I’ve heard A LOT of BS defenses for capitalism over the years but “publicly traded companies are not capitalist” really taked the cake.
At risk of taking the bait: those companies are still privately owned by their shareholders, just that ownership is traded freely among the capitalist class.
Like just think for a second. Most property is traded publicly on the market, but does that mean you don’t privately own your own home? Of course not, it’s still your private property regardless if everyone had the same chance to buy it.
Houses don’t have shares though, those companies have shares. A share to a company is a piece of ownership. Microsoft for example, is not owned by one private individual. It’s collectively owned by Vanguard, BlackRock, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates. And those 4 together only own 20%, the rest are apportioned to the general public. Only 2 have more than 5%. 80% of their shareholders hold less than a fraction of ownership.
Put all those together, can you honestly say Microsoft is privately owned by a private unit? It would be mental gymnastics not to say this is public ownership.
Now, you might have the urge to insist that someone’s share is privately owned, but that doesn’t dispute the company itself. The companies ownership is split into a collective.
I just went to google, and I typed “is Microsoft a private company” and the response was “Microsoft moved its headquarters from Bellevue to Redmond, Washington, on February 26, 1986, and went public on March 13”. In fact, it’s hard to find a source claiming it’s private, I’ve yet to.
can you honestly say Microsoft is privately owned by a private unit?
Yes. Because it is. There is no grey area here, no “but akshually”, no little technicality. It is a privately owned company. End of story, no exception. The fact that many people own a part of it doesn’t make a difference
You are mixing up publically OWNED companies and publically TRADED companies. I’m guessing because publically traded companies are usually just called public companies. Microsoft is privately ownership that is publically traded.
Like you HAVE to understand that your are legitimately and unironically saying that every major publically traded company is collectively owned and therefore socialist, right? And you know how just utterly insane that argument is, right?
Or how about you define where the line is for collective ownership? Is 2 people owning a 50% stake in a company make it publicly owned? No? How about 5? Or 10? 100? Where is the line?
Or how about the fact that this logic would reduce the definition of the “the collective” to the capitalist class and completely ignores the proletariat, because they typically don’t own shares of companies. Like if everyone owned a share of Microsoft, you would have a point. But most people don’t, typically because they are not part of the capitalist class and/or don’t have savings in a managed investment fund.
Okay I would love to explain my thoughts on this to you, I really would. But please take an honest look at the way you’re talking to me right now. It’s not that I’m horribly insulted by your rudeness, it’s that I’m actually not getting anything out of you in the realest sense, and I doubt anything I’m saying is connecting either. For that reason, I’m sure this is a waste of time, and I know I’m about to do way more typing than I should, but I want to show you what I mean.
When I described the corporate structure and collective ownership, I rhetorically asked if you could honestly describe that as privately owned. You took it literally, said nothing to refute that Microsoft is structured in the collective way I described, and answered the question like this:
Yes. Because it is. There is no grey area here, no “but akshually”, no little technicality. It is a privately owned company. End of story, no exception. The fact that many people own a part of it doesn’t make a difference
You assert your point with no elaboration. You reduce my argument to “but akshually”, call it a technicality, still with no argument as to why. Then you call it end of story, no exception, as if to suggest the truth should be accepted as what you say it is, again without question or reason. Then, after all of that, you tell me that a lot of people being part of a collective doesn’t make a difference in whether it’s a collective. Your confidence in your response heavily outweighs the actual contents. You gave me no new information, nothing to think about.
You are mixing up publicly OWNED companies and publicly TRADED companies. I’m guessing because publicly traded companies are usually just called public companies. Microsoft is privately ownership that is publicly traded.
