means of production

Marxian Economic Theory
by Meghnad Desai
Published 20 May 2013

This free labour is free in two senses. It is free from feudal ties and any extra-economic compulsions: it is free to enter into contract. It is also free in another sense. It has been divested of its means of production. Unlike a farmer tilling his (owned or rented) land or a weaver with his loom working either for himself or in a putting out system, the free labourer has no means of production, no tools of trade to work with. This severing of means of production from labour is the outcome of a long historical process which renders peasants into unskilled industrial labour and breaks up Guilds and ruins cottage industries {17}.

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It is not money which by its nature creates this relation; it is rather the existence of this relation which permits of the transformation of a mere money-function into a capital-function. 11/1/30. 146 (62) M - L: The HistoricaZ Conditions In order that the sale of one's own labour-power (in the fornl of the sale of one's own labour or in the form of wages) may constitute not an isolated phenomenon but a socially decisive premise for the production of commodities, in order that money-capital may therefore perform, on a social scale, the above-discussed function M - C < ~ historical processes are assumed by which the original connection of the means of production with labourpower was dissolved - processes in consequence of I."hich the mass of the people, the labourers, have as non-owners, come face to face with the non-labourers as the ol.ners of these means of production. 11/1/31 (63) The Production FUnction is AhistoricaZ Whatever the social form of production, labourers and means of production always remain factors of it •..• For production to go on at all they must unite. The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another. 11/1/34 (64) The Different Nature of Means of Production and Labour-P~er The means of production and labour-power, in so far as they are forms of existence of advanced capital-value, are distinguished by the different roles assumed by them during the process of production in the creation of value, hence also of surplus value, into constant and variable capital.

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The specific manner in which this union is accomplished distinguishes the different economic epochs of the structure of society from one another. 11/1/34 (64) The Different Nature of Means of Production and Labour-P~er The means of production and labour-power, in so far as they are forms of existence of advanced capital-value, are distinguished by the different roles assumed by them during the process of production in the creation of value, hence also of surplus value, into constant and variable capital. Being different components of productive capital they are furthermore distinguished by the fact that the means of production in the possession of the capitalist remains his capital even outside of the process of production, while labour-power becomes the form of existence of an individual capital only within this process.

The Communist Manifesto
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Published 1 Aug 2002

Human society starts out as tribal, in which the means of production are collectively owned and the products of labor are equally and collectively shared by the tribe; it then moves to the next stage, that of slave-owning society, where the means of production—the slave and the land—are privately owned by the slave owner. The next stage is feudal society, where the principal owners (at times, the only owner) of everything are the king and the nobility. Feudal society is followed by capitalism, where the means of production (the factories, the land, the banks) are privately owned by the capitalist class. And so it goes, from one stage to another, the movement typified by the method of production (tribal, slave, feudal, capitalist) and by the type of ownership of the means of production (collective, private), which is the central issue.

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After years and years of laborious study, Marx answered in the affirmative: Yes, the law of social development existed and that law was economic in nature; it had to do with (1) who owned the means of production, (2) what kind of ownership prevailed, and (3) what was the method of production. In the simplest of terms, Marx proposed the following: Human society develops along certain lines; it progresses in a certain predetermined direction; it moves only one way, never going back, never regressing to a previously attained stage. Human society starts out as tribal, in which the means of production are collectively owned and the products of labor are equally and collectively shared by the tribe; it then moves to the next stage, that of slave-owning society, where the means of production—the slave and the land—are privately owned by the slave owner.

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That judgment shall be made only when and if a society based on the collective ownership of the means of production is actually created. And that brings me to the subject of the Soviet Union which, as you recall, I promised to look into. What certainly did occur in the U.S.S.R. was the abolishing of private property. The same happened in Albania, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, the People's Republic of Korea, Poland, Romania, Vietnam. But in none of them was public, collective property instituted. What replaced private ownership was state ownership. All the means of production were both de jure and de facto owned, controlled, and run by the state.

The Communist Manifesto in Plain and Simple English (A Modern Translation and the Original Version)
by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Published 29 Jan 2012

In its positive goals, however, this form of Socialism plans either to restore the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramp the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means. In either case, it is both reactionary and Utopian. In its positive aims, however, this form of Socialism aspires either to restoring the old means of production and of exchange, and with them the old property relations, and the old society, or to cramping the modern means of production and of exchange, within the framework of the old property relations that have been, and were bound to be, exploded by those means.

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Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground -- what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in short, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became like chains. They had to be burst; they were burst. We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society.

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Subjection of Nature's forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalization of rivers, whole populations magically brought out of the ground -- what earlier century could even dream that such productive forces slept in the lap of social labour? We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in short, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became like chains.

Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century
by Mark Walker
Published 29 Nov 2015

On one hand, communists might claim victory since there is no longer exploitation of labor by the capitalist class. On the other, since everyone owns the means of production, capitalists can claim victory—the means of production were not seized by the proletariats, as Marx predicted. In the envisioned future, the working class is absorbed into the capitalist class, as everyone owns their own means of production. In which case, Marx is wrong: the means of production are not owned socially at the end of capitalism. Perhaps, in the spirit of diplomacy, we ought to consider it a tie, since both capitalism and communism achieve their main aim: the MOP remain privately owned and workers are no longer exploited.

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Rather, the point is this, we need to at least understand Marx better than Epstein does before making any such judgments. 46 FREE MONEY FOR ALL Inverted Marxism: A Purer Form of Capitalism Marx makes two important claims: socializing ownership of the means of production would lead to increased freedom for workers, and capitalism is inherently unjustly coercive. Both claims have been challenged. A common response to the first claim is that workers would not be (or are not) freer under a socialized ownership of the means of production. Proponents of this view might point to the inefficiencies of socialist economies. Workers often have to work as many hours as their counterparts in capitalistic economies for less money, and so Marx was wrong to think that socialized ownership of the means of production would result in more freedom.

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The second claim, that capitalism is inherently unjustly coercive, has been challenged in two ways: it has been argued that private ownership of the means of production is coercive, but not unjustly so, and that the private ownership of the means of production is not coercive. For present proposes, we will follow suit with the critics of Marxism and reject both claims by Marx. That is, we will accept, at least for the purposes of argument, that socialism will not lead to more freedom for workers, and that private ownership of the means of production is not unjustly coercive. What I want to suggest is that neither is sufficient to vindicate the contemporary version of capitalism.

Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
by Richard D. Wolff
Published 1 Oct 2012

They must sell their labor power to those who own the means of production in order to survive. Because of these and many other difficulties, I define capitalism differently. My distinctive focus is not on property or distribution mechanisms or freedom. Instead, I highlight the internal organization of production and distribution: how the social sites where goods and services are produced and distributed organize those processes. A capitalist system is, then, one in which a mass of people—productive workers—interact with nature to fashion both means of production (tools, equipment, and raw materials) and final products for human consumption.

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Those key differences then shaped the intellectual struggles between devotees of the two systems, the political struggles between social movements and parties committed to different systems, and the changes brought about by successful revolutions. 5.1 Key Differences between Capitalism and Socialism The first key difference between capitalism and socialism deals with who owns the means of production: land, machines, factories, offices, and so on. Capitalism is the system in which private property predominates. The means of production are privately owned and are contributed to production only if in return the private owners obtain a share of the production’s output (the surplus or profit). In contrast, socialism is defined as a system in which productive property is socialized—becoming the property of the people as a whole—and is then administered by the state for the people as a whole (not for the surplus or profit of private owners).

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Moreover, the practical exigencies of the USSR after 1917 and of “actually existing socialist” economies thereafter led them to emphasize expanding output (and especially means of production) via state ownership and planning. This too helped to push issues of radical transformation inside enterprises to a very secondary status, especially among those who equated socialism with what those economies were struggling to establish. They often banished notions of workers becoming also the direct, first appropriators and hence distributors of enterprise surpluses to the murky future realms of socialist utopias. In my view, the macro-level changes brought about by traditional socialism (nationalized ownership of means of production, planning, reduced income inequality, etc.) did not survive in part because they were not accompanied and reinforced by micro-level changes in the internal reorganization of enterprises.

Socialism Sucks: Two Economists Drink Their Way Through the Unfree World
by Robert Lawson and Benjamin Powell
Published 29 Jul 2019

Workers are alienated because market forces, not the workers themselves, decide what will be produced, how it will be produced, and who will produce it. This means that workers are forced to work for the capitalists who own the means of production and dictate terms to the workers, often leaving them in dull, monotonous jobs, earning unfair wages. Marx claimed that once private property in the means of production was eliminated, workers could produce for their needs, rather than for the capitalists’ profits, and thus end alienation. Marx’s theory of history was the final pillar of his system. He believed the collapse of capitalism and transition to socialism was inevitable.

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Society-wide socialism “from below” that doesn’t entail state ownership is a contradiction in terms. * * * So what the hell is socialism if every country that has ever collectivized the means of production is not socialist? Many of the conference attendees we asked thought socialism meant simply aspiring toward a world with better conditions for various marginalized groups. Few correctly identified collectivism or state ownership of the means of production as the defining characteristic of socialism, and most had not come here to celebrate that. I [Ben] spoke with three young women after the conclusion of the opening rally, all of whom were associated with the Berkeley International Socialist Organization.

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We think a significant number of them identify as socialists without understanding socialism’s defining characteristic—which is state ownership of the means of production and the abolishment of private property. They define socialism as a more radical brand of progressive or leftist beliefs. A significant number of socialist leaders at this conference, however, did support socialism as we understand the term and would socialize the means of production if given the chance. We fear that they are using social justice causes like abortion, the environment, and immigrant rights to bring more young people into the fold.

Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It
by Vivek Chibber
Published 30 Aug 2022

People don’t come to the market as individuals competing on a level playing field. They are grouped into different classes and face very different economic conditions. The basic fact that differentiates the people into these classes is whether or not they own their means of production—land, factories, banks, hotels, etc. The vast majority of people don’t. The only way they can survive is by working for those who do own the means of production, called capitalists. So most people in capitalism are simple workers, and they have no choice but to sell their labor effort to capitalists; capitalists, in turn, sell the goods and services that they produce by hiring the workers.

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They still participated in market transactions, and they even resorted to wage labor occasionally. But their survival never depended on these activities. They relied on them only to supplement their income and consumption. As long as they had access to the means of production, they could keep market forces at bay in their lives. But once economic actors are stripped of the means of production, once they lose access to land and capital, the conditions for their economic reproduction undergo a sea change. They can no longer rely on their own crops or handicrafts to survive, since they don’t have access to key factors of production.

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They have to buy their articles of consumption on the market, which means that they have to first find a way of acquiring money in order to purchase them. This money comes from working for those few people who now have taken exclusive control over the means of production—the capitalists. Another way of putting all this is that capitalism comes about through the creation of a particular kind of class structure—in which there is a small group on one side called capitalists, who control the basic means of production; and another group, the vast majority, on the other side, who don’t have any choice but to seek employment from these capitalists. We call the second group the working class.

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 1 Jan 2010

. ——— When capitalists reinvest, they need to find extra means of production available in the market place. The inputs they require are of two sorts: intermediate products (already shaped by human labour) that can be used up in the production process (such as the energy and cloth needed to make a coat) and the machinery and fixed capital equipment, including factory buildings and the physical infrastructures such as transport systems, canals and ports that support the activity of production. The category of means of production is evidently very broad and complicated. But if any of these means of production turn out to be unavailable, then this constitutes a barrier to further capital accumulation.

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But the form of capital circulation that has come to dominate from the mid-eighteenth century onwards is that of industrial or production capital. In this case the capitalist starts the day with a certain amount of money, and, having selected a technology and organisational form, goes into the market place and buys the requisite amounts of labour power and means of production (raw materials, physical plant, intermediate products, machinery, energy and the like). The labour power is combined with the means of production through an active labour process conducted under the supervision of the capitalist. The result is a commodity that is sold by its owner, the capitalist, in the market place for a profit. The next day, the capitalist, for reasons that will shortly become apparent, takes a portion of yesterday’s profit, converts it into fresh capital and begins the process anew on an expanded scale.

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The trend towards falling profits (which Ricardo had identified) and the crises to which it inevitably would give rise were internal to capitalism and not explicable at all in terms of natural limits. But it is hard to make Marx’s theory of the falling rate of profit work when innovation is as much capital or means of production saving (through, for example, more efficient energy use) as it is labour saving. Marx himself actually listed a variety of counteracting influences to a falling rate of profit, including rising rates of exploitation of labour, falling costs of means of production (capital-saving innovations), foreign trade that lowered resource costs, a massive increase in the industrial reserve army of labour that blunts the stimulus for the employment of new technologies, along with the constant devaluation of capital, the absorption of surplus capital in the production of physical infrastructures, as well as, finally, monopolisation and the opening up of new labour-intensive lines of production.

Why We Can't Afford the Rich
by Andrew Sayer
Published 6 Nov 2014

But apart from things like cooking equipment, most of us lack the means of production to produce the things that we need and hence are dependent on those who do own or control those means of production. So, most people, whether they consider themselves working class or middle class, are dependent on others – those who own means of production and who are willing to employ them – for making a living. In a capitalist society, most means of production are privately owned by a minority. In the classic sense,83 a capitalist is someone who owns means of production and uses it to employ others to produce goods and services at a profit.

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But this situation where workers own or at least control the means of production they use is enjoyed by only a minority today. As Marx clearly saw, it’s very different from the kind of property in means of production that dominates modern capitalism. This allows a massive centralisation of the ownership and control of means of production into the hands of a minority, so that they can then extract unearned income from the majority as a condition of allowing them to benefit from the use of the technological inheritance. In Tawney’s words, the result is that the means of production become not ‘a means of work but an instrument of gain or the exercise of power, and . . . there is no guarantee that gain bears any relation to service, or power to responsibility’.8 Ownership is divorced from work, and from the workers.

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But, as they own neither the so-called ‘means of production’ nor the output, they have little power and are dependent on those who do own them – the capitalists. (I’ll explain why I don’t use the more flattering term ‘entrepreneur’ in Chapter Eight.) We’ve seen that landlords and money lenders, as rentiers, get their money from controlling existing assets. Capitalists own already existing means of production, so are they any different from rentiers? The answer is yes and no. Almost everything we need has to be produced, and this almost always requires means of production. But apart from things like cooking equipment, most of us lack the means of production to produce the things that we need and hence are dependent on those who do own or control those means of production.

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

The example above shows how the recognition of authorship is tied up with the organisation of the labour process. It is individual authorship that makes the photographer into a ‘petty commodity trader’. The petty commodity trader is defined by that he, as opposed to the wage labourer, owns his own means of production and produces commodities for simple exchange. In contrast, the wage labourer does not own the means of production and he has no artistic claim over his output. The wage labourer sells his time to work rather than the products of his work. Karl Marx expected that capitalism would shovel out self-employed traders and replace them with wage labourers.

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The stages where information metamorphoses from means of production to use value and back flow more cheaply, more easily and faster. The end result is not just use values at cut-rate prices; the products are technically more up-to-date. This is, in a nutshell, the economic rationality behind voluntarily entered, peer-to-peer labour relations organised in a commons/community. Appropriation of Tools and Skills Access to tools is at the heart of the Marxist critique of capitalism. The proletariat was created when it was deprived of the means of production. The enclosure movement was a decisive episode for establishing this condition.

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The enclosure movement was a decisive episode for establishing this condition. To the first generation of Marxists, reclaiming the means of production necessitated a seizure of the factories and land held by the bourgeoisie. Their revolution could hardly be anything but violent. A takeover of this kind looks highly improbable today, but, then again, perhaps such a step is not called for any longer. User-centred development models suggest that the proletariat is already in possession of the means of production, at least in a restricted sense and limited to some sectors of the economy. The instruments of labour break down into tools and skills.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2014

The capitalist starts the day with a certain amount of money (whether the money is borrowed or owned outright does not matter here). That money is used to purchase means of production (use of land and all the resources that lie therein, as well as partially finished inputs, energy, machinery and the like). The capitalist also finds a labour market at hand and hires workers under contract for a given period of work (say, eight hours a day for five days for a weekly wage). The acquisition of these means of production and of labour power precedes the moment of production. The labour power is, however, usually remunerated after production has occurred, whereas the means of production are usually paid for prior to production (unless purchased on credit).

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After all, the extraction of surpluses from labour presupposes the domination and the relative unfreedom of labour under the rule of capital. As Marx ironically noted, labourers are free in the double sense: they are free to sell their labour power to whomsover they like, at the same time as they have been freed from control over those means of production (for example, the land) which would permit them to make a livelihood other than that defined by wage labour. The historical divorce of labour from access to the means of production entailed a long and continuing history of violence and coercion in the name of capital’s freedom of access to wage labour. Capital also required a freedom to roam the world in search of profitable possibilities and this required, as we earlier saw, the eradication or reduction of physical, social and political barriers to its mobility.

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This ‘fairness’ rests on the conceit that labourers have an individualised private property right over the labour power they are capable of furnishing to capital as a commodity (a commodity which has the use value to capital of being able to produce value and surplus value) and that they are ‘free’ to dispose of that labour power to whomsoever they like. It is most convenient for capital, of course, that labourers be ‘freed’ of any access to the land or even to any means of production. They then have no option except to sell their labour power in order to live. When put to work, capitalists can see to it that labourers produce more in commodity values than the market value of their labour power. Labourers, in short, must add more value than they get if capital is to be created and reproduced.

Debunking Economics - Revised, Expanded and Integrated Edition: The Naked Emperor Dethroned?
by Steve Keen
Published 21 Sep 2011

‘Guilty of this or that inconsistency because of this or that compromise’ In the course of his attempt to preserve the labor theory of value proposition that labor-power is the only source of surplus value, Marx advanced three propositions which fundamentally contravene his general approach to commodities: that, in the case of the means of production, the purchaser makes use of their exchange-value, not their use-value; that their use-value cannot exceed their exchange-value; and that the use-value of commodity inputs to production somehow reappears in the use-value of the commodities they help create. Marx began with the simple assertion that the means of production can transfer no more than their exchange-value to the product. He next attempted to forge an equality between the exchange-value and the use-value of the means of production, by equating the depreciation of a machine to its productive capacity.

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If therefore an article loses its utility, it also loses its value. The reason why means of production do not lose their value, at the same time that they lose their use-value, is this: they lose in the labor process the original form of their use-value, only to assume in the product the form of a new use-value. Hence it follows that in the labor process the means of production transfer their value to the product only so far as along with their use-value they lose also their exchange-value. They give up to the product that value alone which they themselves lose as means of production. (Ibid.) Don’t worry if you found that paragraph hard to understand: it is replete with erroneous and ambiguous propositions.

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These agents buy commodities – specifically, labor and raw materials – with money, put these to work in a factory to produce other commodities, and then sell these commodities for (hopefully) more money, thus making a profit. Marx stylized this as M – C – M+: Money→Commodity→More money The complete circuit, and the one which emphasizes the fallacy behind Walras’s Law, was M – C(L, MP) … P … C+c – M+m: Money→Labor and means of production … Production … Different commodities, of greater value than paid for the labor and means of production→Sale of commodities to generate more money This circuit specifically violates Say’s Principle and Walras’s Law. Rather than simply wanting to exchange one set of commodities for another of equivalent value, the agents in this circuit wish to complete it with more wealth than they started with.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
by Eugene W. Holland
Published 1 Jan 2009

“In the history of primitive ac­ cumulation,” Marx says, all revolutions are epoch-making that act as levers for the capital class in course of formation; but, above all, those moments when great masses of men are suddenly and forcibly torn from their means of subsistence, and hurled as free and “unattached” proletarians on the labor-market.55 Hence what the title of the first chapter of part VIII calls the “secret” of so-called primitive accumulation is that it really designates the ruthless des­ titution of the working poor, not the stockpiling of wealth in liquid form: The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the laborers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labor. . . .The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the laborer the possession of his means of production. . . . The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production.56 Indeed, classical political economy was often surprisingly forthright about the conditions required for working people to submit to wage labor (and hence capitalism), as Perelman has shown in his detailed study of “clas­ sical political economy and the secret of primitive accumulation” (as his subtitle has it).57 He quotes one German government minister who ac­ knowledged that when all land has passed into private ownership . . . and capital exerts [its] compulsion on liberated or free workers . . . the command of the slave owner has been replaced by the contract between worker and employer, a contract which is free in form but not really in substance.

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Unlike capitalism, where “individuals are subsumed under social production, which exists outside them as their fate,” under communism, social production is to be “subsumed under the individuals who manage it as their common wealth.”21 Remarkably enough, Marx actually ac­ knowledges the Interest of organizing social production via the market: It has been said, and may be said, that the beauty and the greatness lies precisely in this spontaneously evolved connection, in this material and spiritual exchange, which is independent of the knowledge and wishes of individuals and presupposes their mutual independence and indifference.22 But he goes on to critique this view from the perspective of the third, communist stage of historical development, where “social relationships are their own communal [gemeinschaftlich] relations and therefore sub­ jected to their own communal control.”23 And in fact, Marx had already rejected this positive view of the market two pages earlier: “there can . . . be nothing more incorrect or more absurd than to assume, on the strength of exchange-value, of money, control by the associated individuals of their collective production.”24 And he does so in terms that betray the over­ confident Enlightenment modernism shared by most major Marxisms: communism, in this view, would represent “knowledge and will derived from reflection,” the “subordination” of social production by “commu­ nal control” of the means of production,25 a division of labor based on exchange-value being replaced by a social (i.e., nonmarket) organization of labor, “as well as the planned distribution of labor time over the vari­ ous branches of production.”26 It may be possible to read too much into a turn of phrase or two, but this is a watershed.

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Scare quotes are often placed around the word primitive for a number of reasons, the least of which is that it is M arx’s German equivalent for Adam Smith’s origi­ nal term, which is simply previous accumulation—referring to the stock­ piled wealth the capitalist supposedly invested for the first time in means of production to initiate the dynamic of capital accumulation. The term itself thus designates the historical emergence of capitalism as a mode of production and also seems to raise questions about where the “first” stockpile of capital-to-be might have come from. The last part of Capital, volume 1 (part VIII, chapters 26-33), sets out to debunk Smith’s moral fable according to which the thrifty protocapitalist saves up money un­ til he is in a position to hire the profligate, who have nothing but their labor power to sell.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

This helps to explain why it is inaccurate to think of Google’s users as its customers: there is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers. When a capitalist hires workers and provides them with wages and means of production, the products that they produce belong to the capitalist to sell at a profit. Not so here. Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production, as we’ll discuss in more depth later in this chapter. Finally, people often say that the user is the “product.” This is also misleading, and it is a point that we will revisit more than once. For now let’s say that users are not products, but rather we are the sources of raw-material supply.

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In a third phase of competitive intensity, surveillance capitalists discovered the necessity of economies of action based on new methods that go beyond tracking, capturing, analyzing, and predicting behavior in order to intervene in the state of play and actively shape behavior at the source. The result is that the means of production are subordinated to an elaborate new means of behavioral modification, which relies upon a variety of machine processes, techniques, and tactics (tuning, herding, conditioning) to shape individual, group, and population behavior in ways that continuously improve their approximation to guaranteed outcomes. Just as industrial capitalism was driven to the continuous intensification of the means of production, so surveillance capitalists are now locked in a cycle of continuous intensification of the means of behavioral modification.

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See Google Street View market democracy, 31–32, 40, 496–497 Marketplace of Revolution, The (Breen), 502 Marx, Karl, 99, 222, 406, 598n64 Marxism, 222 Mashable, 235 mass production, 29, 31, 63–64, 85–86, 87–88, 347–348 material infrastructure: hyperscale of, 188–189, 500, 501 Mattel, 266–267 Mayer, Jonathan, 168 McCann Erickson, 288 McClain, Linda, 479 McConnell, Mike, 119–120 McDonald’s, 316 McKinsey, 217 means of behavioral modification: actuation as completion of, 293–294; aimed at “them” vs at “us,” 327; and Big Other, 376, 379; China’s use of, 388–389, 391; definition of, 339; as form of state power, 320, 322, 324, 326; and “goodness,” 432; guaranteed outcomes as result of, 203; history of resistance to, 320–328; ideology of human frailty legitimates, 343; information warfare (secrecy, asymmetries of knowledge and power) as essential to, 281; and instrumentarian power, 352, 360, 376, 379, 396f; means of production subordinated to, 8, 9, 11, 19–20, 67, 339, 351; means of social participation coextensive with, 342; need for rejection of, 344; operations of, 351; ownership of, 11, 326–327, 430; production of, 203; regulation of, 320–326. See also behavioral modification; economies of action; uncontracts means of production: machine intelligence as, 95–96, 97f; serves means of behavioral modification, 8, 9, 11, 19–20, 67, 339, 351. See also means of behavioral modification Meckling, William, 38 media use, international study of “unplugging” from, 445, 446 medical fields: and emotion analytics, 288; and internet of things, 247–251 mental health: depression, 275, 287, 446, 464–465; and Facebook use, 446, 463–465; monitoring of, 412; predictions of, 275 Mercer, Robert, 278 Mercury News, 116 meta-data, 117–118, 245, 272–273, 275 Meyer, Max, 362–363, 363–364, 364–366, 372, 412, 633n39, 634n42, 634n44, 635n45 Meyer, Michelle, 304 m-health (mobile health apps), 248–251 Michaels, Jon, 119 Microsoft, 24, 400; Bing search engine, 95, 162, 163; collaboration with metal-cutting factory, 407–409; Cortana digital assistant, 163–164, 165, 255, 400; Inktomi search engine, 71; and insurers, 217; patents filed by, 411–412; revenues of, 165–166, 405; surveillance capitalism spreads to, 9, 162–163; and voice recognition, 263; Windows 10 operating system, 164–165.

The Economics of Inequality
by Thomas Piketty and Arthur Goldhammer
Published 7 Jan 2015

The traditional left-wing position, passed down from nineteenth-century socialist theory and trade-union practice, holds that the only way to alleviate the misery of the poorest members of capitalist society is through social and political struggle, and that the redistributive efforts of government must penetrate to the very heart of the productive process. Opponents of the system must challenge the market forces that determine the profits of capitalists and the unequal remuneration of workers, for instance, by nationalizing the means of production or setting strict wage schedules. Merely collecting taxes to finance transfers to the poor is not enough. This left-right conflict shows that disagreements about the concrete form and desirability of redistributive policy are not necessarily due to contradictory principles of social justice but rather to contradictory analyses of the economic and social mechanisms that produce inequality.

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{TWO} Capital-Labor Inequality Since the industrial revolution, and in particular since the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883), the question of social inequality and redistribution has been posed primarily in terms of the opposition between capital and labor, profits and wages, employers and employees. Inequality is thus described as a contrast between those who own capital, that is, the means of production, and those who do not and must therefore make do with what they can earn from their labor. The fundamental source of inequality is thus said to be the unequal ownership of capital. Initially, the two terms of this basic inequality, capitalists and workers, are conceived as homogeneous groups, and inequality of income from labor is regarded as a secondary matter.

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If the capitalist mode of production is simply a mechanism for matching fixed quantities of capital and labor, n workers per machine, why is it necessary for anyone to own the machine? If the owner of the machine does nothing but claim a share of what it produces, then he could be eliminated by collectivizing the means of production. Saving could be replaced by taking a sufficient sum out of national income for the purpose of increasing the stock of machines and matching them to an appropriate number of workers: there would be no need of capitalists to accomplish this. This is obviously what Marx concluded from his observations of the capitalist economy, whose operation seemed terribly simple.

