To the people who watch these sources they believe its legitimate, real and true.

One year after leaving California, my mother was explaining to me -- based on some selfie video made by two Christians sitting in their car, claiming they had visited San Francisco -- that California was now a hotbed for crime and violent death.

It's not like they suddenly changed their story. For decades now, conservative vloggers and bloggers and "news" networks have been screaming about how California was a post-apocalyptic wasteland and millions of refugees were fleeing the state. She just... tuned it out while she was living in the proverbial horse's mouth, and then started trusting them the second the first-hand evidence was (I am not exaggerating here. She is now in the next state over.) two hours in her rear-view mirror.

Damn. Their $1.3 billion in profits was already stretched thin with these writers' demands. How will they afford this too? One of the execs might need to take out a second mortgage on his thirteenth mansion just to make ends meet.

People's mistake is thinking fascism is an evil ideology that uses any tactics necessary to achieve its goals.

What they don't realize is that "ideology" and "tactics" need to be reversed in this statement: fascism is a cynical tactic that uses any ideology necessary to achieve its goals.

It will hate groomers on Tuesday and find grooming "the only way to raise responsible, patriotic citizens" on that same exact Tuesday, later in the afternoon.

It will hate nepotism and family connections in the same breath as it calls Ivanka "smart" for wielding her presidential clout to enrich herself.

It will defend the sanctitude of the life belonging to a fetus right up until the main threats to that fetus are poor access to medical care, financial stress leading to miscarriages, and our unsustainable car infrastructure killing off pregnant mothers right alongside every other type of person. THOSE fetuses were killed by the laws of nature of course, (and they certainly lack a level of sanctity that competes with Americans' right to be forced to drive twenty minutes to the nearest grocery store and ninety minutes to their place of employment on threat of homelessness. That "right" is inviolable.)

There's no ideology here. No utopia on the map. No belief about how to improve society. There is merely the last, dying , defiant warcry of a certain subset of corporations. A subset that profits more from maintaining underclasses than they do from providing a product to a stable society. A subset that needs to keep reminding black people that if they don't like working for dirt wages at Amazon, they can always get the police involved and die with a police officer's knee on their neck.

And the question isn't, "can our ideology defeat theirs?" Because there was never a single belief to defeat in the first place. The question here is "can democracy survive?"

And so far, it's holding up better than it did in Italy and Germay. 1930s Germany wouldn't have thrown the Patriot Front in jail. Wouldn't have convicted the Wolverine Watchmen, either. Certainly wouldn't be prosecuting the Proud Boys who showed up to Jan 6.

I see a lot of comments saying workers are not allowed to own what they produce. That their employer takes it from them. I feel this is flawed and possibly comes from a place of frustration.

That's not frustration. The viewpoint you are describing (that workers are not allowed to own what they produce) actually comes from a different definition of "capital" and "capitalism" than the one you are using. And that difference in definitions is why I created this post. And I appreciate your answer. It lets me highlight the differences in definitions and the consequences of those differences. Because in the case of capitalism, the difference in definitions are actually more important than any difference in values or priorities.

You noted that people are saying "workers aren't allowed to own what they produce in capitalism." But those people are not referring to capitalism as you have defined it.

Capital

Capital is a combination of property and money. Property being the things you own, with money being a measure of potential property you don’t yet own.

I'm sorry, but no one who disagrees with you thinks that the ability to accrue property and money deprive workers of control over what they produce. Not even Marx and Engels. Not even Mao or Stalin. Certainly, property and money can we wielded in such a way that they become capital. But until then, property and money are merely wealth.

The definition used by people like Marx and Engels -- or by the entire field of economics -- is: capital is property that allows or speeds up the production of goods. A mine. An oil rig. A McDonalds burger conveyor-belt-oven-thingy. A 3D printer. In other words, the word "capital" is about the function of the property. Not its value. A painting can cost $1,000,000 and still not become capital. Because no one will ever operate that painting to cook burgers. Or to mine ores.

Capitalism

Now "the ability to own commodity-producing property" is still not quite sufficient for a system to become "capitalism." In fact, Marx and Engels didn't want any capital to be destroyed at all in the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Because even under the definition of "capital" that communists still to this day believe in, the existence of capital and ownership of it are still not inherently a source of coercion.

There's another crucial piece to the puzzle that leads to people complaining about the whole system:

In capitalism as a system, some form of employment contract always allows the owner of capital to own everything produced using that capital.

For example, the oil rig owner -- according to employment contracts -- owns all of the oil produced using the oil rig. But not only did the owner not need to work the rig to extract the oil: the owner also did not need to weld the seams or turn the screws to build the oil rig. All the owner needs is official ownership of the oil rig and a system that acknowledges their right to everything the oil rig produces, (regardless of who needed to input their labor to turn the oil rig into anything other than a metal sculpture in the ocean.) and with those two things, they are entitled to all of the proceeds of the rig.

