[Refreeze5224]

For the billionth time already, socialism is not "when the government does it." Using the government to increase your capital and become even richer is standard capitalism.

Altman is not now and will not ever relinquish any means of production he own to the workers.

[pyeri]

Altman may not be an altruist but the overall direction the organization takes is what matters in the end. And as long as that organization retains even a semblance of a non-profit (despite having a revenue centric approach to tackle competition in the field), it is still a preferable organization to Anthropic and Amodei.

[satvikpendem]

Well, OpenAI workers do own shares. Tech companies are significantly more socialist than any other large scale enterprises in modern history (I don't know enough about pre-modern history to say).

[geysersam]

Why do you say that?

[satvikpendem]

What do you mean why?

[geysersam]

I mean why do you say that large tax evading organizations, operating in an extremely capitalist environment, steered by a small, unfathomably rich, group of people with uncommon and often ultra liberal ideologies, are more socialist than typical manufacturing companies with a largely unionized workforce?

[satvikpendem]

Unions aren't socialist, the employees don't own the means of production while engineers for example at Google literally own shares of the company and can vote. Don't confuse your screed with the literal definition of the word.

[geysersam]

What fraction of Google is owned by the engineers at Google? 5%? That's nothing compared to the bargaining power obtained by organized labor, actual socialist organization.

[watwut]

That is not socialism.

[satvikpendem]

Workers owning the means of production, and shares are ownership. So yes it is (one form of) socialism.

[watwut]

Not at all. They maybe get portion of future valie, but have no decision power and no power at all.

[satvikpendem]

Voting shares exist. In fact, worker cooperatives are the end result by this method, where every worker does indeed have a vote and therefore decision power.

[watwut]

Employees dont get voting shares. These are carefully designed so that there is no risk of employees getting any rights. They are deferred potential compensation.

And no, the companies we talk about dont produce worker cooperatives.

[Refreeze5224]

Shares are not the means of production. They are a mutually agreed upon fiction and sit firmly within the realm of capitalism.

[satvikpendem]

Leaving aside that market socialism also exists, in which shares do as well, not just Marxist Leninist, what do you define as ownership then? Especially in today's age where value is in software not only hardware. How would a worker own a means of production?

[Refreeze5224]

In today's age of exclusive capitalism? There is no worker ownership of the means of production. If you can't use a mine to get some coal, or use some tools to make widget, or use a GPU to do inference I guess, then you don't own it, do you? The point is anyone who needs to do those things can, and that ownership is tangibly available to everyone. Not in the "this is public property" but the state actually owns it sense.