[briandear]

“Workers” aren’t some monolithic group. Individuals can certainly optimize for their own best interests. We don’t see ourselves as victims in a collective but individuals all pursuing our own goals. My goals aren’t necessarily the same as the person sitting next to me. Why should that guy have a voice in my compensation?

[minimuffins]

> “Workers” aren’t some monolithic group

Yes they are. We're all individuals and have different goals, wear different clothes, read different books, code in different editors, whatever, but objectively we all have something in common by way of being workers in the first place: we rely on wage labor to live.

And crucially: we don't own the means of production (or we'd be owners and not workers).

Why should "that guy" have a voice? Because our fortunes rise and fall together.

Frankly it boggles my mind to no end that tech workers, just because they're contingently pretty comfortable while riding the wave of an advantageous labor market that gives them a lot of (contingent) leverage at the moment, don't understand that they (as single, individual people !) aren't standing as equals against like Alphabet, Inc. an institution that brings in double digit billions per year, increasingly has its hands on levers of policy and culture around the world, etc.

[brippalcharrid]

> We don't own the means of production

You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard. Aren't the means of production increasingly our own brains? Can't computing resources be rented cheaply enough for the average person to bootstrap their own business ideas if they're worth pursuing? I'm puzzled to see stuff like this in the present day, I thought it had been discredited within Marx's own lifetime.

[minimuffins]

I wish there was a term for "means of production" that was clearer or more succinct but I don't know one. The term is sometimes a discourse killer because it triggers a kind of (understandable) reflexive distaste for extremism and a certain kind of annoying radical personality or whatever.

But whatever synonym we use for it, MoP is a concept that you can't really dispense with if you want to talk about this stuff productively. You don't have to buy into a Marxist worldview to use it.

I'll take a crack at a definition: The means of production is the conditions required for making the things that the economy makes, whatever that is. For oil production, it's land and mineral rights in oil rich areas, oil derricks, trucks, private roads, refineries, all the plant equipment to make a refinery work, tools, maintenance equipment, barrels..., I'm sure there's 65,000 more things...whatever happens to be required to convert dead dinosaurs into 10W30.

It sounds Marx-y, but it's a simple, straightforward idea.

In tech, MoP is things like intellectual property, data centers, etc. The lines are blurred a bit because when work takes place inside a worker's brain instead of in a mine or on a factory floor where workers push things around with brute physical force, it's not exactly clear who owns what. In my view that ambiguity is something employers have used to mystify the relationship between employer and worker. They try to convince us that we are all just working together to make the world better, and anyway, we're paid well enough so why complain and rock the boat?

But in the end the rules are the same. You can't make it in this system unless you own some means of production (or get access to them by starting a company of your own and becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it), or you work for someone who has them.

A related point is tech production is not actually as ethereal and abstract as it sounds. Yes, code is just a bunch of immaterial mental abstractions, in some sense, but it's useless without a shockingly large array of computers, buildings, massive data centers which are expensive, difficult and labor intensive to secure and maintain. They suck up a ton of electricity and water and require armed guards, etc. There's a huge amount of hidden physical infrastructure and somebody is going to own it. Whoever does will wield a ton of power in our society, especially as we become increasingly reliant on tech in our everyday lives.

[minimuffins]

As for whether Marx was "discredited" in his own lifetime, I don't know where people get that idea. I hear it or something like it all the time. Like him or not, he's a hugely influential thinker even today. So are most of his critics. It's hardly a settled issue.

But the idea of MoP isn't even part of the controversial parts of Marx. It's just a description about how part of capitalism works, as he saw it. The ideas he draws on in that analysis come largely from Ricardo and Smith, hardly "discredited" radicals.

[brippalcharrid]

> becoming a capitalist yourself--which is fine, but by definition not everyone can do it

This is where I was disagreeing in the comment above; I think the barrier is now so low to entering certain markets (eg. SaaS) that it's meaningless to talk about some of these concepts in terms that are artefacts of the 19th century. I also think that there are far more people who don't want to do it than who want to do it but are prevented from pursuing a more entrepreneurial lifestyle by their economic circumstances.

Datacenters are complex and expensive, but it's now very cheap (in some cases free) to rent resources in them, because they have been commoditized, so I don't think it makes sense to talk about them as a "means of production" that the dispossessed masses have been alienated from achieving their productive desires through. Free Software is another area over the last few decades where barriers to entry in technology have been removed. I doubt that there are too many budding entrepreneurs who are put off solely by the fees to license certain non-free codecs of private datasets in cases where these are the only codecs or datasets that could be used for their business idea.