A Pelican Introduction Economics: A User's Guide
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 May 2014

Capital goods are also known as the means of production and refer to durable inputs into the production process (for example, machines, but not, say, raw materials). In everyday usage, we also use the term ‘capital’ for the money invested in a business venture.* Capitalists own the means of production either directly or, more commonly these days, indirectly by owning shares (or stocks) in a company – that is, proportional claims on the total value of the company – that own those means of production. Capitalists hire other people on a commercial basis to operate these means of production. These people are known as wage labourers, or simply workers.

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Markets were eventually abolished and replaced by full-blown central planning by 1928, when the first Five Year Plan started. By 1928, the Soviet Union had an economic system that was definitively not capitalist. It ran without private ownership of means of production, profit motives and markets. As for the other cornerstone of capitalism, wage labour, the picture was more complicated. Yes, in theory the Soviet workers were not wage labourers because they owned all the means of production – through state ownership or cooperatives. In practice they were indistinguishable from wage labourers in a capitalist economy, since they had little control over the way in which their enterprises and the wider economy operated, and their daily work experience was still subject to the same hierarchical relationship.

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Smith believed that competition among sellers in the market will ensure that profit-seeking producers will produce at the lowest possible costs, thereby benefiting everyone. However, the similarities between Smith’s capitalism and today’s capitalism do not stretch much beyond those basic aspects. There are huge differences between the two eras in terms of how these essential characteristics – private ownership of means of production, profit-seeking, wage employment and market exchange – are actually translated into realities. Capitalists are different In Adam Smith’s day, most factories (and farms) were owned and run by single individual capitalists or by partnerships made up of a small number of individuals who knew and understood each other.

Makers
by Chris Anderson
Published 1 Oct 2012

The academic way to put this is that global supply chains have become “scale-free,” able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Samsung. The non-academic way to say it is this: nothing is stopping you from making anything. The people now control the means of production. Or, as The Lean Startup author Eric Reis puts it, Marx got it wrong: “It’s not about ownership of the means of production, anymore. It’s about rentership of the means of production.” Such open supply chains are the mirror of Web publishing and e-commerce a decade ago. The Web, from Amazon to eBay, revealed a Long Tail of demand for niche physical goods; now the democratized tools of production are enabling a Long Tail of supply, too.

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You can invent a better mousetrap, but if you can’t make it in the millions, the world won’t beat a path to your door. As Marx observed, power belongs to those who control the means of production. My grandfather could invent the automatic sprinkler system in his workshop, but he couldn’t build a factory there. To get to market, he had to interest a manufacturer in licensing his invention. And that is not only hard, but requires the inventor to lose control of his or her invention. The owners of the means of production get to decide what is produced. In the end, my grandfather got lucky—to a point. Southern California was the center of the new home irrigation industry, and after much pitching, a company called Moody agreed to license his automatic sprinkler system.

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They invent their own designs and can charge a premium to their discriminating consumers who are intentionally avoiding mass-produced goods. So, back to the future. Today we are seeing a return to a new sort of cottage industry. Once again, new technology is giving individuals the power over the means of production, allowing for bottom-up entrepreneurship and distributed innovation. Just as the Web’s democratization of the means of production in everything from software to music made it possible to create an empire in a dorm room or a hit album in a bedroom, so the new democratized tools of digital manufacturing will be tomorrow’s spinning jennies. And the guilds they may break may be the very factory model that grew up in Manchester and dominated the past three centuries.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

A common method for the capitalist to increase value creation is handing the worker a tool (in SpongeBob’s case, the spatula and the secret recipe), enabling the worker to be more productive. The worker is dependent on the means of production, which are owned by the capitalist, because the worker can only be productive through them. Yes, you own a laptop and a mobile phone now; but in analyzing a mode of production, the decisive question is not who owns any kind of means of production but who owns the dominant means of production. These used to be the factory, the machinery. They are now becoming the big algorithms, the constantly adjusted and ever-developing virtual machinery.

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He discovered that capital is not a thing but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things. As Marx explains further, “Property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative—the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free will.” Marx argues, “The means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They become capital only under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation and subjection of the laborer.”

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Emancipation, especially the emancipation of labor, does not. It does not emerge as a by-product of technological development, and this still holds true in the age of platforms and algorithmic capitalism. Yes, there are great possibilities for redefining the position of labor in the production process. Yes, the force is strong in the new means of production, but so is the dark side. Should you feel discouraged from opening up a new platform cooperative? No, not at all. But do not expect exploitative, hierarchical, narrow-minded capitalism to roll over and die just because you’re clever enough to program a platform of your own. A new mode of production that could release the potential for a less alienated, less exploited, less asshole-infested worklife will not prevail just because it seems economically superior.

Anarchy State and Utopia
by Robert Nozick
Published 15 Mar 1974

And the charm and simplicity of this theory’s definition of exploitation is lost when it is realized that according to the definition there will be exploitation in any society in which investment takes place for a greater future product (perhaps because of population growth); and in any society in which those unable to work, or to work productively, are subsidized by the labor of others. But at bottom, Marxist theory explains the phenomenon of exploitation by reference to the workers not having access to the means of production. The workers have to sell their labor (labor power) to the capitalists, for they must use the means of production to produce, and cannot produce alone. A worker, or groups of them, cannot hire means of production and wait to sell the product some months later; they lack the cash reserves to obtain access to machinery or to wait until later when revenue will be received from the future sale of the product now being worked on.

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Note that once the rest of the theory, properly, is dropped, and it is this crucial fact of nonaccess to the means of production that underlies exploitation, it follows that in a society in which the workers are not forced to deal with the capitalist, exploitation of laborers will be absent. (We pass over the question of whether workers are forced to deal with some other, less decentralized group.) So, if there is a sector of publicly owned and controlled (what you will) means of production that is expandable so that all who wish to may work in it, then this is sufficient to eliminate the exploitation of laborers.

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So, if there is a sector of publicly owned and controlled (what you will) means of production that is expandable so that all who wish to may work in it, then this is sufficient to eliminate the exploitation of laborers. And in particular, if in addition to this public sector there is a sector of privately owned means of production that employs wage laborers who choose to work in this sector, then these workers are not being exploited. (Perhaps they choose to work there, despite attempts to convince them to do otherwise, because they get higher wages or returns in this sector.) For they are not forced to deal with the private owners of means of production. Let us linger for a moment upon this case. Suppose that the private sector were to expand, and the public sector became weaker and weaker.

Marx: A Very Short Introduction
by Peter Singer
Published 15 Mar 2000

According to Marx’s view of history, as the economic basis of society alters, so all consciousness alters. Greed, egoism, and envy are not ingrained forever in the character of human beings. They would disappear in a society in which private property and private means of production were replaced with communal property and socially organized means of production. We would lose our preoccupation with our private interests. Citizens of the new society would find their own happiness in working for the good of all. Hence a communist society would have a new ethical basis. It has been claimed – by Lenin among others – that Marxism is a scientific system, free from any ethical judgements or postulates.

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The ensuing revolution will be, says Marx, lapsing into the style of his earlier writings, ‘the negation of the negation’. It will not mean a return to private property in the old sense, but to property based on the gains made under capitalism, that is, on co-operation and common possession of land and the means of production. Capitalism will make the transition relatively easy, since it has already expropriated all private property into its own hands. All that is now necessary is for the mass of the people to expropriate these few expropriators. The second and third volumes of Capital are much less interesting than the first.

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Marx’s theory that human nature is not for ever fixed, but alters in accordance with the economic and social conditions of each period, holds out the prospect of transforming society by changing the economic basis of such human traits as greed, egoism, and ambition. Marx expected the abolition of private property and the institution of common ownership of the means of production and exchange to bring about a society in which people were motivated more by a desire for the good of all than by a specific desire for their own individual good. In this way individual and common interests could be harmonized. Marx’s view of human nature is now so widely accepted that a return to a pre-Marxist conception of human nature is unthinkable.

Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War
by Branko Milanovic
Published 9 Oct 2023

This is an important point because it links the existence of capital to the existence of wage labor. The two go together. In a less guarded, maybe less Marxist, way of speaking, people today often use the term capital when they simply mean the machinery or means of production. But in a more accurate Marxist terminology, capital is a means of production when it is used to hire labor and generate profit for the owner of the means of production. Class Structure As in Ricardo, there are three principal classes in Marx: landlords, workers, and capitalists. As in Ricardo, too, it is class position that determines a person’s position in the income distribution.

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To read Marx without regard for his normative positions might sound impossible, but it should be noted that Marx was generally uninterested in questions of inequality in the way that we pose them now. His view, shared by most Marxists, was that unless the background institutions of capitalism—namely, private ownership of means of production and hired labor—were swept away, any political struggles to reduce inequality could at best lead to reformism, trade unionism, and what Lenin later called “opportunism.” Inequality was thus a derivative, secondary issue, barely addressed in Marx’s writings. Descriptions of poverty and inequality fill the pages of Capital, especially its first volume.

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This emphasis on the powerful effects of endowments (privately owned capital), combined with the laws that protect the endowments, gives rise to Marxists’ insistence that, under different historical ways of organizing production, the law of value takes different forms. If the dominant mode of production is small-scale commodity producers working with their own means of production, there will be no general tendency toward equalization of profit rates, and the structure of relative prices will not be what it is under capitalism. 31 And because relative prices will differ under the two systems, so will the output mix and the returns to the factors of production. This feature of Marx’s economics had, as we shall see in Chapter 7 , a strong influence on the economics of income distribution under socialism.

Value of Everything: An Antidote to Chaos The
by Mariana Mazzucato
Published 25 Apr 2018

Smith was particularly attracted to the prospect of investment in machines, then just beginning to be used in factories, because they improved workers' productivity. His emphasis on investment linked directly to his ideas about rent. Smith believed that there were three kinds of income: wages for labour in capitalist enterprises; profits for capitalists who owned the means of production; and rents from ownership of land. When these three sources of income are paid at their competitive level, together they determine what he called the ‘competitive price'.28 Since land was necessary, rent from land was a ‘natural' part of the economy. But that did not mean rent was productive: ‘the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent [from the earth] even for its natural produce'.29 Indeed, Smith asserted, the principle of rent from land could be extended to other monopolies, such as the right to import a particular commodity or the right to plead at the bar.

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In early societies of hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers, people worked enough to create the value that would allow them to survive, but no surplus over and above that. Later, under feudalism, they could be forced to produce enough surplus to satisfy the (unproductive) consumption of the feudal lord, which, as Smith and Ricardo knew, could be substantial. But after the means of production were taken away from independent producers - mostly by violence and expropriation through property rights legislation, such as enclosures of common land in England by big landowners - they became workers, ‘free' and without property. Capitalists were able to purchase the workers' labour power because workers lost their independent means of subsistence and needed a wage to survive.

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Economists had previously thought of ‘capital' as purely physical -machinery and buildings, for example - and surplus as solely positive, helping the economy to reproduce itself and grow. But Marx gives capital a social dimension and surplus a negative connotation. Labour produces surplus value, which fuels capital accumulation and economic growth. But capital accumulation is not just due to productive labour. It is also deeply social. Because workers do not own the means of production they are ‘alienated' from their work. The surplus they produce is taken away from them. Work is necessary for earning the wages they receive to buy the food, shelter and clothes they need to survive.47 Moreover, in a capitalist market society, relations between people are mediated by commodity exchange.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy
by Callum Cant
Published 11 Nov 2019

How did that change things? Did it change things? I had had discussions with interested friends a few times, where I repeated the line that I’d heard other people put forward: ‘I basically own the means of production, apart from the app.’ Deliveroo is often used as an example of how capitalism is developing a tendency to accidentally hand over the means of production to workers themselves. But it didn’t feel like I owned the means of production at all. Basically, what I was saying to my friends was a weak version of the argument Nick Srnicek makes in Platform capitalism. He argues that platforms like Deliveroo outsource the majority of their ‘fixed capital’ to their workers.

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And, sure, Deliveroo workers in London who do the lunch shift taking £40-a-pop boutique sushi into big trading firms have no class solidarity with the people they’re delivering to. But they have much more in common with worse-off white-collar workers. Purely in terms of the relation to the means of production themselves, there exists an underlying possibility for solidarity between the two in the same way that there exists the possibility for alliance between Deliveroo workers and tech workers. As the Greek socialist theorist Nicos Poulantzas put it back in the 1970s, ‘organising such strata, incorporating them in trade unions, engaging them in collective practices and demands and breaking the ideology that they are “middle class” or “professionals” is indeed one of the most important stakes of class struggles today’.12 This professional segment, balancing dangerously on a cliff edge just above the rest of the working class, is no less important today.

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The sensible support of sensible members of the ruling class for the ‘unfortunately necessary’13 dictatorial regimes which prevent workers taking control of the economy itself – be they headed by Mussolini, Pinochet, or Bolsanaro – is the result of the contradictory limits of capitalist democracy and the failures of its ruling political ideology, liberalism. So, the political stakes underlying the proposals of expropriation under workers’ control should not be underestimated. Breaking the grip of the ruling class on the means of production is not a problem that can be skipped around with smart policy and branding. If workers get their hands on the levers of society and begin to challenge the fundamental basis of the mode of production, a desperate fight ensues between extreme reactionaries and the forces of social transformation.

Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution
by David Harvey
Published 3 Apr 2012

Marx accepts the Lo ckean fiction in the opening chapters of Capital (though the argument is cer­ tainly larded with irony when, for example, he takes up the strange role of the Robinson Crusoe myth in political- economic thinking, in which someone thrown into a state of nature acts like a true-born entrepre­ neurial Briton ) . 16 But when M arx takes up how labor-power becomes an individualized commodity that is bought and sold in fair and free m arkets, we see the Lockean fiction unmasked for what it really is: a system founded on equality in value-exchange produces surplus value for the capitalist owner of the means of production through the exploitation of living labor in production (not in the market, where bourgeois rights and constitutionalities can prevail). Th e Lockean formulation is even more dramatically undermined when Marx takes up the question of collective lab or. In a world where individu al artisan producers controlling their own means of production could engage in free exchange in relatively free m arkets, the L ockean fiction might h ave some purchase. But the rise of the factory system from the late eighteenth century onwards, M arx argued, rendered Locke's theoretical formulations redundant ( even if they had not been redun­ dant in th e first place).

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If there is a scarcity of labor and wages are too high, then either existing labor has to be disciplined (technologically induced unemployment or an assault on organized working class power-such as that set in motion by Thatcher and Reagan in the 1980s-are two prime methods) or fresh labor forces must be found (by immigration, export of capital, or proletarianization of hitherto independent elements in the population). New means of production in general and new natural resources in particular must be found. This puts increasing pressure on the natural environment to yield up the necessary raw materials and absorb the inevitable wastes. The coercive laws of competition also force new technologies and organizational forms to come on line all the time, since capitalists with higher productivity can out-compete those using inferior methods.

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Some o f the flow of what seems to be fictitious capital can indeed be involved in value cre­ ation. When I convert my mortgaged house into a sweatshop employing illegal immigrants, the house becomes fixed capital in production. When the state builds roads and other infrastructures that function as collec­ tive means of production for capital, these then have to be categorized as T H E U R BAN ROOTS OF CAP I TALI ST C R I S E S 41 "productive state expenditures:' When the hospital o r university becomes the site for innovation and design of new drugs, equipment, and the like, it becomes a site of production. Marx would not be fazed by these caveats at all.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis
by Benjamin Kunkel
Published 11 Mar 2014

A capitalist, in order to produce, must purchase both means of production (Marx’s “constant capital”) and wage-labor (or “variable capital”). After this outlay—C+V in Marx’s formulation—the capitalist naturally hopes to possess a commodity capable of being sold for more than was spent on its production. The difference between cost of production and price at sale permits the realization of surplus value. The production of any commodity, as well as the “expanded reproduction” of the system itself, can thus be described by the further formula C+V+S: to a quantity of constant capital, or means of production, has been added a quantity of variable capital, or labor power, with a bonus of surplus value contained in the finished commodity.

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The production of any commodity, as well as the “expanded reproduction” of the system itself, can thus be described by the further formula C+V+S: to a quantity of constant capital, or means of production, has been added a quantity of variable capital, or labor power, with a bonus of surplus value contained in the finished commodity. The trouble is already there to see. Imagine an economy consisting of a single firm which has bought means of production and labor power for a total of $100, in order to produce a mass of commodities it intends to sell for $110, i.e. at a profit of 10 percent. The problem is that the firm’s suppliers of constant and variable capital are also its only potential customers. Even if the would-be buyers pool their funds, they have only their $100 to spend, and no more. Production of the total supply of commodities exceeds the monetarily effective demand in the system.

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Capitalism is better understood as designating a society that subordinates all processes—notably the metabolism between humanity and nature, the production and distribution of goods and services, the function and composition of government, and, of course, market exchange—to the private accumulation of capital. As for communism, perhaps it goes without saying, since Žižek doesn’t say so, that it means eliminating private capital on any large scale and realizing the Marxist goal of common ownership of the means of production. Yet would productive enterprises be owned by those who worked for them or by society at large—or somehow jointly between the two groups? Žižek doesn’t ask, let alone answer, such questions. Imagine, in any case, a society whose productive assets are, in one way or another, the property, as Marx said, of “the associated producers.”

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism
by Eric Hobsbawm
Published 5 Sep 2011

Such general remarks as he made on the subject, as in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of the German social democrats, hardly gave his successors specific guidance, and indeed these gave no serious thought to what they considered would be an academic problem or a utopian exercise until after the revolution. It was enough to know that it would be based – to quote the famous ‘clause 4’ of the Labour Party’s constitution – ‘on the common ownership of the means of production’ which was generally understood as achievable by nationalising the country’s industries. Curiously enough, the first theory of a centralised socialist economy was not worked out by socialists but by a non-socialist 8 Marx Today Italian economist, Enrico Barone, in 1908. Nobody else thought about it before the question of nationalising private industries came on the agenda of practical politics at the end of the First World War.

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It was soon realised that such views were likely to be developed by or to attract those who favoured equality, such as the disciples of Rousseau, and to lead to interference with property rights – the point was already made by eighteenth-century Italian opponents of the Enlightenment and of ‘socialists’17 –24 Marx, Engels and pre-Marxian Socialism but it was not entirely identified with a society based on the fully collective ownership and management of the means of production. Indeed, it did not become completely so identified in general usage until the emergence of socialist political parties in the late nineteenth century, and some may argue that it is not completely identified even today. Hence evident non-socialists (in the modern sense) could, even in the late nineteenth century, describe themselves or be described as ‘socialists’, like the Kathedersozialisten of Germany or the British Liberal politician who declared ‘we are all socialists now’.

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How much of Saint-Simon’s views were his own, how much influenced by his secretary (1814–17), the historian Augustin Thierry, need not concern us. At all events social systems are determined by the mode of organisation of property, historic evolution rests on the development of the productive system, and the power of the bourgeoisie on its possession of the means of production. He appears to hold a rather simple view of French history as class struggle, dating back to the conquest of the Gauls by the Franks, which was elaborated by his followers into a more specific history of the exploited classes which antici - pates Marx: slaves are succeeded by serfs, and these by nominally free but propertyless proletarians.

Capitalism: the unknown ideal
by Ayn Rand
Published 15 Aug 1966

The article gives no definition of its subject; it opens as follows: CAPITALISM, a term used to denote the economic system that has been dominant in the western world since the breakup of feudalism. Fundamental to any system called capitalist are the relations between private owners of nonpersonal means of production (land, mines, industrial plants, etc., collectively known as capital) [italics mine] and free but capitalless workers, who sell their labour services to employers. . . . The resulting wage bargains determine the proportion in which the total product of society will be shared between the class of labourers and the class of capitalist entrepreneurs. 1 (I quote from Galt’s speech in Atlas Shrugged, from a passage describing the tenets of collectivism: “An industrialist—blank-out—there is no such person.

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It takes extraordinary skill to hold more than fifty percent of a large industry’s market in a free economy. It requires unusual productive ability, unfailing business judgment, unrelenting effort at the continuous improvement of one’s product and technique. The rare company which is able to retain its share of the market year after year and decade after decade does so by means of productive efficiency—and deserves praise, not condemnation. The Sherman Act may be understandable when viewed as a projection of the nineteenth century’s fear and economic ignorance. But it is utter nonsense in the context of today’s economic knowledge. The seventy additional years of observing industrial development should have taught us something.

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THE NEW FASCISM: RULE BY CONSENSUS by Ayn Rand I shall begin by doing a very unpopular thing that does not fit today’s intellectual fashions and is, therefore, “anti-consensus”: I shall begin by defining my terms, so that you will know what I am talking about. Let me give you the dictionary definitions of three political terms: socialism, fascism, and statism: Socialism—a theory or system of social organization which advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production, capital, land, etc. in the community as a whole. Fascism—a governmental system with strong centralized power, permitting no opposition or criticism, controlling all affairs of the nation (industrial, commercial, etc.) Statism—the principle or policy of concentrating extensive economic, political, and related controls in the state at the cost of individual liberty.54 Based on a lecture given at The Ford Hall Forum, Boston, on April 18, 1965.

Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts, and the Death of Freedom
by Grace Blakeley
Published 11 Mar 2024

Banks gain a “promoter’s profit” by supporting firms to float on the stock market. Capital gains derived from speculation over the “fictitious capital” created in financial markets is made possible through the transformation of capitalist property rights: “ownership of the actual means of production is transferred from individuals to a legal entity.” This transformation renders the production process increasingly independent from individual ownership of means of production. Hilferding, Finance Capital. 74. The increasing involvement of financial institutions in the financing of firm investment “liberates” the industrial capitalist from his role as “industrial entrepreneur.”

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Land was the most valued asset within this social system, and the term feudalism refers both to the importance of land itself and to the dominance of landowners within feudal societies. Under capitalism, a society’s wealth is expressed not as land wealth but as “an immense collection of commodities.”65 The term capital refers to all the resources required to produce those commodities (what Marx called the means of production), and the term capitalists refers to the people who own all those resources. Workers are those who are forced to sell their labor power to capitalists for a living precisely because they don’t own any of these resources. The wage these workers are paid is lower than the value of the commodities they produce over the course of the working day—this is the source of the capitalist’s profit, and the worker’s exploitation.

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Capitalism is, at its core, defined by this divide: the divide between the people who own all the tools required to produce commodities and those who are forced to sell their labor power to the capitalists to buy those commodities.66 The profit of the capitalist comes through the exploitation of the worker—the interests of the two are diametrically opposed. Similar to feudalism, the term capitalism signifies both the importance of commodities and the dominance of the capitalist class. This is what it means to say that capital is a “social relationship.”67 The term’s meaning refers not just to the means of production but also to the relationships that underpin how those resources are produced and used, much as feudalism refers not just to the importance of land in general but to the way it was controlled by an aristocratic class. The people and institutions who control all the things we need to produce commodities, and the money gained from selling them, are the ones in charge.

Alternatives to Capitalism
by Robin Hahnel and Erik Olin Wright

Three ideal types of economic structures—capitalism, statism and socialism—can be differentiated in terms of the dominant form of power controlling economic activity3: •Capitalism is an economic structure within which the means of production are privately owned and the allocation and use of resources for different social purposes is accomplished through the exercise of economic power. Investments and the control of production are the result of the exercise of economic power by owners of capital. •Statism is an economic structure within which the means of production are owned by the state and the allocation and use of resources for different social purposes are accomplished through the exercise of state power.

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That is a “binary” choice, to use Erik’s words, about which we disagree. At the beginning of the twentieth century, virtually all who opposed capitalism saw the market system as a destructive force that required replacement by democratic planning. Not only did they believe we needed to replace private ownership with social ownership of the “means of production,” but also envisioned replacing the impersonal rule of market forces with a self-conscious system of democratic planning. During the middle third of the twentieth century, social democratic political parties changed their position on this issue, and came out in support of the view that Erik expresses above—a system that combines markets with state regulation and planning through the political system.1 During the last fifth of the twentieth century, many radicals from the generation to which Erik and I both belong reacted to the demise of the planned economies and free market triumphalism by joining social democrats in support of a vision of “socialized markets” while endorsing the “tacit knowledge” critique of comprehensive planning voiced by conservative champions of free market capitalism like Von Mises and Hayek fifty years earlier.

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A Social Socialism Both social democracy and socialism contain the word “social,” but generally this term is invoked in a loose and ill-defined way. The suggestion is of a political program committed to the broad welfare of society rather than the narrow interests of particular elites. Sometimes, especially in more radical versions of socialist discourse, “social ownership” of the means of production is invoked as a contrast to “private ownership,” but in practice this has generally been collapsed into state ownership, and the term social itself ends up doing relatively little analytical work in the elaboration of the political program. What I will argue is that the social in social democracy and socialism can be used to identify a cluster of principles and visions of change that differentiate socialism and social democracy from both the capitalist project of economic organization and what could be called a purely statist response to capitalism.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams
Published 1 Oct 2015

A third approach therefore focuses on invention and emphasises that the choice of which technologies to develop and how they are designed is primarily a political matter.76 The direction of technological development is determined not only by technical and economic considerations, but also by political intentions. More than just seizing the means of production, this approach declares the need to invent new means of production. A final approach focuses on how existing technology contains occluded potentials that strain at our current horizon and how they might be repurposed.77 Under capitalism, technology’s potential is drastically constrained – reduced to a mere vehicle for generating profit and controlling workers.

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Through the process called primitive accumulation, pre-capitalist workers were uprooted from their land and dispossessed of their means of subsistence.4 Peasants struggled against this and continued to survive on the margins of the emerging capitalist world,5 and it eventually took violent force and harsh new legal systems to impose wage labour on the population. Peasants, in other words, had to be made into a proletariat. This new figure of the proletariat was defined by its lack of access to the means of production or subsistence, and its requirement for wage labour in order to survive.6 This means that the ‘proletariat’ is not just the ‘working class’ nor is it defined by an income level, profession or culture. Rather, the proletariat is simply that group of people who must sell their labour power to live – whether they are employed or not.7 And the history of capitalism is the history of the world’s population being transformed into proletarian existence through the advancing dispossession of the peasantry.

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Without full automation, postcapitalist futures must necessarily choose between abundance at the expense of freedom (echoing the work-centricity of Soviet Russia) or freedom at the expense of abundance, represented by primitivist dystopias.7 With automation, by contrast, machines can increasingly produce all necessary goods and services, while also releasing humanity from the effort of producing them.8 For this reason, we argue that the tendencies towards automation and the replacement of human labour should be enthusiastically accelerated and targeted as a political project of the left.9 This is a project that takes an existing capitalist tendency and seeks to push it beyond the acceptable parameters of capitalist social relations. Capitalism has long been synonymous with rapid changes in technology: driven by the imperative to accumulate, the means of production are continually transformed.10 In the nineteenth century, agriculture began to be mechanised, and small plots of land became increasingly centralised under larger and larger industrial farms. Craftwork was transformed too, with machinery appearing as an alien intervention into the production process.

