Shares only give you voting power if you have a massive amount of them. In the vast majority of cases shares function as either a place to store wealth to protect it from inflation or as speculative gambling, the majority of use cases is not to signify ownership. I would not classify that as collective ownership, maybe only in theory if you don’t look into it too much but real world application of shares is definitely not collective ownership.
I’m very much in favour of businesses being actually collectively owned through a coop business model though.
Owning public stock is legally indistinguishable from directly owning a joint business venture.
Plenty of things are legally indistinguishable but real world applications are often quite different.
Though I would also challage that claim since owning a joint business gives you legal deciding power while owning 1 stock does not, you get zero votes from that.
Gee, who decided what is legally equivalent? Certainly not the people with wealth to buy politicians and judges.