This is funny to me because this has already been clarified, but you just didn’t notice I guess? I said those companies were publicly traded, because that typically means they’ve gone fully public and their shares are up for grabs. You pointed out that technically houses can be traded publicly and still be privately owned. That’s why I switched to talking about shares, because that’s less ambiguous and makes it clear I’m referring to that actual portions of ownership. You have completely missed that nuance in an effort to scope in on the right words to win rhetorically, which is wholly unproductive as a conversational tactic in and of itself. As a result, you are the one conflating anything I say that’s related to the idea of public as publicly trade, even though I’m saying different words that mean different things. You are now the one conflating the terms, not me.
Like you HAVE to understand that your are legitimately and unironically saying that every major publicly traded company is collectively owned and therefore socialist, right? And you know how just utterly insane that argument is, right?
I didn’t say this, you did in your head. You’re also trying extremely hard to use as many adverbs as you can to show just how amazingly crazy that conclusion you made is, without any effort to elaborate on why. If you really think you have something to tell me here, why don’t you? Why are you using all of this filler speech to assert how crazy that is, instead of applying your knowledge and showing me where I went wrong?
Read a few comments back from me, I distinguish capitalism from corporatism. I did not use the word socialism. I figured this would be a good way to reach a middle ground you might like, because most people (especially on Lemmy) hate corporations. More importantly, it’s true that there’s a distinct difference in the operations of a private business and a large corporate collective. You ignored this clarification and avoided the chance to reach common ground.
Or how about you define where the line is for collective ownership? Is 2 people owning a 50% stake in a company make it publicly owned? No? How about 5? Or 10? 100? Where is the line?
Okay this one is actually answerable, even though I know it’s rhetorical. Yes, if a private family unit or individual owns 50% of the stakes of a company, I think we can safely say it’s privately controlled, at the very least. That said, there would still be 50% owned by shareholders, so it’s still collectively owned to a degree. Ownership and control are different but equally important aspects. Looks like there’s nuance here, hey? This is actually something I’ve thought about a LOT, because the line seems blurry, because it seems like it might be possible to have a degree of private and collective ownership. Thus, defining the line of where it’s one or the other is difficult, like defining when someone is tall. Seeing as how you have demonstrated that you care about the topic, you should genuinely try to think of an answer for this too, instead of asking it in a way that makes it seem silly.
Also, it’s bad faith to act as if I should have preemptively answered this question. It’s fine to think up questions to talk about relating to the nuance of the theory, but you could ask questions for days about any detail. If I did already define that line in my previously comment, it probably would’ve seemed out of place, you probably would not have engaged with it, and then you would’ve pointed out some other important detail implying I should’ve already answered it.
Or how about the fact that this logic would reduce the definition of the “the collective” to the capitalist class and completely ignores the proletariat, because they typically don’t own shares of companies. Like if everyone owned a share of Microsoft, you would have a point. But most people don’t, typically because they are not part of the capitalist class and/or don’t have savings in a managed investment fund.
And this is why I wanted to go over why your responses felt wholly empty to me up until this point. There’s a ton of conversation to be had, just from this paragraph. But it’s buried in tons of bad faith questions with demonstrable overlooking of any of my reasoning. I can’t expect anything I say here to even be read by you, let alone result in any engagement on your part. But you know what? I’m gonna do it anyway lol
So for starters, the term “capitalist class” presumes the point that the ruling class, the oligarchs, the patricians, or whatever group of people you’re referring to, both are primarily capitalistic in nature (which I would refute), and that they hold some sort of monopoly on the concept of private ownership, which I would also refute. It’s also the core of where our disagreement lies, I’m directly telling you that the influence of corporations and the people that run them is better described as corporatism, rather than capitalism. You can’t just presume that’s not true as a premise when that’s what the argument is about
You are correct that the typical wage earner does not hold shares in Microsoft. This does not mean that he’s not a part of the greater collective of citizens. A collective is “of, relating to, characteristic of, or made by a number of people acting as a group.” It’s people acting as a group. The nation is a collective of all of its citizens, Microsoft is a collective of its shareholders. Saying either or both are collective does not ignore any definition of any word. In fact, it’s a more honest application of the definition. For the same reason that you can’t say any group you’re not part of isn’t a group, you can’t say that a citizen not being a shareholder in Microsoft doesn’t mean it’s not a collective. In fact, you’d be the one reducing the definition of a collective by insisting that it can’t be used to describe group ownership of a corporation.
