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marx didn't give the capitalists hell. he just told the truth and they thought it was hell
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this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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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.