I never said when mass production "began." That would be an idle inquiry. The important event was Ford's realizing that the technologies of production had so outstripped the technologies of demand that the latter needed to be addressed by capitalists like him to maximize the profits of capitalists like him. That disparity gave workers bargaining power, which they used quite effectively until globalization put them back behind the eight ball.

There never was a class struggle. There were just people with more or less bargaining power than those with whom they dealt. Post hoc, we can put the winners and losers in "classes," but membership always depended on having or not having something to offer, be it labor or direction. To a logician, there is no difference between the entrepreneur hiring workers to make stuff and the workers hiring the entrepreneur to tell him what stuff to make. And politics always exists to tilt or level the playing field.

I am amused by the discussion of Wakefield in the original article. His understanding, which I have no reason to doubt, is that the government of England planned the economy of Australia. That is not capitalism. That is central planning, like the sort of thing now known as financial repression. Under a capitalist system, land would be priced by the market, but, Holy Adam Smith, Batman, don't you know the price would have settled where the opportunity to buy some land after a tolerable number of years of working would be just right to attract enough workers to make owning the land profitable. That's the sort of equilibration that capitalism is all about. Because that was the plan, the government was really doing what the market would have done anyway, so saying that the price set by the government is "independent" of supply and demand completely misunderstands how supply and demand work.

A 401(k) investor is a capitalist as I use that term, if not one as you use it. That's semantics, not economics. I define a capitalist as the supplier of capital who takes out the last dollar of revenue after everyone else has been paid. A 401(k) investor fits that description. That employee-capitalist may not sit on a corporate board, but the trustee of his fund may indeed wield some power there on the employee's behalf as a capitalist. And the small investor exploits whomever his enterprise exploits as surely as the robber baron who operates with fewer intermediaries.

I do take your point, though, about depriving workers of the means to be self-sufficient. There is no expectation that a self-sufficient potential worker would be an entrepreneur, just that he wouldn't need a job. I'm not persuaded of the intelligent design behind this bit of alienation, but I can't read your linked article on the subject, as it requires me to sign up for something I don't want to sign up for. It is, however, I believe, an obsolete conceit in the industrialized West.

Manderville is certainly right that if everyone were paid enough not to need to work, no one would work. But then, no one would make anything, and nothing could be bought. Sounds a bit like the barber's paradox to me. It hardly seems like a knock on capitalism that it causes things to be made, because the alternative - "they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work" - is hardly an improvement. Manderville describes the human condition, not the abuses of capitalism.