[jmyeet]

In terms of feudalism.

Feudalism was an economic system borne from the Divine Right of Kings [1]. But this was really just an excuse, much like every religious war isn't really about relilgion. Religion is just an excuse to seize land.

Anyway, under feudalism, a King controlled some portion of land. That King would typically have vassals who control part of it. Depending on the size, those vassals may themselves have vassals.

At the bottom of this totem pole was the serf. A noble would control all the land but would grant a serf the ability to use the land to grow a harvest and feed his family. Often the serf would live on that land. In exchange for this the serf would give a portion of his harvest to his lord. The serf may also owe the lord military service in times of war.

By late feudalism, instead of giving crops, the serf would sell their harvest at markets and pay the lord money. This led to the rise of the merchant class and ultimately paved the way for capitalism.

So what's going on here? In feudalism, the lord owns the means of production (being the land). The serf, through his labor, creates value by sowing and harvesting a crop. There is no value to the land without labor. So one can say the the lord is extracting the surplus value of the serf's labor. This framing and understanding was really formalized by Karl Marx later but the origin of the Labor Theory of Value [2] goes back to Ancient Greece and probably beyond.

So what is capitalism? Capitalism simply replaces the noble lord with a capital owner. That's literally it.

As the world industrialized the means of production expanded beyond farms and mines to factories. But everything else applies. A factory extracts the surplus value of the workers' labor to enrichen the factory's owner.

Instead of kings, we have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and the like.

So what Marx talked about was the workers' relationship to the means of production. Socialism in this context simply means the workers own the means of production.

So if you look at your local town or city, Walmart represents capitalism. The value of that labor and from that community is extracted to distant owners. If your town has a local family-owned restaurant, well that's socialism. The restaurant is the means of production here. The family who works there owns it.

A Monsanto-owned agribusiness? Capitalism. Family-owned farm? Socialism.

The crazy thing is that people like boutique hotels, farmers markets, family-owned farms, locally-grown produce and so on.

Some theory wonks migh tyell at me about syndaclism, Marxism, Marxist-Leninism or Mao third-worldism. Don't get lost in the weeds however.

The key part of this is that capitalism has almost nothing to do with markets (let alone "free markets", which is an oxymoron). Markets existed for thousands of years before capitalism did. Markets exist in non-capitalist countries.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_right_of_kings

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value

[lazide]

A major difference here though is that in feudalism, you have one king with associated subordinates per physical area.

In Capitalism, anyone(*) with sufficient capital can become a king in a specific fief, and there are often many overlapping ‘kings’ in a given fief, competing.

Even labor.

It happens all the time, albeit is not ‘that easy’, either.

Socialism (depending on brand), means of production are usually controlled by the state, and that type of ‘inversion of control’ is rarely allowed. In most implementations, most of the economy is in those state owned/controlled entities.

Benefits (and costs) to the population then flow down from there.

* barring monopolies, which is why it’s so popular to stomp on them.

[jmyeet]

> ... you have one king with associated subordinates per physical area

Yes and no. Land changed hands. As recently as the 19th century, a distant relative of mine fled Eastern Europe from an area where he could be conscripted by either the Prussians or the Russians.

> In Capitalism, anyone(*) with sufficient capital can become a king in a specific fief

We're talking about social mobility here, basically. This existed in feudal times too. A Viking called Rollo became the first ruler of Normandy and didn't seem to come from noble beginnings. A direct descendant of his became the King of England by conquest. In fact every European monarch today is a descedant of Rollo.

The land here is simply the means of production, just like Amazon is. Amazon has many owners but is it that different really?

Social mobility in modern times is more limited than you might expect. ZIP codes tend to be strong predictors of your economic outcomes. This is exacerbated by our existence being laden with debt. Student, medical, housing, etc. It's why a lot of people use terms like "neofeudalism" as all this debt makes is increasingly indistinguishable from brick kiln workers in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. This is by design because a debt-laden worker is a compliant worker.

> Socialism (depending on brand), means of production are usually controlled by the state

That's more communism. Even so, the state is comprised of and answerable to the workers. Even then I'd rather have the state capture "profit" to build roads and schools rather than some guy buying another mega-yacht.

A lot of people, myself included, focus on the workers owning the means of production because this can be done incrementally and we'd all be substantially better off if our megacorps were instead collectives.

[AnimalMuppet]

"Incrementally owning the means of production" can look like a lot of things. Contributing to a 401k that's invested in an index fund. Employers granting shares to employees. Unions owning shares in the company. I'm sure there are others that have not occurred to me.