Exceptions to this that I see would include regulatory moats that big incumbents are happy to help build, and a more general tendency for governments to favour regulating private enterprise and then to show partiality towards larger businesses in an attempt to simplify the resulting administration.

[sudosysgen]

The barrier to entry to those markets rises proportionally with saturation. By definition, it is completely impossible for everyone to become an entrepreneur, even in fields such as SaaS - as soon as it can be expected that competition will require you to scale to a level where you need one subordinate person to work for you.

Also, barrier to entry is a term that is also an artefact of the 19th century. Should we drop it? Of course not, it's useful. So is the distinction between owner and worker.

Empirically, for all this task about barriers to entry falling and everyone becoming an entrepreneur, the average size of a company has stayed about the same. Market and social forces are so that we will likely never have a society where everyone can be an entrepreneur. The reasons for this are complicated and go beyond "means of production", but it turns out those were also figured out somewhere in the 19th century, like many useful things.

[minimuffins]

> in terms that are artefacts of the 19th century

This is such a strange neophilic reflex that people have. So the words are from the 1840s. Frankly a bunch of the concepts are even older than that. And yet other concepts that are still pretty useful--geometry, say--are even older. We don't need to re-invent language every decade, and thank God for that. No inherent virtue in novelty.

---

It's easier to start a software company now. No one will dispute this. But there is more to the world economy than SaaS entrepreneurship. Covid has provided us with a great unwanted, illustrative example here: capitalist production still works basically the same way in 2021 as it did in 1848. Some of our supply chains are extremely fragile now though, in part due to their computerization and "rationalization" over the last decades.

Suddenly we need thousands of masks and ventilators and they're nowhere to be found. What the hell happened!? Perhaps we just didn't have enough PPE SaaSes yet?

Now we have a few different vaccines (which is great!) but we're having trouble producing and distributing them fast enough in high enough quantities. There is a NYT article out today on this very problem that did well on HN.

How could our economy which is, on paper at least, vastly more productive than it was 50 or 100 years ago, fail us so badly? I mean look how many SaaS entrepreneurs we have! Look how low the barriers to entry are!

The point I'm trying to make here is that the basic relations of capitalist economy still hold despite all the changes between the 19th century and now, including any new developments in centralization of tech infrastructure (you can call cloud computing "democratizing" if you want, but it's really centralization). It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production (it's still MoP, still has the same economic function, even though the centuries have changed) from big capitalists. So what. If you're not a SaaS entrepreneur (and I keep saying this: not everyone can be) and you want a say in the workplace, you still need a union.

But again, the demand for SaaSes and SaaS entrepreneurs is, well, shockingly high, at least to me, as it turns out, but it's not infinity. If everyone could just become a SaaS entrepreneur and we didn't ever need any normal industries with normal employees anymore, you might have a point. But in the real world people still have jobs and still need unions to bargain with employers that would always rather pay them less and give them less say.

I agree with you that SaaS entrepreneurs are not the dispossessed masses. If I have seemed to make that argument at any point, I regret the error.

[minimuffins]

> It's just easier and cheaper to become a small capitalist by renting some of the means of production...from big capitalists

Just to clarify: I really don't mean to sound like a nihilistic radical by pointing this stuff out. Capitalism has given us a lot of good and a lot of bad. That it's way easier to start a software company today and make a good life for yourself really is great. It just doesn't mean that anything fundamental has changed about the system.

[bergstromm466]

> > We don't own the means of production

> You're going to have to break that down for a 21st century software developer on a SV messageboard.

I love Wendy Liu's explanation on this, it's the best I've found:

"The Silicon Valley model of technological development is structurally flawed. It can’t simply be tweaked in a more socially beneficial direction, because it was never intended to be useful for all of society in the first place. At its core, it was always a class project, meant to advance the interests of capital. The founders and investors and engineers who dutifully keep the engines running may not deliberately be reinforcing class divides, but functionally, they are carrying out technological development in a way that enables capitalism’s desire for endless accumulation.

Consequently, fixing the problems with the tech industry requires revisiting the economic assumptions that underpin it. If technological development is to be truly liberating, it cannot be funded and developed by an imperial machine, driven by the hare-brained schemes of growth-hungry investors, and owned by a miniscule clique not accountable to broader society.

What’s needed instead is a movement to reclaim technology: to prevent its capture by capital, and direct it towards creating social value. Of course, the tech giants are not going to cede this ground easily. This is why the demand of the future will not be to tame or reform Silicon Valley, but to abolish it. For it to serve society, technology will have to be liberated from the constraints of corporate ownership and subjected to democracy.

