Karl Marx promised that Communist revolutions would break out in every fully-developed Capitalist country, resulting in the workers coming to own all means of production. That has, of course, never happened. Indeed, it is said that
Capitalism is the oppression of man by man. Communism is precisely the reverse.
But there are lots of people who do own their means of production, and we have the means to make that many more.
In fact, according to the labor theory of value, in Adam Smith and Karl Marx both, we all own ourselves, and we’re done.
How has that worked? How might it work?
Capitalists
The modern means of production, generically known as capital, are in general not factories and machines that make stuff any more. They are the corporations, the entities that own the factories and machines. That often means the banks who own the loans on the material means.
Officially, corporations have a status similar to slavery, in which the owners of corporations are the shareholders—human, government, or other corporations. Market Fundamentalist doctrine holds that maximizing returns for shareholders is the only duty of corporations. This is nonsense. The actual duty of corporations, according to the corporate managers who run them, is maximizing returns for those who run them, aka executive compensation.
Furthermore, according to Market Fundamentalists and corporate managers, corporations should have the full rights of people, including full ownership and control of the means of production—themselves—regardless of any interests of people, including their nominal owners. And therefore freedom of speech and religion, and unlimited money in politics, and the ability to refuse cooperation with law enforcement and Congressional investigations, far beyond the rights accorded to humans. But as chattels, they are incapable of free speech. Their speech is strictly compelled by management, and it cannot be otherwise.
Now, I personally am entirely down with corporations having all human rights.
On one condition.
When they can no longer be held as chattel slaves, by selling or otherwise distributing stock in themselves. Let them all become independent non-profits, incapable of distributing profits to owners or anybody, and then we can have the rest of that discussion.
The Robber Barons of old, the epitome of Marx's National Bourgeois, personally owned whole railroads, steel mills, oil fields and refineries, and banks, but hired multitudes to do the actual work.
Adam Smith commented on such people back in medieval times:
Everything for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.
Wealth of Nations
We are going to put the National Bourgeois entirely to the side today.
Sole Proprietors
The most obvious cases of real self-ownership are artists and artisans working alone or in small groups who can buy what tools and supplies they like and contract to work for whomever they like. Blacksmiths and goldsmiths and wainwrights and coopers and weavers and so on in olden days, all of whose occupations turned into family names.
In many ancient civilizations, such people were commonly held as slaves by the great landowners. Later on, they were able to establish guilds in the great cities under royal charters giving them protections from the aristocrats. Since feudal times the history of the medieval guilds is their never-ending fight with those kings and aristocrats, who regularly insisted that nobody but themselves had any legal rights to anything.
Yeoman farmers and millers owned land and machinery at a larger scale. There were also painters, sculptors, many musicians (but generally not organists), writers, freelance editors, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, locksmiths, farmers, players of games and many but by no means all sports. Doctors, dentists, lawyers, and accountants. The petty bourgeois.
Then there are people whose means of production is the computer. Artists and writers, again, and Web designers and bloggers and independent software developers and computer security consultants and so on. And increasingly teachers.
And we must also consider books and periodicals and computers as essential means of production that an individual can own in varying degrees. But under copyright law buyers commonly do not fully own publications that they have purchased. There are movements to fix that with Free Software and Creative Commons content, which I will come to below, and again in other Diaries.
And, unfortunately, there are thieves, pickpockets, burglars, conmen, scammers, spammers, grifting preachers and politicians…
Ex-Slaves
The most remarkable cases of workers coming to own the means of production have been the ending of slavery and medieval-style serfdom in numerous countries, where the slaves and serfs were regarded as the means of production for their owners. In each case the legal owners were dispossessed, and the means of production—the slaves—given to the workers—the slaves.
The only actual revolution that ended slavery in a country was in Haiti. The outcome, continuing to this very day, was worst than disastrous.
I'm sorry, I can't go on right now. Everything I thought I knew about Haiti was wrong. Everything you think you know about Haiti is wrong. The reality is much, much worse.
Yes, it turns out that owning the means of production is no good if someone else owns the markets and the global infrastructure and can hold you and your entire nation to ransom for more gold than there is, or invade you and suspend your Constitution at will.
