[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.