If this is hard to imagine, it’s probably because we’re so used to the way technology works in today’s economy that most of us are unable to see beyond its horizons. But it’s time we started seeing Silicon Valley for what it really is: not separate from the economy, and not its saviour, but instead capitalism on steroids. All the negatives we associate with Silicon Valley — useless gadgets that no one needs, companies with billion-dollar valuations going up in smoke, exploitation of precarious workers — are a microcosm of a broader economic system. Abolishing Silicon Valley, then, means more than breaking up a few corporations; it’ll require a fundamental transformation of the economic structures that govern society.

Transformation

In the coming years you’ll read a lot of columns agonising over how to ‘fix’ Silicon Valley. Most will be technocratic, evacuating politics from the discussion. This is, after all, the framing that allowed Silicon Valley to grow so powerful in the first place: a binary choice between technological development on capital’s terms, or remaining stuck in the past. But structural problems require structural solutions. Rather than relying on ‘ethical’ founders or investors to change the system, we need collective action to challenge it.

This will mean undoing the labyrinth of intellectual property rights, which are intended to protect corporations and commodify information. It will mean revisiting the funding model that gave rise to the ‘go-big-or-go-home’ culture responsible for so many wasteful start-ups, shifting away from the return-driven venture capital model, and towards a state-backed social entrepreneurship with public responsibilities.

It will also mean building worker power, within the tech industry and beyond it. Within it, the long-term goal must be a union culture encompassing all workers involved in production. That means not just the highly-paid software engineers but contractors packing boxes for Amazon, or driving for Uber, or cleaning offices in Silicon Valley should all have representation in decision-making structures. And beyond the confines of the industry, a wider-organised labour movement needs to offer resistance to technology being used to facilitate increased worker exploitation through surveillance or regulatory arbitrage.

None of this will be easy, of course. Reclaiming the emancipatory potential of technology will require prying it from the clutches of capital. But that is a worthy fight. If the task of politics is to imagine a different world, then the job of technology is to help us get there. Whether technology is developed for the right ends — for the public good, instead of creating a privatised dystopia — will depend on the outcome of political struggles." [1]

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[minimuffins]

I mean, I agree with most of the content here, but it's written in that confident left-wing manifesto style that is probably more convincing to the already convinced than to the undecided.

If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.

I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.

[bergstromm466]

I think I sorta get where you're coming from. To me this style represents the urgency to end capitalist exploitation, considering the immense suffering it has caused and is still causing currently.

In that sense it gives voice to the anger of the oppressed, the downtrodden. It's pure solidarity. Marx' critique is ammunition. Ammunition to unshackle our chains and claim our communist freedom.

> If I kind of saw myself as at-one with the basic Silicon Valley ethos, like I used to, this would definitely put me off before I fully ingested the argument.

Would you be willing to share which bits speficifally put you off in this text(or would have before you didn't see yourself as at-one with the ethos)? Are there maybe any specific words or labels?

> I wish I had an example of an introductory text in the style I would like to see. I will try to find something like that. I'm sure it exists, given how much writing there has been on this topic over the last decade.

Yeah I would love to see that. Please do share if you want to and if you have it at hand.

I think being in the bourgeoisie sucks for the bourgeoisie, and I'm curious to what extent it is possible to describe the alienation experienced by the capitalists/dominators (who are consciously dehumanizing proletarians their whole lives). Class traitorism should always be encouraged (Engels, Geuvara, etc.), and I'm still exploring narratives that support it.

[Daishiman]

It is absolutely hilarious how you think that the voice of your colleagues in collective bargaining is somehow less aligned with your own interests over those of your company's executive body.

[scsilver]

And you are free not to join. But you are lacking understanding of market forces if you dont think your colleagues dont have any say in your wage. Them being there is part of an ecosystem that supports your value to the world. Unless you can produce professional software and competitive speeds all built from the ground up by yourself.

If you work in javascript, the javascript environment has given you your value, companies have bought into that talent pool and must court it to compete. Unless you provide value to the world without that ecosystem and without that company, your wage is necessarily impacted by those stakeholders.

You are free to press for your own goals, just dont be so sure those goals are divisible from your coworkers.

[infinite8s]

You realize that actors are all in a union (SAG). I don't think Tom Cruz's pay is affected by how much an SAG extra is being paid. In the case of SAG, they set the minimum floor for pay, but have no say in the upper bound.