7 ms·

Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first pla

Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first place, hence the 'seizing' part.

kortilla 7y ago
Yet all of the modern means of production stemmed from no means of production... hmmm. People create all of the time with extremely limited resources. Especially ones that haven’t been seized.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  How would you go about building your own means of production for creating modern computers?
  - taneq 7y ago
    It took a large part of modern industry working cooperatively for decades to build the tooling to make ICs. If your commune wants to make a similar effort then there’s nothing stopping you. If you don’t then you’re not entitled to own a chip fab.
    - tsimionescu 7y ago
      Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is some rich daughter entitled to own a chip fab? Because she is in the current system, while anyone else would have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one.
      - kortilla 7y ago
        > Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is anyone entitled to own food? If someone invests their resources to have something built (or help make it themselves), why wouldn’t they be entitled to own it? The rich daughter gets to own it because that’s what the owner wanted and the thing about owning something generally is deciding its fate. If someone builds themselves a house out of wood they chop from trees they grew, do they get to keep it? What if they exchanged goods and services for the wood instead? What if they also exchanged goods and services to have someone else build it who needs the goods and services. > have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one. So? That’s how many of the successful chip fabs existed. What’s your proposed alternative when 10,000 people want chip fabs and there are only 200 for you to steal? The government seizing them certainly doesn’t make more and it completely discouraged anybody from wanting to invest their time/labor/money into building new ones.
        tsimionescu 7y ago
        My proposal is that no one person is entitled to own vastly expensive items that required the work of countless people to create. Those items should generally be collectively owned by the people who designed and built them. The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them (which includes marketing and sales people and whatever else is needed), in some democratically chosen percentage. I said nothing about the state in this. I am still talking exclusively about private property. And as for food, I believe people are entitled to life, and by implication to anything required to sustain it, such as food, medication, water, air etc. The exact means for realizing this entitlement (free food? UBI? I don't know) are not clear, but the fact that you can starve to death in a country with enough food to feed the whole medieval world is a travesty.
        imtringued 7y ago
        >The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them Well, economic theory says that the profits should approach zero as more and more competitors join the market and the provided goods or services become commodities. This effectively is a redistribution mechanism. The reality is a bit uglier. By the way, prevention of wealth accumulation doesn't require repossession of existing property. A simple redistribution policy could dictate that a single person is not allowed to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parents. This forces parents to have two children and split the wealth. After a few generations the children will have 25%, 12%, 6% of the original wealth and so on. There are still ways to exploit this if the siblings are colluding but let's be serious. If your family is rich and owns 50 billion dollars. Would you prefer $25 billion or $0 billion for the sake of higher generational wealth? My point is that you need to create policies that even rich people would agree with.
        ctdonath 7y ago
        Not yours to “not allow”.
        pmiller2 7y ago
      - imtringued 7y ago
        >Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? If I make a coffee why should I be entitled to drink it? Well it's obvious. I bought the ingredients, heated water, etc... I consumed my own resources to make the coffee. If I don't own the end result then by making coffee I am just harming myself. >while anyone else would have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one. So would the rich daughter. A chip fab requires external funding. This means the rich daughter has to obtain credit from a bank. In an ideal world the bank is itself funded by the depositors which have agreed to let their bank lend the money out. (in reality the central bank offers low % credit to encourage this)
        tsimionescu 7y ago
        There are people rich enough in this world that they could probably buy a chip fab 'money down' from their own finances. If that is somehow exaggerated, there are certainly people rich enough that they could buy, say, a shoe factory, or a brewery. The point still stands. Also, even if you involve a bank: the rich daughter can get credit to buy a factory, while the worker in the factory certainly could not.
      - taneq 7y ago
        Ok so they do that, they organise people and get everyone working together (which, while it’s not generally acknowledged in this kind of conversation, IS work and DOES count as creating value) and by the time they’re old, they own a chip fab. That’s ok, right? It’s fair? If they build it, or pay other people to build it in a fair trade of money for services, then they own it? So if they own it, they can do what they like with it. Including give it to their daughter.
        tsimionescu 7y ago
        No. They can't give it to their daughter, because it's not their factory: it's in the ownership of everyone who participated, since we were assuming no capital to start with. If you aren't born with capital, and don't win the lottery, you can't pay people to build something for you. You can work very hard, together with other people, and build something as a community. This is difficult and almost never happens in practice, as it requires extreme dedication and some alternate revenue stream to be able to live until the thing being built is done and can be used to produce ongoing value. But when this does happen, the end result is in the ownership of the community, it is not any one member's to give away or sell. Alternatively, if you are born with wealth, you can dispense with all that effort, and simply invest several fractions of your wealth in things until you hit on one thing that you can collect rent from. Sure, you'll do some work, but the money accumulated by your ancestors, often built on slave labor, monopolies, theft and other nice things, will do most of the work for you.
        pmiller2 7y ago
        If by "organize people," you mean induce people to work for them then, no, that is not work. That is using the coercive nature of capitalism (work or starve/be homeless/die) against workers.
tathougies 7y ago
But all humans of sufficient ability (except those with extreme mental handicap) have innate means of production. Even those who have lost use of their limbs have an innate means of production via their minds in the form of intellectual property. Honestly, even many with mental disability but physically capable are capable of producing value from relatively little.
- Klinky 7y ago
  Your bar is too low if you think that things are okay because "you can always become a starving artist".
  - tathougies 7y ago
    No need to starve. Just make something people want. You can do ghostwriting or content writing with few materials. You can become a personal assistant if you can answer a phone. You can, with labor, and ready materials(garbage for example) make a lot of things people want
  - taneq 7y ago
    More like “you can get a job and use the money you earn to buy tools.”
    - Klinky 7y ago
      Unless the job you get doesn't provide enough money to buy these tools, or there is a general lack of labor opportunities. This is a reality for a large portion of the current population. So it's not an innate ability to create value really that matters, it's the ability to navigate a system with many gatekeepers who have entrenched interests, and where not everyone is starting from the same spot, but we should pretend they are, and pretend that all wealth accumulated is justified. Let's not question the means to that wealth or its ramifications on society as a whole.
      - tathougies 7y ago
sdfin 7y ago
How did the first means of production appear?
- hollerith 7y ago
  The first capitalists stole it from the poor people :)

