[js8]

I think socialism is the mechanism - one person one vote with the stake of ownership.

I am pretty liberal but it I believe it needs socialism (democracy in economic sphere) to avoid capture by corporations. (And vice versa, socialism needs liberalism to prevent capture by government. They can't survive without each other, being constantly threatened by authoritarianism.)

[pjc50]

I feel the non-profit/co-operative model has been really under-explored, other than the huge successes of Open Source and Wikipedia itself.

On the other hand, even that's vulnerable. The UK used to have customer-owned banks until shareholder banks offered to buy them out. https://www.thenews.coop/85589/sector/big-bang-demutualisati...

[js8]

Yes, the reason it is vulnerable IMHO, because within our mostly liberal system, there is too little support for coops in the law. We do not protect enough against people taking power from others. That's why I believe liberalism (which at least ideologically values this diversity) cannot survive without socialism.

[ants_everywhere]

> one person one vote with the stake of ownership.

I'm not great with the terminology of this stuff. Just to be clear on what you're suggesting, do you mean that each person has a stake of ownership as well as a single vote? So functionally something like a corporation with one kind of stock where no owner owns more than one share?

And do you mean to have restrictions on stock ownership? Like everyone in the country gets a share? Or only employees can own a share? Or anyone can buy a single share? Or something else?

I think there are interesting points to explore along the design space of how we distribute stock shares. I just don't know enough about it to have much intuition, and I'm trying to get a sense of how I could model it.

[js8]

What I am suggesting in practice would be similar to either consumer or worker cooperative. These are similar to publicly-traded companies, except the stakeholders are not some Wall Street randos, but people who actually use company products or employees of the company.

Of course, for this to be truly socialist, the system has to be democratic, i.e. each person involved has equal and non-transferrable vote.

What type a company should be is up to discussion. I believe infrastructure (natural monopolies) are better served by consumer (public) ownership, while companies that can compete on the free market are better served by worker ownership.

As I said elsewhere in the discussion, I think lot of Internet infrastructure should be publicly owned. (And on this infrastructure, businesses could be built.)

Personally, I would prefer an economic system where every company above certain size (say 20 employees) must be either publicly-owned or worker-owned, i.e. democratic in the above sense. Which makes me into a pretty traditional socialist. But that's tangential to the discussion about the Internet.

[ants_everywhere]

Got it, thanks that was very helpful

[hkt]

I'd second this: self hosting and so on is a poor substitute for democratic, socially owned infrastructure. That's the only way we can make social, rather than corporate, networks accessible to everyone in a sustainable way. At the moment the fediverse gets by on goodwill. That isn't sustainable.

[wildrhythms]

Socialism has nothing to do with 'government capture'; it only concerns itself with worker ownership over the means of production.

[senortumnus]

And government protections / mandates toward that end or masquerading as being toward that end

[velcrovan]

So what?

[suoduandao3]

The means of production these days is a laptop or a smartphone. A solar panel or a garden if one is in the physical portion of the economy.

We are kind of already at a point where working class individuals can own the means of production without ever needing to 'smesh capitalism'. I expect as a result we'll see a divergence between people who want to own the means of production and people who want to impoverish the current owners.

[js8]

I think this misunderstands what "ownership of means of production" really means in Marxism. The point is NOT that the capitalist owns the factory, which they then rent to workers, who can choose to do whatever they want with it. The ownership of means of production instead refers to full control over the production process, including the social structure of work that makes production possible. Marx's point is that it is this social structure, primarily, that should be collectively owned (that's why all the discussion about alienation).

It's kinda like "owning a home" doesn't imply just owning the walls, but implicitly also a place with privacy.

So in today's SW world, means of production is not a computer, but rather the datacenters of the cloud, proprietary APIs and control over browser standards. And control over habits of the users, who also participate in production, by generating "content". These things cannot be simply replicated by the workers.

[suoduandao3]

So if someone improves the logistic infrastructure involved in getting the products from the workers to the consumers none of the value they generated belongs to them? That actually explains a lot. Even today, places with food insecurity don't have supply but distribution problems, so it's a pretty hard problem to solve.

I wonder how many Marxists study logistics.

[js8]

If you improve the operation of the worker-owned company, you will get rewarded just like any other employee who improves things.

If you want to improve things by doing things on your own, you will own the fruits of your labor. If you need additional employees to improve things, then you will probably have to share with them.

[suoduandao3]

How is owning the fruits of your labour different from capitalism again? Something about how other people's labour is priced?

[js8]

I think you misunderstood my comment. In order for socialism to remain true to its intent of being democratic, it needs liberalism. By 'government capture' I mean the authorities in government taking control over an ostensibly democratic system (as frequently happened in the real-world attempts at socialism). You need to have an ability to rebuild these democratic systems elsewhere, which is provided by liberal freedoms.

[bdw5204]

I'd actually agree to a significant extent that people should own their employment (this is the original American Founding ideal of "free labor" that Jefferson and Lincoln both believed in) but I think you're better off not using the word "socialism" to describe that economic system. People associate that word with "communism" which is defined as a dictatorship where the government operates as a single monopoly under the pretense of representing the will of the people. The word "socialism" is also associated with corporate dominated market systems where the government provides a safety net and some labor rights for working people.

A system where workers are part owners of their companies is probably better described as "distributed ownership" to avoid confusing connotations. If the first thing you have to do is explain to people that you're not advocating a Nordic style welfare state or a USSR/CCP/North Korean style dystopian dictatorship, you're using problematic terminology.

If I'm misunderstanding you and you're advocating that all businesses should be controlled by a (democratic) government rather than by their employees then I'd be against that because most people are not going to have enough time, under any system, to become informed about stuff they have no direct stake in. I don't want politicians or voters responding to a media fear campaign telling businesses what products to produce and such a system would almost certainly devolve into incumbent politicians using the media to keep themselves in power and ensure their preferred successors win. I think it essential that decisions on whether to start new firms or what they are to produce should be mostly depoliticized except where there's a strong public interest that the government needs to regulate (like firms that want to pollute the environment or sell harmful highly addictive products).

An economy completely under the control of a democratic government would allow 50%+1 people who don't like Taylor Swift's music to ban her from singing and deprive 40% of the population who are fans of her music of their right to listen to her sing (or in the case of representative democracy, allow a majority to vote for a "lesser evil" party that includes outlawing Taylor Swift concerts as one of their package deal policies). A more extreme example of why democracy needs to be limited in scope would be how the democratic government of Athens voted, by majority popular vote, to execute Socrates because his constant challenging questions they didn't want to answer were annoying to them.

[js8]

No, the word socialism is correct, it describes pretty much what you call "distributed ownership", although a condition should be it's also democratic. I don't see why to avoid a well-defined term because of a connotation, that's a receiver's and not a sender's problem.

Regarding democracy, this kind of voting (although it's unequal) already exists with publicly traded companies. Interestingly, nobody is worried where billionaires will find the time or interest to vote in many companies they own; it's always the common people being the problem.