The Nature of Technology
by W. Brian Arthur
Published 6 Aug 2009

These too form building blocks available for continual combination. Modern technology is not just a collection of more or less independent means of production. Rather it is becoming an open language for the creation of structures and functions in the economy. Slowly, at a pace measured in decades, we are shifting from technologies that produced fixed physical outputs to technologies whose main character is that they can be combined and configured endlessly for fresh purposes. Technology, once a means of production, is becoming a chemistry. In attempting to come up with a theory of technology, our first challenge will be to see if we can say something general about it.

…

The radio processes the signal, and I mean this literally, not metaphorically. It pulls signals from the air, purifies them, and transforms them into sounds. It is a miniature extraction process, a tiny factory that these days can be held in the palm of a hand. All devices in fact process something. That, after all, is why economists refer to technologies as means of production. Does the correspondence work in the other direction? Can we view methods and processes as devices? The answer is yes. Processes and methods—think of oil refining or sorting algorithms—are sequences of operations. But to execute, they always require some hardware, some sort of physical equipment that carries out the operations.

…

And we picture this system, “the economy,” as something that exists in itself as a backdrop to the events and adjustments that occur within it. Seen this way, the economy becomes something like a gigantic container for its technologies, a huge machine with many modules or parts that are its technologies—its means of production. When a new technology (the railroad for transportation, say) comes along, it offers a new module, a new upgrade, for a particular industry: the old specialized module it replaces (canals) is taken out and the new upgrade module is slid in. The rest of the machine automatically rebalances and its tensions and flows (prices, and goods produced and consumed) readjust accordingly.

Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle
by Silvia Federici
Published 4 Oct 2012

However, the return of “Primitive Accumulation” on a world scale, starting with the immense expansion of the world labor market, the fruit of multiple forms of expropriation, has made it impossible for me to still write (as I had done in the early 1970s) that WfH is the strategy not only for the feminist movement “but for the entire working class.” The reality of entire populations practically demonetized by drastic devaluations in addition to proliferating land privatization schemes and the commercialization of all natural resources urgently poses the question of the reclamation of the means of production and the creation of new forms of social cooperation. These objectives should not be conceived as alternatives to the struggles for and over the “wage.” For instance, the struggle of immigrant domestic workers fighting for the institutional recognition of “carework” is strategically very important, for the devaluation of reproductive work has been one of the pillars of capital accumulation and the capitalistic exploitation of women’s labor.

…

Similarly, the appearance of child-soldiers in the 1980s and 1990s would never have been possible if, in many countries, the extended family had not been undermined by financial hardships, and millions of children were not without a place to go except for the street and had someone to provide for their needs.11 War has not only been a consequence of economic change; it has also been a means to produce it. Two objectives stand out when we consider the prevailing patterns of war in Africa, and the way in which warfare intersects with globalization. First, war forces people off the land, i.e., it separates the producers from the means of production, a condition for the expansion of the global labor market. War also reclaims the land for capitalist use, boosting the production of cash crops and export-oriented agriculture. Particularly in Africa, where communal land tenure is still widespread, this has been a major goal of the World Bank, whose raison d’etre as an institution has been the capitalization of agriculture.12 Thus, it is hard today to see millions of refugees or famine victims fleeing their localities without thinking of the satisfaction this must bring to World Bank officers as well as agribusiness companies, who surely see the hand of progress working through it.

…

In contrast to UN-made feminism, with its NGOs, its income-generating projects and paternalistic relations with local movements, stand the grassroots organizations that women have formed in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to fight for basic services (like roads, schools, clinics), to resist the governments’ attacks on street vending which is one of women’s main forms of subsistence, and to defend each other from their husbands’ abuses.19 Like every form of self-determination, women’s liberation requires specific material conditions, starting with control over the basic means of production and subsistence. As Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen have argued in The Subsistence Perspective (2000), this principle holds not only for women in the “Third World,” who have been major protagonists of land struggles to recover land occupied by big landowners but also for women in industrialized countries.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism
by Peter Frase
Published 10 Mar 2015

We will have to do at least a little work to manage and maintain the machines. But I assume all human labor away to avoid entangling myself in a debate that has bedeviled the Left ever since the Industrial Revolution: how a postcapitalist society would manage labor and production, in the absence of capitalist bosses with control over the means of production. This is an important (and ongoing) debate, but the issues I’m concerned with will be clearer if I can set it aside. Thus, the constant in my equation is that technical change tends toward perfect automation. If automation is the constant, ecological crisis and class power are the variables.

…

I share Marx’s aversion to recipes for the kitchens of the future, so I won’t attempt some kind of programmatic account of the transition to communism. I’ll merely suggest some basic principles. We should not assume that the end of capitalism necessarily involves some grand revolutionary movement that merely bides its time and builds strength, before seizing the state and the means of production at one stroke—the model of Bolshevik and other insurrectionist revolutionaries. That’s not to say, however, that some kind of dramatic rupture won’t ultimately be necessary; it would be naïve to think that the holders of wealth and power will relinquish it voluntarily. But since we are a long way from being able to force such a reckoning, we can think in the meantime about strategies that build the alternative to capitalism before it is completely overturned.

…

Rents accrue not just to land and government bonds but to distributed stock portfolios and, increasingly, to intellectual property, to which we will return. The existence of rents and rentiers has always been something of an embarrassment to the defenders of capitalism. Defending the necessity of the boss who controls the means of production is easier, since ideologists can at least claim that they do something, whether it’s organizing production or coming up with products, or merely taking economic risks. But rentiers create nothing, make nothing, do nothing; they just passively accept the rewards of ownership. Thus, there have historically been calls to tax away the rents from merely owning property, as opposed to the profits that come from doing something with it.

Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 20 Nov 2018

Social inequality is considered an inevitable by-product of the private ownership of the means of production: the factories, machines, technologies, intellectual property, and so forth. Capitalist economies create an ever-growing wealth gap between those who own the means of production and those who must sell their labor for less than the value it creates in order to meet their basic needs. Ongoing exploitation of those who work for a living increases the wealth of those at the top; the rich get richer at a faster and faster rate, which allows them to control more and more of the means of production. Socialist policies interrupt this trend toward growing inequality through a number of mechanisms, including the creation of public or collectively owned enterprises (co-ops) and/or redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation and the creation of publicly funded social safety nets to prevent destitution.

…

.… The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation. Since then, socialist theorists have also blamed capitalism for the commodification of women’s sexuality, and argued that women’s economic independence from men and the collective ownership of the means of production would liberate personal relations from economic calculation. In their view, a more egalitarian society with men and women living and working together as equals would lead to a new kind of relationship based on love and mutual affection, unsullied by questions of worth, value, and exchange.8 As far back as the era of utopian socialism in the 1830s, theorists argued that postcapitalist societies would generate a new form of sexual morality.

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August Bebel (1840–1913): A cofounder of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party of Germany who would go on to head the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The author of the influential book Woman and Socialism and a prominent advocate for women’s rights, Bebel argued that woman would only be freed from their economic dependence on men when workers collectively owned and controlled the means of production. Bebel is widely credited with being the first political figure to deliver a public speech in favor of gay rights. Courtesy of U.S. Library of Congress. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Writing this book challenged me to break out of my usual academic register. I had much help from family, friends, and colleagues who encouraged me to pursue this project, gave moral support, provided general editorial advice, and read or commented on individual chapters: Courtney Berger, Susan Faludi, Dagmar Herzog, Agnieszka Kościańska, Marwan Kraidy, Sonya Michel, Mira Nikolova, Mitchell Orenstein, Kevin M.

Basic Income: A Radical Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy
by Philippe van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght
Published 20 Mar 2017

On the contrary, they justify the attempts by some of his followers to work out normative perspectives that could justify the strugÂ�gle for the replacement of capitalism by socialism, of the private by the collective ownerÂ�ship of the means of production. Two concepts play a crucial role in Â�these attempts—Â� exploitation and alienation—Â�and both are no less relevant to the discussion of an unconditional basic income than to the discussion of socialism. Exploitation, or the extraction of surplus value, is essentially the appropriation by nonworkers of part of the net product of an economy. Part of the total product in any given period is used to replace the material means of production used up in the production proÂ�cess, from seeds to computers. What is left is the net product, some of which is purchased with the workers’ wages.

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So can collaboration between national tax authorities in the form of agreements on minimal rates and exchange of fiscal information.25 In the history of basic income, Â�there have been more radical proposals that avoid this probÂ�lem by making capital pay for basic income without its needing to be taxed. If a state owns all means of production, it can simply determine what proportion of the total product it allocates to wages, to investment, and to other expenditures, including, if it so wishes, an unconditional basic income. In a socialist society, in other words, part of the economic surplus can be disbursed as a uniform social dividend without anyone’s needing to be taxed. This is posÂ�siÂ�ble Â�under centrally planned socialism, but it is also posÂ�siÂ�ble Â�under market socialism, where the collective ownerÂ�ship of the means of production is combined with competition among firms and a free Â� Â�labor market.

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Fund i ng, E xper i men ts, and Trans itions John Roemer all include a social dividend.26 If Â�there is a Â�free Â�labor market— as opposed to a centralized allocation of workers—Â�the relative levels of wages and the social dividend raise incentive issues analogous to Â�those raised by taxation Â�under capitalism, though with more leeway since there Â� is no private capital to be assuaged by sufficient profits. This option may not be completely ruled out in the few countries in the world in which a significant part of the means of production is still publicly owned.27 But elsewhere, a Â�wholesale nationalization of the means of production is not exactly in sight. A move in this direction was nonetheless proposed by James Â�Meade as a central component of his “Agathotopian” model.28 Â�Under his “topsy-Â�turvy nationalization,” firms are privately managed but half of their shares are owned by the state.

The Great Economists Ten Economists whose thinking changed the way we live-FT Publishing International (2014)
by Phil Thornton
Published 7 May 2014

Think of a supermarket checkout worker, a solicitor’s assistant or a bank teller and you can see that the same dynamic applies now. Marx saw that there was a difference between what the workers were paid for their efforts and what the factory owners received as a result. Marx called this ‘surplus value’: the capitalists were able to keep the extra value of profits because they owned the means of production. Capitalists therefore need to pay the workers less than the value at which they planned to sell the goods. This equation also needs to include the costs of the machinery, which Marx explains as being the value of the ‘concealed’ labour that went in to build the machine. Their profit was the surplus divided by the sum of the labour costs (variable capital) and machines (fixed capital).

…

With this grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself,’ Marx wrote. ‘The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument [skin]. 58 The Great Economists The capitalist system was in Marx’s eyes unsustainable and would end in revolution and its own overthrow. This integument is burst asunder.

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Indeed, it was the stark differences between the wealth enjoyed by people living in capitalist countries and those living under communism that fuelled the overthrow of the latter regime – rather than the other way around. 64 The Great Economists Working conditions have improved rather than deteriorated thanks to innovations such as the minimum wage, which Marx would have approved of, and trade unionisation, which he would also have applauded. But what Marx did not predict was the rise of the middle class, a group of people that did not own the means of production (unless they bought and held stakes in Britain’s privatised industries) but who could command a high value for their labour. Defenders of Marx can point to the fact that governments of capitalist countries have had to respond to workers’ demand for greater pay and greater rights in order to avert rising anger and revolution at work as a sign that Marx was on the right lines in looking at how capitalism would develop as a dynamic model.

Having and Being Had
by Eula Biss
Published 15 Jan 2020

We didn’t amass capital, we didn’t understand it, and we didn’t learn how to manage it. We didn’t have mothers and grandmothers teaching us about capital. But here’s the thing—she circles her womb with her hand—we are capital. We are the means of production. I had three children, she says. I’ve been the means of production. Now I want to own the means of production. I pause over this, wondering what it means to own yourself. And wondering if the very idea of owning yourself requires, as she suggests, imagining your body as capital. Now she’s saying, You know, money isn’t bad. Money isn’t the problem.

…

“The fossilized trace of a trillion birds will outlast—and mark the passage of—the humans who made them,” Raj Patel and Jason Moore write in A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things. What about capitalism, I wonder, could we tax capitalism itself? I ask the economist if he can explain to me what capitalism is. The botanist leaves to get a drink. Capital, he begins, is a means of production. That much I already know. And capitalism is a system in which one builds wealth by owning a means of production. Like a factory, he says, or a cow. Or land? I ask. Yes, land. Or another person. Even a sharpened stick is capital. Capitalism has been around a long time, he says, it’s as old as ownership. I think he’s wrong on this, but we’re talking about fossil fuels now.

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century
by George Gilder
Published 30 Apr 1981

It betrays every person who seeks to redistribute wealth by coercion. It balks every socialist revolutionary who imagines that by seizing the so-called means of production he can capture the crucial capital of an economy. It baffles nearly every conglomerateur who believes he can safely enter new industries by buying rather than by learning them. It confounds every bureaucrat of science who imagines he can buy the fruits of research and development. The cost of capturing technology is mastery of the underlying science. The means of production of entrepreneurs are not land, labor, or capital but minds and hearts. Capitalism is a system that begins not with taking but with giving to others.

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Even Karl Marx knew enough not to stress, as the crux and keystone of capitalism, control over the means of consumption—or even of the supply of money. Marx, however, erroneously located the means of production in the material arrangements of the society rather than in the metaphysical capital of human freedom and creativity. The problem of contemporary capitalism lies not chiefly in a deterioration of physical capital, but in a persistent subversion of the psychological means of production—the morale and inspiration of economic man—undermining the very conscience of capitalism: the awareness that one must give in order to get, supply in order to demand.

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Even government-financed R&D, outside the results-oriented military, is mostly wasted. Enduring are only the contributions of mind and will and morality. If we continue to harass, overtax, and oppressively regulate the entrepreneurs, our liberal politicians will be shocked and horrified to discover how swiftly the physical tokens of the means of production dissolve into so much corroded wire, abandoned batteries, forlorn windmills, scrap metal, and jungle rot. More than thirty years ago, led by Art Laffer who famously inscribed his concept on a napkin in a congressional dining room, supply siders boldly proclaimed that by reducing tax rates Washington would be paradoxically rewarded with higher revenues.

Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
by Gareth Stedman Jones
Published 24 Aug 2016

The downfall of the Reich and other repressive states in Europe would come about not as the result of the activities of this or that subversive party, but because the productive forces created by the capitalist mode of production had come into ‘crying contradiction’ with that mode of production itself: ‘To such a degree that if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place’.76 Engels also offered an opportune criticism of the ‘ultimate scientific insufficiency’ of the ambition to create ‘a free people’s state’.77 The bourgeoisie through its transformation of productive forces had replaced the means of production of the individual by social means of production only workable by ‘a collectivity of men’. In effect the means of production had already begun to be socialized to such an extent that the state had already begun to take over ‘the great institutions for intercourse and communication – the post office, the telegraphs, the railways’.78 In this way, the bourgeoisie, having transformed ‘the great majority of the population into proletarians’, was itself ‘showing the way to the accomplishing of revolution’.

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Attention was also paid to the effect of ‘subsumption; upon rural and domestic occupations, originally pursued to meet the needs of the family, but progressively ‘transformed into independent capitalist branches of labour’.125 Reiterating a theme which he had first encountered in the 1840s, Karl stated that the ability of ‘objectified labour to convert itself into capital i.e. to convert the means of production into means of command over, and exploitation of, living labour, appeared under capitalist production as ‘an inherent characteristic of the means of production’ that was ‘inseparable from them as a quality which falls to them as things … The social form assumed by labour in money expressed itself as the qualities of a thing.’ In this perspective, ‘The capitalist functions only as capital personified … just as the worker only functions as the personification of labour … Thus the rule of the capitalist over the worker is … the rule of the object over the human, of dead labour over living, of the product over the producer.’

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It demonstrated the ambiguity of the notion of ‘freedom’ in the case of the early-modern peasant or artisan, freed from serfdom, but also free in the sense of being deprived of any independent access to the means of production. Possessing nothing therefore, except their labour power, these once independent peasants and artisans were compelled constantly to resell their labour power in order to survive. It traced how the separation of labour from means of production was maintained and reinforced by the process of primitive accumulation: ‘the spoliation of the church’s property, the fraudulent alienation of the State domains, the robbery of the common lands, the usurpation of feudal and clan property, and its transformation into modern private property, under circumstances of reckless terrorism, were just so many idyllic methods of primitive accumulation.

Let them eat junk: how capitalism creates hunger and obesity
by Robert Albritton
Published 31 Mar 2009

What is central to capitalism is that well-defined pieces T H E M A NAG E M E N T O F AG R I C U LT U R E A N D F O O D 21 of private property constituting the means of production come to be fully controlled by capitalists, thus excluding workers from them. In its very constitution private property always implies a power relation between an owner and non-owner, and in the case of pure capitalism all means of production are private property owned exclusively by capitalists. The exclusion of workers from the means of production creates a structural power relation, which in principle, forces a worker in pure capitalism to accept the working conditions and wages set by the competitive labour market.

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It is natural, then, for capital to intensify, speed up and extend the production of profit to the limit of human endurance. A good capitalist worker should not go to bed until absolutely exhausted, for every minute of lost productivity is profits lost forever. In some cases, capital can keep its means of production working 24 hours a day (agrarian field labour is usually limited to daylight hours), and it can increase the intensity of its work and speed of its machines. When workers cannot be made to work any faster, it may be possible to replace them with robots that can. Since every minute of production time that is lost is lost forever, the linear sequential counting of time becomes central to capitalist economic logic.

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(Presumably no one would voluntarily and knowingly enter into an exchange where something of greater value is exchanged for something of lesser value.) As already mentioned, historically the commodification of labour T H E M A NAG E M E N T O F AG R I C U LT U R E A N D F O O D 39 power is brought about by the separation of workers from the means of production, primarily land, and the continued commodification of labour-power depends upon some means of maintaining an industrial reserve army so that when capital needs more hands, they can be hired. “Hands” is an appropriate metaphor because capital is indifferent to the distinct qualities of the worker as a person, but rather simply hires the quantity of hands that it requires at the lowest possible pay (“subsistence” in pure capitalism).

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy)
by Noam Chomsky
Published 7 Dec 2015

Both Smith’s vivid excoriations of what the division of labor does to destroy our creative individuality and Dewey’s harsh words on the shadow cast by corporate interests on just about every aspect of public and personal life are invoked to establish this. The tradition of anarchism (from Bakunin to Rudolph Rocker and the anarcho-syndicalism of the Spanish Civil War period) combines socialist ideas with the liberal principles of the classical Enlightenment to construct an ideal—of cooperative labor, workers’ control of the workplace and the means of production, and a social life revolving around voluntary associations—that, if implemented, would sweep away the obstacles to the goal of human development that come from both free-market capitalism and Bolshevik tendencies to a “red bureaucracy.” Dewey’s ideas on education reveal how, by contrast with much of the contemporary practice found in educational institutions, the goal of human development can best be pursued from an early age.

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But consider his ideas.13 In his conception of democracy, illegitimate structures of coercion must be dismantled. That includes, crucially, domination by “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” He recognized that “power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,” even if democratic forms remain. Until those institutions are in the hands of the public, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business,” much as we see today. But Dewey went well beyond calling for some form of public control.

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See also origin of language action at a distance, apparent absurdity of: ignoring of, by post-Newtonian physicists, xvii, 34, 98–99, 108; Locke on, 33; Newton on, xvi, 33–34, 83, 85, 86, 87–88, 98; parallel of, with consciousness arising from matter, 86–87; Russell on, 90 aesthetic theory, relation of scope and limits in, 56–57 Affordable Care Act, complexity of, as symptom of broken U.S. health system, 68–69 African Americans, exclusion of from U.S. personhood, 46 aitiational semantics, 43 Albert, David, 55 Albert, Michael, 72 Alperovitz, Gar, 72 American tradition, roots of anarchism in, 72–73 Analysis of Matter (Russell), 90, 99–100 anarchism: anarcho-syndicalism as goal of, 62; balance of socialist and libertarian elements in, xxiii; federations of self-governing communities under, 66–67, 72; and freedom from domination, 66–67; and freedom from economic exploitation, 64; and freedom from guardianship, 64–65, 80; as heir to principles of classical liberalism, 62, 63, 71; and human development, xxi; on necessity of state power to defend oppressed, 67; political goals of, 62, 64, 70; principles of, xxi; roots of, in American tradition, 72–73; as term, 63; and unjustified coercion, dismantling of, xxiii, 63–64, 66; workers’ ownership of means of production in, 71–72 anarcho-syndicalism: Rocker on, 62; of Spanish Civil War, xxi, 63 animal signals: causative link of, to external objects, xviii–xix, 41–42, 126; vs. human language, xviii–xix, 41–43, 48; as unlikely evolutionary source of human language, xviii–xix, 48 apes: global nature of association in, 42–43; and language as computational procedure, x–xi, 13 Aristotle: on democracy, 79; on form, 50; on nature of language, xi, xviii, 4, 6, 14; on words as mind-dependent concepts, 44, 45 atomic elements of computation: complex nature of, 126; lack of causative link of, to external objects, xix, 42, 126; lack of referential properties in, xviii, 43–46, 126; necessity of accounting for, in model of language origin, 41; origin of, as mystery, 125–26; parallels of, with phonetic elements, 43; as prior to words or lexical items, xviii, 41; questionable value of literature on, 41; as unique to humans, 59, 125 Bakunin, Mikhail, xxi, 64, 68 Basic Property of Language, viii, 4; and computational procedure, ix, 4; and early definitions of language, 5–7; formulation of, 3–4; issues exposed by clear formulation of, 9–12; Merge as optimal computational procedure for, 24; origin of, requirements for credible account of, 40; and principle of simplicity, 16–17; reformulation of, 13 Bernays, Edward, 76 Bilgrami, Akeel, 43 biolinguistic framework, 5; and mid-twentieth-century turn to generative grammar, 9 biological basis of I-language, ix, xiv, 5, 59; importance of investigating vs. computed objects, 8–9; provisional abstraction from, ix, 129n3.

The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich
by Ndongo Sylla
Published 21 Jan 2014

In fact, according to Brenner, in the line of Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi, the economic development model described by Adam Smith presupposes social relations of production that are specific to the 75 Sylla T02779 01 text 75 28/11/2013 13:04 the fair trade scandal capitalist system: private property and the ‘commodification’ of labour. Capitalism presupposes on the one hand a free labour force and on the other a separation between workers and the means of production. In the capitalist system, as Henri Nadel points out, ‘man with labour power must necessarily have no other commodity to sell but this strength, and no other means to survive without alienating it’ (1994: 129). Likewise, owners of means of production must compete with one another in order to preserve their means of production. These are the structural contradictions that would generate economic growth as well as its related exploitation and inequalities.

…

This is only possible when the labour force is free (no slavery, no servitude, and no forced labour). It also implies that the division of labour enables a labour productivity increase. This is the case only when free workers are gathered within production units with means of production made available for that purpose. Indeed, the existence of several small owners of means of production does not encourage specialisation or the adoption of new methods of production. Finally, it implies that there is continuous pressure towards an increase in labour productivity. This was not the case until the advent of capitalism. In fact, according to Brenner, in the line of Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi, the economic development model described by Adam Smith presupposes social relations of production that are specific to the 75 Sylla T02779 01 text 75 28/11/2013 13:04 the fair trade scandal capitalist system: private property and the ‘commodification’ of labour.

The City
by Tony Norfield

In the end, they have to raise productivity. Raising productivity means that more commodities are produced per worker in a given time, thereby increasing the mass of the means of production – raw materials, machinery and technology – compared to the number of workers employed and the labour time they work. This is what Marx called a rise in the ‘technical composition’ of capital. Alongside this, the value of the means of production will also tend to increase relative to the money that capitalists have to advance to pay wages. For example, even the infamous Foxconn, with its vast assembly plants in China employing very low-paid workers, had to increase the number of robots a hundredfold in order to lower its unit production costs further.30 Marx’s concept of the rising ‘organic composition’ of capital is used to refer to the process of capital accumulation where both the technical and the value compositions rise together.

…

But there is no definite limit to the mass of raw materials and machinery that he or she can work with. Over time, the mass of profit created by the worker will tend not to rise as much as the value of the capital invested in the means of production rises. This results in a tendency for the rate of profit per worker to fall, and so too throughout the whole capitalist economy. This tendency is modified in practice by many factors. Improved productivity often means that a given portion of the means of production, such as computers or raw materials, will cost less than before. But usually a revamp of the productive system is needed for significant productivity increases.

…

They are both the culmination of previous economic trends and a means by which the rate of profit might be increased back to levels that will allow investment and growth to resume. This can happen in several ways. If capital values are destroyed through a collapse in asset and commodity prices, those capitalists left standing will be able to buy means of production more cheaply and so secure a higher rate of return on their investments. This was what happened after the Second World War. But, at least in the rich countries today, governments have been reluctant to allow the mechanism of crisis to get into full swing, fearing social turmoil. Instead, huge levels of debt, which in earlier crisis resolutions would have been either written off or devalued, still remain in place.

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

One example could be the young and relatively domain-specific collaboration so ware that this book is being wri en with, Booki. 113 So ware services have made “installation” of new so ware as simple as visiting a web page, social features a click, and provide an easy ladder of adoption for mass collaboration. They also threaten autonomy at the individual and community level. While there are daunting challenges, meeting them means achieving “world domination” for freedom in the most important means of production—computer-mediated collaboration —something the free so ware movement failed to approach in the era of desktop office so ware. 114 31. Science 2.0 Let the future tell the truth and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.

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Put more boldly, distributed collaboration is a means to transgress the system of International apartheid condemned by Bonnardel and Olivier. The effect and effectiveness of transgression is always hotly debated. However, it is also possible that open collaboration could alter relationships between some workers and employers in the workers’ favor both in local and global markets. Control of the means of production Open collaboration changes which activities are more efficient inside or outside of a firm. Could the power of workers relative to firms also be altered? 133 “Intellectual property rights prevent mobility of employees in so far as their knowledge is locked in in a proprietary standard that is owned by the employer.

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When the source code is closed behind copyrights and patents, however, large sums of money is required to access the so ware tools. In this way, the owner/firm gains the edge back over the labourer/programmer. This is were GPL comes in. The free license levels the playing field by ensuring that everyone has equal access to the source code. Or, pu ing it in Marxist-sounding terms, through free licenses the means of production are handed back to labour. […] By publishing so ware under free licences, the individual hacker is not merely improving his own reputation and employment prospects, as has been pointed out by Lerner and Tirole. He also contributes in establishing a labour market where the rules of the game are completely different, for him and for everyone else in his trade.

On Anarchism
by Noam Chomsky
Published 4 Nov 2013

These associations would serve as “a practical school of anarchism.”20 If private ownership of the means of production is, in Proudhon’s often quoted phrase, merely a form of “theft”—“the exploitation of the weak by the strong”21—control of production by a state bureaucracy, no matter how benevolent its intentions, also does not create the conditions under which labor, manual and intellectual, can become the highest want in life. Both, then, must be overcome. In his attack on the right of private or bureaucratic control over the means of production, the anarchist takes his stand with those who struggle to bring about “the third and last emancipatory phase of history,” the first having made serfs out of slaves, the second having made wage earners out of serfs, and the third which abolishes the proletariat in a final act of liberation that places control over the economy in the hands of free and voluntary associations of producers (Fourier, 1848).22 The imminent danger to “civilization” was noted by de Tocqueville, also in 1848: As long as the right of property was the origin and groundwork of many other rights, it was easily defended—or rather it was not attacked; it was then the citadel of society while all the other rights were its outworks; it did not bear the brunt of attack and, indeed, there was no serious attempt to assail it.

