Lol, enshitification of these services are happening because the owners want to extract as much money as possible from the users. Workers would do the same even if they owned it. How many people would turn down millions of dollars because users don’t like the change?
In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.
Yeah I’m not sure why it’s nowadays common to simplify socialism as “workers owning the means of production”. It’s not exactly wrong, but it is often misunderstood.
A company being owned by it’s employees is not necessarily “socialism”. In today’s global capitalist economy, there are worker-cooperatives as well, but they too exist within the capitalist economy and have to follow its rules, which is above all the profit motive. If you don’t orient yourself based on profit, you will be out-competed eventually.
Traditionally, when socialists talk about “workers owning/seizing the means of production”, they are not talking about individual workers or individual businesses.
Workers means “the working class”, which would be pretty much everyone (“the 99%”). Means of production means industry and the economy overall, not individual factories and businesses.
What makes FOSS special is that the software is not privately owned by anyone, not by the devs, not by a couple of programmers, not by a company. It is commonly owned, anyone can use, copy and alter the code however they want without any artificial barriers. This of course makes it a lot harder to extract money from users.
Yah, if workers own a tiny portion of the means of production, as they do now in various co-ops around the globe, they will be either (1) required to operate on the basis of profit in order to outcompete entities that are not worker-owned, or (2) cease to exist because they get outcompeted by those who operate on the basis of profit.
This forces all existing co-ops to behave in line with capitalism as a whole. The point is to overcome that system of socio-economic relations: When calls are made for workers to own and operate production, as in this meme, they mean that the class constituted by workers — the proletariat — should be in control of all productive means. Not just that some workers should start co-ops, for this primary reason.
The idea that owners would sacrifice their profits if their business were merely a co-op is, I agree, not necessarily true. (Though workers in co-ops who are directly connected to the point of value production would definitely be more willing to sacrifice profits for decisions that enhance social value.) The point, however, is to move beyond an economy owned and operated for profit and forge a society in which profit is not the basis for operation in the first place. If, for example, workers’ needs were guaranteed, the impetus for profit-seeking would evaporate, though will not be absent, at least while the artifacts of capitalist society persist in us and our institutions.
You must think that humans are inherently greedy and/or are projecting what you would do in a scenario where you’re part of a worker co-op. Most workplaces aren’t worth millions. Most folks who round themselves in a worker co-op would most likely try to better the operation for everyone.
That’s not exactly how things be.
If means of production were all owned by workers, then that means they are operating them for their own benefit and the benefit of their communities. Why? The profit motive is not quite as strong. You are no longer needing to amass wealth to live a happy life. Because those who control the local farms are part of the community. Those who control local factories are workers that are part of the community. Each of those operates the means of production to fulfill their own needs, and their community
As if workers give a shit about customers.
They do when they work in a cooperative and have a stake in the business being successful.
My question is always: so if me and 10 other people have a great idea for a business, where does the money to start it come from? Most businesses take years to turn a profit, so in this collective, are we all just pouring in our savings until it takes off?
What if we all bust ass for 3 years, never getting paid because we’re building the product, we launch and start getting orders, and find that we’re getting a lot more orders than we expected, so we hire / bunch of people to help fulfill orders. Do those new hires all get an equal share, even though they weren’t there for the 3 years of unpaid R&D? Do they have to contribute money when they get hired for the share of the building that the rest of us already own?
I’m all for workers rights, and workers standing together collectively to get fair wages and working conditions, but when people say “workers should own the means of production”, they can never seem to explain how that would actually work.
Simply, the central bank can play the role of a VC where people with great ideas apply for loans or grants.
Two things stand out about this comment:
You’ve framed the idea of worker ownership in the context of profit maximization. It’s important to keep that in mind when running a business because you gotta know how your opponents are thinking and making decisions, but the point of worker ownership isn’t profit but instead agency.
I find it hard to believe that in always asking this question no one has ever answered with an overview of the different collective ownership forms that have existed throughout recorded human history or even a brief synopsis of how your country’s corporate law structures allow for it.
Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.
