One of the thorniest issues in the debate about ‘real socialism’ was whether this was a class society. If classes are defined by the idea of private property, this was surely not the case. The state was the formal proprietor of all or most of the means of production, although peasants often had some stake in property relations current in these countries, whether some sort of collectivization had taken place or not (mostly it did). Workers were supposed to be the ruling class in these states, yet, as argued above, this was by no means the case. We thus have to ask what ‘property’ means beyond juridical definitions, as already suggested in the previous section. While this is not the main aim of this book a basic answer to it must be given in order to understand the role of the political dimension and its hold on the whole authoritarian collectivist social formations.

We can say that ‘appropriation’ means first of all that someone, individually or collectively, takes real control of something. It implies power over the appropriated object, either juridically, as we have known since the Romans with their definition of rights in rem (that is, over things). More concretely, it allows for the manipulation of the thing appropriated – whether we eat it, use it to produce something else, play with it or throw it away. It thus implies the power of command over that which is appropriated. This command may be collectively shared through some sort of networked relationship, and this can be, overall, exclusionary. Part of it can also be placed in a temporary lease to smaller groups of workers or, if of limited size, on a more permanent basis.

In the case in point, as part and parcel of the state, the core elements regarding property/appropriation in the party-state were those who had more direct control and discretionary power over most objects in authoritarian collectivism. But this did not occur through individual and private appropriation. Appropriation was always collective and public (though with a high level of secrecy). No one had a private title to appropriate the means of production. The party-state and especially its upper echelons were the actual proprietors of the means of production in these societies and could appropriate the economic surplus as well as social privileges, though on a much smaller scale than capitalists in their adversarial societies.