Not so sure you understand what means of production are. You cannot build more means of production without having access to means of production in the first place, hence the 'seizing' part.

kortilla 7y ago

Yet all of the modern means of production stemmed from no means of production... hmmm. People create all of the time with extremely limited resources. Especially ones that haven’t been seized.

pmiller2 7y ago
How would you go about building your own means of production for creating modern computers?
- taneq 7y ago
  It took a large part of modern industry working cooperatively for decades to build the tooling to make ICs. If your commune wants to make a similar effort then there’s nothing stopping you. If you don’t then you’re not entitled to own a chip fab.
  - tsimionescu 7y ago
    Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is some rich daughter entitled to own a chip fab? Because she is in the current system, while anyone else would have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      > Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? Why is anyone entitled to own food? If someone invests their resources to have something built (or help make it themselves), why wouldn’t they be entitled to own it? The rich daughter gets to own it because that’s what the owner wanted and the thing about owning something generally is deciding its fate. If someone builds themselves a house out of wood they chop from trees they grew, do they get to keep it? What if they exchanged goods and services for the wood instead? What if they also exchanged goods and services to have someone else build it who needs the goods and services. > have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one. So? That’s how many of the successful chip fabs existed. What’s your proposed alternative when 10,000 people want chip fabs and there are only 200 for you to steal? The government seizing them certainly doesn’t make more and it completely discouraged anybody from wanting to invest their time/labor/money into building new ones.
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        My proposal is that no one person is entitled to own vastly expensive items that required the work of countless people to create. Those items should generally be collectively owned by the people who designed and built them. The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them (which includes marketing and sales people and whatever else is needed), in some democratically chosen percentage. I said nothing about the state in this. I am still talking exclusively about private property. And as for food, I believe people are entitled to life, and by implication to anything required to sustain it, such as food, medication, water, air etc. The exact means for realizing this entitlement (free food? UBI? I don't know) are not clear, but the fact that you can starve to death in a country with enough food to feed the whole medieval world is a travesty.
        imtringued 7y ago
        >The profits from operating them should go to the people operating them Well, economic theory says that the profits should approach zero as more and more competitors join the market and the provided goods or services become commodities. This effectively is a redistribution mechanism. The reality is a bit uglier. By the way, prevention of wealth accumulation doesn't require repossession of existing property. A simple redistribution policy could dictate that a single person is not allowed to inherit more than 50% of the wealth of their parents. This forces parents to have two children and split the wealth. After a few generations the children will have 25%, 12%, 6% of the original wealth and so on. There are still ways to exploit this if the siblings are colluding but let's be serious. If your family is rich and owns 50 billion dollars. Would you prefer $25 billion or $0 billion for the sake of higher generational wealth? My point is that you need to create policies that even rich people would agree with.
        ctdonath 7y ago
        Not yours to “not allow”.
        pmiller2 7y ago
    - imtringued 7y ago
