[kaashif]

> Hollywood actors and famous football players are often very rich, but they sell their labor to get by.

But there's a key difference. They don't need to continue to sell their labor, they can stop at any time and live on e.g. income from dividends. Or maybe they have enough cash they could literally not even invest it and still live fine.

Although they may not own the means of production right at this moment, they easily could at any moment, it's a choice.

[robertlagrant]

You tomorrow could start out as a carpenter, buy a hammer and own the means of production. It's not a high bar to clear.

[AnthonyMouse]

Ironically it's more often governments that interfere with this. Go to the library and read some books and you can learn how to be a plumber or an electrician, buy a toolbox and you're on your way. Presumably there is some kind of licensing exam?

No, first you've got to find an existing tradesperson and apprentice under them, even if you could already pass the exam on your own. For a few weeks is it? Years, typically. To become a journeyman. Still can't work for yourself, now you have to work under them for a few more years.

Figure out how to file papers for an LLC. Maybe you need a lawyer. Tax accounting will be fun too. Do any of the cities you operate in have a different sales tax rate? Which of your business expenses can be deducted in the current year and which have to be depreciated? Is that the same for things you resell?

Guess what happens if you want to move to another state.

[robertlagrant]

It's not ironic - governments are the main source of power behind protectionism in all its forms. More regulations are good for incumbents.

[AnthonyMouse]

More regulations as determined with a tape measure across the law library, sure. Each rule is another cost of entering the market.

The hard part is how to take a scalpel to them. Okay, 95% of them are inefficient, granted. Which 95%? You don't want the government to ban tall buildings or adversarial interoperability or to subsidize corn syrup or prohibit farmers from selling their crops or the Jones Act or rent control or de facto caps on the supply of doctors or certificate of need laws or taxi medallions. But you probably want the government to ban leaded gasoline.

So how do you get them to do the few narrow things they need to do but not all the rest of it?

[robertlagrant]

No idea. I'm just saying it's not ironic.

[__MatrixMan__]

A hammer is a poor example of the means of production now that they're so easy to come by. The chokepoint is elsewhere.

A more relevant example would be influence over the information that people consult when they're deciding which carpenter to hire. You need both a hammer and a place to swing it that gets you paid--and nobody is trying to restrict access to hammers to protect their position.

This is why many of our most valuable companies are ad companies--you operate at a disadvantage unless you give them a cut of your profits.

[robertlagrant]

In your example the means of production is an advertisement? How would the worker own the means of production? Hammer and newspaper? Or hammer and all the newspapers?

[powersnail]

Who's going to hire a carpenter who picked up a hammer yesterday? You can't just hammer away in your yard and expect income.

It's not a trivial bar to clear, if you want to own the means of production that happens to be a viable livelihood.

[robertlagrant]

> if you want to own the means of production that happens to be a viable livelihood

If the means of production is now a livelihood, I have to say that this is a great example of how "means of production" is an insufficiently-precise phrase. It means all things to all people.

Marx seeing his mate's factory and thinking "it'd be nice if the workers owned that" and coming up with a generic-sounding equivalent phrase isn't really good enough to define a real concept.

Which is why people who use the phrase "means of production" seem to all mean different things. Owning a hammer is owning the means of production. It's just the means of production isn't enough.

[powersnail]

I do agree that "means of production" is quite vague and too varied. But still, from a practical perspective, if the phrase is to have any meaning at all, I'd say that it would be enabling some form of "production" to be done by whoever owns that thing.

In a carpenter's hand, a hammer is a mean of production. Whereas owned by someone incapable of producing what can be considered work of carpentry, it wouldn't be.

If the phrase refers to literally a tool which that can be used by some arbitrary somebody --- not necessarily the owner --- to produce something, then we're all in possession of "means of production", by simply having a body with basic I/O, which enables us to be a freelance CEO.

I find that to not be a very practical definition, and probably not the meaning used by whom your first reply was directed to.

[thiagoharry]

Means of production, for Marx, means any instrument which builds something other than the user who uses it. If I use a walking stick to walk, it is not means of production because the object is building my ability to move. Neither if I use a house for living. But if the house is mine and I rent it, then it is not building my subsistence, it is building rent.

Even Marx agreed that people have access to some means of production: the carpenter owns the hammer. However, after capitalist development, the major means of productions that produce the majority of wealth (like the industries that produce most GDP for a country) are indeed outside the reach of most people and this creates a division between people who gets money because they labor and people who gets money because they own capital and relevant means of production.

[robertlagrant]

> However, after capitalist development, the major means of productions that produce the majority of wealth (like the industries that produce most GDP for a country) are indeed outside the reach of most people and this creates a division between people who gets money because they labor and people who gets money because they own capital and relevant means of production

I'm always fascinated by this sort of thing. What do you mean "after capitalist development"? Do you think once upon a time people owned factories together, and capitalism came along and stopped all that?

[thiagoharry]

Of course not. Factories are a product of capitalist development. But this monopoly of means of production is a necessity for capitalism, because without it, there is no salaried work. Therefore, we had things like the enclosure of communal lands in Europe that were instrumental for deprieving people of means of production.

Why do you think that in American continent we had slave labor? How do you convince someone to work in your land if the person is able to simply go and easily take for herself vacant land and produce for herself instead of producing for someone else and get a salary smaller than her production? Slavery was how you deal with the problem forcing people to work. Later (and usually before the enslaved people are freed), the land becomes a commodity and then nobody can so easily simply take land for herself.