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It is in this spirit that Daniel Guérin has approached the study of anarchism in Anarchism and other works.15 Guérin quotes Adolph Fischer, who said that “every anarchist is a socialist but not every socialist is necessarily an anarchist.” Similarly Bakunin, in his “anarchist manifesto” of 1865, the program of his projected international revolutionary fraternity, laid down the principle that each member must be, to begin with, a socialist. A consistent anarchist must oppose private ownership of the means of production and the wage slavery which is a component of this system, as incompatible with the principle that labor must be freely undertaken and under the control of the producer. As Marx put it, socialists look forward to a society in which labor will “become not only a means of life, but also the highest want in life,”16 an impossibility when the worker is driven by external authority or need rather than inner impulse: “no form of wage-labor, even though one may be less obnoxious than another, can do away with the misery of wage-labor itself.”17 A consistent anarchist must oppose not only alienated labor but also the stupefying specialization of labor that takes place when the means for developing production mutilate the worker into a fragment of a human being, degrade him to become a mere appurtenance of the machine, make his work such a torment that its essential meaning is destroyed; estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in very proportion to the extent to which science is incorporated into it as an independent power. . . . 18 Marx saw this not as an inevitable concomitant of industrialization, but rather as a feature of capitalist relations of production.

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23 The workers of Paris, in 1871, broke the silence, and proceeded to abolish property, the basis of all civilization! Yes, gentlemen, the Commune intended to abolish that class property which makes the labor of the many the wealth of the few. It aimed at the expropriation of the expropriators. It wanted to make individual property a truth by transforming the means of production, land and capital, now chiefly the means of enslaving and exploiting labor, into mere instruments of free and associated labor.24 The Commune, of course, was drowned in blood. The nature of the “civilization” that the workers of Paris sought to overcome in their attack on “the very foundations of society itself” was revealed, once again, when the troops of the Versailles government reconquered Paris from its population.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Writing in 1936, in the throes of the Great Depression, he asked whether the institution of private ownership of the means of production would continue indefinitely to foster economic progress, or whether at a certain stage of technological development the very success of the system would become a shackle to its further advance.4 Lange noted that when an entrepreneur introduces technological innovations that allow him to lower the price of goods and services, he gains a temporary advantage over competitors strapped with antiquated means of production, resulting in the devaluation of the older investments they are locked into. This forces them to respond by introducing their own technological innovations, again increasing productivity and cheapening prices and so on.

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It is not fully here yet, but as it kicks in, it will eventually and inevitably reduce marginal costs to near zero, eliminate profit, and make property exchange in markets unnecessary for many (though not all) products. The democratization of manufacturing means that anyone and eventually everyone can access the means of production, making the question of who should own and control the means of production irrelevant, and capitalism along with it. Three-dimensional printing, like so many inventions, was inspired by science-fiction writers. A generation of geeks sat enthralled in front of their TV screens, watching episodes of Star Trek. In long journeys through the universe, the crew needed to be able to repair and replace parts of the spaceship and keep stocked with everything from machine parts to pharmaceutical products.

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The historian Maurice Dobb makes the point that the subordination of production to capital, and the appearance of this class relationship between capitalist and producer is, therefore, to be regarded as the crucial watershed between the old mode of production and the new.2 The concentration of ownership of the means of production by the capitalists and the subjugation of labor to capital would come to define the class struggle by the late eighteenth century. Adam Smith penetrated to the very core of the contradiction that would plague capitalism until the end of its reign. Smith saw a correlation between the enclosure of land and the enclosure of the tools of craftsmen.

Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World
by Branko Milanovic
Published 23 Sep 2019

CHAPTER 2 LIBERAL MERITOCRATIC CAPITALISM [Democracy] is a wonderfully pleasant way of carrying on in the short-run, isn’t it? —Plato, The Republic The definition of liberal meritocratic capitalism is quite straightforward. I define capitalism in the fashion of Karl Marx and Max Weber, as the system where most production is carried out with privately owned means of production, capital hires legally free labor, and coordination is decentralized. In addition, to add Joseph Schumpeter’s requirement, most investment decisions are made by private companies or individual entrepreneurs.1 Definition of liberal meritocratic capitalism The terms “meritocratic” and “liberal” come from the definitions of various forms of equality that John Rawls lays out in A Theory of Justice (1971).

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Both believed that every society contains, or has contained, a distinct upper class, and that such an upper class uses ideology to present its own interests as general interests and thus to maintain its hegemony over those it rules. How to think about today’s elite in liberal meritocratic capitalism Their view differed, however, about the importance of ownership of the means of production as the principal basis for class distinction, and about the importance of the way in which production is organized. Marx saw these factors as determining the characteristics of societies and those of the ruling classes, while Pareto’s view was more open-ended: even within a single social formation, the elite may be formed according to different criteria and may maintain its dominion in different ways.

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If the optimistic Marxist view about the ability of imperialism and global capitalism to convert Third World economies into clones of Western capitalist economies had been correct, colonialism would have turned them into mirror images of Britain and France, and there would have been no need for structuralist explanations. Structuralists and dependency theorists thus merely tried to fill this gap, explaining why global capitalism was not more successful while at the same time shying away from suggesting a fully socialist economy (e.g., public ownership of the means of production) as a way to development, since the Soviet model was, by the time structuralists came to the scene, showing clear signs of senescence. The structuralists came to the scene too late, and their approach, as well as the huge gap between what they advocated and what they actually implemented (when they had a chance to do so), reflects that lateness.

The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas
by Janek Wasserman
Published 23 Sep 2019

Only when everyone—especially socialists—realized that the gift of marginal utility theory “is not a weapon of one man against another” but rather a tool for “all in the economic struggle against nature” would society enjoy all the benefits of free economic exchange.61 With the authors’ innovative economic and ideological arguments, Böhm and Wieser found broad resonance. Anton Menger, Carl’s brother and a professor of law, even preferred their work to his brother’s. In his juridical work, Anton took up their antisocialist arguments, criticizing the feasibility of worker control of the means of production and the distribution of goods, along Wieser’s lines. An Austrian School was beginning to coalesce in the mid-1880s not just in economics but in political theory, jurisprudence, and philosophy too.62 With the Austrians’ intellectual reputation assured, they turned their attentions to practical affairs.

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He claimed to hoist Marxism on its own petard, arguing that the socialist state would of necessity engage in the same exploitation of labor as the capitalist one: “But much more important than any such sporadic obtaining of interest by private individuals is the fact that, in the Socialist state, the commonwealth itself, as against the citizens, would make use of the principle of interest which to-day it reviles as ‘exploitation.’” This interpretation was a misreading of socialist theories of exploitation, which did not object to interest or capital per se but to who owned the means of production and who received the profits. Nonetheless Böhm’s Positive Theory served as a starting point for subsequent liberal critiques of socialism.72 In the midst of Böhm’s star turn, he promoted his friend and brother-in-law, Wieser. Böhm admitted that he only dealt with the role of capital in the production of wealth and could not provide a full accounting for the distribution of value across the factors of production.

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Schumpeter wanted to extend his earlier work from static models into an examination of the dynamic processes of the modern economy. Looking at the flow of goods through production and consumption cycles, Schumpeter betrayed his indebtedness to Wieser, Böhm, and Menger on every page. He deployed Böhm’s theory of roundabout means of production to explain economic change, and he referenced approvingly Menger’s theory of higher-order goods. Working from a position of methodological individualism—that is, that economic investigation must start by examining the actions of individuals—he showed how marginal utility theory explained economic activity.41 As much as Schumpeter liked economic models, he reveled more in uncertainty.

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy
by Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson
Published 30 May 2016

The Means of Connection For the last couple of centuries, linear businesses created value by owning the means of production. They focused on creating value from the capital base of the company, whether it was factories, human capital, or intellectual property. They aggregated internal resources and designed processes to turn their capital base into valuable products and services for their customers. This was a linear process in which the business acquired inputs and turned them into more valuable outputs, whether that product was a Ford truck, investment advice, or tax software. For a linear business, the means of production were the primary activity in Porter’s value chain.

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Think about what Uber does for taxis, what Airbnb does for vacation rentals, what Apple does for apps, and what YouTube does for videos. None of these companies is a traditional, linear business. They are all platforms. Like eBay, these businesses don’t directly create and control inventory via a supply chain the way linear businesses do. Platforms don’t, to use a common phrase, own the means of production—instead, they create the means of connection. The two most successful platforms to date are Google and Apple, whose rise to the top in mobile we discussed in the prologue. But they are only the tip of the iceberg. The number of platforms at the top of our economy is growing fast. In 2015, the top three members of Forbes’s list of most valuable brands were platform companies, as were eleven of the top twenty.15 All of the companies at the heart of the social media boom were also platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

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This method of establishing market dominance contrasts starkly with how platforms operate today. Platform businesses grow not by acquiring more factories but by connecting more and more users within their networks. In other words, platforms become dominant not because of what they own but rather because of the value they create by connecting their users. They don’t own the means of production, as industrial monopolies did. Instead, they own the means of connection. This fact helps explain why old monopolies were largely despised while today’s platforms are not. Although every business has some detractors (we all have that one friend who refuses to use Facebook), consumers love Facebook, Alibaba, and Google.

The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?
by Ian Bremmer
Published 12 May 2010

It’s a turn of phrase that captures the freedom and personal empowerment that many of us imagine when thinking about the only economic system proven over time to generate sustainable prosperity. But capitalism takes many forms, and freedom is a relative concept. For our purposes, capitalism is the use of wealth to create more wealth, a broad enough definition to capture both free-market and state capitalism. Generally speaking, in a capitalist economic system, most means of production—labor, land, and capital—are privately owned and traded. Money is the measurable, universally accepted means of exchange. Individuals and privately owned institutions make most of the decisions on what to buy and how much to pay, what to make and how much to charge, how much to save and where to invest.

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Some, like Liebknecht, railed against the half measures of those who failed to denounce capitalism forcefully enough. Liebknecht assured a socialist congress in Paris that, “Nobody has shown more distinctively than I that State Socialism is really State Capitalism.”5 He was arguing that it’s not enough for the state to seize the means of production. It must surrender political power to the proletariat. Once Marxism gained a real-world foothold following the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922, this debate began to get ugly. Liebknecht was long dead by the 1920s, but the argument gained new force among some within the Bolshevik elite.

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Those who practice state capitalism know, often from bitter personal experience, that command economies are bound to fail eventually, because governments can never direct supplies of scarce resources and attach values to goods and services as efficiently and intelligently as markets can. Instead of eliminating markets, they try to harness them for their own purposes. Socialism often represents a long-term commitment to progressively greater state control, a sort of “slow boat to communism”—eventual state ownership of all means of production. This boat may never reach port, but its captain is ideologically committed never to change course, no matter how heavy the storms that stand in his way.8 The current governments of China and Russia, on the other hand, have no intention of pushing their countries back toward communism. They want as much control as possible over economies that remain dynamic and innovative enough to produce explosive and sustainable growth.

Working the Phones: Control and Resistance in Call Centres
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 20 Nov 2016

Without the labour that 55 Working the Phones went into reproducing labour-power, producing commodities for sale, or those for use by capital – for example, computers, telephones and networks – the affective work in call centres would not be possible. This involves a move from the formal to the real subsumption of workers to capital. Formal subsumption involves capital monopolising the means of production – the ownership of workplaces and the things inside them, for example – and compelling people to work for a wage. This shift to real subsumption ‘means instead that the workers’ lifetimes have been captured by the capital flow, and the souls have been pervaded by techno-linguistic chains’. This entails the ‘introduction of pervasive technologies, the computerization of productive processes and of social communication [that] enact a molecular domination upon the collective nervous network’.30 Within mental labour it is possible to distinguish between ‘brain workers’ and ‘chain workers’.

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43 84 Management This paints a picture of an unchecked management, whose power leaves workers helpless. The only alternative seems to be fleeing from the call centre, the advantage being what Marx ironically describes as a doubly free worker – free to choose who to sell their labour to, and additionally freed from the ownership of capital or means of production.44 It is worth returning to the quote from Alan McKinlay and Phil Taylor, that ‘the factory and the office are neither prison nor asylum, their social architectures never those of the total institution’.45 The potential of the Panopticon for surveillance, controlling and intensifying the labour process is clear.

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The call centre is an obvious example as it would be difficult to imagine why it would be brought under workers’ control: who would you want to bombard with high speed sales calls? This is because the development of the call centre has been tied closely to the use of methods of surveillance, speed-up and control. Rather than seizing the means of production, a more attractive option is to simply go and do something else. The second kind of work is that which could be fulfilling and useful if it could be radically reorganised. An example of this is privatised care work. In the UK a large proportion of this kind of work is done on a highly casualised basis with low pay, often organised on a highly regulated basis in which limits are put on how long workers may spend with each user.

Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
by Costas Lapavitsas
Published 14 Aug 2013

Finance is a part of circulation, but also possesses mechanisms standing aside commodity trading and its corresponding flows of money. The traded object of finance is loanable money capital, the cornerstone of capitalist credit. Production, circulation and distribution give rise to class relations, pivoting on the ownership of the means of production, but also determined by the appropriation of profits. Financialization reflects a growing asymmetry between production and circulation – particularly the financial component of the latter – during the last three decades. The asymmetry has arisen as the financial conduct of non-financial enterprises, banks and households has gradually changed, thus fostering a range of aggregate phenomena of financialization.

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Marx did not subscribe to Adam Smith’s fallacious abstraction of ‘primitive’ trade. Treating money as the outcome of relations of commodity exchange has nothing to do with assuming that money emerges out of a primordial state of barter. For Marx, societies in which production is run by autonomous and private owners of the means of production necessarily turn products into commodities. Such societies rely on markets to organize the flow of commodities and to allow reproduction to take place: they require money as a social organizer, and none more so than capitalist society. However, the historical origin of money does not lie within the internal organization of communities; money does not emerge as a curative for a malfunctioning barter economy.

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Under other social and historical conditions, financial practices would remain partial, fragmentary, and particular, even if they were complex and sophisticated. It is a theoretical point of paramount importance that appropriate relations for the emergence of a system of finance emerge only within the capitalist mode of production. Under capitalist social conditions – independent, competing capitalists who own the means of production and hire wage labour – the deployment and expansion of monetary value becomes a fixed social practice, providing the foundation for the emergence of a financial system. A financial system is a specifically capitalist phenomenon, although sophisticated financial practices can be observed in a wide variety of other social formations.4 Even assuming the existence of capitalist conditions, however, the emergence of a financial system continues to pose thorny theoretical problems, as is shown in the rest of this chapter.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life
by Adam Greenfield
Published 29 May 2017

The question then becomes what kind(s) of shared space will be produced by people endowed with this particular set of capabilities, individually and collectively—and how we might help the unmediated contend with environments unlike any they have known before, enacted for the convenience of the ambiguously transhuman, under circumstances whose depths have yet to be plumbed. 4 Digital fabrication Towards a new political economy of matter A roughly cubical object of modest scale, rounded at the corners, sits on a dusty tabletop in the University College London building where I teach one day a week. Faintly smelling of long-chain molecules, it scarcely seems credible that this little box could transform what is meant by “ownership of the means of production.” And yet a means of production is precisely what I am looking at. The cubical object is a MakerBot Replicator 2 3D printer, nothing less than a portable manufactory. No larger than a first-generation Apple Macintosh, the Replicator 2 can be programmed to produce … just about anything you can imagine, really, as long as it isn’t any larger than eleven inches in any dimension, and you don’t mind it being made of a slightly greasy polymer.

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Bowyer’s vision of a self-replicating future implied not merely an enormous increase in planetary production capacity, but its radical democratization as well. In this conception of things, there may be fairly stark limitations on what can be produced—combine harvesters and pile drivers are out, similarly mobile phones or tablets—but the barriers to entry are lowered to the point that anyone with the requisite will can own the means of production. And because the RepRap’s specifications are open, users are free to tinker and improve upon Bowyer’s original design, free to contribute those improvements back to the informational commons so everyone can benefit from them. Bowyer hoped that the fabricator itself would become “subject to evolution by artificial selection,” as the fruits of constant, iterative enhancement were incorporated into each new generation.

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The unstated premise behind all of these visions of the future isn’t merely an economy in which high-precision fabricators themselves are available cheaply. It’s one in which all the inputs required to make things with them—specifically, feedstock, energy and specification diagrams—are also available at something very close to zero cost. Without access to these, one doesn’t truly own the means of production, only its instruments; with them, but for labor time and amortization of the fabrication engine itself, objects might indeed be had for something close to the cost of the raw material used to make them. But feedstock, energy and specifications all need to be produced by someone, somehow, and the costs involved cannot simply be wished away.

The Education of Millionaires: It's Not What You Think and It's Not Too Late
by Michael Ellsberg
Published 15 Jan 2011

For knowledge workers in the developed world, the tools of their trade have become so ridiculously cheap that the “means of production” have once again become affordable to individual workers. These workers no longer have to depend on bosses or large organizations to furnish them with the means of production. They can quit the factory-style organizations and become “butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers” once again—that is, digitally connected entrepreneurs and solo-preneurs. Pink calls it “Digital Marxism: In an age of inexpensive computers, wireless handheld devices, and ubiquitous low-cost connections to a global communications network, workers can now own the means of production.”11 And increasingly, more and more of them (especially younger ones who have grown up with the Internet) are deciding to take their means of production, strike out on their own with their copy of The Four-Hour Workweek in their laptop bag, and flip a big, bad massive bird to their former employers.

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As Pink points out in Free Agent Nation, there was a time in our nation’s history, before the Industrial Revolution, when most people were self-employed—that is, “the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker.” In these times, writes Pink, mass self-employment made sense because “most of the things people needed to earn their living they could buy easily and keep at home.” However, writes Pink, “it was only when these things—the means of production, to use Karl Marx’s famous phrase—became extremely expensive . . . that large organizations began to dominate.... Capital and labor, once so intertwined the distinction scarcely mattered, became separate entities. Capitalists owned the equipment. Laborers earned their money by receiving a sliver of the enormous rewards those giant machines produced.”10 Pink argues that in the last decade, in one area of the economy—called “knowledge work”—a shift has occurred as massive and with implications as far-reaching as those during the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society.

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Pink calls it “Digital Marxism: In an age of inexpensive computers, wireless handheld devices, and ubiquitous low-cost connections to a global communications network, workers can now own the means of production.”11 And increasingly, more and more of them (especially younger ones who have grown up with the Internet) are deciding to take their means of production, strike out on their own with their copy of The Four-Hour Workweek in their laptop bag, and flip a big, bad massive bird to their former employers. And here’s something else these self-employed people, small-business owners, and micropreneurs are starting to realize more and more: for them, formal educational credentials are irrelevant to the new economic reality they are operating in. In this new reality, no one gives a damn where you went to college or what your formal credentials are, so long as you do great work.

The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing
Published 13 Jul 2016

The revolt should aim to achieve Keynes’s desired ‘euthanasia of the rentier’, weakening mechanisms that produce rental income. But there is something more. The failing distribution system and emerging class structure have produced inequalities of particular relevance to the precariat. A century ago, progressives linked to the proletariat hoped to gain control of the ‘means of production’. Today that would excite humour and puzzlement. The means of production are not the assets over which the redistributive struggle should take place. For the precariat, the assets of most value are those essential to a decent life in modern society – income security, time, quality space, uncommodified education, financial knowledge and financial capital.3 Policies should be judged by whether or not they would reduce the unequal distribution of these key assets.

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Deliveroo delivers meals to your door; TaskRabbit undertakes domestic tasks and errands; Thumbtack finds local professionals to supply services, from installing a kitchen to teaching yoga. It is a misnomer to call this the ‘sharing economy’. These digital platforms are rentier entities; they control the technological apparatus but, unlike great corporations of the past, they do not own the main means of production. Rather, they are labour brokers, often taking 20 per cent (sometimes more) from all transactions. ‘Crowdwork’ platforms also act as labour brokers, providing a digital labour exchange through which organisations (‘requesters’) post online tasks, split into small, sometimes micro tasks, which workers (‘taskers’) then bid for.

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This is disingenuous. Most taskers are neither entrepreneurial nor independent; few will build a business based on queuing for iPhone buyers, as some are tasked to do. But it would be equally wrong to call them ‘employees’ in the classic sense of that term; they are not directly supervised, they own the main means of production and, in principle, they have control over their working time. However, taskers are not self-employed either. They depend on the labour broker (the platform) to obtain tasks and are subject to rules, such as wearing a T-shirt with the company logo or accepting a certain number of tasks. Yet, like the self-employed, they bear most job-related costs, including transport, repairs and maintenance, and insurance for accidents and ill-health.

The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism
by Ruth Kinna
Published 31 Jul 2019

While this construction usefully highlighted the corrupting power of the bourgeoisie and the partiality of the law, it wrongly underplayed the independent, oppressive power of the state. Thus for Marx, Bakunin argued, revolution meant seizing control of the ownership of the means of production. Marx believed wrongly, in Bakunin’s view, that this was possible if the proletariat seized control of the state’s machinery. Marx was unable to see that for as long as the state remained intact, the revolution would be stunted. Control of the means of production would bring class equality, in the sense that it would wipe out the economic power of the bourgeoisie, but it would not remove hierarchy: workers would still be subject to the dictates of the law.

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Between these two social classes there cannot exist any bond of friendship or fraternity, for the possessing class always seeks to perpetuate the existing economic, political and social system which guarantees it tranquil enjoyment of the fruits of its robberies, while the working class exerts itself to destroy the iniquitous system and institute one in which the land, the houses, the machinery of production and the means of transportation shall be for the common use.61 Yet Magón’s analysis was also typically anarchist in the way it drew on a critique of private property ownership and government. In talking about class, anarchists often devote as much attention to issues of social exclusion and dependency as to prevailing Marxist concerns like the ownership of the means of production or the extraction of surplus value. Anarchists have also rejected aspects of Marx’s theory and have rarely adopted it uncritically. The anarchist objection to Marxist class analysis is that it is underpinned by a thesis of progress. Marxists tend to see revolution as the outcome of a process of change led by transformations in the economy which then lead to the emergence of worker solidarity and awareness of the collective power of workers as a revolutionary force.

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For regardless of the revolutionary status that Marxism bestowed upon them, in official unions workers had more reason to maintain and manipulate the system for their own ends than they had in destroying it. It followed that the Marxist focus on class struggle would bankrupt the socialist vision. In his obsession to wrest control of the ownership of the means of production, Marx skirted over the deadening, polluting effects of industrial production, the mindless boredom of labour and the structural impacts of capitalist-driven technology. Anarchists wanted to inherit the earth not the drab, dirty world that Marxist communism seemed to promise on the back of the capitalist transition.

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
by Christopher Lasch
Published 16 Sep 1991

Debate on the left now confined itself to such questions as whether these goals could be achieved without socializing the means of production or at least subjecting industry to sweeping public controls, whether the labor movement should devote itself to pure and simple unionism or press for a broad program of political reforms, and whether unions should be organized on craft or industrial lines. But almost everyone on the left agreed, even those who looked forward to the day when the workers would control the state and thereby own the means of production (in theory), that workers would continue to sell their labor as if it were a commodity, if not to private employers then to the state itself.

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A regime of "petty industry" and "simple commodity production" was "compatible only with ... a society moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds." A system of production in which "the labourer is the private owner of his own means of labour, ... the peasant of the land which he cultivates, and the artisan of the tool which he handles as a virtuoso" precluded the "concentration of the means of production," a "cooperative division of labour," "control over ... the forces of Nature by society," and the "free development of the social productive powers." The simple market society to which artisans and farmers wanted to return would have assured the reign of "universal mediocrity." Marx did not argue simply that capitalist production created preconditions favorable to the development of socialism.

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Acquisitiveness led to an increasingly complex division of labor, as Raymond pointed out, and thus widened the gulf between the propertied and the laboring classes. "Labor's independence," as Allen Kaufman summarizes Raymond's thinking, rested on labor's "technical know-how" and its "ownership of the means of production." Those who opposed the more and more militant demands made by artisans in the I830s and I840s did not quarrel with the claim that wage labor was a form of slavery. They merely denied that a permanent wage‐ earning class was taking shape in the United States. "In this favoured land of law and liberty, the road to advancement is open to all," as one of them put it, "and the journeymen may by their skill and industry, and moral worth, soon become flourishing master mechanics."

Distrust That Particular Flavor
by William Gibson
Published 3 Jan 2012

Musicians could perform for money, and the printing press had given rise to an industry in sheet music, but great fame, and wealth, tended to be a matter of patronage. The medium of the commercial audio recording changed that, and created an industry predicated on an inherent technological monopoly of the means of production. Ordinary citizens could neither make nor manufacture audio recordings. That monopoly has now ended. Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and nonprofit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth.

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Some futurists, looking at the individual musician’s role in the realm of the digital, have suggested that we are in fact heading for a new version of the previous situation, one in which patronage (likely corporate, and nonprofit) will eventually become a musician’s only potential ticket to relative fame and wealth. The window, then, in which one could become the Beatles, occupy that sort of market position, is seen to have been technologically determined. And technologically finite. The means of production, reproduction, and distribution of recorded music are today entirely digital, and thus are in the hands of whoever might desire them. We get them for free, often without asking for them, as inbuilt peripherals. I bring music up, here, and the impact the digital is having on it, mainly as an example of the unpredictable nature of technologically driven change.

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Film, I imagine, is in for a different sort of ride up the timeline, primarily owing to the technology-intensive nature of today’s product. Terminator III Unplugged is a contradiction in terms. Hollywood is massively and multiply plugged, and is itself a driver of new technologies. The monopoly on the means of production (at least in terms of creation) can be preserved, in this environment, as the industry itself operates on something very near the cutting edge of emergent technology. For a while, at least. In terms of the future, however, the history of recorded music suggests that any film made today is being launched up the timeline toward end-user technologies ultimately more intelligent, more capable, than the technologies employed in the creation of that film.

The Limits of the Market: The Pendulum Between Government and Market
by Paul de Grauwe and Anna Asbury
Published 12 Mar 2017

Ultimately these contradictions must lead to the destruction of the capitalistic mode of production, when impoverished and alienated workers start a revolution against a capitalistic system that has become increasingly fragile because of its incapacity to generate sufficient profits. After the revolution a communist mode of production will be set in motion characterized by a collectivization of the means of production. This will be the start of a ‘red paradise’ where the exploitation of the workers by private owners of the means of production will have become impossible. This theory of the internal contradictions of capitalism has exerted an incredible influence on the minds of many people and has led many of them to take action so as to overthrow capitalism. This led to communist regimes in many parts of the world during the twentieth century.  OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 27/10/2016, SPi R I S E A N D F A L L : LINEAR OR CYCLICAL ?

