> Contributing to a 401k that's invested in an index fund

At an earlier point in my life I used to believe in this, what some people will call things like "shareholder democracy". I've changed my tune on this. I now think it's incredibly destructive to society in the same way that private property is destructive because the majority of people are homeowners.

Why? Because it fools people to think they're beneficiaries of the system when they're really not. If you own a house, it serves a basic need. If you buy your house for $200k and it goes up to $500k, you haven't really gained anything if every house has increased in value similarly. You still need one unit of housing to live in.

Compare that to someone owning 1000 houses. Well they've just made a huge profit. So the entire housing prices always going up thing is just theft from the next generation. It's creating massive personal wealth at the expensive of a lifetime of debt for many.

401ks have the same effect on the stockmarket. You might think of yourself as a capital owner because you own a few shares of Amazon but you're not. A capital owner, by definition, derives wealth from their capital. A worker derives wealth from their labor. Note that someone like LeBron James is a worker in this scenario. Another myth is that socialism is a poverty cult. It is not.

Anyway, so we have a government that become sinvested in keeping the stockmarket going up. This benefits a few capital owners disproportionately and creates lots of negative externalities as we allow capital owners to skirt safety, steal from workers, steal from the government and so on all because governments become afraid that the stockmarket might go down. Doubling your Amazon shares from $100k to $200k doesn't substantially change your life. Bezos going from $100 billion to $200 billion creates massive problems.

> Employers granting shares to employees.

This is a little different and depends on the scale. As tech workers, getting RSUs in Amaazon or Google has the same (negative) effects as a 401k and allows Larry Page and Sergey Brin to accumulate $100B+ for really no reason.

But if the share is more substantial and/or the ownership is mostly or wholly worker-owned then you've arrived at the workers owning the means of production.

This can happen at scale. Consider Mondragon Corporation in Spain [1].

> Do you have a preferred approach

It's a difficult question because the money from the wealthy corrupts every facet of government and life. Consider something as simple as giving people Internet access. The best solution, and it's not even close, is municipal broadband. Yet we have national ISPs that have successfully lobbied to make this illegal in many states.

Likewise, we have a government that tends to bail out failing businesses rather than doing what they should do and simply nationalizing them. Imagine where we'd be if, after the 2008 GFC, the banks who had created this problem were nationalized and instead re-organized as community owned and operated banks.

America has become very anti-labor. Again this was by design. Union membership sits around 10-11% IIRC. We have a society that celebrates hyper-individualism when collectivism would benefit everybody. People delude themselves into thinking they can individually negotiate with trillion dollar companies and come out ahead. Even if you're in a high-demand field like tech, that power you may think you have is fleeting. Big Tech is doing everything they can do undermine labor and suppress wages, including the current trend for permanent layoffs (ie constantly laying off ~5% of their workforce).

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-be...