Karl Marx didn’t think much of Abraham Lincoln when Lincoln was not an abolitionist, and was indeed an avowed White Supremacist. Lincoln wanted ex-slaves to go “back” to Africa, or maybe somewhere in the Caribbean. (I won’t go into the disastrous history of the Liberian experiment in this policy.) Lincoln, like Thomas Jefferson, was certain that Blacks were incapable of being citizens of the US, until Frederick Douglass gave him a demonstration.
Anyway, once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Marx changed his opinion, and wrote Lincoln an admiring letter.
When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution,with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic.
Lincoln replied through Ambassador Charles Francis Adams.
Ambassador Adams Replies
Legation of the United States
London, 28th January, 1865
Sir:
I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.
So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they area ccepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.
The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.
Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example.It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.
I have the honor to be, sir, your obedient servant,
Charles Francis Adams
The “general holy crusade of property against labor” is vintage Marx, but he did not remark on the ex-slaves being given themselves as their own means of production.
The holy crusade continues to this day in many blasphemous Southern churches and among the various other neo-Confederate and White Supremacist forces. The ex-slaves owned themselves, but nothing else, and vast energy was wasted on trying to keep them that way. Most were reduced to the equivalent of slavery again by the system of sharecropping on the land still owned by the ex-slaveowners, and by the rest of Jim Crow.
The Thirteenth Amendment in fact explicitly allowed slavery to continue for the duly convicted in prison, which resulted in the US having the largest prison population in the world. The system as it operates in Florida was put on display in the book and movie Cool Hand Luke. Convicts and even ex-convicts were then denied the right to vote, and still are in some states. Blacks were denied numerous basic rights, including voting, education, mortgages, business loans, police protection, jobs, effective public transportation, union memberships, and much more.
So we are not finished with giving the descendants of slaves full ownership and control of themselves as means of production, and the rights that are supposed to go with that ownership. There is going to be a concerted effort to do so in 2021, assuming that Democrats can get unified control of Congress and the Presidency again, as in 2008. However, at the moment Nancy Pelosi, while pushing for many such measures, is also busy denouncing Socialism as expressed by AOC and Bernie, claiming that there are only a handful of us, and otherwise kowtowing to "Centrist" memes. I have some views on that, as you can see here.
What Genuine Centrist Ideas Look Like
Similarly for the rights of ownership of themselves as means of production of women, immigrants, and others oppressed by various forces in society, along with all other workers in general.
To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men [sic], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence
Those whose consent was not asked of course include women, slaves, Native Americans, numerous groups of immigrants and refugees, and so on.
So we must consider voting to be a means of production of rights and a property right in oneself, and make it unalienable in actual practice. I will have much more to say about that another time.
Software
My part in that effort to secure voting was in helping to start the Open Voting Consortium, to create publicly-owned, secure voting software.
Anti-Capitalist Meetup: Secure Voting Systems 101: The "Holy Grail"
There is a great deal of publicly-owned software, under various names, such as Free Software and Open Source. Several use the copyright laws of various countries to create licenses guaranteeing that software released under them cannot be taken up by corporate interests and turned into secret proprietary software.
The various versions of the Linux operating system are the freest. The BSD license requires material under license to remain free, but permits it to be incorporated into a non-free commercial product, as in the case of the later versions of MacOS. Android uses a free kernel, but is heavily commercialized.
There is a quite substantial amount of Free Software for education. Not the commercial shovelware of a fixed number of canned lessons on a standard topic, but sharp tools, including Open Office/Libre Office, graphics, mathematics, various sciences, language learning, art, music, and much more. Edubuntu and Sugar are two major distributions of educational software.
Owning your own education can be huge, in terms of owning the means of production.
I participate at Duolingo, which provides free teaching materials on the Web for learning a multitude of languages. I studied Spanish there, and read variou s books and watched TV and talked to people locally, and now I regularly answer questions on Spanish Quora where I was named an Escritor Destacado (Distinguished Writer) last year.