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.  capital accumulation n diminishing returns  /income ratio n public and private in Great Britain and France f quantity of –,  capitalism , , , , – crony ,  global b internal contradictions –,  linear theories see linear theories on the rise and fall of capitalism see also capitalism, limits of capitalism, limits of – individual and collective rationality – see also external limits of capitalism; internal limits of capitalism carbon dioxide emissions –, , – and emission standards – and taxation – central banks – see also in particular Bank of England under United Kingdom; European Central Bank (ECB); Federal Reserve (Fed) under United States centrally planned economic model – China consumption per capita  gross domestic product (GDP) per capita f climate change  see also global warming Club of Rome, ‘The Limits to Growth’ n Coase, R.  collective decision-making process – collective irrationality   INDEX collectivization of means of production  communism , , –, – competition/competitiveness –, , –, ,  Congo, Republic of infrastructure, lack of  consumption lack of growth in , ,  material  prices  tax (VAT) –,  continental European model and social security  cooperation –,  Croatia labour costs, gross hourly f cyclical theories of rise and fall of capitalism  Cyprus labour costs, gross hourly f Czech Republic labour costs, gross hourly f Damasio, A.  De Keyzer, P.

The Knowledge Economy
by Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Published 19 Mar 2019

A third stage of innovations in the legal and institutional structure of the market order would begin with change in the property regime, which defines the terms for the decentralization of economic initiative and the claims of economic agents on the means of production. The point would not be to replace the unified property right, established and theorized only in the nineteenth century, by another, equally exclusive form of property vested, for example, in the firm’s labor force. The aim instead would be to radically diversify the forms of decentralized access to capital and the other means of production. The traditional unified property right joins all the powers that we associate with property (and that the civil law tradition distinguished as use, usufruct—command of the income stream, and dominion—the right to alienate or sell) and vests them in a single right holder, the owner.

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Because it facilitates contrarian entrepreneurial initiative, the unified property right will continue to be useful and even indispensable to the development of the knowledge economy. But rather than remaining the default way to decentralize economic initiative, it would turn over time into a limiting case. The more common form of the property right would become its disaggregation into fragmentary, temporary, or conditional claims on the means of production. Such disaggregation would organize the coexistence of claims by different stakeholders—such as private or public investors, workers, local governments, and local communities—in the same productive resources. It would make it possible to increase the decentralization of economic initiative—the number of economic agents able to bargain on their own initiative and their own account.

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The sixth level of initiatives breaking through supply constraints on economic growth also breaks through the demand constraints because such initiatives form part of a reallocation of power in the economy, against the background of changes in education and in politics that reassign power in culture and in the state. In any generalized form of the knowledge economy, the corporate form and the unified property right cease to be the nearly exclusive legal instruments for the decentralization of access to the means of production. The disaggregation of the property right—the creation of a wide range of fragmentary, conditional, or temporary stakes in pieces of the apparatus of production—allows different kinds of stakes and stakeholders in the same productive resources to coexist. It also makes it possible to combine, to a greater extent than present arrangements do, the decentralization of economic initiative and the aggregation of resources, the better to achieve scale.

The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990
by Mary Fulbrook
Published 14 Oct 1991

But to what extent had the two Germanies developed into different societies in the period before 1989? Let us start with an attempt to compare the two Germanies in a number of different empirical respects. There was an obvious difference in the question of ownership of the means of production: in West Germany, capital remained predominantly in private ownership, while in East Germany between 1945 and 1989 private ownership of the means of production was to a major extent abolished. According to the GDR's official statistics, in 1983 out of 8,445,300 economically active persons, only 397,100 were engaged in privately owned concerns. 1 This effect was achieved in stages over the years; while, as we have Page 222 seen, there were radical changes in socio-economic structure in the occupation period, in 1952 over forty-five per cent of the economy was still in private hands. 2 In this fundamental respect, then, capitalist West and communist East were by definition quite different.

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Concessions made by employers to workers, when the latter were relatively strong and the former feared a more radical revolution, were to be fundamentally queried and subject to sustained assault as was the political system that guaranteed those concessions when the relative circumstances of the parties had changed. By December 1918, the USPD had fallen out with Ebert's cautious course. The radical socialists had wanted to seize the opportunity for a thorough-going reform of the army, and for the socialization of the means of production; in short, they wanted to effect a genuine revolution, not to administer affairs on a temporary basis pending national elections. The USPD left the Page 28 government; and at the end of December, the far left formed the German Communist Party (KPD). In January 1919 the split between moderate Social Democrats on the one hand, and radical socialists and communists on the other, became an unbridgeable chasm.

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By contrast, in 1939 the area which was to become West Germany had 43 million inhabitants; in 1980 despite fears in the 1970S about the declining birth-rate, and claims that the 'Germans were dying out' the population had risen to 61.7 million. 5 These figures, and the corresponding statistics concerning numbers of inhabitants per square kilometre, again give detail to the immediate impressions of relative emptiness and sparser population of East Germany in comparison to the West. Discussions of ownership or non-ownership of the means of production, and of the distribution of population among agrarian, industrial and service sectors of employment, or levels of urbanization, do not tell us very much about social structure, however. Central questions about stratification and social inequality must be addressed also. The German Democratic Republic was grounded in a political theory committed to the eradication of class differences; yet East German theorists admitted that social inequalities persisted, and certain inequalities of status, privilege and income were variably condoned or encouraged in East Germany.

Water: A Biography
by Giulio Boccaletti
Published 13 Sep 2021

His analysis posited that material conditions were endogenous to society; they were determined by the combination of technical and productive capacity—the means of production—and the social relations that supported production, including the structure of property rights. In response to those material conditions, societies evolved through different modes of production, ultimately embracing communism. In this process, which Marx called dialectic materialism, water resources and the natural environment had an ambiguous role at best. Marx recognized that the natural world was an important means of production in the early stages of a society’s development. In fact, Marx went as far as to say that humans first defined themselves as a species in the modification of nature.

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To address China’s exception, Marx introduced the idea of an “Asiatic mode of production,” a mode which did not appear to follow his theory of social evolution: slavery to feudalism, to capitalism, and—finally—to communism. In this mode, agriculture and manufacturing were inseparable within small subsistence communities. It was an agrarian society under the control of a despotic regime, which exercised overwhelming control of the means of production, in part through the command of hydraulic infrastructure. Marx did not spend a lot of time elaborating on this mode of production. China’s anomaly seemed largely irrelevant. After all, it was still a pre-capitalist society. Marx’s gaze was fixated on the British industrial proletariat, for that is where he and Engels believed the revolution would come from.

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In his world, nature had been tamed, so much so that when it started to rain, automatic awnings would be rolled out over the street so that people could continue walking about their business without any worry of getting wet. In 1890, William Morris, another socialist utopian, wrote News from Nowhere, a science fiction response to Bellamy, describing a time traveler who visits the Thames of the twenty-first century, finding a libertarian socialist utopia in which people owned all means of production, organized largely around the river. Water and its power were central to these imagined futures. Sometimes, people even tried to make them happen. In 1902 Theodor Herzl published his utopian novel, Altneuland. It was a vision for a new Jewish state, which he would then pursue with all his energy in the spring of the following year.

Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism
by Peter Marshall
Published 2 Jan 1992

It meant politically a society without government, that is anarchy, and economically, the complete negation of the wage system and the ownership of the means of production in common: ‘everybody, contributing for the common well-being to the full extent of his capacities, shall enjoy from the common stock of society to the fullest possible extent of his needs.’65 Moreover, Kropotkin believed ‘Anarchy leads to Communism, and Communism to Anarchy.’66 He felt that anarchist communism was the union of the two fundamental tendencies of his society, a tendency towards economic equality and a tendency towards political liberty.67 As he points out in the The Conquest of Bread, Kropotkin felt that economic communism is the only fair solution since wealth results from collective effort and the means of production are the collective work of humanity: Individual appropriation is neither just nor serviceable. All belongs to all. All things are for all men, since all men have need of them, since all men have worked in the measure of their strength to produce them, and since it is not possible to evaluate everyone’s part in the production of the world’s wealth.68 The means of production would be owned not by the State but by associations or communes of producers. They would be organized on a voluntary basis and connected federally.

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While his followers, the mutualists, tried to retain private ownership for agriculture (because of the individualism of the French peasantry), they accepted collective ownership for transport and proposed a form of industrial self-management. Proudhon himself thought that in the future, large-scale industry must be the fruit of association, that is to say, the means of production and exchange must be managed by associations of workers themselves. Making a distinction between possession and ownership, he proposed that the workers should possess their means of production, but not be their exclusive owners. They would exchange goods whose value would be measured by the amount of labour necessary to produce them. Workers would receive wages in ‘work vouchers’ according to the amount of work done.

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Collectivists believed that the State should be dismantled and the economy organized on the basis of common ownership and control by associations of producers. They wished to restrict private property only to the product of individual labour, but argued that there should be common ownership of the land and all other means of production. Collectivists in general look to a free federation of associations of producers and consumers to organize production and distribution. They uphold the socialist principle: ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to work done.’ This form of anarchist collectivism appealed to peasants as well as workers in the labour movement who wanted to create a free society without any transitional revolutionary government or dictatorship.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century
by Rodrigo Aguilera
Published 10 Mar 2020

The official ideology of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” has chilled liberalization, heightened reliance on mercantilism, raised bureaucratic hurdles to trade and investment, weakened the rule of law, and strengthened resistance from vested interests that impede more dynamic economic development.34 It is a common argumentative fallacy in economics to assume that just because some level of economic liberalization is better than autocracy or state control of the means of production, as in Soviet-style communism, that more liberalization is necessarily better. But when something is better than nothing, it does not follow that more of that something is intrinsically better than only some of it. The sweet spot is usually somewhere along the spectrum rather than at any of the extremes and economists have so far not developed a magic formula to find out exactly where (immediately distrust any economist who says otherwise).

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Just as democracy distributed power to disenfranchised citizens, whatever economic model succeeds capitalism must be capable of distributing wealth just as effectively to disenfranchised workers. An increasingly popular proposal is employee-ownership, which is the central feature of the increasingly popular idea known as democratic socialism. This sets it apart from other socialist models like Soviet-style communism where the means of production were owned by the state as an intermediary of employee control and which, unsurprisingly, led to authoritarianism wherever it was implemented3. Democratic socialism is undoubtedly radical — at this point, any alternative to liberal capitalism is — but hardly as disruptive as its critics fear.

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Source: Lampel et al. (2014).6 A shocking revelation for “classic liberals” will be that one of the most famous liberal philosophers and political economists of the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, was a strong supporter of this form of worker-managed organization. Mill, not unlike many socialists of his day (his classic Principles of Political Economy was first published the same year as the Communist Manifesto), viewed the ownership of the means of production as being fundamentally social rather than personal, claiming that “Even what a person has produced by his individual toil, unaided by any one, he cannot keep, unless by the permission of society”7. Mill also went further than Marx himself in predicting that employee-owned firms would eventually displace capitalist firms, given their advantages in efficiency, incentives, and workplace democracy: The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and workpeople without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.8 Mill may have been right about their benefits but he was wrong in his prediction that they would eventually become the dominant form of productive organization.

Ellul, Jacques-The Technological Society-Vintage Books (1964)
by Unknown
Published 7 Jun 2012

But, with a better understanding of the illusory nature of the “threshold quan­ tity," we are able to turn aside the objections which are always raised by those who rightly but extraneously urge that historical societies have always had to struggle with the possibility of a ma­ terial takeover and that the present state of affairs is therefore not something new. The answer, of course, is that the objection is ir­ relevant. Ellul could not mean to assert that men in the past have not had to contend with material means which threatened to ex­ ceed their capacity to make good use of them, but that men in the past were not confronted with technical means of production and organization which in their sheer numerical proliferation and ve­ locity unavoidably surpassed man’s relatively unchanging biologi­ cal and spiritual capacities to exploit them as means to human ends. Second, Engel’s law must never be taken to imply a one-way transition of quantity into quality.

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Nor must we overlook the fact that this parentage represents a profound inter­ vention in the economy on the part of the state, an intervention, moreover, not dictated by a theory or a will to power, but by the technical manifest. The necessity of utilizing certain goods also tends in the same direction. It has long been recognized that technical progress is effected more rapidly in the creation of the means of production. From this fact comes a kind of hypertrophy of machine-producing industries. The well-known Hoover Committee for the elimination of waste found, for example, that the production of the American clothing industry was 45 per cent greater than necessary. The ca pacity ot the shoe industry was double its real production; and the printing industry was overequipped by 100 per cent.

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The eif ects of this new revenue-calculating economic technique, which relates economic effects to their causes, are easily seen in fields such as the liquor industry, housing, trans­ portation, and so on. It is clear that this calculated revenue poten­ tial bears not merely on money but also on human capital. France does not yet have a central accounting service which could com­ pletely exploit this technique and establish a measurement of social needs, means of production, movement of capital, national income, and demographic change, etc. Returning to the methods of pure economic technique, we find the metl^od of models. It is extremely difficult to experiment in eco­ nomic matters. But experimentation is indispensable in all sciences and even more so in techniques.

The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind
by Jan Lucassen
Published 26 Jul 2021

It is likely that the first wage labour was created in this way – albeit without a labour market. Parallel to this, we now see the first evidence of the private ownership of the means of production, specifically of land and cattle, but in the cities, too, of artisanal tools. This is how self-employed households that traded their products on the market came into being. And it was this that first made wage labour in the service of the self-employed possible on a larger scale – that is to say, the phenomenon of people without the means of production (especially land) working for someone who does, but for a reward: wage labour through the market. The question then is, how was the nature and level of this reward determined?

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Thus, the uneven redistribution of communal revenue became institutionalized. In the states – that is, the polities – that emerged from city leagues, elites became increasingly powerful, internally and externally. Internally, they could now claim for the state not only all revenues but also the means of production and, in exchange for remuneration, the services of non-property-owning citizens (for example, as professional soldiers). At the same time, citizens could work for themselves and, in addition, traders and other professionals could acquire production resources and, ultimately, they could also employ wage workers.

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The term ‘transegalitarian’ is used to describe the transitional form of more unequal societies, in the sense that: ‘Where significant ownership of resources, economically based competition, and wealth differences occur but are not institutionalized as class distinctions, we refer to such societies as “transegalitarian” societies.’ Even more unequal societies have been called ‘chiefdom organizations’.81 For the time being, however, we should not regard the concept of ownership as the ownership of the means of production (land, cattle), but as control over harvest surpluses. Signs of unevenly distributed property only come later.82 The question now, then, is how to characterize the gradual transition between hunting-gathering and agriculture along these lines. Let us again start from the important observation that the Neolithic Revolution created possibilities for saving food, much more than was the case among most hunter-gatherers.

Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself
by Peter Fleming
Published 14 Jun 2015

That process is, of course, capitalism. The accumulation of capital – in all its variants, including financial or fictitious capital – involves the use of a labour process that takes a variety of organizational forms. That labour process is in turn built around exploitation and class relations (i.e. who owns and controls the means of production). What we call work is the social embodiment and ritualistic calculus of that exploitation process. One reason that the ideology of work has got away with its recent exponential growth, becoming a ‘way of life’, is that it is still confused with survival and ineluctable necessity. This is one of the great ruses of neoliberal reason: it is able to impose an artificial regime based upon the pretext of organic self-preservation.

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Work becomes an inescapable way of life, 24/7. For example, when we enter the workplace today we are not only selling our skills as potential labour power but also ourselves as certain kinds of people. Hence the popularity of ‘human capital’ in neoclassical economics, which is now a central component of the means of production in a totally commercialized society. We can note this emphasis on human and social capital in the following mainstream praise of the modern corporation. Under the title of ‘Sociability’s Value Added’, we are told by pro-business celebrants Goffee and Jones that sociability is often a boon to creativity because it fosters teamwork, the sharing of information, and an openness to new ideas.

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Customer service staff, cleaners, catering, recruitment services, telephone operators and even managers are employed by a myriad of other firms, which then outsource their staff functions as well. In the end, the hotel is merely a building and a brand. Other than its owners, it is people-less. For is not the private ownership of the means of production liberated from the trouble of labour the perfect ideal of the current era? This is not an isolated case; it is the basic business model of late capitalism, especially for jobs that involve dangerous, controversial or undesirable work. It keeps wages low, enables large firms to bypass health, safety and employment regulations and defers the costs of employment in a never-ending chain of contractors.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User
by Joanne McNeil
Published 25 Feb 2020

“[When] i went into cyberspace i went into it thinking that it was a place like any other place and that it would be a human interaction like any other human interaction,” Hermosillo began, tearing down The WELL’s self-mythologizing as a utopia, and instead painting a picture of cyberspace as large as a vampiric spectacle: i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories, which karl marx called “the means of production.” capitalists were people who owned the means of production, and the commodities were made by workers who were mostly exploited. i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment. that means that i sold my soul like a tennis shoe and i derived no profit from the sale of my soul. people who post frequently on boards appear to know that they are factory equipment and tennis shoes, and sometimes trade sends and email about how their contributions are not appreciated by management.

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A good explanation of the difference between users and customers can be found in “The Discovery of Behavioral Surplus,” in Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, 2019): “There is no economic exchange, no price, and no profit. Nor do users function in the role of workers … Users are not paid for their labor, nor do they operate the means of production.” 1. SEARCH In 2015, Google restructured itself and renamed its holding company “Alphabet,” but no one seems to actually call it that other than its shareholders. There was an NPR segment in 2014 about the questions the New York Public Library fielded from the 1940s to the ’80s (“Before the Internet, Librarians Would ‘Answer Everything’—And Still Do,” December 28, 2014).

Stolen: How to Save the World From Financialisation
by Grace Blakeley
Published 9 Sep 2019

For a long time, it has been easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism — by which we mean an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production (the main factors used in the production process) with the aim of profit maximisation, the enforcement of private property rights by the state, and the allocation of resources through the market mechanism. The system may create inequality, unemployment, frequent crises, and environmental degradation but, we have been told, the alternative is far worse. Socialism — a system under which the means of production are owned collectively — has only ever lead to death and destruction. Capitalism is the worst way of organising the economy, except for all the others.

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Capitalism has built these systems, and the powerful are trying to contain their complexity using hierarchical, top-down decision-making processes that are unfit for the task. As a result, capitalists are slowly losing control. As Marx put it, modern bourgeois society, which “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.25 There is a better way. Just as feudalism paved the way for capitalism, the development of capitalism is paving the way for socialism. Socialising ownership would ensure that economic growth and development benefit everyone — if everyone has a stake in the economy, then when the economy grows, we all get better off.

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No new jobs are created when I pay my landlord rent or when a corporation pays interest to a bank — income is simply transferred from one place to another. The combination of a falling wage share and a rising rentier share saps demand out of the real economy, as well as increasing financial instability, contradictions that will be analysed later in this book. The divide between the owners of the means of production and rentiers on the one hand, and those who are forced to work for a living on the other, is the divide between the many and the few — between those who live off work and those who live off wealth. This is the fundamental divide that characterises capitalist societies today. The political salience of this divide may rise and fall depending upon wider political economic conditions, but it never goes away.

23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 1 Jan 2010

The top Russian scientists were as inventive as their counterparts in capitalist countries, but the rest of the country did not seem able to live up to the same standard. What was going on? In pursuit of the communist vision of a classless society based on collective ownership of the ‘means of production’ (e.g., machines, factory buildings, roads), the Soviet Union and its communist allies aimed for full employment and a high degree of equality. Since no one was allowed to own any means of production, virtually all enterprises were run by professional managers (with minor exceptions such as small restaurants and hairdressers), preventing the emergence of visionary entrepreneurs, like Henry Ford or Bill Gates.

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Despite this, the system still failed to function well because of the inefficiency of the communist central planning system, which was supposed to be a more efficient alternative to the market system. The communist justification of central planning was based on some quite sound logic. Karl Marx and his followers argued that the fundamental problem with capitalism was the contradiction between the social nature of the production process and the private nature of ownership of the means of production. With economic development – or the development of productive forces, in Marxist jargon – the division of labour between firms develops further and as a result the firms become increasingly more dependent on each other – or the social nature of the production process is intensified. However, despite the growing interdependence among firms, the Marxists argued, ownership of the firms firmly remains in separate private hands, making it impossible to coordinate the actions of those interdependent firms.

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Many unsold products are thrown away, machines that used to produce now-unwanted things are scrapped, and workers who are capable and willing to work are laid off due to the lack of demand. With the development of capitalism, the Marxists predicted, this systemic contradiction would become larger and consequently economic crises would become more and more violent, finally bringing the whole system down. In contrast, under central planning, the Marxist argued, all means of production are owned by the whole of society and as a result the activities of interdependent production units can be coordinated ex ante through a unified plan. As any potential coordination failure is resolved before it happens, the economy does not have to go through those periodic crises in order to balance supply and demand.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World
by Jason Hickel
Published 12 Aug 2020

This was utterly new in world history. Such people were referred to at the time as ‘free labourers’, but this term is misleading: true, they were not forced to work as slaves or serfs, but they nonetheless had little choice in the matter, as their only alternative was starvation. Those who controlled the means of production could get away with paying rock-bottom wages, and people would have to take it. Any wage, no matter how small, was better than death. * All of this upends the usual story that we’re told about the rise of capitalism. This was hardly a natural and inevitable process. There was no gradual ‘transition’, as people like to assume, and it certainly wasn’t peaceful.

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Capitalism rose on the back of organised violence, mass impoverishment, and the systematic destruction of self-sufficient subsistence economies. It did not put an end to serfdom; rather, it put an end to the progressive revolution that had ended serfdom. Indeed, by securing virtually total control over the means of production, and rendering peasants and workers dependent on them for survival, capitalists took the principles of serfdom to new extremes. People did not welcome this new system with open arms; on the contrary, they rebelled against it. The period from 1500 to the 1800s, right into the Industrial Revolution, was among the bloodiest, most tumultuous times in world history.

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While output soared, commoners were hit by two centuries of famine. So too in the factories. None of the gains from the surge in labour productivity went back to the workers themselves; indeed, wages declined during the enclosure period. Profits were pocketed instead by those who owned the means of production. The essential point to grasp here is that the emergence of the extraordinary productive capacity that characterises capitalism depended on creating and maintaining conditions of artificial scarcity. Scarcity – and the threat of hunger – served as the engine of capitalist growth. The scarcity was artificial in the sense that there was no actual depletion of resources: all the same land and forests and waters remained, just as they always had, but people’s access to them was suddenly restricted.

Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow
by Tim Jackson
Published 8 Dec 2016

The starting point is to unravel some of the workings of modern capitalism. Varieties of capitalism Capitalism is an elusive concept. It isn’t a simple, homogeneous entity. And it certainly thrives or survives in numerous varieties. The most widely used formulation defines capitalism in terms of the private ownership of the ‘means of production’. Common definitions also stress the importance of a ‘profit motive’ as a defining motive within the economic system.4 What does this mean in practice? Broadly, it means that private individuals (capitalists) invest their money (their ‘capital’) in the factories, the farms, the mines, the supply chains and the distribution networks (also the ‘capital’) that allow society to produce goods and services.

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I want to come back to this question at the end of the book (Chapter 11), as it has some interesting repercussions for debates about prosperity and growth. But what’s immediately clear from empirical experience is that the forms of ownership of capital can vary enormously from context to context. In oligarchic capitalism, the means of production are owned by a few powerful firms or individuals. In shareholder capitalism, the ownership is spread much more widely across society. Today, for instance, anyone with a pension participates in the ownership of any number of companies. In most advanced economies, we are all to some extent capitalists.

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And as I’ve already intimated, the act of definition is itself so distorted by the inherently politicised nature of the debate as to be virtually impossible. To make any kind of progress, we have to settle on a usable definition of the term. So let’s start with Baumol’s assumption that capitalistic economies are those where ownership and control of the means of production lies in private hands, rather than with the state. In general terms, this suggests there’s a likelihood that the economy of tomorrow is going to be ‘less capitalistic’.16 Longer-term, less productive investments will be essential for sustainability but less attractive to private capital. So the role of the progressive State in protecting these assets is going to be vital.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

Reviving equality In the twentieth century, inequality was seen in terms of profits and wages. For social democrats and others, redistribution was to be achieved by controlling the means of production, through nationalisation, and obtaining a greater share of profits through taxation, which could then be redistributed in state benefits and public services. That model fell into disrepute and socialists are in despair. In a collection of essays on Reimagining Socialism by American socialists who saw the means of production going to China, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher (2009) wrote: ‘Do we have a plan, people? Can we see our way out of this and into a just, democratic, sustainable (add your own favourite adjectives) future?

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A POLITICS OF PARADISE 171 They should take heart. The egalitarian ethos has moved on. The baton is being picked up by the precariat, the rising class in a tertiary society where means of production are nebulous and dispersed, and often owned by workers anyhow. Every Transformation has been marked by a struggle over the key assets of the era. In feudal societies, the peasants and serfs struggled to gain control of land and water. In industrial capitalism, the struggle was over the means of production, the factories, estates and mines. Workers wanted decent labour and a share of the profits in return for conceding control of labour to managers.

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality
by Don Watkins and Yaron Brook
Published 28 Mar 2016

We have to think and produce if we want to live and achieve happiness, and as a result we must have the right to think and produce (and to keep what we produce) if we are to create a society in which individuals can flourish. What can violate those rights? What can stop us from supporting our lives through thought and production? Basically, just one thing: physical force. The only way human beings can coexist peacefully is if they “leave their guns outside” and agree to live by means of production and voluntary trade rather than brute violence. As Locke explained, this was the purpose of government: to protect the rights of the “industrious and rational” from violation by “the quarrelsome and contentious.”26 By making the government the guardian of our equal rights rather than a tool through which the politically privileged controlled and exploited the rest of society, the Founders transformed the state from an instrument of oppression into an instrument of liberation: it liberated the individual so that he was free to make the most of his life.

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East Germany, however, conformed to Soviet-style totalitarian rule, economic central planning, and an egalitarian ideology that “stressed uniformity in outcomes, irrespective of individual differences in ability or effort.”40 The Socialist Unity Party of Germany oversaw virtually all production, most of the means of production were owned by the state, and prices and wages were placed under centralized control. The government dictated what to produce, how to produce it, and how to distribute what was produced. Although it allowed for some income gaps, those gaps were far narrower than in West Germany.41 But if we focus on living standards rather than income differences, it is clear that East Germany’s economic equality went hand in hand with poverty and stagnation, and West Germany’s economic inequality went hand in hand with prosperity and progress.

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By the mid-1900s, Sweden was one of the richest countries in the world. What made this possible? Freedom. Over the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, all major government restrictions, regulations, and controls were removed and the basic institutions of capitalism were established: private ownership of the means of production, freedom of competition, and free trade. The government was small (spending around 10 percent of GDP), and taxes were low.55 The 1870s would mark the beginning of what is known in Sweden as “The 100 Golden Years.” Between 1870 and 1970, Sweden enjoyed some of the highest economic growth, productivity growth, and wage growth in the world.

Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing
by Josh Ryan-Collins , Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane
Published 28 Feb 2017

It enabled early industrialists to raise capital to fund investment in new machinery, and played a central role in the post-war restructuring of national economies in Germany, Japan and Korea, where land redistribution and the grant of title to those who worked it (mainly in an agricultural context) spread access to capital (both credit and the means of production) to a much larger proportion of society than had existed previously. This in turn enabled the emergence of dynamic, capitalist economies and the long boom of the post-war era (Linklater, 2013). In the UK and much of the Western world, the mid-twentieth century rise of individual homeownership also spread landownership to large sections of the population, with broadly beneficial consequences for economic growth, resilience and equality (Saunders, 2016), at least up until the 1970s.

