[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.