If a landlord owns 500 homes and tenants pay off the mortgage, maintain the place, and generate the income stream, who is really taking from whom?
"Seizing" kind of sounds like theft. If McDonald's employees at one shop in Pasadena Texas suddenly stopped sending money up the chain, isn't that theft of that particular McDonald's shop? I say no, because the theft has already occurred, but legally: faceless profiteers at wherever McDonald's is headquartered stole the land from the locals in Pasadena for the purpose of generating profits for people in NYC. Their labor and the surplus value of same is stolen to actualize and maintain those profits.
"But McDonald's provided the equipment, training, advertising!" Yes, and long after the value of that equipment, training, and advertising is "paid off" (the given franchise has achieved profitability), the headquarters will continue to steal surplus value from the local workers. Indefinitely.
Why don't Pasadena McDonald's employees just build/buy their own equipment, start their own burger shop, call it something other than McDonald's? Because society is designed to serve the needs of McDonald's shareholders, not Pasadena minimum wage McDonald's employees: they could never get together the kind of capital needed to do so. Get a loan, investment? Sure, now they're in the same situation: someone is extracting the surplus profit off their labor, and nobody's gonna go for a loan to a bunch of minimum wage Pasadenans without a very juicy potential profit margin.
Capitalism is structured around exclusion: capital, land, patents, credit, licenses, distribution networks, rent, and monopoly advantages are already controlled. The era of "just compete with McDonald's" is long dead.
> Is seizing the means of production not equivalent to starting a company and stealing things others have built for the company to get started with?
So to answer your original question, "seizing the means of production" doesn't mean "starting a company." Within the context of capitalism, you could do what I did and start a co-op, which is a worker-owned entity where profits are distributed equally, so no theft of surplus. However that's not a sustainable solution to the overall problem of capitalism because we will never have the kind of capital accumulation that allows much larger companies to start influencing governments or engage in lawfare. If AKQA decides to eat us, there's not much we can do to stop them. Also all institutions of capitalism are against us: nobody wants to give us loans or an investment, it's stupid hard to navigate bureaucracy, the very formation mechanisms are so much more complicated than when a business is a simple minority shareholder owned corp. On the other hand our members make way more than local rates (3x, sometimes more) and are much happier than AKQA folks, and our client outcomes are phenomenal, so idk, everyone should convert their business to a co-op.
Sorry, rambling. Seizing the means of production doesn't mean taking people's toothbrushes, it means abolishing the right of an owner class to control the productive infrastructure everyone depends on and extract profit from other people’s labor simply because their name is on a piece of paper.
Means of production: land, factories, warehouses, tools, machines, logistics networks, software infrastructure, housing, energy systems, water systems.
Seizing means transferring control away of the means of production from distant profiteers, to the people who actually build, operate, and maintain those means.
Incidentally this shifts priorities away from pure profit and usually to things that are better for the workers and users: compare the incentives and impacts of Linux versus those of Microsoft.
Seizing can look like: occupying, collectivizing, expropriating, squatting, unionizing, converting firms to worker control, building commons, abolishing intellectual property, refusing rent, creating parallel distribution systems, and making capitalist ownership unenforceable or irrelevant.