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(Clark, 1899, p. viii) More broadly, Clark and the marginal utility theory that was blossoming in Europe can be seen as a reaction to the writings of both George and Karl Marx’s (1867) labour theory of value. Both emphasised the economic rent and exploitation of workers derived from private ownership (of the ‘means of production’ in Marx’s famous term). Although presented as an objective theory of distribution, in fact Clark’s version of marginal productivity had a strong normative element. He explicitly argued that having rewards determined by marginal contribution to output was fair because ‘what a social class gets is, under natural law, what it contributes to the general output of the industry’ (Clark, 1891a, p. 319).

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Ultimately, this limits what the theory can say about the distribution of income, particularly in a world where such economic rents are large (Robinson, 1973). 3.7 Land and socialism Although neoclassical economics can be said to have dominated the past fifty years of economic thought, Karl Marx’s powerful legacy and its continuance in socialist regimes across the world from 1918 to 1990 in the first sixty years of the twentieth century maintained a focus on the economic rents that can be derived from ownership of the means of production. Social democratic regimes in Europe in particular were successful in advancing an interventionist role for the state in preventing the worst abuses of monopoly via competition laws, as well as using progressive income taxes to support advanced welfare states. Even in the United States, where socialism and public ownership of enterprise never took off, powerful anti-trust legislation dealt a blow to big business monopolists that controlled the railroads, the telegraph and oil businesses.

American Marxism
by Mark R. Levin
Published 12 Jul 2021

Marx, with his emphasis on historic materialism, wrote: “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie [the capitalists, the owners of property and the means of production] and Proletariat [laborer, the industrial working class]…”13 Marx argues that “[n]ot only are [the proletarians] slaves of the bourgeois class, and the bourgeois State, they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the over-seer, and above all, the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself.”14 Consequently, the proletariat’s fate is at a dead end.

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Whoever speaks in the name of the proletariat will recall, throughout the centuries, slaves at grips with their masters; he cannot believe any longer in the progressive development of a natural order, but counts on the crowning revolt of the slaves to eliminate slavery.”51 Despite these observable facts, Anyon repeats Marxist propaganda by writing that “[s]ocial class is another concept of Marx which neo-Marxists in education have made extensive use of. Social class is defined as a person’s or group’s relation to the means of production—that is, whether your relation to factories, corporations, and other businesses is one of ownership and control, or one of worker as dependent on being hired. Marx described two main classes as characterizing the capitalist system. Members of the working class… are in an unequal and contradictory relation to the owners who hire them.

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CHAPTER FOUR RACISM, GENDERISM, AND MARXISM The foundational question: what is Critical Theory, from which these other Critical Theory/Marxist movements sprang? Uri Harris at Quillette explains: “Critical theory draws heavily on Karl Marx’s notion of ideology. Because the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, Marx suggested, they controlled the culture. Consequently, the laws, beliefs, and morality of society reflected the interests of the bourgeoisie. And importantly, people were unaware that this was the case. In other words, capitalism created a situation where the interests of a particular group of people—those who controlled society—were made to appear to be universal truths and values, when in fact they were not.”1 Harris continues: “The founders of critical theory developed this notion.

Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent
by Robert F. Barsky
Published 2 Feb 1997

Such "common ownership must not be confounded with public ownership," a system in which workers are commanded by state officials who direct production. Rather, they must themselves take over complete control of the means of production and all planning and distribution. Capitalism is a "transitional form," combining modern industrial technique with the archaic social principle of private ownership. Advanced industrial technology combined with common ownership "means a free collaborating humanity," the proper goal of the workers movement. [Pannekoek] also wrote that ''the idea of their common ownership of the means of production is beginning to take hold of the minds of the workers." (Radical Priorities 263) file:///D|/export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_41.html [4/16/2007 3:05:03 PM] Document Page 42 Chomsky emphasizes that Pannekoek's writing on the workers' councils was, in fact, almost unknown beyond a few small circles.

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Chomsky and Bertrand Russell One of the few adornments in Chomsky's office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a large poster of Bertrand Russell. As a young man, Chomsky discovered the British mathematician, logician, and philosopher who came to realize (quite a bit later in life than Chomsky) that the ruling classes own the means of production and are therefore driven to legitimize their power. Russell was an inspiration to Chomsky. First, he was an important influence upon Chomsky's thinking about philosophy and logic; second, he had a similarly profound commitment to the cause of popular liberation; third, he was closely affiliated with the university world as a scholar, while simultaneously acting on behalf of the oppressed lower classes; and fourth, he upheld his views even if it meant jeopardizing his reputation, or even his freedom.

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In the domain of economic and historical analysis, they claimed, ''Marx fits the facts and is useful for prediction." The elements of this society that the group considered unsatisfactory would continue to exist "as long as there is a controlling class, wages and profits, and a lack of complete freedom in the utilization of the means of production." The People did not believe that reform is possible within the framework of the capitalist society, or that any bureaucratic structure, any attempt to manage or lead the people, "will in the long run aid in the development in the desired direction." file:///D|/export2/www.netlibrary.com/nlreader/nlreader.dll@bookid=9296&filename=page_72.html [4/16/2007 3:05:24 PM] Document Page 73 The document makes reference to historical-materialist works such as those of Erich Fromm (of the Frankfurt School) and Arthur Rosenberg, as well as works of American cultural anthropology, modern natural sciences, and mathematical logic.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World
by Aaron Hurst
Published 31 Aug 2013

And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans. —Robert F. Kennedy, 1968 The Information Economy At the start of the 20th century, the name of the game was efficiency and output, which launched an obsession with building faster and more efficient means of production. By the middle of the 20th century, the marketplace was dominated by large corporations and institutions, which created a new kind of workplace built on hierarchy and development within an organization. Labor became increasingly segmented into narrow functional roles, and new vocational training and professional schools were created to respond to the need for more focused training within one specialization.

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And it has inspired the purpose generation, Millennials, who are increasingly constructing their identities around purpose to make sense of the rapidly evolving world and their equally fluctuating role in it. And yet, this is not an economic or social evolution; it is how we manipulate the world to better serve our needs. Each new economy evolves out of a distinctive set of conditions and is characterized by an innate set of products and means of production. Just as the farmers of the Agrarian Economy made use of the earth to grow crops and raise livestock, the industrialists extracted raw materials for producing energy and fueling a new breed of powerful machines. The expertise developed in building increasingly sophisticated machines was key to the rise of the Information Economy.

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The simple stamp of approval, a “fair trade certified” Fair Trade USA icon (which can now be found on over 12 thousand products in 100 thousand U.S. retail locations), was effectively a campaign for more humane production methods and practices. This tactic has helped change public perceptions around ethical means of production. Leveraging these changing public perceptions, the group created a foundation that is now a vehicle for affecting policy, creating awareness, supporting transparency, and promoting best practices in the supply chain. 7. San Francisco Public Utility Commission: Utility Conservation the San Francisco Public Utility Commission is exemplary among American utility providers.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

Negation of negation is explained by Žižek as the separation of the “negated system’s ‘real’ death from its ‘symbolic’ death . . . the system has to die twice.” See Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 72. Or to put it in straightforward Marxist terms: producers take over the means of production, but at this first stage it remains within the confines of private ownership; this first stage has to be further negated to abolish the whole principle of private ownership of the means of production. 64. Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto, 10–12. 65. Referring to David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation of 1817. 66. Paolo Virno, Multitude: Between Innovation and Negation, trans.

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Facebook regularly shares information with government agencies and purges activist’s accounts, such as those of campaigners trying to organize antiausterity protests in 2011, including the UK Uncut and Occupy movements.89 A closer look at the terms of service of these platforms confirms ways that ownership is carefully managed, parodied by a consumer advocacy blog with the suggestion for new terms: “We can do anything we want with your content. Forever.”90 Users are happily granted access to the means of production but not ownership. The underlying contradiction is clear: “The social web facilitates an unprecedented level of social sharing, but it does so mostly through the vehicle of proprietary platforms.”91 In such ways, freedom is extracted by a service to serve the free market, not free expression.

The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa
by Irene Yuan Sun
Published 16 Oct 2017

Whether he can ever become a factory owner will depend not only on hard work and determination—which Stephen has in spades—but also on the relationships he is able to forge with foreign investors. The latter can offer him a partnership or not, look out for his interests or not, believe in him or not. If Chinese investment in Africa is to spawn a generation not only of African workers but also of African industrialists who themselves own the means of production, multiple elements will be required: individual initiative, complementary business arrangements, and ultimately, that most nebulous of ingredients: personal trust. … Realizing Stephen’s dream of becoming a factory owner will no doubt be an uphill battle, but hopefully not as literal of a battle as what he’s endured so far.

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He would have cash in the bank and no need to buy more machinery, and he would have hundreds of workers with experience with his production system. Only time will tell whether Luqy pulls off his big order, becoming the biggest success—or the biggest failure—of the bunch. These four local owners—Chris, Mabereng, Thabiso, and Luqy—illustrate the diversity of the locals who aspire to own the means of production. From well-heeled royalty to ordinary small businesspeople, they bring differing skills and shortcomings to their endeavors. The elites are well connected, lacking neither cash nor state backing, but short on factory-floor experience and perhaps naive about whom to trust. The no-name business owners are scrappier and understand the nitty-gritty of the shop floor, but struggle to obtain credit and to generate enough cash to grow.

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“I wasn’t sure if I would make it financially, but I have known these people since 1992. I really trust them. They are like family.”14 Mrs. Zaf’s story points to the magic ingredient that’s needed if the Chinese in Africa today are to avoid becoming enclaved communities like the Indian Kenyans and the Lebanese Ivorians. For Africans to increasingly own the means of production, the strivings of local entrepreneurs and the business abilities they possess are only part of the equation. The other part is relationships—whether budding business partners have a true affinity, whether each trusts the other enough to share when a promising new opportunity arises. Here is where business becomes personal: for local ownership to become a reality, local integration must happen first.

Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
by William N. Goetzmann
Published 11 Apr 2016

Corporate dividends are derived from paying meager subsistence wages to laborers and then turning around and selling goods at higher money prices that no longer reflect their labor value. Capitalists control the means of production and use it to generate and hoard surplus labor. Mechanization and productivity gains generate higher profits and result in layoffs, which in turn lead to a reserve of cheap labor. Unemployment drives down demand, however, and profits suffer. This cycle of productivity gain and unemployment leads to periodic crises in the capitalist economy. At some point, the cycle will break down, and workers will control the means of production and thus be able to retain for themselves the surplus value of their own labor.

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In the spirit of Marx, Lenin envisioned this ultimate global battle as the end of capitalism itself; the transformative financial crisis predicted by Marx in Das Kapital that would reunite workers and the means of production to take back the accumulated labor value stored in the portfolios of the world’s moneybags. Imperialism, he argued, was the transition of competitive capitalism to monopoly capitalism, in which the means of production are finally controlled by a handful of powerful global financial giants who have divided the world into spheres of interest and thus reduced costly competition. At the outset, Lenin made it clear that his book was inspired by Hobson’s Imperialism—taking the 1902 treatise as an inspiration but throwing out Hobson’s bourgeoisie pacifism and replacing it with the iconoclastic vision of Marx’s end of capitalism.

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While criticism of market forces, banks, stock markets, lending, and investment existed long before Karl Marx, the novelty of Das Kapital is that it redefines capitalism in its own terms and predicts its doom. He argued that the seeds of capitalism’s future failure lay in the business cycle. Eventually, a great recession in the industrialized economies would stir the proletariat to seize the means of production from the capitalists. In the meantime, capitalism would relentlessly and systematically drain the life blood of the working class. KAPITAL IN A NUTSHELL In Marx’s world, the value of everything is a function of the labor expended to create it. Marx adapted this view from the work of David Ricardo—a brilliant and influential political economist of the early nineteenth century who proposed a theory of value based on human input to the production process.

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class
by Kees Van der Pijl
Published 2 Jun 2014

Title 337.4073 HF1532.5.U5 First published 1984 © Kees van der Pijl 1984 Verso 15 Greek Street London W1V 5LF eBook ISBN: 978-1-84467-936-2 Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84467-871-6 v3.1 For Kiek, Margreet & Frank ‘Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organization of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.’

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As will be demonstrated below, this distinction is particularly important when it comes to reconstructing the ideological propensities of the functionaries of productive capital. This also goes for another distinction Marx deploys in Volumes Two and Three — the one between capital engaged in the production of means of production and capital engaged in the production of consumer goods: Departments I and II. Since Fordism in the era of Atlantic integration rested on the dynamic articulation of relative surplus-value production in the consumer-durables sector and a concomitant reorientation of key ‘Department I’ industries towards supplying this sector with semi-finished products (notably steel), the departmental division is relevant in this light as well.

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Through the Technical Assistance and Productivity Program, the complete inventory of Taylorism and Fordism, like merit rating, job classification, shift labour in continuous processes, and so on, was exported to Western Europe. The key component of Marshall Plan hardware deliveries in this context was the technology of continuous wide-strip mills for the steel industry. These advanced means of production were capable of producing large quantities of cheap sheet steel for automobiles and household appliances, and, thus, were instrumental in subordinating the traditionally reactionary steel industry to the system of relative surplus-value production, while at the same time consolidating the subordination of the US steel industry to the powerful automobile groups by cheap exports.40 Twenty years after their introduction in the United States, the wide-strip mills with American aid broke the cartel barriers which hitherto had prevented their installation in Europe.

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition
by Jonathan Tepper
Published 20 Nov 2018

Brandeis and Friedman were fortunate to live and work in the United States, but European economists viewed the dangers of concentration even more acutely. The Ordoliberals saw how large trusts aided the rise of Hitler. As Friedrich Hayek wrote, “It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves.” He went on to warn, “If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of “society” as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.”10 After World War II, the United States exported its tradition to Europe, and the Ordoliberals helped extend it further.

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Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz have referred to it as “ersatz capitalism,” where the distorted representation we see is as far away from the real thing as Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean are from real pirates. If what we have is a fake version of capitalism, what does the real thing look like? What should we have? According to the dictionary, the idealized state of capitalism is “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, characterized by the freedom of capitalists to operate or manage their property for profit in competitive conditions.” Parts of this definition have universal appeal today. Today, for example, we take private property for granted in the world. Communism defined itself in opposition to private property.

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He could trade on better terms than smaller merchants by receiving rebates up to 75% of the cost of shipping.5 When other companies couldn't compete, he would offer to buy them out or run them out of business. Small farmers, refiners, and businessmen resented the tycoons because they controlled the highways of industrial traffic, the means of production, and all avenues through which the stream of commodities passed from producer to the consumer. The large could squeeze the small. As Vanderbilt had discovered after acquiring one railway, owning the arteries of commerce meant you could expand your reach ever further. The desire to exploit power at the time was endless.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Published 14 May 2017

Imitation was no longer the only conduit by which to get closer to the elite. Instead, through both mass production and fast credit (a development from the latter half of the twentieth century), many more people began to consume the same products as elites. In Veblen’s time the elite leisure class owned property, and controlled the means of production and the means to acquire material goods. The Industrial Revolution brought massive economic restructuring and the introduction of a middle class of businessmen and workers. These new workers were unlike the landless proletariats before them who were oppressed under the noble class. In the ensuing decades, the middle class, not just the upper tiers of society, acquired property, and generated wealth and disposable income that allowed them to purchase status through consumption.

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Deindustrialization brought erosion to major urban centers (where many factories were located) and joblessness throughout huge swaths of the country.36 In manufacturing’s place came the rise of the service economy, a truly bifurcated economic structure. Globalization manifested itself in the outsourcing of cheap labor for manufacturing but also through the emergence of elite “global cities,” to use Saskia Sassen’s term. Global cities became the sites for the new economic means of production—information and financial capital. The labor market elites responsible for the greatest profit-making were found in professional sectors—accountancy, finance, law, and medicine, or what Sassen calls “high level producer services.” Another account of this economic restructuring offers a similar but simpler explanation: The global economy had moved from producing widgets to producing ideas—those who were responsible for generating those ideas, what Robert Reich has called “symbolic analysts”37 or Richard Florida has termed the “creative class”—are the winners in the new economy.38 While a college degree is not an explicit measure of membership to Sassen’s, Reich’s, or Florida’s categorization, it certainly helps and most members do possess one.

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First, so much of material consumption is accessible and overt that the aspirational class, both consciously and unconsciously, finds more obscure, codified symbols to reveal their social position.4 Second, there is no “leisure class.” The restructuring of the global economy prizes a meritocracy, who own the means of production through their minds, not land ownership. These labor market elites (many of whom are members of the aspirational class) believe in upward mobility and want the same for their children. Their dominant ethos—working hard and acquiring knowledge—is also the dominant cultural hegemony and spills over into all walks of life.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
Published 9 Jun 2010

A lot of new kinds of media have emerged since Gutenberg: images and sounds were encoded onto objects, from photographic plates to music CDs; electromagnetic waves were harnessed to create radio and TV. All these subsequent revolutions, as different as they were, still had the core of Gutenberg economics: enormous investment costs. It’s expensive to own the means of production, whether it is a printing press or a TV tower, which makes novelty a fundamentally high-risk operation. If it’s expensive to own and manage the means of production or if it requires a staff, you’re in a world of Gutenberg economics. And wherever you have Gutenberg economics, whether you are a Venetian publisher or a Hollywood producer, you’re going to have fifteenth-century risk management as well, where the producers have to decide what’s good before showing it to the audience.

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We’ve always enjoyed all three of those activities, but until recently, broadcast media rewarded only one of them. TV is unbalanced—if I own a TV station, and you own a television, I can speak to you, but you can’t speak to me. Phones, by contrast, are balanced; if you buy the means of consumption, you automatically own the means of production. When you purchase a phone, no one asks if you just want to listen, or if you want to talk on it too. Participation is inherent in the phone, and it’s the same for the computer. When you buy a machine that lets you consume digital content, you also buy a machine to produce it. Further, you can share material with your friends, and you can talk about what you consumed or produced or shared.

Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek
Published 22 Dec 2016

This includes media content like YouTube and blogs, as well as broader contributions in the form of creating websites, participating in online forums, and producing software.4 A related claim is that material commodities contain an increasing amount of knowledge, which is embodied in them. The production process of even the most basic agricultural commodities, for instance, is reliant upon a vast array of scientific and technical knowledges. On the other side of the class relation, some argue that the economy today is dominated by a new class, which does not own the means of production but rather has ownership over information.5 There is some truth in this, but the argument goes awry when it situates this class outside of capitalism. Given that the imperatives of capitalism hold for these companies as much as for any other, the companies remain capitalist. Yet there is something new here, and it is worth trying to discern exactly what it is.

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AWS is now the most rapidly growing part of Amazon – and also the most profitable, with about 30 per cent margins and nearly $8 billion in revenue in 2015. In the first quarter of 2016, AWS generated more profit for Amazon than its core retail service.40 If Google and Facebook built the first data extraction platforms, Amazon built the first major cloud platform in order to rent out an increasingly basic means of production for contemporary businesses. Rather than relying on advertisers’ buying data, these cloud platforms are building up the basic infrastructure of the digital economy in a way that can be rented out profitably to others, while they collect data for their own uses. Industrial Platforms As data collection, storage, and analysis have become increasingly cheaper, more and more companies have attempted to bring platforms into the field of traditional manufacturing.

The Rise of the Network Society
by Manuel Castells
Published 31 Aug 1996

The structural principle under which surplus is appropriated and controlled characterizes a mode of production. In the twentieth century we lived, essentially, with two predominant modes of production: capitalism and statism. Under capitalism, the separation between producers and their means of production, the commodification of labor, and the private ownership of means of production on the basis of the control of capital (commodified surplus), determined the basic principle of appropriation and distribution of surplus by capitalists, although who is (are) the capitalist class(es) is a matter of social inquiry in each historical context, rather than an abstract category.

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In advanced economies, the public-service sector becomes the refuge of employment for an increasing share of the work force expelled from traditional good-producing sectors. And entrepreneurship and innovation continue to thrive on the margins of the corporate sectors of the economy, increasing the numbers of self-employed as technology allows self-reliance in the control of the means of production of knowledge-based services, from the desk-top quality printer to online services. In sum, the occupational structure of our societies has indeed been transformed by new technologies. But the processes and forms of this transformation have been the result of the interaction between technological change, the institutional environment, and the evolution of relationships between capital and labor in each specific social context.

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Matter includes nature, human-modified nature, human-produced nature, and human nature itself, the labors of history forcing us to move away from the classic distinction between humankind and nature, since millenniums of human action have incorporated the natural environment into society, making us, materially and symbolically, an inseparable part of this environment. The relationship between labor and matter in the process of work involves the use of means of production to act upon matter on the basis of energy, knowledge, and information. Technology is the specific form of this relationship. The product of the production process is socially used under two forms: consumption and surplus. Social structures interact with production processes by determining the rules for the appropriation, distribution, and uses of the surplus.

Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953-1975
by Hannah Arendt
Published 6 Mar 2018

MCCARTHY: Actually you do have the tendency now—I am not talking about the Soviet Union—in some of the Eastern states towards private property in exactly the sense you mean: without ownership of the means of production. It seems to me that, so far as I can look ahead, socialism does represent the only force for conservation, and, in fact, represents a conservative force in the modern world. ARENDT: I said the means of production should not be in the hands of a single man. But who owns it then? The government. A few years ago, in Germany, the left demanded the nationalization of the Springer Press, the right-wing press.

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What he understood, surely, was that power is in any society wielded by the people who control access to the means of production, the means of life, the means of labor. And that, in his terminology, was a class. Would Miss Arendt agree that the only reason a bureaucracy has what power it has—and I wouldn’t agree with her that it has anything like the power she attributes to it—because and only insofar as, and only in those countries where it has become a class in Marx’s sense, that is, of the people who control access to the means of production? ARENDT: I would not agree with this. What you consider my idiosyncratic use of words—I think there is a little more to it, of course.

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Macdonald was clearly wrong when he wrote, three months before Hiroshima, “To say that civilization cannot survive another war is a truism; the question is whether it can survive this one.” The German “economic miracle,” the rapid recovery of Japan, the rebuilding of Russia after Stalin’s death have all demonstrated that up to a point the modern means of production function nowhere better than where the modern means of destruction have first created a kind of tabula rasa—provided that the population of the country is sufficiently “modern” and that the production process is not obstructed by the perverse power considerations of a totalitarian dictatorship.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

Peer into the cover’s computer screen and all you see looking back at you is you. In a solipsistic world, every Lonely Girl is a Great Man. DIGITAL SHARECROPPING December 19, 2006 STRIP THE HAPPY-FACE EMOTICONS from the social web, and you’re left with a sad-face truth: By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses but withholding from those same masses any ownership over the products of their work, the internet provides an incredibly efficient mechanism for harvesting the economic value of the free labor provided by the very many and concentrating it into the hands of the very few.

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THE LOOM OF THE SELF April 9, 2014 “IT IS HARD TO RESIST a technology that is also a tool of pleasure,” write Sarah Leonard and Kate Losse in the new issue of Dissent. “The Luddites smashed their power looms, but who wants to smash Facebook—with all one’s photos, birthday greetings, and invitations?” That’s on the money. Things do get messy, confused, when the means of production is also the means of communication, the means of expression, the means of entertainment, the means of shopping, the means of fill-in-the-blank. But out of such confusion comes, eventually, simplification, a concentration of effort and effect. Imagine if, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the power loom also served as a social medium.

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Beyond the efficiency gains, Silicon Valley would stand to profit from such a system. By developing a proprietary brain-computer network that renders human cogitation fully machine-readable, the tech industry would be able to transmit, store, parse, and hence to own, the entirety of our thoughts. “Industrial capitalism privatized the means of production,” Davies observed. “Digital capitalism seeks to privatize the means of communication.” That’s already happening. In digitizing human expression, the protocols of social networks are beginning to alter speech to make it more amenable to machine transmission and interpretation. Think of Like buttons, or other forms of online communication that involve, say, tapping an icon or clicking a checkbox or selecting an option from a drop-down menu.

The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking
by Saifedean Ammous
Published 23 Mar 2018

Government regulations and taxes are becoming less powerful as individuals can live or work where it suits them and deliver their work via telecommunication. As more and more of the value of economic production takes the form of nontangible goods, the relative value of land and physical means of production declines, reducing returns on violently appropriating such physical means of production. Productive capital becomes more embodied in the individuals themselves, making the threat of violently appropriating it increasingly hollow, as individuals' productivity becomes inextricably linked to their consent. When peasants' productivity and survival was tied to the land that they did not own, the threat of violence was effective in getting them to be productive to benefit the landowner.

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The most productive allocation is determined only through the price mechanism allowing the most productive users of capital goods to bid highest for them. The supply and demand of capital goods emerges from the interaction of the producers and consumers and their iterative decisions. In a socialist system, government owns and controls the means of production, making it at once the sole buyer and seller of all capital goods in the economy. That centralization stifles the functioning of an actual market, making sound decisions based on prices impossible. Without a market for capital where independent actors can bid for capital, there can be no price for capital overall or for individual capital goods.

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Socially, economically, and politically, the role of government was recast as the wish‐granting genie, and the population merely had to vote for what it wanted to have it fulfilled. French historian Élie Halévy defined the Era of Tyrannies as having begun in 1914 with World War I, when the major powers of the world shifted toward economic and intellectual nationalization. They nationalized the means of production and shifted to syndicalist and corporatist modes of societal organization, all while suppressing ideas viewed as opposed to the national interest, as well as the promotion of nationalism in what he termed “the organization of enthusiasm.”15 This classical liberal conception of government is only possible in a world with sound money, which acted as a natural restraint against government authoritarianism and overreach.

India's Long Road
by Vijay Joshi
Published 21 Feb 2017

The aims I have outlined are compatible with what is sometimes called ‘social democracy’, which seeks to achieve the egalitarian objectives of socialism, while remaining committed to the values and institutions of liberal democracy.3 What about the means of attaining the above aims? The most fundamental choice concerns the balance between the state and the market in the organization of economic activity.4 Post-​independence India has always been a mixed economy in which private and state ownership of the means of production, as well as free and regulated markets, co-​exist. But the mix has varied. In the first three decades after 1947, it moved quite sharply towards state ownership and state intervention in the market. Since then the balance has swung towards market liberalization and private ownership.5 I believe this shift was wholly desirable.

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But it is an impractical ideal at present since India lacks the data base for such an ambitious project. See Government of India (2013). I therefore stick to the convention of treating growth and environmental sustainability as separate objectives. 3. The defining principle of socialism is state ownership of the means of production, with central planning and control as its mode of operation. But this principle is pressed into the service of egalitarian aims. Social democrats accept the egalitarian aims but not the defining principle of state ownership and central planning. 4. A healthy democratic society also requires thriving civil-​society institutions that operate outside the domains of the state and the market but serve to keep them honest.

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A healthy democratic society also requires thriving civil-​society institutions that operate outside the domains of the state and the market but serve to keep them honest. In addition, a strong civil society helps to develop the bonds of trust between citizens that are essential to the working of both the state and the market. The state should do all it can to allow civil society to flourish. 5. The relation between free markets and private ownership of the means of production is not entirely straightforward. It can and has been argued that the two are separable, i.e. that markets can work without private property. It is possible to imagine a ‘socialist market economy’ in which managers of state enterprises make decisions on the basis of optimal ‘shadow’ prices provided to them by the central planning authority (see Lange 1936).

