You really are demonstrating a complete lack of familiarity with the topic while trying to defend small business owners. Small businesses that hire employees are exploiting workers and stealing the surplus value from their labor just like giant corporations do, full stop. You might have a leg to stand on if you were referring exclusively to co-ops but even those are rife with issues under capitalism (I wrote some about co-ops in another comment) and can only be said to have control over the tiniest fraction of the means of production. Socialism is the proletariat as a class owning the means of production and small business owners are by definition part of the capitalist class - this is about society as a whole, not 3 or 4 guys getting together to buy some machines (owning a lil slice of the MoP) they then use to exploit the people hired to work those machines. Even if those 3 or 4 guys chip in with the work, it’s irrelevant. That’s literally the problem, not the solution.


All of this is just scratching the surface on correcting the misunderstandings you’ve displayed. I don’t have the time or inclination to go into all those corrections and I think it’s safe to say the same is true of OP. If u/Cowbee was in this thread, he would probably be willing to go into it for you but I’m not going to bug him with a ping. However I couldn’t stop you from DMing him if you were genuinely interested in learning. Or you can just check out his reading list which I would encourage any lurking readers, since you mentioned them, to do as well.