My post was a bit of a rant, admittedly. I am reading Das Kapital now and have found it useful - I am an engineer, so yes, "central planning" is a unrealistic ideal (how does the behavior or organization of the Federal Reserve not fall under "central planning"?) But as a work of philosophy, the ideas in Das Kapital are useful - labor theory of value, productive / unproductive labor, etc. My first draft got long, so I'll try to keep this short.

As for your situation, it to me seems more like the corrupt quasi-totalitarian system involving oligarchs and Ayn Rand's "moochers" and etc - crony capitalism? It doesn't sound anything marxist to me - the Soviet Union was not communism, despite whatever they claimed. And America is hardly a democracy... People are fundamentally corrupt, especially when there is money and power involved.

Re: "control of the means of production" - let me explain it this way. In London, I got hired to build a website and somehow it turned into me being employee-ish #1 (and the only one) for a B2B startup. In my contract (one for contractors) was a clause about my ability to stop work and demand payment for late invoices at any time. But IT startup culture is not really like that - you get the job done, right? It is hard, and professionalism counts for everything. So in my mind, it was the nuclear option - I need to use that, then the relationship with my client has irrevocably broken down because step 2 is calling in the lawyers. But the CEO of this startup, who is a lazy, shiftless, and sociopathic bastard, leveraged that work ethic to the point where he was refusing to pay everyone's invoices (me and the salesguys) - "cash flow problems". But we still kept working, to keep the company running. While this bastard took skiing vacations - he and the other founder did very little work, really. All they did was put up a bunch of cash and had an idea and no skill what so ever relevant for the task, except how to exploit the workers and scam the customers with badly written contracts.

It all came to a head when one customer threatened to sue - he'd been flat out lied to about the nature of the data he was being sold. I fixed the situation - I was the engineer - and then demanded payment. They point blank told me to go fuck myself, deliberately breaching the contract.

This is when I realized I 'control the means of production' - I was the -only- person in this 5person company who could do anything useful of value. I was the one generating all the value (the code, the systems). I was labor and had been fucked over by capital, who brought nothing to the table except money. They didn't even bring a work ethic. Well, the salesguys, but their function was to take my output and get customers interested in it. All capital did was think up ways to exploit both customers and workers. So I controlled the means (because everything I did was the foundation of the company) and I did not use that power to my benefit to counteract the predations of the evil capitalist pig I was dealing with. I should have gone on strike; that's what that clause in the contract was for. But middle class white collar Americans don't have that mentality, and especially IT people. My introduction to the real world utility of Marxist philosophy was a harsh one...

Fundamentally, my mistake was not realizing I was my own corporation, and not an employee, and so had the responsibility of acting as sociopathic as need be in order to deal with 'corporations' or people who are doing the same. I hate doing that - it is not in my nature or mentality. I guess mentally, I am more working class. I prefer to cooperate with people than exploit them and I would guess this goes for most people in IT.

So what are you producing that other people higher up in the hierarchy are appropriating for their own and exclusive benefit? It sounds like you have decided to become capital yourself, which I encourage - today's ethos of engineers starting their own companies is a good thing, one that really wasn't happening when I started in IT. So hopefully the lazy capitalist pigs who do nothing but exploit labor can be cut out of the equation eventually... But don't exploit the people who work for you!