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism
by Calum Chace
Published 17 Jul 2016

A society comprising gods and the useless might turn out to be inherently unstable. In a full-on conflict between them it seems likely that the gods would have the means to protect themselves, but at what cost? Will capitalism remain fit for purpose? Private property is an essential feature of capitalism, and in particular, the private ownership of the means of production, exchange and distribution. In market economies, most people earn their living by selling their labour – their time and their physical and intellectual skills. People called entrepreneurs hire workers and combine their labour with the other major element of the capitalist economy – capital, which consists of money, machinery, land, buildings and intellectual property.

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Second, if the rate of technological progress continues to accelerate, the elite may avail themselves of the means of cognitive and physical enhancement to diverge from the majority, both physically and cognitively. The obvious but difficult remedy for this is to end the institution of private property. The means of production, exchange and distribution would be placed into some kind of collective ownership to prevent the possibility of social and species fracture. As we saw in chapter 3.1, this conclusion is rejected by the two most popular books published so far about technological unemployment. I share their inclination, and it makes me extremely uncomfortable.

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There is no enforcement of a rigid equality of personal outcomes across the lives of everyone in this society, but there is also no increasingly entrenched divergence between those with access to all the latest technologies and those without. In chapter 5.5, we confronted the possibility that this society has felt obliged to abandon our powerful attachment to the concept of private property, and has moved to some form of collective ownership of the means of production, exchange and distribution. In other words, socialism. Those of us who are convinced that the free market economy, suitably regulated, is an ingenious system that has demonstrably created the best standards of living that humans have ever enjoyed will find this hard to swallow. Certainly, the idea takes some getting used to.

The Geek Feminist Revolution
by Kameron Hurley
Published 1 Jan 2016

Those who can bear them are the means of that production. Gain control over the means of production, and you can rule the world. And this is where this film gets all the violence-against-women stuff right, because it boldly and frankly positions it for what it is, stripping it of the male gaze, of sexuality, of uncontrollable male urges. There are no on-screen rape threats, rape attempts, or rapes because they would detract from the entire point. You have to strip all that away to see it for what it is: Sexism is about power. Sexism is about controlling the means of production. At its core, sexism has very little to do with the act of sex.

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It’s why we see a large room full of well-fed women hooked up to milking machines—yes, milking machines—because all anybody drinks in this world is water and milk, and all you ever see them eat is bugs and lizards. The animals are dead. That leaves us with those women. And these women are owned totally and completely by Immortan Joe, who controls all the means of production—he owns the water and the women. And, once he owns those two things, he owns everyone and everything. He has consolidated absolute power by turning people into chattel. In this world, those who can bear babies are chattel, used to breed more soldiers and provide life-sustaining milk to the elite.

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
by Jeanette Winterson
Published 15 Mar 2021

The lost revenue in local taxes. The local shops closed down. The privacy and anonymity you give away with every purchase and every search and every click and every like. Marx, finding his way around the Industrial Revolution, urged workers to take control of the means of production. But what happens when human beings are the means of production? Or, more correctly, the means of extraction? Whatever your day job, you, me, all of us are working for the tech companies for no pay. Free stuff is not free. Give your data, give yourself. Can we regain control of ourselves? * * * Depends on what you believe about human nature

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Firestone’s biological determinism was a key factor in her tech-cheering, but reading her again, I get a sense of something like gnosis, a guess at a bigger reality that she couldn’t prove – not least because the technology didn’t exist. * * * Firestone was focused on reproduction. Always witty, she took Marx’s statement about controlling the means of production, and repurposed it: women should control the means of re-production. To her, that involved much more than popping the Pill or having access to abortion – both rights that are currently under review, and under threat, in states across the world, including in the USA. Firestone wanted a more radical series of solutions.

Abolish Silicon Valley: How to Liberate Technology From Capitalism
by Wendy Liu
Published 22 Mar 2020

Capitalism is one of those words with a highly contested definition: how you define it is a function of your stance toward it. So even venturing a definition requires navigating tricky political terrain. For my analysis, I’ll take as a starting point a straightforward definition: a mode of production in which actors are driven by the accumulation of capital, which is made possible through private ownership of the means of production. Of course, that definition is very incomplete; capitalism wasn’t formed in a vacuum. The system we have now has developed over the course of history, sprouting over a field already littered with other systems of governance. The inception of capitalism is interlaced with various historical systems of social control, and so it’s useful to understand capitalism as more than simply an economic system.

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On top of these social divisions, capitalism’s very axioms lead to an overarching economic division. Capitalism is fundamentally a system of distinct classes5: those who own capital, and those who own nothing except their ability to work; those with power, and those who live under the power of others. After all, owning the means of production doesn’t mean much unless there are people willing to work for those owners — even if the profit they produce accrues to the owners, not themselves. In practice this divide is usually fuzzy, but as the gulf of wealth inequality widens, the split between owners and workers sharpens. This fissure sheds light on how technology is used in a capitalist system.

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Right now, capital has inordinate control over many aspects of work, including the conditions of work, how it’s compensated, and how its terms can be contested. In the tech industry, there has emerged a broad division in the workforce. On one side, there are the highly-valued workers building the product and making the decisions; on the other side is everyone else. This division has emerged due to capital’s tendency to keep the means of production close by, while outsourcing other jobs as much as the market can bear. To fix this, a number of avenues need to be addressed. The first goes beyond just the tech industry: workers need more power. They need a higher minimum wage and raises that at least keep up with inflation. They need universal healthcare and unemployment benefits so they can quit a job that is exploitative, toxic, or immoral.

The Social Life of Money
by Nigel Dodd
Published 14 May 2014

This notion is money as mystification, and is the fountainhead of greed.15 Marx’s theory of credit is extended in Volume 3 of Capital, where he conveys the dynamics of credit inflation as a bubble. Specifically, he shows how capital must simultaneously assume various forms in order for capital accumulation, the “M–C–M” cycle, to continue. It must assume the form of money, the form of commodities, the form of means of production, and (back again) the form of money. This is where credit money and the financial system come into play. Now that we have all the key players of a credit crisis arranged on the stage, we can move on to the fifth key step in Marx’s analysis: the existence of fictitious capital makes it inevitable that capitalism goes through a repeat cycle of bubbles and crashes.

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Marx, as much as any thinker, drew attention to the crucial importance of the social life of money to any understanding of its nature, and in particular, its role in the dynamics of capitalism. Remember what he actually said: Monsieur le Capital and Madame la Terre are social characters as well as mere things. Likewise with money: “Capital is the means of production as transformed into capital, these being no more capital in themselves than gold or silver are money” (Marx 1894: 953). Hence Marx’s theory of money only makes sense if we take both parts of the formulation (social characters, mere things) together. When Marx wrote Capital, most forms of money, especially fiat money, were related to gold.

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To grasp its full ramifications, we need to take a step backward to consider an aspect of his argument right at the end of the first volume of Capital that tends to be overlooked, particularly its implications for the theory of money. This aspect is the account of primitive accumulation. PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION Marx defines primitive (originary: ursprünglich) accumulation as “the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” (Marx 1982: 875). This divorcing is the process whereby producers lose ownership and control over the fruits of their labor. Harvey calls it “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2005b: ch. 4). Historically, it has occurred in various ways: for example, through the seizure of land and the expulsion of the resident population.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

Automation could lead to an economic singularity. “Singularity” is a term borrowed from maths and physics, and means a point where the normal rules cease to apply, and what lies beyond is un-knowable to anyone this side of the event horizon. (1) An economic singularity might lead to an elite owning the means of production and suppressing the rest of us in a dystopian technological authoritarian regime. Or it could lead to an economy of radical abundance, where nobody has to work for a living, and we are all free to have fun, and stretch our minds and develop our faculties to the full. I hope and believe that the latter is possible, but we also need to make sure the process of getting there is as smooth as possible.

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The optimistic scenario is that AI-powered robots do all the work, creating an economy of what Peter Diamandis calls radical abundance, leaving humans to pursue self-fulfilment by reading, writing, talking, playing sports and undertaking adventures. Or perhaps playing endless video games in immersive virtual realities. Martin Ford envisages this as a modification to the market economy, with the UBI being funded by taxes on the rich. An alternative is some form of socialism, whereby the means of production – the AI systems and their peripherals, the robots – will be taken into common ownership. UBI is a noble vision, but it leaves three large problems outstanding: the allocation of scarce resources, the creation of meaning, and the transition. Even if radical abundance is possible without consuming and polluting the entire planet, there will still be scarce resources.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States
by James C. Scott
Published 21 Aug 2017

Each of the earliest states deployed its own unique mix of coerced labor, as we shall see, but it required a delicate balance between maximizing the state surplus on the one hand and the risk of provoking the mass flight of subjects on the other, especially where there was an open frontier. Only much later, when the world was, as it were, fully occupied and the means of production privately owned or controlled by state elites, could the control of the means of production (land) alone suffice, without institutions of bondage, to call forth a surplus. So long as there are other subsistence options, as Ester Boserup noted in her classic work, “it is impossible to prevent the members of the lower class from finding other means of subsistence unless they are made personally unfree.

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Alexis de Tocqueville reached for this analogy when he considered Europe’s growing world hegemony: “We should almost say that the European is to the other races what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue, he destroys.”41 If we substitute for “Europeans” “early states,” and for “other races” “war captives,” we do not greatly distort the project, I think. The captives, individually and collectively, became an integral part of the state’s means of production and reproduction, a part, if you will, along with the livestock and grain fields of the state’s own domus. Pushed even farther, I believe the analogy has an illuminating power. Take the question of reproduction. At the very center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s or animal’s reproduction, which entails confinement and a concern for selective breeding and rates of reproduction.

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 1 Jan 2013

Neo-Protestantism, whose adherents are proud of their lives of constant exhaustion minutely structured around ‘the compatibility of job and family’,32 and the human capital capitalism of self-commodification in contemporary labour markets, with its internalization of returns-to-education calculations in the life plans of whole generations, apparently have put an end to the ‘crisis of wage-labour’ and of the achievement principle, as has the ‘new spirit of capitalism’33 which, by drawing on newly created spaces of creativity and autonomy at the workplace, has deepened corporate integration and served as a vehicle for personal identification with the aims of profit extraction.34 Whereas the loyalty of workers and consumers to postwar capitalism held steady, the same was by no means true on the side of capital. The problem of the Frankfurt crisis theories of the 1970s was that they did not think capital capable of any strategic purpose, because they treated it as an apparatus rather than an agency, as means of production rather than a class.35 So they had to make their calculations without it. Even for Schumpeter, not to speak of Marx, ‘capital’ had been a constant trouble spot in modern economic society: the source of ‘creative destruction’36 until the socialism of bureaucracy would finally lay it to rest.

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While correctives to the market based on social – political ideas of justice are disturbances to capitalist practice, they must be considered inevitable so long as it is possible that the born losers of the market refuse to play ball. Without losers there can be no winners, and without permanent losers, no permanent winners.27 Furthermore, capital could always react to social encroachments in the market that seemed to go too far. Crises develop if those who control essential means of production fear they will not eventually be rewarded in accordance with their ideas of market justice; their ‘confidence’ then sinks below the minimum level necessary for investment. Holders and handlers of capital may transfer it abroad or park it somewhere in the money economy, withdrawing it forever or temporarily from circulation in the economy of a polity in which they no longer trust.

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There is much to be said for the view that the emergence of finance capital as a second people – a Marktvolk rivalling the Staatsvolk – marks a new stage in the relationship between capitalism and democracy, in which capital exercises its political influence not only indirectly (by investing or not investing in national economies) but also directly (by financing or not financing the state itself). In the 1960s and 1970s critical crisis theory studied how postwar states more or less succeeded in securing their democratic legitimacy despite the special position occupied by citizens in command of the means of production and investment. The rapid, class-skewed decline of democratic organization and participation within the liberalization process, as well as the diminishing scope for political action in the crises of the past four decades, might signify that something similar may not be possible after the transition from the tax state to the debt state.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality
by Bhaskar Sunkara
Published 1 Feb 2019

History doesn’t usually offer second chances, so what would we do with one? FOR YEARS PRIOR to this moment, there have been arguments within the modern American socialist movement—of which you are now part—about what exactly we oppose in capitalism and what we can live with. Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production and wage labor. It relies on multiple markets: markets for goods and services, the labor market, and the capital market. The left wing of the Springsteenist movement opposes private ownership of production and wage labor because of the power it gives some people over others. Its members believe socially created wealth shouldn’t be privately expropriated.

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As Bernstein and Kautsky wrote, such a “transformation amounts to the emancipation not only of the proletariat, but of the entire human race.” The immediate tasks of the day were laid out in a section largely drafted by Bernstein: “Without political rights, the working class cannot carry on its economic struggles and develop its economic organization. It cannot bring about the transfer of the means of production into the possession of the community without first having obtained political power.” The Erfurt Program also shifted away from Lassallean illiberalism to a declaration that the party “fights not only the exploitation and oppression of wage earners in society today, but every manner of exploitation and oppression, whether directed against a class, party, sex, or race.”

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It was a party driven by trade unions’ interests, and it never had the same radical ideological influences as the German SPD. Labour was refused admittance into the Second International for years for its emphasis on class collaboration, but it took a turn to the left after the Great War. Clause IV of its constitution, adopted in 1918, called for “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.” The party’s second stint in power was in 1929. In the 1923 general election, Labour won over a million fewer votes than the Conservative Party but was able to form a minority government with Liberal support. The experiment only lasted ten months, and with less than a third of Parliament, MacDonald was unable to pass anything other than minor education, housing, and employment reforms.

Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 9 Mar 2000

Vogelfrei, ‘‘bird free,’’ is the term Marx used to describe the proletariat, which at the beginning of modernity in the processes of primitive accumulation was freed twice over: in the first place, it was freed from being 158 P A S S A G E S O F S O V E R E I G N T Y the property of the master (that is, freed from servitude); and in the second place, it was ‘‘freed’’ from the means of production, separated from the soil, with nothing to sell but its own labor power. In this sense, the proletariat was forced to become the pure possibility of wealth. The dominant stream of the Marxist tradition, however, has always hated the poor, precisely for their being ‘‘free as birds,’’ for being immune to the discipline of the factory and the discipline necessary for the construction of socialism.

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Marx described the processes of proletarianization in terms of primitive accumulation, the prior or previous accumulation necessary before capitalist production and reproduction can begin to take place. What is necessary is not merely an accumulation of wealth or property, but a social accumulation, the creation of capitalists and proletarians. The essential historical process, then, involves first of all divorcing the producer from the means of production. For Marx it was sufficient to describe the English example of this social D I S C I P L I N A R Y G O V E R N A B I L I T Y 257 transformation, since England represented the ‘‘highest point’’ of capitalist development at the time. In England, Marx explains, proletarianization was accomplished first by the enclosures of the common lands and the clearing of peasants from the estates, and then by the brutal punishment of vagabond-age and vagrancy.

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It would be a mistake, however, to take the English experience of becoming-proletarian and becoming-capitalist as representative of all the others. Over the last three hundred years, as capitalist relations of production and reproduction have spread across the world, although primitive accumulation has always involved separating the producer from the means of production and thereby creating classes of proletarians and capitalists, each process of social transformation has nonetheless been unique. In each case the social and productive relations that preexisted were different, the processes of the transition were different, and even the form of the resulting capitalist relations of production and especially those of reproduction were different in line with specific cultural and historical differences.

Because We Say So
by Noam Chomsky

Some might even use the term “capitalism” to refer to the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher, in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.” The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” has been virtually disenfranchised.

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In contrast, as Rocker writes, a truly democratic system would achieve the character of “an alliance of free groups of men and women based on cooperative labor and a planned administration of things in the interest of the community.” No one took the American philosopher John Dewey to be an anarchist. But consider his ideas. He recognized that “power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,” even if democratic forms remain. Until those institutions are in the hands of the public, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business,” much as is seen today. These ideas lead very naturally to a vision of society based on workers’ control of productive institutions, as envisioned by 19th-century thinkers, notably Karl Marx but also—less familiar—John Stuart Mill.

The End of Work
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 28 Dec 1994

Cheaper wages will entice employers to hire additional workers rather than purchase more expensive capital equipment, thereby moderating the impact of technology on employment. 2 The idea that technological innovation stimulates perpetual growth and employment has met with stiff opposition over the years. In his first volume of Capital, published in 1867, Karl Marx argued that producers continually attempt to reduce labor costs and gain greater control over the means of production by substituting capital equipment for workers wherever and whenever possible. The capitalists profit not only from greater productivity, reduced costs, and greater control over the workplace, but also secondarily by creating a vast reserve army of unemployed workers whose labor power is readily available for exploitation somewhere else in the economy.

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Issues of hiring and firing, promotions, discipline actions, health benefits, and safety concerns were brought into the collective bargaining process in every industry. Business Week warned that "the time has come to take a stand ... against the further encroachment into the province of management."28 Menaced by the increasing intensi ty of labor's demands and determined to maintain its long-standing control over the means of production, America's industrial giants turned to the new technology of automation as much to rid themselves of rebellious workers as to enhance their productivity and profit. The new corporate strategy succeeded. In 1961 a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee published statistics on the impact of automation on jobs in the preceding half decade.

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Today, less than 3 percent of the price of a semiconductor chip goes to the owners of raw materials and energy, 5 percent to those who own the equipment and facilities, and 6 percent to routine labor. More than 85 percent of the cost goes to specialized design and engineering services and for patents and copyrights. 44 In the early industrial era, those who controlled finance capital and the means of production exercised near-total control over the workings of the economy. For a while, during the mid-decades of this century, they had to share some of that power with labor, whose critical role in production assured it some influence in decisions governing both the ways and means of doing business and the distribution of profits.

Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics
by Nicholas Wapshott
Published 10 Oct 2011

Socialism told us that we had been looking for improvement in the wrong direction.”1 Mises’s principal objection to a communist or socialist society was that it ignored the price mechanism he believed essential for any economy to operate efficiently. He argued in Economic Calculation that because in a socialist society the government owned the main industries—“the means of production”—and therefore set the prices of goods, the key purpose of prices, to distribute scarce resources, was made redundant. He claimed that “every step that takes us away from private ownership of the means of production and from the use of money also takes us away from rational economics.”2 Mises’s arguments went to the core of the debate that was to ensue between Keynes and Hayek, and they presaged one of Hayek’s eventual contentions, that by ignoring market prices socialism deprives individuals of their unique contribution to society—to express, through their willingness to pay a price, their opinion of the worth of an object or service.

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Hayek also confronted another Keynesian remedy, that if an idle plant was brought into use it would spur a depressed economy back to life and increase employment. “What [economists like Keynes] overlook is that . . . in order that the existing durable plants could be used to their full capacity it would be necessary to invest a great amount of other means of production in lengthy processes which would bear fruit only in a comparatively distant future.”45 He went on, “It should be fairly clear that the granting of credit to consumers, which has recently been so strongly advocated as a cure for depression, would in fact have quite the contrary effect.” Such “artificial demand,” he suggested, would merely postpone the day of reckoning.

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Keynes, who, from the outset, analyses complex dynamic processes without laying the necessary foundations by adequate static analysis of the fundamental process.”34 As for substance, Hayek tangles with Keynes over definitions, preferring established Austrian terms for such basic concepts as “savings” and “investment” to those either already in use at Cambridge or newly minted by Keynes to describe what he believed to be freshly observed phenomena. Hayek’s main objection to Keynes’s treatise, however, is his ignoring Austrian notions of capital theory, in particular the implications to prices and demand of “roundabout” means of production of capital goods that he had so singularly failed to explain adequately in his lecture to the Marshall Society. Hayek drew attention to two notions at the heart of their conflicting views of how an economy works: Hayek could not agree with Keynes’s rejection of the need for an equilibrium between savings and investment; nor could he accept Keynes’s assertion that the importance of the divergence between investment and savings was that it adversely affected the stability of prices.

Paper Money Collapse: The Folly of Elastic Money and the Coming Monetary Breakdown
by Detlev S. Schlichter
Published 21 Sep 2011

Other goods deliver a more satisfying service to the public if their supply is increased. More cars can transport more people; more TV sets can entertain more people; more bread can feed more people. These things are goods because they have use-value, they can directly satisfy the needs of their owners. This holds likewise for the means of production, such as tools, plants, and machinery. Although they do not satisfy the needs of consumers directly, their usefulness lies in their ability to help in the production of goods and services that will ultimately satisfy the needs of consumers. However, to the extent that a good is used as money, its usefulness does not lie in any ability it may have to meet any needs directly but lies exclusively in its marketability, in its general acceptance as a medium of exchange.

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Yet, the state played an important and over time increasingly active role, to be witnessed, among other things, by constantly rising levels of taxation, regulation, and public debt. With the collapse of communism in 1989, the mixed economy, meaning the combination of mostly privately owned means of production with democratically legitimized state interventionism, became the globally dominant societal model. That the state should supply the economy with its own paper money under a regional monopoly, that the state should thus control and flexibly adjust the supply of money and constantly expand it, had become unquestioned features of this system.

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In Germany the Nazi economist Werner Daitz declared that “in future, gold will play no role as a basis for the European currencies, because a currency does not depend on what it is covered by, but rather it is dependent on the value which is given it by the state, or in this case by the economic order which is controlled by the state.”22 After the Second World War, and in particular after the disintegration of the Communist Soviet Bloc after 1989, the dominant global model of society became parliamentary social democracy, which combines capitalist elements, in particular private ownership of the means of production, with a democratically legitimized, interventionist state. Democratic states have all experienced on-trend growing state expenditure, rising levels of taxation and rising public debt. Against this backdrop it should come as no surprise that the attempt to limit the power of the state by subjugating it to the strictures of an immovable and inflexible system of commodity money turned out to be short-lived.

Unhealthy societies: the afflictions of inequality
by Richard G. Wilkinson
Published 19 Nov 1996

He suggested that how hierarchical or egalitarian societies are depends as much upon control over the means of destruction as it does on control of the means of production. Some weapons—like stone tools, spears, bows and arrows—are essentially democratic in that anyone can make them and it is difficult to deny people access to them. On the other hand, guns can only be obtained from other sources, and if people manage to gain a monopoly in access to them (or to any other superior weaponry), they have the power to coerce others. Clearly the means of production are also important. Class systems depend on controlling access to the means of production in ways that necessarily differ at different stages of development.

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Mar 2016

For example, there is a great variety of small-scale food production systems which feed the greater part of the world’s peoples, using a modest amount of land and producing less waste, be it in small agricultural parcels, in orchards and gardens, hunting and wild harvesting or local fishing. Economies of scale, especially in the agricultural sector, end up forcing smallholders to sell their land or to abandon their traditional crops. Their attempts to move to other, more diversified, means of production prove fruitless because of the difficulty of linkage with regional and global markets, or because the infrastructure for sales and transport is geared to larger businesses. Civil authorities have the right and duty to adopt clear and firm measures in support of small producers and differentiated production.3 On and on he went, explaining the ways that monopoly control of capital and resources not only leads to their overextraction but also prevents a majority of people from participating in value creation.

…

And it suggests what governments can do to facilitate instead of hinder this transition to a postindustrial prosperity. Distributism should not be confused with leftism. It’s calling not for the redistribution of earnings or capital through taxes or state action after the fact but for the widest possible distribution of the means of production as preconditions for a healthy marketplace. Workers ought to own the tools they use, and their contributions to an enterprise should earn them an ownership stake in the business itself. Distributism also discourages the externalization of costs to other parties or government, the privatization of currency, the treatment of economics as an impartial physical science, and the way big business and big government drain the market of liquidity.

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What might the tetrad for a genuinely digital, distributist business look like? One that could live up to the demands of a renaissance? It would amplify value creation from everywhere as much as from the center—distributed creativity. It would obsolesce centralized monopolies, working to break them up and share the means of production with customers. It would retrieve the values of the medieval marketplace, recovering inexpensive means of exchange between peers. Pushed to the extreme, well, a digitally distributed company would probably seek some sort of collective or spiritual awareness—another retrieval of a more familial or even tribal sensibility.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism
by David Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1978

When he has gotten all the way around the circle, the politician throws fifty cents down in front of one person, who is overjoyed at the unexpected windfall. The process is repeated, ending with a different person. After a hundred rounds everyone is a hundred cents poorer, fifty cents richer, and happy. III You object that capitalism works too well, that more efficient means of production drive out less efficient, leaving everyone with sterile and repetitive jobs in a soul-killing environment. More efficient means of production do drive out less efficient means, but your definition of efficiency is too narrow. If under one arrangement a worker produces a dollar an hour more than under another, but the conditions are so much worse that he will gladly accept a wage of two dollars an hour less to work under the other, which is more efficient?

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I would have no objection to such a socialist society, beyond the opinion that its members were not acting in what I thought was their best interest. The socialists who advocate such institutions do object to our present society and would probably object even more to the completely capitalist society that I would like to see develop. They claim that the ownership of the means of production by capitalists instead of by workers is inherently unjust. I think they are wrong. Even if they are right, there is no need for them to fight me or anyone else; there is a much easier way to achieve their objective. If a society in which firms are owned by their workers is far more attractive than one in which they are owned by stockholders, let the workers buy the firms.

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism
by Robin Chase
Published 14 May 2015

The Peers Inc structure transforms the economic logic and this once-sound societal-benefits argument. Remember, platforms give individuals the power of the corporation at very affordable prices (often for free). Productivity and quality-of-life gains are now not necessarily achieved only through government support of the big and wealthy. Peers now have access to the means of production themselves. We don’t have to stifle the informal economy, because platforms organize, improve quality, and even self-regulate. In Chapter 10, I profile G-Auto, an example of an Indian company that is cleaning up the disorganized auto rickshaw market. But for all that, the rise of the micro-entrepreneur requires reworking and rethinking laws that protect them and their rights to earn a living wage and to work in a safe and healthy environment.

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It stands alone, beautiful, inspiring, challenging. Return to that beach two weekend days later, and what was a beach in its rocky wild form has been transformed into a landscape of dozens of rock cairns. With each passing day visitors see the example, the template for what is possible. The means of production lie at hand. One hour of pleasant painstaking experimentation later, you take a photo to capture and share your proud accomplishment, then continue on your hike. Photo: Robin Chase Photo: Heidi Spencer See it, do it, share it—like the rocks on the beach of this Maine island, like videos on YouTube, like successful uses of GPS.

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To survive and thrive involved becoming just a smidge smaller than a monopoly, controlling the market while avoiding regulation. Control was maintained by exclusive ownership of intellectual property, trade secrets, copyrights, equipment, and employees. Why? Because factories, tools, and other expensive means of production demanded organizations large enough to extract their full potential. Products and services were standardized because high volumes led to economies of scale and the ability to offer lower-priced products. Higher volumes also meant increased market share. Then the Internet happened. Those old barriers to entry—large privately held assets and closed intellectual property—no longer result in the greatest value.

The Pirate's Dilemma: How Youth Culture Is Reinventing Capitalism
by Matt Mason

Anything and everything else could be next. As a result, many companies are now basing their entire operation around punk capitalists, pandering to their every need with ever more advanced technology. It seems that ownership of the means of production—the backbone of capitalism—is falling into the hands of the masses. But soon the notion of “owning” the means of production may itself be redundant. 3-D.I.Y. Anything that can be transmitted electronically and downloaded is being affected by the ever-increasing flurry of D.I.Y. activity. Because of downloading, the media and entertainment industries are becoming very different beasts.