      >Why is anyone entitled to own a chip fab? If I make a coffee why should I be entitled to drink it? Well it's obvious. I bought the ingredients, heated water, etc... I consumed my own resources to make the coffee. If I don't own the end result then by making coffee I am just harming myself. >while anyone else would have to work their whole lives, and convince hundreds of others to work with them, to create a chip fab, if they wanted to own one. So would the rich daughter. A chip fab requires external funding. This means the rich daughter has to obtain credit from a bank. In an ideal world the bank is itself funded by the depositors which have agreed to let their bank lend the money out. (in reality the central bank offers low % credit to encourage this)
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        There are people rich enough in this world that they could probably buy a chip fab 'money down' from their own finances. If that is somehow exaggerated, there are certainly people rich enough that they could buy, say, a shoe factory, or a brewery. The point still stands. Also, even if you involve a bank: the rich daughter can get credit to buy a factory, while the worker in the factory certainly could not.
    - taneq 7y ago
      Ok so they do that, they organise people and get everyone working together (which, while it’s not generally acknowledged in this kind of conversation, IS work and DOES count as creating value) and by the time they’re old, they own a chip fab. That’s ok, right? It’s fair? If they build it, or pay other people to build it in a fair trade of money for services, then they own it? So if they own it, they can do what they like with it. Including give it to their daughter.
      - tsimionescu 7y ago
        No. They can't give it to their daughter, because it's not their factory: it's in the ownership of everyone who participated, since we were assuming no capital to start with. If you aren't born with capital, and don't win the lottery, you can't pay people to build something for you. You can work very hard, together with other people, and build something as a community. This is difficult and almost never happens in practice, as it requires extreme dedication and some alternate revenue stream to be able to live until the thing being built is done and can be used to produce ongoing value. But when this does happen, the end result is in the ownership of the community, it is not any one member's to give away or sell. Alternatively, if you are born with wealth, you can dispense with all that effort, and simply invest several fractions of your wealth in things until you hit on one thing that you can collect rent from. Sure, you'll do some work, but the money accumulated by your ancestors, often built on slave labor, monopolies, theft and other nice things, will do most of the work for you.
      - pmiller2 7y ago
        If by "organize people," you mean induce people to work for them then, no, that is not work. That is using the coercive nature of capitalism (work or starve/be homeless/die) against workers.

tathougies 7y ago

But all humans of sufficient ability (except those with extreme mental handicap) have innate means of production. Even those who have lost use of their limbs have an innate means of production via their minds in the form of intellectual property. Honestly, even many with mental disability but physically capable are capable of producing value from relatively little.

Klinky 7y ago
Your bar is too low if you think that things are okay because "you can always become a starving artist".
- tathougies 7y ago
  No need to starve. Just make something people want. You can do ghostwriting or content writing with few materials. You can become a personal assistant if you can answer a phone. You can, with labor, and ready materials(garbage for example) make a lot of things people want
- taneq 7y ago
  More like “you can get a job and use the money you earn to buy tools.”
  - Klinky 7y ago
    Unless the job you get doesn't provide enough money to buy these tools, or there is a general lack of labor opportunities. This is a reality for a large portion of the current population. So it's not an innate ability to create value really that matters, it's the ability to navigate a system with many gatekeepers who have entrenched interests, and where not everyone is starting from the same spot, but we should pretend they are, and pretend that all wealth accumulated is justified. Let's not question the means to that wealth or its ramifications on society as a whole.
    - tathougies 7y ago

sdfin 7y ago

How did the first means of production appear?

hollerith 7y ago
The first capitalists stole it from the poor people :)