You gave me no new information, nothing to think about.
Because this is such a basic question that ALL the information has already been laid out. Ownership in microsoft is private, private individual privately own stocks in the company. Someone could, in theory, come along and buy up all the stocks of microsoft and run it as 1 person. Its such a basic fact its like you’re saying the sky is actually green. What nuanced argument are you supposed to give to such an outlandish and obviously wrong statement?
This is funny to me because this has already been clarified, but you just didn’t notice I guess? I said those companies were publicly traded, because that typically means they’ve gone fully public and their shares are up for grabs. You pointed out that technically houses can be traded publicly and still be privately owned. That’s why I switched to talking about shares, because that’s less ambiguous and makes it clear I’m referring to that actual portions of ownership. You have completely missed that nuance in an effort to scope in on the right words to win rhetorically, which is wholly unproductive as a conversational tactic in and of itself. As a result, you are the one conflating anything I say that’s related to the idea of public as publicly trade, even though I’m saying different words that mean different things. You are now the one conflating the terms, not me.
Im sorry I cant keep up with your ridiculous mental gymnastics here, Im just too attached to the reality we actually live in to keep track of how things work in your world where the biggest capitalist companies arent capitalist, but are actually socialist because 2 or more people have a stake in them. Ill make a mental note that private ownership is only when 1 and only 1 person owns all of something. And as soon as a couple of people privately own a thing, it becomes public ownership. Like how both my mum and dad own their house, that means their house is publicly owned? Or how my freind’s house is part owned by me and part owned by the bank so is also publicly owned too right?
Thus, defining the line of where it’s one or the other is difficult,
The entire point is its not. Private ownership and public ownership are 2 discrete categories. There may be some cases where they overlap or a re grey, but those are very few and far between, the vast majority fall neatly into one or the other. Your car? private. The roads you drive on? Public. The gas station you fill up at? Private. Because for something to be publicly owned it must be “owned” by the entirety of the “the public”. Which we usually define as the citizens of a country. So roads are publicly owned as they owned by the government, which (at least in theory) is the representative body of the citzens of the country, so (in theory) everyone in the country has part ownership of the road and has some say over what is done to it. The same cannot be said for Microsoft. I have no shares in Microsoft, so I have 0 ownership of it. So that means either I am not part of “the public” or Microsoft is not publicly owned. And since as a citizen of my country I am by definition part of the public, that means that MS is not publicly owned.
Also, it’s bad faith to act as if I should have preemptively answered this question.
You still havt answered it now, other than a shrug and a “its complicated” thats just mean to deflect from one of the many giant glaring flaws in this ridiculous argument. So let me ask one specific question very directly and you can tell me yes or no. If 2 people have a 50% stake in a thing, does that mean, according to your logic, that thing is publicly owned?
You talk about bad faith arguments but that all you are giving me.
Even your last 2 paragraphs are that as well. Trying to deflect from a simple topic by making it seem more deep and philosophical than it is. To go back to my earlier example, its like you’re arguing the sky is a green, I say its actually blue and you start going on about how words have arbitrary meanings and what I call blue could be what you call green. Its just nonsense to dristract from the actual point being made.
And that core argument is that big, publicly traded corporations are capitalist. And since you like your definitions from google so much ill give you a couple here
Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state
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Private Ownership: the fact of being owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by the state or a public body.
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Public Ownership: ownership by the government of an asset, corporation, or industry.
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But please take an honest look at the way you’re talking to me right now.
Please understand just how ridiculous your argument is, i cannot stress enough just how ludicrous it is. So I feel like im giving you an appropriate level of respect given the circumstances.
Someone could, in theory, come along and buy up all the stocks of microsoft and run it as 1 person
And then it would be private, yes? Implying that before that happens, it’s not private?
