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You know I wasn’t on your side at first but then your well researched and well worded arguments won me over 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I’m gonna reply to both your comments here, so this is gonna be a massive reply.

Right, that’s the definition in the book, but in practice, for what you find in the comments sections, my description is a better fit.

I’ve never seen a single communist/socialist use your description. Like I said “capitalist” have a definition and we use it, communism is not a freestyle idea where we just say what ever comes to our mind, there is theory behind all of this. You should read Marx and watch channels like Second Thought.

If people can’t “own the means of production (which, by the way, every single person does)”

No, Private Property is also a defined term. Private Property refers to the private property of the means of production, so things like land, farms, factories, machines etc. It’s literally the means in which production happens, and the people that owns this are the bourgeoisie, the common worker doesn’t.

The opposite of Private Property is Personal Property, which is the things you personally own, like your smartphone, your TV, your computer, your toothbrush etc.

then they are not free to associate or trade freely.

How are they not? You can associate with anyone you want and trade freely with anyone you want, again the only thing you can’t do is own the means of production and exploit people for their labor.

In case you don’t know what I mean by exploiting people for their labor, it has to do with Marx concept of surplus value, which is basically the fact that the worker creates more value than they receive in wages.

Where people can associate freely, trade freely, and own property, private businesses get started.

State owned enterprises and workers’ coops exists.

Outlawing business necessitates interfering with people’s aforementioned freedoms.

Let’s be real here, what “freedoms” do the average person have? Because it’s ever so clear that the working class doesn’t have freedom or even choice for that matter.

You work 10 hours a day, your job pays you pennies and you can barely scrap by? Too bad, you can’t negotiate better pay and better work conditions because your boss can simply fire you and hire someone else that will do the same thing you do for less, or just threat doing that if you continue insisting.

If we are talking about the US, then you can’t even have the luxury of being sick or suffering an accident, the trip to hospital and the treatment are gonna bankrupt you.

In a socialist society everyone gets to have healthcare, education, work and stability. This allows for much more freedom than just being a cog in the machine with no certainty for tomorrow. It allows freedom to actually be someone and not just some product that needs to sell themselves at every corner to afford to exist.

Also, “kulaks” were a thing. If a farmer was prosperous, he was taken to the cleaners, sometimes killed, and his property taken from him. Communists reek of envy.

Do you mean gulags? (Which are just prisons, by the way.) Kulaks are just farm owners, and if they refuse collectivization of the farm for the benefit of everyone instead of themselves, they should rightfully be thrown into prison.

If by being “prosperous” you mean accumulating and controlling the grains for themselves while they let everyone else starve, them yeah, they were being “prosperous”.

Also, “the top 1%” doesn’t do nothing. They govern and regulate the business, which is something that has to be done.

There is no need for this because the workers themselves can govern and regulate the business. A business without an owner is a cooperative, a business without workers is nothing.

They take all of the risk. You might like to socialize gains, but you don’t want any part of the losses, do you? Businesses take the majority of the gains, but suffer all of the losses.

What risk? If we are talking about a random Joe that wants to start a small local bar, market, bakery or whatever, then yeah, they are taking a huge risk. If their business fails they can go into a debt they can never recover. Bezos and Musk doesn’t have to worry about anything, they can open a 100 different business and if only one is successful, it’ll pay for the other 99 that failed.

For the majority of people, simply commuting to work is a bigger risk than any risk these businesses can take. If the business closes, the workers lose their job and risk losing everything while the capitalist just moves on to whatever they want to do next. Hell, the business doesn’t even need to close, every now and then there is news about a massive amount of people being fired despite the company reporting massive or even record profits.

And no, making something does not confer ownership. If I hire you to mow my lawn, you do not then own my lawn, or my lawnmower, or the dirt. You own the consideration I paid to you to mow my lawn. Same with anything else.

You are equating doing a service with making a product. If you pay someone else to mow your lawn that’s it, that’s the whole operation you can’t make a profit of their labor, you are simply paying them to do a service for you. If someone works at your factory, you pay them less then the value they produce for you to make a profit, a profit that can only exist because of the worker, and not despite them. Again, a business without an owner is a cooperative, a business without workers is nothing.

Also, ownership of the means of production is collective, not individual like in your example. All the workers own their workplace, therefore all of them have agency over their work conditions, that’s called democracy.

If a business has parts and makes them into products, and a worker takes the parts which are not his and makes a product, that product doesn’t magically become his because he put it together. The paycheck becomes his.

If an owner that produces nothing and have workers takes the product that the workers produced to sell for a profit, that product doesn’t magically become theirs because they took it, it belongs to the workers that made it.

It’s an unequal relationship, even if the owner is the one that bought the parts that are used to make the product, the workers are not gonna be paid fairly for doing all the work.

The relationship between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is antagonistic. The proletariat wants to be paid as high as possible to work as little as possible, while the bourgeoisie wants to pay as low as possible for the highest amount of work as possible.

To work is to collectively produce something for society, so why does someone that doesn’t even take part in the production gets to individually own the labor and products of the workers?