You skipped over the part where he says “You think I own this business? You think I own IKEA?” implying he would care if he actually had any skin in the game which he would if his job operated as a worker co-op.
That would be an improvement actually, because the customers of these companies are not users, they are other companies looking to advertise or buy users personal data. The users of for profit social media are in fact the product, not the customers.
Honestly I don’t even know where to start with this, so I’ll keep it simple. Enshittification of Twitter, Reddit et al. is not necessarily a result of capitalism, and likewise Fediverse doesn’t exist because “workers took the means of production”.
For example the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly” (that’s why swear words and gore are banned), and in part due to a need to follow existing copyright law.
Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.
Monetisation rules are a direct result of capitalism. Profits are what motivates the decision making. In a post-capitalism economy it would be the needs and wants that motivates the decision making. One of the failures of capitalism is that we assume wants/needs has a correlation with profits, when clearly the enshitification demonstrates otherwise.
In socialism nobody wants to work so good luck with your YouTube. There is a reason for proprietary software being most popular and often more feature rich. What we need is capitalism + more opensource work from us, regular people. Capitalism + opensource is way to go.
You posted this on an open source platform built by volunteers without any hint of irony. 🤡
Nobody? Look to be honest there are some lazy people that dont want to work but most of us will be happy to work in a socialist economy where we the workers get compensated fairly. Capitalism and open source dont go hand by hand. People is literally creating all of this amazing products for free!! Workinf for the community thats what socialism is. And also the proprietary software is more “popular” because big companies just take open source and make it proprietary then they said they created just look at Apple and RedHat.
Enshittification of those services is a direct symptom of capitalism.
No one is arguing that the fediverse exists because of workers owning the means of production.
You should really look into what “enshittification” means and how it’s a direct result of capitalism.
the disastrous YouTube monetisation policy comes in part from a desire to keep the site “child friendly”
Sure, but the reason why they want to keep the site “child friendly” is because content for children is incredibly profitable and because advertisers don’t want their ads getting related to “controversial” content.
Even if YouTube was run by a worker co-op, or was a state enterprise those two factors would likely still lead to stringent monetisation rules.
This is the reason why I don’t like equating socialism with “workers owning the means of production”. Worker-cooperatives can exist in a capitalist economy, which means they have to follow capitalist rules (including the drive to generate profits).
When leftists say “workers”, they generally mean “the 99%” or “the working class”, not individual workers. When leftists say “the means of production”, they mean the economy/industry overall, not individual companies.
If youtube was owned and operated in common, it would not be bound to profitability, but to use.
We can also look at something like peertube, which is essentially a commonly owned version of youtube. Instead of being guided by profitability, it is used based on many different use-cases. There can be peertube instances that are completely private, there can be peertube instances that are used for a specific topic or community (for example kids) and there can be peertube instances which are not for children at all.
Uh… No.
When you say “workers” do you mean the actual workers or some vanguard party of intellectual champagne socialists who make decisions on the workers’ behalf?
Actual workers. If we made a society where people are taken care of, we’d find most folks would be enthusiastic about their work. Saying “people don’t want to work” is often taken at face value when the reality is that most people do want to work, because it helps them feel a sense of purpose. They don’t, however, want to be exploited/work under capitalism because that is soul crushing.
Oh I agree completely with all of that. I just have been duped before by MLs saying worker ownership and what they really mean is their particular political party controlling everything. If everything is run by workers’ councils with no existence of a vanguard party, that would be paradise for me.
I would also go beyond saying that labor (not “work,” as IMO the word “work” implies labor under capitalism) gives people a sense of purpose in that it gives communities a sense of purpose and connectedness. When we are all sharing in common labor toward the goal of enhancing our community and generally improving lives, we feel a more collectivized responsibility for one another.
Obviously they meant the former since that’s what we’re literally doing here. But even the latter would do a better job managing Twitter/Reddit than what they have now.
Is it obvious though? MLs mean something very different from anarchists when they say “workers” in this context
Do you think OP is a Marxist-Leninist, posting online using a decentralized protocol ironically controlled by workers, to subtly build support for a big government-run website?