Like how both my mum and dad own their house, that means their house is publicly owned?
No, that’s a family unit. I already said that.
Private comes from the Latin privus, which, in its origin, basically means family unit. The concept of the individual came later in the empire, because the prevailing theology involved forgiving an individual person’s sins, outside the perspective of their family. Latin was still the dominant language at the time, so “private” came to mean an individual or family unit. It remained so, because the wealth of the individual tends to be shared with the family anyway. Ownership is passed to next of kin, and family members typically help with and/or inherit businesses.
You still havt answered it now, other than a shrug and a “its complicated”
Actually I did answer, I very clearly gave you what I thought, and the reason behind it. Just read it:
Yes, if a private family unit or individual owns 50% of the stakes of a company, I think we can safely say it’s privately controlled, at the very least. That said, there would still be 50% owned by shareholders, so it’s still collectively owned to a degree. Ownership and control are different but equally important aspects. Looks like there’s nuance here, hey?
I gave you a straight answer on my belief, and expanded on why there’s nuance to the question. That’s different than not answering, and that’s different than just saying it’s complicated.
Private Ownership: the fact of being owned by a private individual or organization, rather than by the state or a public body.
So which private individual or organization owns Microsoft?
Lmao wtf, that’s some Olympic level mental gymnastics you’re doing here.
I’ve heard A LOT of BS defenses for capitalism over the years but “publicly traded companies are not capitalist” really taked the cake.
At risk of taking the bait: those companies are still privately owned by their shareholders, just that ownership is traded freely among the capitalist class.
Like just think for a second. Most property is traded publicly on the market, but does that mean you don’t privately own your own home? Of course not, it’s still your private property regardless if everyone had the same chance to buy it.
Houses don’t have shares though, those companies have shares. A share to a company is a piece of ownership. Microsoft for example, is not owned by one private individual. It’s collectively owned by Vanguard, BlackRock, Steve Ballmer, and Bill Gates. And those 4 together only own 20%, the rest are apportioned to the general public. Only 2 have more than 5%. 80% of their shareholders hold less than a fraction of ownership.
Put all those together, can you honestly say Microsoft is privately owned by a private unit? It would be mental gymnastics not to say this is public ownership.
Now, you might have the urge to insist that someone’s share is privately owned, but that doesn’t dispute the company itself. The companies ownership is split into a collective.
I just went to google, and I typed “is Microsoft a private company” and the response was “Microsoft moved its headquarters from Bellevue to Redmond, Washington, on February 26, 1986, and went public on March 13”. In fact, it’s hard to find a source claiming it’s private, I’ve yet to.
Yes. Because it is. There is no grey area here, no “but akshually”, no little technicality. It is a privately owned company. End of story, no exception. The fact that many people own a part of it doesn’t make a difference
You are mixing up publically OWNED companies and publically TRADED companies. I’m guessing because publically traded companies are usually just called public companies. Microsoft is privately ownership that is publically traded.
Like you HAVE to understand that your are legitimately and unironically saying that every major publically traded company is collectively owned and therefore socialist, right? And you know how just utterly insane that argument is, right?
Or how about you define where the line is for collective ownership? Is 2 people owning a 50% stake in a company make it publicly owned? No? How about 5? Or 10? 100? Where is the line?
Or how about the fact that this logic would reduce the definition of the “the collective” to the capitalist class and completely ignores the proletariat, because they typically don’t own shares of companies. Like if everyone owned a share of Microsoft, you would have a point. But most people don’t, typically because they are not part of the capitalist class and/or don’t have savings in a managed investment fund.
Okay I would love to explain my thoughts on this to you, I really would. But please take an honest look at the way you’re talking to me right now. It’s not that I’m horribly insulted by your rudeness, it’s that I’m actually not getting anything out of you in the realest sense, and I doubt anything I’m saying is connecting either. For that reason, I’m sure this is a waste of time, and I know I’m about to do way more typing than I should, but I want to show you what I mean.
