this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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What's private property?
A person can have a paper saying that they own something and in a dispute courts will consider among other factors.
So if I don't own anything and I'm hungry so I eat some food, and someone says they have a paper that says they owned the food and courts agree with them, then what happens?
Depends. Do you think OP's description sounded like commie propaganda, or that it wasn't accurate?
I think it's not an explanation. They use technical terms from the ideology (private property, markets, ownership) and rephrase them into each other, but that doesn't explain what actually happens.
This would be the equivalent of me "explaining" a nuclear reactor by saying it extracts potential energy from the strong nuclear force, and then clarifying that by saying the strong nuclear force is mediated by gluons.
For reference, I would go:
Capitalism is a social system where everything is 'owned' by someone (or something, we'll get to that later), which means that they are the only ones who are allowed to decide what gets done with it even if they haven't used it and don't have plans for using it. There are people that go around beating people up or dragging them into cages for using stuff without permission of the owner, even if they need it. So if you don't own anything you can't survive except if an owner keeps making you the owner of what you need to survive, but most owners will only do that if you work hard to make the stuff they own better for them.
This is why people go around beating people up for using stuff they don't own; owners give them the stuff they need to survive and some extra so they can live a nicer life than other people who don't own stuff. I also think they like it because they get to be bullies rather than victims.
Over time, owners that make people work the hardest get to own more stuff that they can use to work more people harder. They can also fight other owners with violence or by cleverly using ownership of specific things to make the other owner have to give them lots of stuff to keep some stuff. Like if you 'owned' the back half of a cave and I owned the cave mouth, then I could make you give me stuff each time you want to get to the back half of the cave to use the stuff you own.
Another way for owners to get more stuff was to trick other owners into owning stuff they want to get rid of. If an owner says "I own everything that is in this field", then a different owner can put some rotten garbage on that field and now the owner of the field has to get rid of it.
Owners didn't want to spend as much time fighting each other, so they had the people that work for them to beat people up work together as long as the owners agreed to behave in ways the other approved of. Though as I said, the strongest owners are the ones that are cleverest at getting more stuff, so they aren't kind to each other, so they needed to write down their boundaries at which point they would no longer work together or even have their people try to beat the other owner up. With lots of owners working together this became a whole complicated set of commonly-agreed on boundaries called the legal system. Different alliances of owners had different legal systems, and the stuff each alliance owned was called a 'country'.
Now, some of these alliances/countries agreed to write a law that people can say there is a thing that owns things, called a 'legal entity'. This legal entity has laws of its own, so there can be people who say that the legal entity gave them stuff who don't get beaten up because other owners agree it's according to the legal entity's laws ('employees'), and other people who say the legal entity gave them stuff who do get beaten up. Interestingly, the only way a legal entity does anything with the stuff it owns is because there are employees that say the laws say other employees should do with that stuff what that employee says. Those employees are called executives.
One of the most important legal entities is a corporation, which is a legal entity that is owned, which has laws of its own that say to get as much stuff for the owners. Because executives can get beaten up if they take stuff the company owns while the company's owners say the executive is not following the company's law of getting as much stuff for the owners, these executives can get very ruthless in what they tell other employees to do to get more stuff.
The other most important legal entity is the state. Most countries (alliances of owners) have a single state, which usually doesn't have an owner. In many countries, the executives of the state do most of the saying when {people that {beat people up for {using stuff owners say they don't own}} can get food without getting beaten up}, and those executives also say when {people who say {they've interpreted the laws of the country to come to a decision who to beat up and how much}} get food.
And yes, the predictable feedback loop does tend to happen here: executives give food to people that interpret the laws in their favor and give food to people to (not) beat people up in their favor. This means the society will act like the executive of the state has increasingly more power, and the executive can also make themself owner of more stuff. This can get so bad that what the executive wants is more of a determining factor than what the laws say.
Some countries' laws say that who the executives of the state are is chosen regularly by the people, this is democracy. In others the exective of the state has laws that agree that the executive should be all-powerful, this is dictatorship. If the state is owned by a single person it is a monarchy, though a state can be "owned" in a more ceremonial sense when the laws of the state says the "owner" doesn't get to make important decisions while the executives make the real decisions. A state with a single person as a ceremonial owner is called a "constitutional monarchy". If the state is owned in such a ceremonial sense by the entire population while the executive is all-powerful, this is called "dictatorship of the proletariat".
All of these are states, and so they are all societies where everything is owned by someone or something, where someone will get beaten up for using something they need that nobody else was using. Capitalism is often defined more narrowly - around legal entities or corporations or around ownership by non-state entities or around there being a large diverse set of owners that follow the rules of the country - but the core of the rot lies there.
I'm not going to read the entirety of this extremely long explanation, because I don't need to read an extremely long criticism of capitalism pretending to be an explanation. I've read many criticisms of capitalism (and agree with at least some of them).
I got as far as your first two paragraphs before I had a serious issue with it as an explanation. We can discuss that if you really want, but I think your issue is not a valid one. Recalling OP's explanation:
So the terms they used are:
So, it is explaining capitalism in terms of those, which are simpler and more likely for anyone reading to understand. I would say in particular that everyone reading should understand the first term, that "private property" is understood by almost everybody, and that "competitive markets" is the least likely to be understood, but can be explained further. None of them is comparable to "gluons".
No matter how many explanations of capitalism there are that make it sound really bad, it only takes one that doesn't sound too bad to contradict the main post. So you need to focus on why that one is inadequate, rather than making your own explanation.
"Other people know what this means" is not an explanation either. It has been used throughout philosophical and scientific history to fake-explain lots of stuff, from the Platonic Ideal definition of a human to ethnonationalism, but you don't get any knowledge from that either. It relies on people's tendency to feel too dumb to vocalize uncertainty about "obvious" unspoken assumptions.
So please, can you explain "private property"? Without simply rephrasing it ("ownership", "possession", etc.) or referring to an authority ("the courts will mediate and the outcome of that mediation depends", or other ways to dodge explaining something? I have given an example of how to do it.
An explanation of a concept is a rephrasing of it in different terms. Your standards for explaining something are impossible to meet. Your example is just a very long rephrasing, but it still relies on further concepts you assume your audience understands.
Even if that were true, that wouldn't mean any rephrasing is an explanation. The "simply" in my comment was load-bearing, as you would acknowledge if you were arguing in good faith. But I am quite confident in my being able to explain terms such as "beating up" without using terms. I might even be able to use my long-ass comment as a guide for how to explain private property using no terms other than ones derived from term-free explanations.
You go to a food pantry or similar distribution network, and you support those facilities and offices politically so that everyone can have their basic needs met.
Unless you mean for me to tell you the court outcome? Honestly IDGAF how the judge rules, for your own sake you really shouldn't be eating trash in the first place.
And thus you didn't explain anything.
Also I've eaten trash lots of times, it's a great way to save money. Because corporations are hostile to people, they need far stricter rules of what constitutes "safe food" than people who want to find and make healthy food for their friends. So corporations end up throwing out lots of perfectly healthy food.