Do you have a preferred approach, or is the big thing just getting workers to own at least part of the means of production?

[jmyeet]

> Contributing to a 401k that's invested in an index fund

At an earlier point in my life I used to believe in this, what some people will call things like "shareholder democracy". I've changed my tune on this. I now think it's incredibly destructive to society in the same way that private property is destructive because the majority of people are homeowners.

Why? Because it fools people to think they're beneficiaries of the system when they're really not. If you own a house, it serves a basic need. If you buy your house for $200k and it goes up to $500k, you haven't really gained anything if every house has increased in value similarly. You still need one unit of housing to live in.

Compare that to someone owning 1000 houses. Well they've just made a huge profit. So the entire housing prices always going up thing is just theft from the next generation. It's creating massive personal wealth at the expensive of a lifetime of debt for many.

401ks have the same effect on the stockmarket. You might think of yourself as a capital owner because you own a few shares of Amazon but you're not. A capital owner, by definition, derives wealth from their capital. A worker derives wealth from their labor. Note that someone like LeBron James is a worker in this scenario. Another myth is that socialism is a poverty cult. It is not.

Anyway, so we have a government that become sinvested in keeping the stockmarket going up. This benefits a few capital owners disproportionately and creates lots of negative externalities as we allow capital owners to skirt safety, steal from workers, steal from the government and so on all because governments become afraid that the stockmarket might go down. Doubling your Amazon shares from $100k to $200k doesn't substantially change your life. Bezos going from $100 billion to $200 billion creates massive problems.

> Employers granting shares to employees.

This is a little different and depends on the scale. As tech workers, getting RSUs in Amaazon or Google has the same (negative) effects as a 401k and allows Larry Page and Sergey Brin to accumulate $100B+ for really no reason.

But if the share is more substantial and/or the ownership is mostly or wholly worker-owned then you've arrived at the workers owning the means of production.

This can happen at scale. Consider Mondragon Corporation in Spain [1].

> Do you have a preferred approach

It's a difficult question because the money from the wealthy corrupts every facet of government and life. Consider something as simple as giving people Internet access. The best solution, and it's not even close, is municipal broadband. Yet we have national ISPs that have successfully lobbied to make this illegal in many states.

Likewise, we have a government that tends to bail out failing businesses rather than doing what they should do and simply nationalizing them. Imagine where we'd be if, after the 2008 GFC, the banks who had created this problem were nationalized and instead re-organized as community owned and operated banks.

America has become very anti-labor. Again this was by design. Union membership sits around 10-11% IIRC. We have a society that celebrates hyper-individualism when collectivism would benefit everybody. People delude themselves into thinking they can individually negotiate with trillion dollar companies and come out ahead. Even if you're in a high-demand field like tech, that power you may think you have is fleeting. Big Tech is doing everything they can do undermine labor and suppress wages, including the current trend for permanent layoffs (ie constantly laying off ~5% of their workforce).

[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/how-mondragon-be...

[wesselbindt]

One thing that bothers me about the incremental approach is that we seem to be at a local minimum[footnote]. It feels like any small amount of ownership of the means of production we transfer to the workers will be clawed back into the hands of the owning class, because they have the means to do the clawing back, and we do not. There's a couple examples I know of in this regard, namely Allende in Chile, the PKI in Indonesia, and of course the nationalization of oil in various middle eastern countries in the past century (Iran, for example).

For a more western example, look at Corbyn's loss in the 2019 UK elections. Part of his platform was actually a plan to get closer to workplace democracy, by offering collectives of employees a first option when a company gets sold (or something to that effect). Exactly the kind of incremental step I imagine you're talking about. I cannot help but think his loss was inevitable due to who owns the media (the owning class).

It seems to me that any small step we take will be fruitless if there's this big behemoth looming in the background.

I appreciate you putting your thoughts to paper. More than my one line question deserved.

[footnote] Actually local minimum implies that things aren't getting worse, while they are. E.g. neoliberal European governments are systematically underfunding all sorts of public institutions, which will eventually lead to them being privatized, because the free market would do a much better job than the government, which has been making a mess of it for years. Starving the beast has us barreling towards a minimum, but we're not there yet.

[AnimalMuppet]

> ... and of course the nationalization of oil in various middle eastern countries in the past century (Iran, for example).

I do not know for certain, but I strongly suspect that Iran's oil industry wasn't owned (even incrementally) by the workers. Its nationalization was not a claw back by the owning class, but a claw back from the owning class (to the government, which may be essentially the same thing).