Edit: Mods forgive me I posted debate bro shit - but it seemed justified in this case.
Well, what's important to capitalism is not just the "ownership" of the means of production in a technical sense, but also the relations of power that come with massive accumulation of capital relative to others. There's a couple of ways to make sense of this. Instead of writing a whole ass essay right now, I'll explain just one rebuttal.
Their argument is one of technicality, which is a very lawyerly thing to do haha. but that's not a materialist understanding of the situation. We have to look at the power relations that exist, not just what the rules say on paper. Consider a financial schema split between two partners where partner A owns 999,999 shares, and partner B owns 1 share. Sure, it's technically correct to say it's a partnership, and that there are owners of capital. Owning the means of production makes that person a capitalist. Owning share(s) is owning the means of production. Both A and B own share(s). Ergo, both A and B are capitalists. The argument is logically valid!There's no distinction to be made! We must rejoice for Communism has been defeated! Perhaps you've already guessed, but there's more to the story than just that reductive logic. Control enough capital, and you have de facto control over all of the capital. B's 1 share will never override any decision by A's 999,999. A difference in quantity can in fact become a difference in quality.
In the US, The richest 1% own 50% of the stock market, and the richest 10% own almost 90% . Realistically, only the richest 10% have any real claim to being capitalists, with there being a huge difference in power between petty bourgeois wealth/power and B I G bourgeois wealth/power. Marxism explains that too - over time petty bourgeois get gobbled up by the tendency towards monopolization and forced back into the proletariat. Look at the rapid consolidation of wealth in the neo-liberal world, and you see that in action. The big recessions hurt the petty bourgeois and working class, and the big banks/financial capitalists win out. Fundamentally, your friends' argument that there's no difference ignores the material realities of the situation, the grand majority of people in the US own little to nothing, and subsequently have no control over of the means of production.
No owning stock does not make you a capitalist. A stock is simply a portion of a company and it's fractionalized worth that allows the owner of the stock to vote for the leadership of the corporation it belongs to. It's a simple voting system where one stock unit equals one vote.
Here's what separates folks you, me, and your grandparents who own some stocks as a light supplement to living off of the fruits of our labour, and the capitalists who've accumulated enough wealth that they can buy large swaths of stock and live off of the interest that those stocks provide.
We live and die by our work. The capitalists thrive off of our work and face being turned back into a worker if they fail to perpetuate their sizable wealth.
thats like tying a whale to a sinking ship and calling it a land animal
You can point out how while it is technically true, the vast amount of shares are owned by the upper 1% and the people actually working there will own a tiny tiny tiny fraction, if at all. The more shares you own in a company, the more power you have over it so workers don't actually have any control in how the company is run.
Every person I know who buy shares do it because they worry about having a stable source of income because of how fucked the job market is and not because they're sadistic assholes who chase after bigger numbers. If we had a fair system to begin with, no one would need to invest in the first.
People always seem to expect ideological purism from leftists, but themselves are rarely pure to their beliefs. I know a libertarian who uses a similar line of logic. However, they believe taxation is theft, yet they pay their taxes. 🤔 Leftists are required to be martyrs for our beliefs, but no one else is held to the same standard.
This is a disingenuous argument by your friends that betrays a mechanical understanding of the world. Yes "owning" financial instruments does 'legally' give you some measure of ownership of a company, but functionally you really have no control over the shares of the stock. This is not an accident, as the law is was written with the intention of ensuring that these stockholders would be silent partners. Much of the post Great society retirement scams have been built around primarily not giving people vehicles to save for retirement but giving free capital to companies, the mechanisms of which are largely obscured by the system. For example if your company opens a 401k for you when you start working there, unless you take the time to go through the headache of decoding the financialease and mapping out their purposefully labyrinthine website, your retirement funds will almost always be allocated in a manner that helps the company; in some cases it will be entirely invested in the company itself. This is one reason companies dont mind giving their employees investment matching as it is basically a free bump to their stock prices.
Additionally even if you ignore these sorts of shenanigans, most people dont actually manage the funds themselves, they are either managed by the company or a fund manager, who has no fiduciary responsibility to your financial well being. Finally the social legal reality of any sort of worker owned fund is reveled in bankruptcy(in murica though I imagine it isn't much different in other capitalist hell holes). When a company goes bankrupt employee pensions are almost always last in line for restitution from the sale of company assets. This means that those most responsible for bad management, those who own the stock, will always be made whole on the backs of the worker retirement funds.
Basically I would tell your friends to grow up, learn some dialectics and stop thinking like children.
