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You can get pretty comfortable (rich for most people's definition) just being average and capturing a small part of a market. I guess one could stretch the defi

by vasco 7y ago

You can get pretty comfortable (rich for most people's definition) just being average and capturing a small part of a market. I guess one could stretch the definition of "ownership of means of production" but I'm not sure that's what you meant by it. Specially in the internet age the bar is much lower to be able to participate in the market like this.

madaxe_again 7y ago
It really depends on how you define rich. I think the traditional concept of “having enough assets work for you that you do not have to” (i.e. the idle rich) is the correct bar, but we often mean mega-rich now (centimillionaires+) when we say rich. I ran a small business you’ve never heard of, and left it four years ago with a not huge (<£1M) amount of money - but it was enough for me to acquire enough working assets that I have been able to retire from having to work in my early 30’s. I spend less than the assets earn, and because I’m free from having to work, I’m able to live in an inexpensive country, where my purchasing power is huge - freeing yourself from direct labour is the dividing line in my view - and you can get there by eschewing depreciating assets and instead acquiring earning assets. I don’t own a helicopter, I don’t have a yacht, my car is a beat up 1988 hilux - I could have those things, but then I would be poor again. I did spend a lot on coffee, while running the business, admittedly.
ajross 7y ago
"Capturing a small part of a market" is literally the definition of "ownership of means of production"! I get that political history makes discussion of Marx's ideas a ridiculous hot potato. But the actual economics behind it is pretty banal and uncontroversial. If you own a business you can get rich without bound (or bounded only by the size of the relevant market), and if you don't you're trapped at whatever the market has set for wages in your profession. That's, really, just sort of a "duh" point. This very website is effectively dedicated to that exact pursuit! "Make things people want so you can hack the system, find an exit and get rich" is just a restatement of "the bourgeoisie can lift themselves above the proletariat by ownership of the means of production" from the bourgeois perspective. Whether that is good or bad, or deserves a revolution to adjust, is sort of a different issue. But no one seriously argues with the facts here.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  Well, in tech "means of production" is mostly a brain.
  - lidHanteyk 7y ago
    "In a knowledge economy, computers and networks are means of production." [0] In our world, datacenters and fiber backbones are the primary infrastructure upon which we depend. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production
  - ajross 7y ago
    Actually no. If you work for, say, Facebook, and use your brain to do ML image recognition analysis, you get paid wages. They're good wages, but they're still wages and you don't get more unless the market decides that machine learning geeks need to be paid more. You don't own the means of production. Zuckerberg et. al. do. And nothing changes that, no matter how high your wages are and how big your brain is. If you work for facebook you get paid market wages and all the excess profit (and more importantly control over how new investments are spent) goes to someone else. And the point of communism (informed by late 19th century industrialization) was that this imbalance leads to inevitable injustice as proletarian wages get pushed ever lower by increasing automation and centralization. It wasn't even wrong, really, though it doesn't have much relevance to tech jobs today. But to confuse "a brain" with "the means of production" is fundamentally missing the point of the concept.

by vasco 7y ago

madaxe_again 7y ago

It really depends on how you define rich. I think the traditional concept of “having enough assets work for you that you do not have to” (i.e. the idle rich) is the correct bar, but we often mean mega-rich now (centimillionaires+) when we say rich. I ran a small business you’ve never heard of, and left it four years ago with a not huge (<£1M) amount of money - but it was enough for me to acquire enough working assets that I have been able to retire from having to work in my early 30’s. I spend less than the assets earn, and because I’m free from having to work, I’m able to live in an inexpensive country, where my purchasing power is huge - freeing yourself from direct labour is the dividing line in my view - and you can get there by eschewing depreciating assets and instead acquiring earning assets. I don’t own a helicopter, I don’t have a yacht, my car is a beat up 1988 hilux - I could have those things, but then I would be poor again. I did spend a lot on coffee, while running the business, admittedly.

ajross 7y ago

"Capturing a small part of a market" is literally the definition of "ownership of means of production"! I get that political history makes discussion of Marx's ideas a ridiculous hot potato. But the actual economics behind it is pretty banal and uncontroversial. If you own a business you can get rich without bound (or bounded only by the size of the relevant market), and if you don't you're trapped at whatever the market has set for wages in your profession. That's, really, just sort of a "duh" point. This very website is effectively dedicated to that exact pursuit! "Make things people want so you can hack the system, find an exit and get rich" is just a restatement of "the bourgeoisie can lift themselves above the proletariat by ownership of the means of production" from the bourgeois perspective. Whether that is good or bad, or deserves a revolution to adjust, is sort of a different issue. But no one seriously argues with the facts here.

BurningFrog 7y ago
Well, in tech "means of production" is mostly a brain.
- lidHanteyk 7y ago
  "In a knowledge economy, computers and networks are means of production." [0] In our world, datacenters and fiber backbones are the primary infrastructure upon which we depend. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Means_of_production
- ajross 7y ago
  Actually no. If you work for, say, Facebook, and use your brain to do ML image recognition analysis, you get paid wages. They're good wages, but they're still wages and you don't get more unless the market decides that machine learning geeks need to be paid more. You don't own the means of production. Zuckerberg et. al. do. And nothing changes that, no matter how high your wages are and how big your brain is. If you work for facebook you get paid market wages and all the excess profit (and more importantly control over how new investments are spent) goes to someone else. And the point of communism (informed by late 19th century industrialization) was that this imbalance leads to inevitable injustice as proletarian wages get pushed ever lower by increasing automation and centralization. It wasn't even wrong, really, though it doesn't have much relevance to tech jobs today. But to confuse "a brain" with "the means of production" is fundamentally missing the point of the concept.