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- There's no need to imagine anything, here's the discussion Engels was having: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/letters/88_...
He's replying to an aspiring author who sees Engels as an authority on the matter, and he's giving an account of the structure of a new genre of literature (realism) and using its greatest representative (Balzac) to do so. Presumably she takes Engels to be an authority for the same reason many do today: he's one of the best read people to have lived and he was on the frontier of every domain of science for which he had utility. (See the lasting impact of his Anti-Dühring.)
My intent was to provide an entry point into the rich domain of Marxist literary theory by the authority of two of its most important progenitors. Engels and Lenin were crucial in developing an apparently important way of studying and creating history. I figured this is a relevant addition to the conversation because I am gesturing to a positive answer to the gaping question that you opened: what is it that makes a historical interpretation "correct"? Unless perhaps your intent was to leave it agape, which is fit for the postmodernist ideological realm in which Downton Abbey and Bridgerton were written in the first place.
- >What's the practical difference between 'society-wide public ownership' and government ownership? The government is supposed to represent the people.
Typically, socialists (and even market socialists) contend that the current democratic establishment does not represent the people, usually going off Lenin's conception of "bourgeois democracy". This is also behind the most common Marxist rejection of achieving socialism through non-revolutionary means. Compare, for instance, how Lenin described what he figured Soviet Socialism would turn out to be - control by the soviets, not by the state. Of course it didn't really turn out that way, and in Economic Problems of the USSR, Stalin effectively admitted as such.
>What are some existing, real, sustained examples of 'social ownership' in real history?
This is a difficult question because one would either have to draw from pre-capitalist modes of production to answer the question, or one would have to argue that the USSR/Stalinism implemented such social ownership. I have already described why the second is not appropriate (see here[0] too) but the first is also not appropriate because "social ownership" is not a transhoistorical term, it was intended to describe a future mode of production in which it is one of the components of socialism (market or otherwise) - its applicability, therefore, does not encompass pre-capitalist or capitalist modes of production. For the notion of the critique of transhistorical categories, see Marx's discussion on the "Robinsonades"[1] and Patrick Murray's argument on Marx's improvement over David Ricardo and Adam Smith[2]. That said, you would probably have to look deeper into anthropology to find if such a society did indeed exist - that is to say, a society in which as far as we can tell today the will of the producers themselves was actually reflected in the ownership and control of the means of production and its products.
Finally, a note: Marx himself, to my knowledge, never used the term "social ownership". In fact, his argument against Proudhon was that plain "social ownership" results in a state where "society becomes a general capitalist". The term was used by Engels once, but he quotes Marx as follows:
>Marx assumes on page 56 “a community of free individuals, carrying on their work with the means of production in common, in which the labour-power of all the different individuals is consciously applied as the combined labour-power of the community[3]
As such, I tend to avoid using the term, as do most academic Marxists.
[0] "On the Question of Soviet Socialism" (2011) by Paresh Chattopadhyay, a rejoiner to David Laibman's thesis of the USSR having achieved "formal" socialism but not "real" socialism; (Chattopadhyay doubts that it even achieved "formal" socialism in the Marxian sense). https://www.jstor.org/stable/25769087
[1] https://marxism.csbs.utah.narkive.com/qeQK04SD/marx-on-robin...
[2] "Marxs “Truly Social” Labour Theory of Value: Part II, How is Labour that Is Under the Sway of Capital Actually Abstract?" Historical Materialism, Number 7 (Winter 2000)
[3] "Anti-Dühring" by Frederick Engels (1877), chapter XIII. Dialectics. Negation of the Negation; available here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhrin...
- Marx and Engels most certainly did not think equality of outcome was a cornerstone of communism, on the contrary. Just think about "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" from Marx Critique of the Gotha Program. Clearly administering goods according to need is antithetical to equality of outcome.
Marx/Engels thought that equality in general, was a concept used by the "bourgeoisie" to manage scarcity. They thought that equality of outcome was impossible, and that communism would be so much more efficient than capitalism at providing goods (because communism would be based on pure cooperation rather than 'energy intensive' class antagonisms of capitalism) that nobody cared any more about equality, because everybody had more than enough. In other words, with communism, the desire for equality would whither away.
See e.g.
- F. Engels, Brief an Bebel (1875), MEW 34, 129
- F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, MEW 20, 9599
- > Ah, the no-true-socialist fallacy.
No. In order for this to be a fallacy, it actually has to be fallacious. Many years I have been on Slashdot, Reddit and HN and seen this bandied about. I do not believe it is a fair assessment.
One of the core tenets of Socialism is collective worker control over social means of production and its democratic management. There have not even been plans in Venezuela to put this into place.
Another is the abolition of the functions of private (i.e bourgeois) property via seizure. This has not happened and many businesses employing wage labour continue unimpeded.
Another is the abolition of wage labour. This has not happened nor has there been any apparent effort put towards it.
Another is production for use (i.e maximising use-value) rather than for exchange, exchange containing within it the operation of the Law of Value. Almost all goods continue to be produced for the purpose of exchange value maximisation.
Another is the removal of money, as Engels said in Anti-Duhring, "Money is already contained in embryo in the concept of value; it is value, only in developed form." This has not happened nor has there been any effort toward it.
A possible replacement for money is the adoption of non-exchangable labour vouchers, a possible suggestion by Marx and Proudhon for "lower stage Communism". This has not happened nor has there been any effort toward it.
Venezuela exhibits all aspects of the capitalist mode of production. If you think that "Socialism" means "government doing stuff" or "government gives away money to people", you are either using a very strange and ahistorical definition of Socialism, or you are wrong. The actions of Venezuela more closely resemble a weak social democratic model.
So what exactly are you trying to say?
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