When I described the corporate structure and collective ownership, I rhetorically asked if you could honestly describe that as privately owned. You took it literally, said nothing to refute that Microsoft is structured in the collective way I described, and answered the question like this:
You assert your point with no elaboration. You reduce my argument to “but akshually”, call it a technicality, still with no argument as to why. Then you call it end of story, no exception, as if to suggest the truth should be accepted as what you say it is, again without question or reason. Then, after all of that, you tell me that a lot of people being part of a collective doesn’t make a difference in whether it’s a collective. Your confidence in your response heavily outweighs the actual contents. You gave me no new information, nothing to think about.
This is funny to me because this has already been clarified, but you just didn’t notice I guess? I said those companies were publicly traded, because that typically means they’ve gone fully public and their shares are up for grabs. You pointed out that technically houses can be traded publicly and still be privately owned. That’s why I switched to talking about shares, because that’s less ambiguous and makes it clear I’m referring to that actual portions of ownership. You have completely missed that nuance in an effort to scope in on the right words to win rhetorically, which is wholly unproductive as a conversational tactic in and of itself. As a result, you are the one conflating anything I say that’s related to the idea of public as publicly trade, even though I’m saying different words that mean different things. You are now the one conflating the terms, not me.
I didn’t say this, you did in your head. You’re also trying extremely hard to use as many adverbs as you can to show just how amazingly crazy that conclusion you made is, without any effort to elaborate on why. If you really think you have something to tell me here, why don’t you? Why are you using all of this filler speech to assert how crazy that is, instead of applying your knowledge and showing me where I went wrong?
Read a few comments back from me, I distinguish capitalism from corporatism. I did not use the word socialism. I figured this would be a good way to reach a middle ground you might like, because most people (especially on Lemmy) hate corporations. More importantly, it’s true that there’s a distinct difference in the operations of a private business and a large corporate collective. You ignored this clarification and avoided the chance to reach common ground.
Okay this one is actually answerable, even though I know it’s rhetorical. Yes, if a private family unit or individual owns 50% of the stakes of a company, I think we can safely say it’s privately controlled, at the very least. That said, there would still be 50% owned by shareholders, so it’s still collectively owned to a degree. Ownership and control are different but equally important aspects. Looks like there’s nuance here, hey? This is actually something I’ve thought about a LOT, because the line seems blurry, because it seems like it might be possible to have a degree of private and collective ownership. Thus, defining the line of where it’s one or the other is difficult, like defining when someone is tall. Seeing as how you have demonstrated that you care about the topic, you should genuinely try to think of an answer for this too, instead of asking it in a way that makes it seem silly.
Also, it’s bad faith to act as if I should have preemptively answered this question. It’s fine to think up questions to talk about relating to the nuance of the theory, but you could ask questions for days about any detail. If I did already define that line in my previously comment, it probably would’ve seemed out of place, you probably would not have engaged with it, and then you would’ve pointed out some other important detail implying I should’ve already answered it.
And this is why I wanted to go over why your responses felt wholly empty to me up until this point. There’s a ton of conversation to be had, just from this paragraph. But it’s buried in tons of bad faith questions with demonstrable overlooking of any of my reasoning. I can’t expect anything I say here to even be read by you, let alone result in any engagement on your part. But you know what? I’m gonna do it anyway lol
So for starters, the term “capitalist class” presumes the point that the ruling class, the oligarchs, the patricians, or whatever group of people you’re referring to, both are primarily capitalistic in nature (which I would refute), and that they hold some sort of monopoly on the concept of private ownership, which I would also refute. It’s also the core of where our disagreement lies, I’m directly telling you that the influence of corporations and the people that run them is better described as corporatism, rather than capitalism. You can’t just presume that’s not true as a premise when that’s what the argument is about
You are correct that the typical wage earner does not hold shares in Microsoft. This does not mean that he’s not a part of the greater collective of citizens. A collective is “of, relating to, characteristic of, or made by a number of people acting as a group.” It’s people acting as a group. The nation is a collective of all of its citizens, Microsoft is a collective of its shareholders. Saying either or both are collective does not ignore any definition of any word. In fact, it’s a more honest application of the definition. For the same reason that you can’t say any group you’re not part of isn’t a group, you can’t say that a citizen not being a shareholder in Microsoft doesn’t mean it’s not a collective. In fact, you’d be the one reducing the definition of a collective by insisting that it can’t be used to describe group ownership of a corporation.