Now, hopefully, you can see that, provided a worker has entered into such a contract, "workers are not allowed to own what they produce" is not a statement born from frustration: it's just true by definition. It's not saying "the worker is NEVER allowed to own anything they ever create in this society." It's saying: "within the relationship laid out by the employment contract, the worker who operates capital is not entitled to the direct consequences of their labor."

Now, whether the worker benefits from this arrangement is another picture, but in accepting an employment contract, the worker is entering into a dynamic where they do not own the outcome of their own labor.

Bonus Question #4

Which is why bonus question #4 (the difference between a workers' cooperative and a company that uses these employment contracts) is extremely important to understanding the consequences of the difference between these definitions. You even touched on its importance in your earlier replies, saying yourself:

If that worker is employed by a sprocket making company; they still make sprockets, but that’s not what they produce. They produce labor. Which they’ve chosen to sell to the sprocket company for money and/or other benefits

(Aside: what you're describing here is literally Marx's theory of alienation.) But more importantly,

I'm assuming the sprocket company "produces" sprockets by your definition of "produce." Well, in a workers' co-op, the workers vote in the decisions of the company. They elect the CEO (if there is one) and the managers. They take shares of the profits. They are the company. And if the workers are the company, and the company produces sprockets, then the workers are once again -- just like if they were self-employed, but with the benefits of efficiency and networking that come from being part of an organization -- producing sprockets. They are no longer (as Marx would say) alienated from the results of their labor.

In other words, the co-op is a form of self-employment according to the definitions you appear to be using. Which makes the distinction between cooperatives and other kinds of companies... massive.

The people saying, "capitalism strips workers of the results of their labor" love workers' co-ops. Love them. Despite you probably defining the workers' cooperative as "another example of capitalism", not even avowed Marxists would in any circumstance suggest that the worker co-op "disallows workers from owning what they produce." In fact, they strongly believe the opposite. To them (and to Marx himself) the worker cooperative operates under an entire opposing paradigm to the worker contract. And to them, it is therefore a rival philosophy to capitalism.

You don't have to accept their definitions. You don't need to believe Marxist definitions are correct. You can believe co-ops are capitalist all you want.

But please: try to understand that when people criticize "capitalism," they are (I 100% guarantee) referring to something far more narrow and far more specific than what you call capitalism.

Ah... good point. My description did nothing to distinguish capitalism from feudalism. There is necessity for some mention of who is allowed ownership of this form of property. (Or what is allowed ownership as is often the case.)

As for the word private though: I wanted to avoid more terms I would need to define that might obscure my definition. Also I'm not even sure what distinguishes private ownership from other kinds of ownership. Or what makes a private entity.

But thanks for the input. At some point I'll edit my definition.

Ideally, copyrights and patents would protect the small inventor and small musician. Unfortunately, wielding copyrights and patents in any useful way requires other forms of capital. (You have to have wealth in order to sue someone for infringement.)

At what price -- to drill and construct an oil rig for example -- would you consider it so prohibitively expensive that "somewhere else" has a hard time existing?

A million dollars? Five million dollars?

Consider that the median bank balance in America is $5,300. That is to say, half of all Americans have less than $5,300 in the bank.

What startup cost makes it difficult for others to compete?

Okay, but "includes many progressives" is a better phrasing than "includes much of progressivism" ... albeit in a subtle way.

Like, for example I have Muslim friends and Christian friends, and if you said, "the majority of Christian/Muslim ideology is genocidal." I'd scoff because that's obviously untrue.

The majority of Islam, as a religion, as it impacts my Muslim friends' life? They pray several times a day. They fast on particular days on particular months for particular hours.

None of that is Jihad. None of that is what goes on in Iran. That's just plain old boring old riituals.

The same with the Christians I know. They pray. They attend worship gatherings. They read the Bible and try to find wisdom in it that will help them become kinder, more righteous people.

Again, none are pushed toward another Spanish Inquisition by these rituals.

And this is literally coming from an anti-theist. I think religions are inherently harmful to their practitioners on an emotional and psychological level. I think Jihads and Inquisitions and Crusades and American Indian genocides are unusually common when embracing these philosophies.

But even I, an anti-theist, would still be annoyed -- on behalf of those people (whose religion I find deeply problematic) -- if someone said, "the majority of this religious philosophy is about subtly driving people to genocide."

Because that's insulting everything valuable and precious to these people and disregarding everything positive they get from their church.

In other words, phrasing is important.

Carmex lip balm as well.

I think I can speak for all of my fellow MX Fluxbox users when I say:

Those people are the worst!

He's got what pro-capitalists call "moxy"

My one hope is that police departments (being bureaucratic organizations) might be so slow to update to the latest camera-disabling hardware / software they they may turn out consistently one step behind.