@ggersh
As will be pictures of needles going into arms.
The ink on the paper or the pixels on the screen are the only real things there

like cuz they care about us, NOT

cnn.com

Former Presidents Obama, Bush and Clinton volunteer to get coronavirus vaccine publicly to prove it's safe

Here is one take

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZ9cmN_O0eY]

EDIT: The above mentioned trio of evil will one day make it to the top of that list

@Nastarana
Good term: it is a seduction.
Insert "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote here.
Just look at any major national league sport: a few top players make millions, while millions of kids dream of being in their shoes -- to the extent of buying shoes with their heroes' names on them. For a small fortune.
A lot of the seduction is this illusion that anyone can rise to the top, if they just do everything right. (But the top can get crowded very fast.)

As far as your definition of companies/enterprises owned and managed by the workers: that is the most basic definition of socialism, imho: workers controlling the means of production. At one time I identified with anarcho-syndicalism; now I'm not that confident of labels. But socialism has proven to be efficient at delivering needs, if not consumer goods. Example: a Cat 4 hurricane struck an American island and 3,000 people died. A Cat 5 hurricane made a direct hit on Havana and TEN people died. A far better example is the rona: just look at the stats for China, Vietnam and Cuba. We killed two million Vietnamese trying (and failing) to prevent a society that now measures rona cases in the hundreds rather than the hundred thousands. Capitalism furnishes us with a rich supply of what I call "pet rocks" (and the illusion of "freedom"), gewgaws which we don't NEED but which we are manipulated to WANT, making a very few people very rich in the process. Socialism is much more efficient at providing the basic needs of life. Few pet rocks, but much food, clothing and shelter. And now medicine.

Your description of France in the early industrial revolution is a good description of what a Marxist would call the bushwah (I refuse to try to spell in French) revolution, what Marx considered a necessary stage between feudalism and socialism. Goods became abundant, but the labor of those chained to the machines was stolen.

So to sum up what I think of as the seductions of capitalism: the illusion of opportunity, and the abundance of pet rocks.

Also: yes, I use King Arthur flour, but I didn't know about their worker policies. Good to know! Thanks.

what is the seductive appeal of capitalism? What makes people so attached to capitalism? I am asking; I do not know, although I do have some preliminary observations.

First, how do we define 'capitalism"? Even that I can't really do, though I do know some of what capitalism isn't.

Capitalism is not industrialization. The socialist countries industrialized. One communist writer, later became a democratic socialist, said the appeal of communism was that it offered a poor country a means of rapid industrialization. In order to do that, the entire productive capacity, including that of women, who were required to join the workforce, had to be marshalled and employed.

I would assert that capitalism does NOT itself create wealth. Wealth is created by work, including, as feminists used to understand, the work done by women in the home; by making, growing and building.

It looks to me like capitalism buys stuff and sells stuff. It uses, or exploits if you prefer, the productive capacity of people and the land they live on. And, like any other parasite, it eventually destroys its' host.

It is important to remember that back in the beginnings of our capitalism, people, including the poorest, did not necessarily experience capitalism as something that made their lives worse. Here is an interesting example, from the historian Michelet, quoted by Fernand Braudel. It seems that the early textile mills in France made use of their new machinery to massively overproduce. The mills had to keep cutting the price of their cloth till it fell to the rock bottom six sous. Then,

"The sound of six sous seemed to act as a trigger. Millions of buyers, poor people, who had never bought [textiles] before, began to stir....The warehouses were emptied in a flash. The machines went frantically back to work....And the result was a major, though little remarked, revolution in France, a revolution in cleanliness and the suddenly improved appearance of the poor home: people had bed linen, body linen, linen for the table and the windows: it was now possessed by whole classes who had never had any since the world began." (Jules Michelet, Le Peuple, 1899, quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, p. 183). What does through many people's minds when they hear "socialism" is something like, I won't have anything anymore, I will be living like my greatgrandparents did.

I see capitalism as embodying three of the deadly sins, envy (keeping up with the Joneses), avarice (never enough money), and pride (only little people pay taxes). However, I also don't think highly of socialism as we have seen it practiced in the last century. I think that socialism has a fatal flaw, which is that human nature is simply not perfectible. There are no Big Rock Candy Mountains. More important, Marxism is a European philosophy which can't be transplanted to North America. People have been trying for at least a century now, with no success yet.

OTOH, Democratic Syndicalism, which as I understand it, means the workers themselves own the means of production AND themselves direct operations, does seem to be able to flourish here. One fairly well known example of a worker owned company is King Arthur Flour, which produces a superior line of products at prices most home bakers can afford. I use their products and I have been baking for about 50 years now. I also flatly REFUSE to spend a dime on either Pillsbury or Gold Medal because their products are crap, as in absolutely useless. At least in this one example it would seem that the worker owned company is maintaining its workforce at living wages AND producing a superior product.

@Nastarana
Factories must not be owned by private capital. There is too much opportunity for damage: damage to the environment, damage to workers' lives, etc. Private ownership is private exploitation, and the true costs of the damages are externalized, i.e., ignored. Think of polluted rivers and Walmart workers living on food stamps. Anything of large scale must be operated under "lifeboat rules", since our world now resembles an increasingly crowded lifeboat with finite resources. Libertarian style "freedom" is a luxury notion, descended from the notion of a limitless frontier open to exploitation. Much like Cassiodorus' reference to "cheap nature".

Small scale enterprises should be owned and operated by workers' co-op type structures, with benefits accruing to workers, not investors.

I think you have the Stalinist model of socialism in mind, what I think Trotskyists call state capitalism. That's too broad a topic for my feeble and uneducated mind; I'm a scientist, not a political philosopher. But I have ten years as a metal worker (certified boilermaker; steelworkers, shipbuilders, machinists unions) for experiential knowledge of industry. In the end, heavy/large scale industry in private hands is a recipe for disaster. Which we are witnessing.

You mention aircraft manufacture. Need I mention Boeing?

Yes, I use "rona" as a lazy abbreviation because my arthritic hands avoid excess typing.

Good to chat with you. Be safe, be well.

'Rona' is corona?

My understanding is that 'socialism' refers to a system in which the GOVERNMENT owns and operates the means of production, you can call it Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but what it is is government. And, as we have seen, the folks who make the decisions and issue the orders are a non-productive nomenklatura, Djilas's New Class, not the working men and women. Of course, with us, what we have is a non-productive, ignorant ( see Tanden, Neera) gang of sycophants and hangers on who make, well receive as if from God, and enforce the decisions. And that is what some call Freeeedom!

I think that some things ought to be administered as public utilities, such as the Post Office, healthcare and public education. Also libraries, national parks and similar amenities which the private sector either can't or won't do. If you are making, for example, airplanes or rolling stock for trains, you need a factory with a (well paid, one hopes) skilled workforce and a functioning supply chain. Other products, food, to my mind, ought to be produced either locally or at most regionally. I consider it absolutely insane to be importing any foodstuffs that we can't grow here and we can just about grow anything, including tropical products in Hawaii and Puerto Rico, somewhere in the USA. And, some things are best done at home, if possible. I can make a garment that fits me exactly the size and shape I am right now today; I can't buy one.