Because this is such a basic question that ALL the information has already been laid out. Ownership in microsoft is private, private individual privately own stocks in the company. Someone could, in theory, come along and buy up all the stocks of microsoft and run it as 1 person. Its such a basic fact its like you’re saying the sky is actually green. What nuanced argument are you supposed to give to such an outlandish and obviously wrong statement?
Im sorry I cant keep up with your ridiculous mental gymnastics here, Im just too attached to the reality we actually live in to keep track of how things work in your world where the biggest capitalist companies arent capitalist, but are actually socialist because 2 or more people have a stake in them. Ill make a mental note that private ownership is only when 1 and only 1 person owns all of something. And as soon as a couple of people privately own a thing, it becomes public ownership. Like how both my mum and dad own their house, that means their house is publicly owned? Or how my freind’s house is part owned by me and part owned by the bank so is also publicly owned too right?
The entire point is its not. Private ownership and public ownership are 2 discrete categories. There may be some cases where they overlap or a re grey, but those are very few and far between, the vast majority fall neatly into one or the other. Your car? private. The roads you drive on? Public. The gas station you fill up at? Private. Because for something to be publicly owned it must be “owned” by the entirety of the “the public”. Which we usually define as the citizens of a country. So roads are publicly owned as they owned by the government, which (at least in theory) is the representative body of the citzens of the country, so (in theory) everyone in the country has part ownership of the road and has some say over what is done to it. The same cannot be said for Microsoft. I have no shares in Microsoft, so I have 0 ownership of it. So that means either I am not part of “the public” or Microsoft is not publicly owned. And since as a citizen of my country I am by definition part of the public, that means that MS is not publicly owned.
You still havt answered it now, other than a shrug and a “its complicated” thats just mean to deflect from one of the many giant glaring flaws in this ridiculous argument. So let me ask one specific question very directly and you can tell me yes or no. If 2 people have a 50% stake in a thing, does that mean, according to your logic, that thing is publicly owned?
Even your last 2 paragraphs are that as well. Trying to deflect from a simple topic by making it seem more deep and philosophical than it is. To go back to my earlier example, its like you’re arguing the sky is a green, I say its actually blue and you start going on about how words have arbitrary meanings and what I call blue could be what you call green. Its just nonsense to dristract from the actual point being made.
And that core argument is that big, publicly traded corporations are capitalist. And since you like your definitions from google so much ill give you a couple here
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Please understand just how ridiculous your argument is, i cannot stress enough just how ludicrous it is. So I feel like im giving you an appropriate level of respect given the circumstances.
And then it would be private, yes? Implying that before that happens, it’s not private?
No, that’s a family unit. I already said that. Private comes from the Latin privus, which, in its origin, basically means family unit. The concept of the individual came later in the empire, because the prevailing theology involved forgiving an individual person’s sins, outside the perspective of their family. Latin was still the dominant language at the time, so “private” came to mean an individual or family unit. It remained so, because the wealth of the individual tends to be shared with the family anyway. Ownership is passed to next of kin, and family members typically help with and/or inherit businesses.
Actually I did answer, I very clearly gave you what I thought, and the reason behind it. Just read it:
I gave you a straight answer on my belief, and expanded on why there’s nuance to the question. That’s different than not answering, and that’s different than just saying it’s complicated.
So which private individual or organization owns Microsoft?