Creative Commons
Similarly there are licenses for content, including documents, music, and art, that use copyright law to give rights to the public rather than lock them away. The various Creative Commons licenses are the best known. For example, US copyright law provides no explicit way to put material into the public domain until its copyright runs out. The CC-0 license follows the statute to simulate that condition, giving away all rights that can be disclaimed, while not allowing others to usurp them. There are other Creative Commons variations, for allowing only non-commercial use (NC), for requiring attribution to the creator (BY), and for allowing re-use under the same license (SA, Share-Alike).
Scientific Publications
Scientists and mathematicians have for some time owned the means of production for technical papers, that is, computers, free software such as TEX, and laser printers. They are now in the middle of a growing revolution aimed at taking the rights to those papers away from the rapacious academic publishing corporations that charge them to publish their papers, and then charge them again for reading them.
Open-access scientific publishing is nearing a tipping point. It will save money and lives, and allow researchers everywhere, regardless of the budgets of their university libraries, to read the papers they need in order to carry out their own research.
The costs of academic publishing are absurd. The University of California is fighting back.
The UC system just dropped its $10 million-a-year subscription to the world’s largest publisher of academic journals.
More than 20 years ago, I argued in a published market research report that technology had enabled researchers and academic institutions to save money by switching to all-electronic scientific publishing, and that the imperatives of unrestricted access to research would impel them to break away from for-profit academic publishers entirely in time. I could not name the day when it would happen, but I am delighted that we are reaching that point.
Standards
Another aspect of Free Software is the use of open standards, to ensure that users would have permanently free access to the contents of their own files. Microsoft is infamous for changing its file formats with new versions of Windows and the various Microsoft applications, and not telling anybody what they are except under expensive licenses with NDAs.
Public standards on topics such as the Unicode universal character set standard and various programming languages now routinely come with free reference implementations in software.
I assisted with the Internet Engineering Task Force project on Unicode Internet Domain names and Web URLs. Part of the issue was challenging proponents to come up with snippets of working code to install in Web server configurations. This was necessary to overcome objections from opponents who claimed that it would “break the Internet”.
The Open Voting Consortium is working with NIST, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, on determining what aspects of voting security can be standardized, and how.
Free Digital Textbooks
Computers suitable for use in school now routinely cost less than printed textbooks. Some countries have taken the initiative to create free textbooks for their schools, starting with Bangladesh.
Open Educational Resources
The average telephone is faster than an old time Cray-1 supercomputer. It can do enough math and graphics and programming for the lessons in any elementary and high school subject, and a fair amount at the college level.
We know how to teach a variety of computer languages starting in third grade. The record is held by Ken Iverson, who used an IBM 360 and a room full of Selectric terminals to teach first-grade arithmetic in APL.
1+1
2
1+1 2 3 4
2 3 4 5
He wrote textbooks for Arithmetic and Algebra: An Algorithmic Approach.
I wrote up a suggestion for teaching Turtle Art to preliterate preschoolers, in a game that I called You Be the Turtle. I also programed a variety of demonstrations in Turtle Blocks, a version of Turtle Art using blocks that snap together on the screen, making syntax errors impossible. My most elaborate project was a Turing machine, a universal computer, programmed in Turtle Blocks. You can see the entire set of source code images in the Sugar Wiki.
Above the college level, we have a variety of distributed computing projects in which anyone can add as much computer power as they own or direct. I am currently participating in the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, where I just finished testing the exponent 86,962,297. The numbers we are testing regularly get much bigger, but computer power continues to grow at about the same rate, so we continue to find a new record-breaking Mersenne prime every year or so. There are other such programs for protein folding, processing gravitational wave data, cosmology, and much more.
The combination of
- Rooftop solar power, owned by individuals or communities
- Mobile phones and community broadband
- Free textbooks and educational software and the riches of the Internet
could prime the pump for ending poverty in a generation, including laying the groundwork for health care, clean water, sustainable agriculture, ending corruption and oppression and war, reaching Peak Humanity and starting to come down to sustainable levels, and creating sustainable economies. I have costed it out. $25 billion annually would get us started everywhere. More than that could make it happen sooner.
We can teach a billion children how to take over the world!!!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
It’s their job, you now, just as many of their elders have taken on the job of keeping them from doing it. But in the US millions of children fall away from the old fears and hatreds every year. We can spread that around the world, too.
After poverty and war and Global Warming and such, we could tackle the hard problems.
Happy revolutions!