into it. This is only one form of leeching off workers labor of course. Landlording is another major one.

We were talking about people taking ownership over the means of production, that was more than the people in the red army. People all over russia confronted the kulaks and literally took ownership of the land. It was a very chaotic time, sometimes they dealt with the kulaks via mob justice, sometimes with help from the red army, a few private owners saw the tides turning and willingly ceded whatever they had and integrated into the collective. Also the revolution preceded the civil war. The civil war was a response of the capitalists to the people taking ownership.

As for companies where the owners skim of the top, all the major ones. With stocks for instance the owners typically arent involved in the operation but just collect dividends and get together to vote a CEO, CFO etc. to operate the company for them. With others like Meta or Tesla you can see how good it is when the owners try to ram their passion projects through like with the Cybertruck or the metaverse. The whole point of “passive income” is exactly that, to make the most money from the smallest effort so you can do whatever you want.

I dont know where you got the 1% or 2% from, could you link it please? There were uprisings against the kulak class all over the country.

Owning a company, if you’re rich enough actually does mean you just skim off the top. That’s why it’s called “passive income”. You pay others to manage the company and optimize it. It’s definitely not a 9-5 job you get to come and go as you please and often the company does worse when the owners get involved because they dont know what they’re talking about. See e.g. Elon Musk and Tesla or Twitter.

I would argue that setting up cooperatives under capitalism is extremely difficult since it requires a huge amount of capital to be invested up front. People that can put this investment forth then become the owners of the venture and not the laborers themselves. Again you have private ownership of the means of production.

But even if the laborers come up with the investment themselves, then usually each laborer individually owns a portion of the venture and gets the value created paid out according to that. However truly collective ownership over the means of production means that no one individually owns any part of the venture but everyone collectively owns the whole thing. Such a construct is not really possible or very very very difficult to set up within a capitalist legal framework.

The fact that people do want ownership however can be seen by the lengths they will go to if able. Every communist revolution had at its core a demand for collective ownership over arable land, factories etc. And they fought bloody battles against the private owning class thats how much they wanted it. At the moment however this cost is too high compared to our current lifestyle which is why people dont organize a war against the owning class.

But often I go into a supermarket and wonder what it would look like if the cashiers, the people stocking the shelves, cleaning the floors, transporting the goods, owned it. A lot less white fluorescent lighting I’d imagine. Or what if the tenants of a huge building owned the entire thing themselves and any rent they paid got put to use for the building they occupy. And I think if people actually thought about what it would mean for them to own the workplaces they work at or the buildings they live in, then I think most would agree that they would much rather have that, than have some other people owning it all who arent affected in how it is run in their day to day lives, but only skim the profit.

Well ownership over some means of production entitles one to the products produced with them.

So someone who owns a factory will employ the laborers, pay their salary and be entitled to all that the laborers produced using that factory and will then sell them for profit or loss independent of what the laborers were paid. The laborers get no say in how their products are used or sold and if they get sold at loss to often they will simply all be let go. If they get sold at huge profits then they will not benefit from that either. The owner has to eat all the loss or enriches themselves from the products independent of how much or if they put labor into it themselves.

If the laborers own the factory they work in however they own the products they produce and can decide how to divvy up what these products sold for. If they sell at a loss they can still look to mitigate the fallout to the more vulnerable and can decide themselves whether to close up shop and look for work elsewhere. If they sell them for much higher than the input cost than they get to divide it all for themselves. All those and only those that worked for them get to directly benefit from the sale.

So ownership of the means of production gives you the power to distribute the wealth that gets produced. This is something people generally like/want since its directly tied to a more comfortable life for them

The main differences are that the right accepts social, class differences while the left wants socialized support and unity. On the other hand the left wants individual personal differences while the right wants uniform values.

Uh no, one wants private ownership of the means of production, the other collective ownership of the means of production. You cant have any analysis of right vs. left without looking at that since that is core to each ideology and everything else revolves around that.