It’s really pretty simple:
Capitalism is a system where private individuals are free to trade with one another in an open marketplace. They are free to keep the profits from those trades, accumulate capital, and invest it in businesses in return for partial or complete ownership.
Capitalists are therefore people who use capital to invest in the means of production, with the expectation that they will be able to own those means of production and profit from the sale of the resultant sale of the goods and services they produced.
Now, if you set up a business as a collective, the interior structure of that business may be different than the typical capitalist enterprise. But to the outside world, there is no difference.
If Collectives were competitive in the open marketplace, you would see more collectively-owned businesses. Since you don’t, the only way you could get to a place where all businesses were worker collectives would be to mandate it by law. You’d need to prevent the accumulation of capital by taxing it away from anyone who collects more money than they ‘should’. You would have to prevent individuals from using their capital to set up companies that are not employee owned.
If you do that, you no longer have a free market, and you no longer have capitalism.
Brainglutton appears to think that there’s a big difference in behavior of worker-owned companies vs companies in which the person with capital owns the company and hires the workers for a salary. I don’t see it. He seems to think that such companies would be better stewards of the environment, would act more ethically, and in someway contribute to a new form of quasi-socialist capitalism in which there’s technically a free market, but really the workers of the world are just using the market to bind their collectives together in a large conglomeration of workers. Or something.
History suggests that that simply isn’t the case. Once you get past the smallest of organizations, you can no longer manage it collectively. You need to establish hierarchies to allow decisions to be made. You need to have leaders who can speak for the company and make deals and sign contracts. These people in responsibility generally expect to be paid more. Eventually, you wind up with a corporate structure that looks pretty much like any other corporate structure.
Hell, even within labor unions themselves hierarchies develop. Have you seen how much money big labor bosses make? And while members do vote on major contracts affecting them, the day-to-day decisions of the union are made by the leadership. And if you think union leaders are somehow more community-minded or ethical than business leaders, you haven’t paid much attention. There are a lot of former labor leaders in jail for unethical behavior.
Brainglutton seems to think that there is a path to utopia or at least a much better world that can be attained if only we find a way to give workers all the power. Communism has failed, Socialism isn’t doing so hot, so now terms are being redefined and the big thinkers in the collectivist movement are trying to invent new ways of stripping power from the current capitalists and giving it to the workers under the theory that workers are more deserving and better people. They know that Socialism and Communism have largely discredited themselves, so they’re trying to build this brave new world under the banner of free markets - a newer, better kind of free market that is owned and controlled by the ‘workers’.
But you can’t avoid the rules of economics and human behavior. Humans respond to inecntives. Power corrupts. People are not equal in intelligence or work ethic. So no matter what kind of system you start out with, you’ll wind up with 80% of the wealth being controlled by 20% of the people. The Soviet Union had equality of income - but factory owners got ‘use’ of government provided summer homes. Politicians rode around in state-provided ZIL limousines and could shop at department stores not open to ‘the people’.
Whenever a system comes along that attempts to use force to organize people into ‘better’ ways of living that deny the reality of incentives and human behavior, the result is ultimately a tragedy.