I see. I think the particular case is just one event revealing a problem that is much older and deeper.
If worker exploitation has not been overcome, then communism has not been achieved.
As I say, I feel doubtful that you genuinely understand communism.
Arguably, housing should be accessible without toiling to make a rich person less unhappy and more wealthy.
Private property is a construct.
Natural rights is a construct.
Neither represents a transcendent truth.
The best account for natural rights is that it provides elegant packaging for values and norms already shared. The danger emerges because whoever controls the packaging is the one who also determines what becomes elegantly packaged.
By some measures, Musk’s decisions managing Twitter/X should earn him one million lifetimes of homelessness.
I know no one personally who would remain secure after losing billions of dollars, yet I keep hearing that owners take all the risks and workers are always protected from hardship.
Much of our perception is logarithmic, which is predictable, since patterns occur from proportion of quantities. Absolute quantities are meaningless in themselves. Even ten dollars as a quantity is meaningless except through prior experience understanding the value of a single dollar. Every value except the smallest is tenfold greater than some other value of at least some consequence.
Simply, owners demand for themselves more than they pretend to allow for workers.
Sure. Much of your observations speaks to the more conceptual differences between the millionaire and billionaire with respect to role in society. Workers generate plenty of wealth, more than enough for all to live well.
Billionaires generate no wealth, only hoard the wealth generated by workers.
Since workers were born into a world that affirms private property, they obviously never gave it their consent.
It is just a fiction that developed its own life by the whip, blade, and gun, and also by the pen and press.
Most of the work of leftist criticisms has been simply deconstructing entrenched doctrine, to help expand consciousness, and to build capacity for liberation.
Ellerman seems to prefer instead constructing his own layer of obfuscation. It may antagonize the wage system, but it declines to deconstruct the deeper nature of moral ideals, social constructs, and legal frameworks.
It is worth becoming familiar with leftist criticisms of natural rights.
It feels elusive how anyone could spend so much, but controlling the content of mass media has been of great service for the interests of the Kochs and the Wilkses.
For you, is it more significant that many may achieve such wealth, or that many more may not do so?
I am not denying any of the differences, but the differences you both have with billionaires is even greater, as the billionaire occupies a role in society of power and domination, through control of resources and assets that are utilized socially, for the necessity that we produce our shared sustenance.
Mostly, Ellerman’s approach is weighty and unwieldy, by capturing or complicating constructs that leftists have identified as unnecessary, unrobust, and outright fictitious.
Most leftists have no need for recovering natural rights, nor even have need of natural rights.
Workers might simply rebel against the exploiters, because workers have no wish and no need for being exploited.
You are probably not vastly different from a millionaire, just someone with less pomp and perhaps pretentiousness than some millionaires may have.
You may even know someone who secretly holds such wealth but feels too embarrassed to make it known.
A billionaire is someone who has the social role of controlling a vast section of society, through private ownership of resources and assets that are needed by others for use.
Ellerman, according to my understanding, has tended to approach liberal defenses of private property by attaching further abstractions and obfuscation that produce no particular further clarity above established leftist criticisms.
Since money of course is just the means of exchange, having it prevents the suffering resulting from deprivation being imposed.
Communism is not complacency or obedience.
It is simply the eradication of the systems of exploitation.
Exploitation and autocracy are expressly encouraged by particular structure, though, whereas antagonized by other.
I encourage seeking to develop those structures protect the empowerment of everyone.
I feel doubtful that a society being permanently stable is necessarily the most important objective.
Try to understand what people need and seek in their lives, and consider how certain organization may promote or impede their capacity to reach or to achieve such needs and wants.
Try not to worry about the absolute count of negative events or negative actors. Most important is the structural resilience against such stress.
The reason is because of much of what you have written, for example…
Various examples occur throughout your comments appearing as reactionary or liberal obfuscations of communism, and its differences with capitalism, or that seem unaware of general criticisms of capital.
You may feel my characterizations are inaccurate, and you may be correct, but I feel that they are representative of your argumentation, by its heavy assimilation of various tropes common within bad faith engagement with leftism.