…

And it might not have happened in quite the same way if it were not for a nun in the 1940s, throwing children's birthday parties. All hail Sister Alicia, the patron saint of sharing. Talking 'bout Boundaries (Territorial Disputes) Each story in this book is about boundaries coming down. Punk democratized the means of production. Pirates ignored old restrictions on new ideas. We have seen how useful the remix can be, and how graffiti artists reclaim public spaces from private interests. All of these ideas are about sharing and using information in new ways. But each story in this book has another side to it. As quickly as society figures out new ways to share ideas that advance the common good, private interests move in to stop this from happening, to maintain the old systems that benefit only the elite.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
by J. Bradford Delong
Published 6 Apr 2020

The forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves become thinner and thinner.”4 Marx was also certain that his dystopian vision of late capitalism would not be the end state of human history. For this bleak capitalist system was to be overthrown by one that nationalized and socialized the means of production. The rule of the business class, after creating a truly prosperous society, would “produce… above all… its own gravediggers.” What would society be like after the revolution? Instead of private property, there would be “individual property based on… cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” And this would happen easily, for socialist revolution would simply require “the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people,” who would then democratically decide upon a common plan for “extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally.”

…

The Socialist Party of Germany’s platforms also called for: By every lawful means to bring about a free state and a socialistic society, to effect the destruction of the iron law of wages by doing away with the system of wage labor… The transformation of the capitalist private ownership of the means of production—land and soil, pits and mines, raw materials, tools, machines, means of transportation—into social property and the transformation of the production of goods into socialist production carried on by and for society… Emancipation… of the entire human race.… But it can only be the work of the working class, because all other classes… have as their common goal the preservation of the foundations of contemporary society.

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Marx had interpreted the economic history of Britain as one of “primitive accumulation.” Landlords had used the political system to steal land from the peasantry and squeeze their standard of living. This forced some of the peasantry to migrate to the cities, where they became a penniless urban working class. There, manufacturers and owners of means of production used the political system to force them to build and work in factories. For Marx, this awful outcome was one of the things that made capitalism an obstacle to human development and flourishing. The Bolsheviks took Marx’s critique of British modernization and made it their business model. Not just Stalin, but Trotsky, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky, and others among the elite had concluded that rapid industrialization was possible only if the ruling communists first waged economic war against Russia’s peasants.

In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays
by Bertrand Russell
Published 1 Jan 1935

VII THE CASE FOR SOCIALISM The great majority of Socialists, in the present day, are disciples of Karl Marx, from whom they have taken over the belief that the only possible political force by which Socialism can be brought about is the anger felt by the dispossessed proletariat against the owners of the means of production. By an inevitable reaction, those who are not proletarians have decided, with comparatively few exceptions, that Socialism is something to be resisted; and when they hear the class-war being preached by those who proclaim themselves their enemies, they naturally feel inclined to begin the war themselves while they still hold the power.

…

The matter is one of degree, and is easy to adjust, since various legal formalities are necessary in large transactions, but not in small ones. Where such formalities are indispensable, they give the State opportunity to exercise control. To take another instance: jewellery is not capital in the economic sense, since it is not a means of production, but as things are a man who possesses diamonds can sell them and buy shares. Under Socialism he may still possess diamonds, but he cannot sell them to buy shares, since there will be no shares to be bought. Private wealth need not be legally prohibited, but only private investment, with the result that, since no one will be in receipt of interest, private wealth will gradually melt away except as regards a reasonable modicum of personal possessions.

Masters of Mankind
by Noam Chomsky
Published 1 Sep 2014

He saw the dangers of a “permanent inequality of conditions” and an end to democracy if “the manufacturing aristocracy which is growing up under our eyes,” “one of the harshest that has ever existed in the world,” should escape its confines. Or America’s leading twentieth-century social philosopher, John Dewey, who held that we cannot talk seriously about democracy in a regime of private power. “Power today resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication,” he wrote. “Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,” and politics is little more than the “the shadow cast on society by big business” as long as the country is ruled by ‘business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.”

…

However, a recent study by the International Monetary Fund indicates—to quote the business press—that perhaps “the largest US banks aren’t really profitable at all,” adding that “the billions of dollars they allegedly earn for their shareholders were almost entirely a gift from US taxpayers.”2 This is more evidence to support the judgment of the most respected financial correspondent in the English-speaking world, Martin Wolf of the London Financial Times, that “an out-of-control financial sector is eating out the modern market economy from inside, just as the larva of the spider wasp eats out the host in which it has been laid.”3 The term “capitalism” is also commonly used for systems in which there are no capitalists: for example, the extensive worker-owned Mondragón conglomerate in the Basque Country of Spain or the worker-owned enterprises expanding in northern Ohio—often with conservative support—a matter discussed in important work by Gar Alperovitz.4 Some might even use the term “capitalism” to include the industrial democracy advocated by John Dewey, America’s leading social philosopher. He called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate,” and for all institutions to be under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation, and communication.5 Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.”6 The truncated democracy that Dewey condemned has been left in tatters in recent years. Now, control of government is narrowly concentrated at the peak of the income scale, while the large majority “down below” are virtually disenfranchised.

Rethinking Islamism: The Ideology of the New Terror
by Meghnad Desai
Published 25 Apr 2008

฀Capitalism,฀or฀the฀bourgeois฀mode,฀was฀the฀current฀ one฀ and฀ in฀ it฀ the฀ conflict฀ between฀ the฀ proletariat฀ (the฀ workers)฀ and฀ the฀ capitalists฀ (the฀ owners฀ of฀ the฀ means฀ of฀ production)฀ was฀ the฀ central฀ dynamic฀ force.฀ But฀ capitalism,฀ too,฀ was฀ destined฀ to฀ pass.฀ It฀ would฀ be฀ followed฀ by฀ socialism฀ and฀ then฀ Communism.฀ Under฀capitalism,฀the฀proletariat฀–฀the฀propertyless฀workers฀–฀were฀ exploited฀ by฀ the฀ capitalists฀ who฀ owned฀ the฀ means฀ of฀ production฀ which฀the฀workers฀were฀employed฀to฀use฀to฀produce฀surplus฀value.฀ Socialism฀would฀come฀with฀the฀collapse฀of฀capitalism฀as฀a฀result฀of฀   ฀  its฀own฀internal฀contradictions.

The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Metropolitan Elite
by Michael Lind
Published 20 Feb 2020

This drive, moreover, is world-wide in extent, already well advanced in all nations, though at different levels of development in different nations.4 In his essay “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946), George Orwell provided a succinct summary of Burnham’s thesis: Capitalism is disappearing, but Socialism is not replacing it. What is now arising is a new kind of planned, centralized society which will be neither capitalist nor, in any accepted sense of the word, democratic. The rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham, under the name of “managers.” These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands.

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Antimonopolists want to turn wage earners into small business owners. In the 1930s, Keynes speculated about the euthanasia of the rentier class. These reformers propose the euthanasia of the working class. The neoliberal utopia is a workerless paradise. * * * — WHAT ABOUT SOCIALISM—the genuine kind with state ownership of the means of production? In theory, the option of democratic socialism need not be discredited by the horrors wrought by Marxist-Leninist dictatorships in rural nations like twentieth-century Russia and China. Democratic socialism is discredited for other reasons. One is the greater track record of the mixed economy, with a blend of markets, public enterprises, and nonprofit provision, over both the pure free market economy and state socialism.

Libertarian Idea
by Jan Narveson
Published 15 Dec 1988

But also it was Locke who insisted that there were important limits to what we can acquire in a “state of nature”, at least: no more than we can use without spoiling, and only what leaves “enough and as good for others”. The question quite properly asked by objectors to private property, especially as applying to the “means of production”, is how we can suppose that we could, starting with just the premises about self-ownership, wind up with the entire panoply of ownership rights familiar in contemporary nonsocialist societies. It is not clear, as will be seen in Part Three, just what that “panoply” really consists of, but let us suppose that what we are after are the rights of (1) exclusive use, and thus of permitting or refusing use by any others, except only on jointly agreed terms, and (2) transfer in the form of (a) sale, (b) exchange, (c) gift, and (d) bequeathal.

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And he suggests that “Equality, more than any other baseline, reflects the fact that, other things being equal, nobody naturally deserves a larger or smaller share.”18 Of course, we should also use any baseline in which W (the worst-off person, remember) is better off than the worst-off 90 person would be in any other system, and so this might give us one of the others. What could the libertarian say in reply? Arthur suggests this. “One other line of argument is open to the libertarian. Suppose that private ownership of the means of production were far more efficient than public ownership, and suppose further that capitalism for some reason could not survive if individuals were required to compensate others when they appropriate a natural resource for their own use. How would these putative facts affect W‟s demand for compensation?”

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With private property held by a number of people, various arrangements are possible, but ordinarily those arrangements have been made, and if they have not, we can expect trouble when the joint owners diverge regarding the use to which it is to be put. In the case of public property, however, ownership being totally “collective”, these problems are legion. It might be thought that public ownership gives unlimited “access” (as in the socialist‟s “access to the means of production”). But obviously a given thing cannot be completely available to all, or indeed to more than one. Rules will have to be framed so as to assure a fair shake for all potential users, say, or something of the sort. The point is that with public ownership, we must resort to politics to decide who is going to do what with it and when—with all the difficulties that entails.

Money: 5,000 Years of Debt and Power
by Michel Aglietta
Published 23 Oct 2018

There is a probability qi expressing the power of influence that i has over the group in its totality, that the process converges towards ui(0), and thus that U = {ui(0), … ui(0)}. Source: André Orléan (1984), ‘Monnaie et spéculation mimétique’, pp. 55–68. What are the theoretical properties of such a solution? The society of market subjects, who are supposedly all endowed with means of production, is a society of equals. In the theory of coordination by the market, this is expressed in the hypothesis that all subjects accept prices that they hold to be exogenous. In the theory of social interaction, subjects uniformly seek a form of wealth that is immediately an object of social recognition: namely, liquidity.

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This also implies the intertemporal solvency of the value of the assets that sustain these debts and credits, which is to say, their capacity to be converted into liquidity. Here we enter into capital’s monetary economy. This is one of the two foundations of capitalism, the other being the separation of labour and capital by way of the private appropriation of the means of production. Capital’s monetary economy, however, is the essential focus of the arguments that we elaborate in this book. For now, we will show how day-to-day settlements work, and thus how the finality of payments operates, when money appears in a multiplicity of banking signs issued as a counterparty to credits.

…

In our study of the implementation of monetary policy, we showed that the guide for monetary policy in these economies is the natural interest rate. This rate expresses the net anticipated profitability of new investment in production. It thus orients the business projects whose fulfilment depends on access to finance. The cost of accessing the means to finance the new capital goods that replace used or out-of-date means of production is the capital cost. The central bank influences the interest rates for the financial supports through which savings are made available to business projects. Insofar as it exercises this influence, the central bank is the regulator of this adjustment. It tries to ensure that the point of adjustment between aggregate savings and investments takes place at the level of economic activity which most efficiently employs the available human and material resources.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life
by Ian Dunt
Published 15 Oct 2020

‘The history of all hitherto existing society,’ Marx wrote in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto, ‘is the history of class struggles.’ Class was defined by a group’s relationship to the means of production, which were the tools and raw materials used to make products. The bourgeoisie – such as factory-owners – controlled the means of production and the proletariat sold their labour to them. In Marx’s time, the means of production were developing at an extraordinary rate in the form of factories, coal mines, railways and utilities. But Marx believed that by creating the huge workforce necessary to run them, capitalism was giving birth to its own grave-diggers.

…

But Marx believed that by creating the huge workforce necessary to run them, capitalism was giving birth to its own grave-diggers. The vast ranks of the disenfranchised, propertyless industrial working class would bring down the system. In the first post-revolutionary stage, called socialism, they would seize the means of production and establish the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ In the second stage, called communism, private property would be abolished and everything held in common. As the material condition of society changed, people’s social personality would evolve, and the era of exploitation and injustice would pass away. Unlike most socialist ideas of the time, which were typically quite dream-like, Marx framed his theory in scientific language.

The Cold War: A New History
by John Lewis Gaddis
Published 1 Jan 2005

The social alienation generated by economic inequalities could only result in revolution: “[N]ot only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians.” Capitalism’s grave-diggers would sooner or later replace it with communism, a more equitable method of organizing society in which there would be common ownership of the means of production, and in which extremes of wealth and poverty would no longer exist. Neither, therefore, would resentment, so the happiness of the human race would follow. Communism, Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels claimed, would mark “the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”6 This was not just a profession of faith: Marx and Engels also saw it as science.

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Like the nuclear war that never came, the revival and eventual triumph of democratic capitalism was a surprising development that few people on either side of the ideological divide in 1945 would have foreseen. Circumstances during the first half of the 20th century had provided physical strength and political authority to dictatorships. Why should the second half have been different? The reasons had less to do with any fundamental shift in the means of production, as a Marxist historian might have argued, than with a striking shift in the attitude of the United States toward the international system. Despite having built the world’s most powerful and diversified economy, Americans had shown remarkably little interest, prior to 1941, in how the rest of the world was governed.

…

The most inspirational alternatives the Soviet Union could muster were Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko, a clear sign that dictatorships were not what they once had been. Meanwhile, communism had promised a better life but failed to deliver. Marx insisted that the shifts in the means of production would increase inequality, provoke anger, and thereby fuel revolutionary consciousness within the “working class.” He failed, though, to anticipate the kinds of shifts that would take place, for as post-industrial economies evolved they began to reward lateral over hierarchical forms of organization.

Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization
by K. Eric Drexler
Published 6 May 2013

Like the Industrial Revolution, it will use artificial mechanical systems to make things. Like the Information Revolution, it will use high-frequency nanoscale devices to process and deliver patterns (but of atoms rather than bits). Like each of the prior revolutions, it will lead to deep changes in products, productivity, means of production, and human society. Able to multiply the productivity of agriculture, manufacturing, and computation by factors of ten to one million. Can radically extend the scope and scale of production, transforming the material basis of civilization and reducing its impacts on climate and the Earth as a whole.

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For example, in 1960, after half a century’s progress, an efficient aircraft could stay aloft for no more than tens of hours without refueling, yet even the earliest satellites could stay aloft for millennia. Satellites had quite literally entered a realm with new rules. Likewise with the future potential of manufacturing. Simple, conservative implementations of advanced APM can far outperform the most refined modern means of production, again because the new realm has new rules. Because location matters more than refinement, the cost structure changes. In product-oriented engineering, the costs of manufacture and operation typically dwarf the cost of design, and as a consequence, large investments in design can bring great rewards.

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Speculations in this area may be worth undertaking if the results are regarded with sufficient skepticism, but here, such speculations would be out of scope. Consumer goods pervade our experience of life, yet they aren’t part of its deeper physical basis. My concern here is with developments at that deeper level, where some of the most basic driving forces for change can be expected with substantial confidence. TRANSFORMING THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION From where we stand today the coming transformation can best be understood through contrasts with current industrial technologies. As we’ve seen, the primary contrasts emerge from just two basic characteristics of APM-level technologies: the nanoscale size of components and the atomic precision of processes and products.

Break Through: Why We Can't Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists
by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus
Published 10 Mar 2009

Around the world, a barrage of hopeful books and articles were published touting the romantic notion that the little guys of the forest were agents of history, authentically representing nature’s true interests against corrupt governments, violent landlords, and rapacious corporations. Even writers critical of how Europeans projected their own romantic notions of the “noble savage” on Indians ended up reading their own fantasies into Mendes’s coalition. The following is a typical example from the period: They called for popular control over the means of production and distribution of forest commodities, along with the provision of financial credits to producers rather than to middlemen. They also called for justice and legal protection of their rights to land and life. These are the concrete elements of a socialist ecology—the only strategy that can save the Amazon and its inhabitants.30 By the time of the 1992 United Nations environment conference in Rio de Janeiro, everyone from CEOs to ranchers to heads of state had adopted the language of sustainable development, leading environmentalists to believe that the promises being made would somehow progress to a new mode of economic development in the Amazon.

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In a world of abundance, we must take more control over the food that we feed our children and ourselves. In a nation that spends 15 percent of its gross national product on health care, Americans need useful metrics to inform how we use medicine and take control of our health. In a country in which working Americans, through their pensions and retirement savings, now in large part own the means of production, the new fault line will increasingly be between management and ownership, not management and labor. For many liberals, this rising demand for choice and possibility feels consumerist, selfish, and less communitarian than the class-based, redistributive populism of the New Deal and the Great Society.

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Americans today aspire to be unique individuals, to be autonomous and in control of their lives, and to be respected and recognized as such by those around them. They no more aspire to be common than they aspire to be poor. The class wars of the Great Depression and the New Deal are dead and gone, and the politics of the common man with it. Today’s common man, with his pension and retirement accounts, more likely than not owns the means of production—an ironic fulfillment of Marx’s prophecy. He eats like the aristocrats that Nietzsche exalted and lives in a castle with central heating and a flat-panel television. Throughout this book we have argued that for people to become compassionate and generous, they must become, and feel, secure, wealthy, and strong.

The Power Elite
by C. Wright Mills and Alan Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1956

From even the most superficial examination of the history of the western society we learn that the power of decision-makers is first of all limited by the level of technique, by the means of power and violence and organization that prevail in a given society. In this connection we also learn that there is a fairly straight line running upward through the history of the West; that the means of oppression and exploitation, of violence and destruction, as well as the means of production and reconstruction, have been progressively enlarged and increasingly centralized. As the institutional means of power and the means of communications that tie them together have become steadily more efficient, those now in command of them have come into command of instruments of rule quite unsurpassed in the history of mankind.

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The government has subsidized private industry by maintaining high tariff rates, and if the taxpayers of the United States had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road system, Henry Ford’s astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile industry.5 In capitalistic economies, wars have led to many opportunities for the private appropriation of fortune and power. But the complex facts of World War II make previous appropriations seem puny indeed. Between 1940 and 1944, some $175 billion worth of prime supply contracts—the key to control of the nation’s means of production—were given to private corporations. A full two-thirds of this went to the top one hundred corporations—in fact, almost one-third went to ten private corporations. These companies then made money by selling what they had produced to the government. They were granted priorities and allotments for materials and parts; they decided how much of these were to be passed down to sub-contractors, as well as who and how many sub-contractors there should be.

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As a definition, it points to the tendency of military men not to remain means, but to pursue ends of their own, and to turn other institutional areas into means for accomplishing them. Without an industrial economy, the modern army, as in America, could not exist; it is an army of machines. Professional economists usually consider military institutions as parasitic upon the means of production. Now, however, such institutions have come to shape much of the economic life of the United States. Religion, virtually without fail, provides the army at war with its blessings, and recruits from among its officials the chaplain, who in military costume counsels and consoles and stiffens the morale of men at war.

How Will Capitalism End?
by Wolfgang Streeck
Published 8 Nov 2016

Institutional supports having fallen into disarray, post-capitalist capital accumulation depends on culture lagging behind structure, or substituting for a structure that has long dissolved, and on the difficulties of an alternative culture developing under the combined pressures of fragmented competition and precarious, all-too-easily lost access to the means of production and consumption. Ideology, in particular the exaltation of a life in uncertainty as a life in liberty, is of central importance here. Neoliberal ideological narratives offer a euphemistic reinterpretation of the breakdown of structured order as the arrival of a free society built on individual autonomy, and of de-institutionalization as historical progress out of an empire of necessity into an empire of freedom.

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This would seem to be another indication that the economy of the oligarchs has been decoupled from that of ordinary people, as the rich no longer expect to pay a price for maximizing their income at the expense of the non-rich, or for pursuing their interests at the expense of the economy as a whole. What may be surfacing here is the fundamental tension described by Marx between, on the one hand, the increasingly social nature of production in an advanced economy and society, and private ownership of the means of production on the other. As productivity growth requires more public provision, it tends to become incompatible with private accumulation of profits, forcing capitalist elites to choose between the two. The result is what we are seeing already today: economic stagnation combined with oligarchic redistribution.39 CORROSIONS OF THE IRON CAGE Along with declining economic growth, rising inequality and the transferral of the public domain to private ownership, corruption is the fourth disorder of contemporary capitalism.

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In the final analysis, the transformation of the debt state into a consolidation state is to end the tendency, envisaged under both ‘Wagner’s Law’ and the Marxian conjecture of an increasing socialization of production, for a maturing capitalist-industrial society to require ever-rising levels of public support – of infrastructural investment and all sorts of collective repair work and compensation – up to a point where capitalist industrialism would become incompatible with private ownership in the means of production. Imposing public austerity on the debt state of the late twentieth century may be interpreted as an effort to escape this trend, in response to the growing resistance of capitalist society against being taxed for public provision. What results is a large-scale political experiment turning over to private enterprise the tasks of insuring against social risks, providing welfare, education and health, building and maintaining physical infrastructures, and even parts of government itself (warfare, the collection of intelligence).

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
by Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman
Published 2 Jan 1980

And getting SEC approval may cost upwards of $100,000—which certainly discourages the small firms our government professes to help. Freedom to own property is another essential part of economic freedom. And we do have widespread property ownership. Well over half of us own the homes we live in. When it comes to machines, factories, and similar means of production, the situation is very different. We refer to ourselves as a free private enterprise society, as a capitalist society. Yet in terms of the ownership of corporate enterprise, we are about 46 percent socialist. Owning 1 percent of a corporation means that you are entitled to receive 1 percent of its profits and must share I percent of its losses up to the full value of your stock.

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They reflected the change that had occurred earlier in the intellectual atmosphere on the campuses—from belief in individual responsibility, laissez-faire, and a decentralized and limited government to belief in social responsibility and a centralized and powerful government. It was the function of government, they believed, to protect individuals from the vicissitudes of fortune and to control the operation of the economy in the "general interest," even if that involved government ownership and operation of the means of production. These two strands were already present in a famous novel published in 1887, Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, a Utopian fantasy in which a Rip Van Winkle character who goes to sleep in the year 1887 awakens in the year 2000 to discover a changed world. "Looking backward," his new companions explain to him how the Utopia that astonishes him emerged in the 1930s—a prophetic date—from the hell of the 1880s.

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It has simply altered its direction. The expansion of government now takes the form of welfare programs and of regulatory activities. As W. Allen Wallis put it in a somewhat different context, socialism, "intellectually bankrupt after more than a century of seeing one after another of its arguments for socializing the means of production demolished—now seeks to socialize the results of production." 2 In the welfare area the change of direction has led to an explosion in recent decades, especially after President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty" in 1964. New Deal programs of Social Security, unemployment insurance, and direct relief were all expanded to cover new groups; payments were increased; and Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, and numerous other programs were added.

Singularity Sky
by Stross, Charles
Published 28 Oct 2003

How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the selfreplicating means of production?" There was a pause, and Timoshevski exhaled furiously. Just as he was about to speak, the telephone made an odd bell-like noise: "That will be sufficient. You will deliver the theory to this node. Arrangements to clone a replicator and library are now under way. Query: ability to deliver postulated proof of validity of theory?"

…

And does it contain schemata for producing direct fusion weapons, military aircraft, and guns?" "Yes and yes to all subqueries. Query: ability to deliver postulated proof of validity of theory?" Timoshevski was punching the air and bouncing around the office. Even the normally phlegmatic Wolff was grinning like a maniac. "Just give the workers the means of production, and we'll prove the theory," said Rubenstein. "We need to talk in private. Back in an hour, with the texts you requested." He pressed the OFF switch on the telephone. "Yes!" After a minute, Timoshevski calmed down a bit. Rubenstein waited indulgently; truth be told, he felt the same way himself.

…

"Well, you won't find any decent hospitality here." Rubenstein swept a hand around the clearing. "Old Earth, did you say? Now that is a long way to come with a parcel! Just what exactly is it?" "It's a cornucopia machine. Self-replicating factory, fully programmable, and it's yours. A gift from Earth. The means of production in one handy self-propelled package. We hoped you might feel like starting an industrial revolution. At least we did before we found out about the Festival." Rachel blinked as Rubenstein threw back his head and laughed wildly. "Just what exactly is that meant to mean?" she demanded irritably.

The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
by James Howard Kunstler
Published 31 May 1993

lly the .fancy .hl1ildings.. where J :hey lived, worked, and were e�t:ertained. It was reasoned, therefore, that the com­ ing evolutionary leap into utopia would include the uplift of the work­ ers, resulting in "the new industrial man. " Ultimately, reasoned Karl Marx, the new industrial man would attain control of "the means of production" and all class distinctions would be abolished in an ensuing reorganization of life. Thus exalted and elevated, this new industrial man would require a better place to live than the slums that had been his customary abode. 6 0 ... YE S TE R D A Y ' S T O M O R R O W In fact, he and everybody else would require a new architectural setting for everyday life to replace the structures of the decadent past-else the new industrial man would lose the edge of moral superiority that he had only lately achieved, his evolution having been mostly a moral leap.

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Trolleys hogged the major thoroughfares, which were further clogged by horse-drawn ve­ hicles. Traffic control meant an occasional cop at the busiest intersec­ tions. ( t' O F 8 8 ... J O Y R I DE Henry Ford did not invent the automobile, but with the Model T he developed a very reliable machine that "the great multitude" could afford to buy, and he dreamed up a means of production-the assembly line-that made his machine cheaper every year for two decades, even while wages, and the prices of other things, climbed. Ford offered the first Model T in the fall of 1908 at $825 for the "runabout" and $25 more for the "touring car. " This was a time when $1200 was an ex­ cellent yearly salary.

…

The long-term result was the death of the family farm in America, the replacement of agriculture by agribusiness. By 1940, the percentage of the population on farms fell to 23 percent, and by 1980 it had dwin­ dled to 3 percent. In and of itself, this population shift might not have been a bad thing, but it was accompanied by another terrible cost. A way of life became simply a means of production. Human husbandry gave way to the industrial exploitation of land. Left behind was the knowledge of how to care for land, so plainly evinced in today's prob­ lems of soil erosion and in pollution from chemical pesticides and fer­ tilizers. The cycle of overproduction, debt, and foreclosure in the late 1920s was the first sign that accommodating a new technology like the motor vehicle in an established economy could be wildly disruptive.

Arguing With Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future
by Paul Krugman
Published 28 Jan 2020

(People generally like the idea of being able to buy into Medicare, but not the idea of being required to give up private insurance if they’re happy with it.) Should America adopt socialism? That’s not a real question, because “socialism” can mean different things to different people. The classic definition is “government ownership of the means of production,” and clearly voters don’t favor that. But there’s a long tradition in American politics of trying to conflate socialism in that sense with what Europeans call “social democracy”—a market economy, but with a strong public social safety net and regulations that limit the range of actions businesses can take in pursuit of profit.

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The libertarian Cato Institute says no: “Denmark has quite a free-market economy, apart from its welfare state transfers and high government consumption.” That’s some qualification. It’s true that Denmark doesn’t at all fit the classic definition of socialism, which involves government ownership of the means of production. It is, instead, social-democratic: a market economy where the downsides of capitalism are mitigated by government action, including a very strong social safety net. But U.S. conservatives—like Fox’s Regan—continually and systematically blur the distinction between social democracy and socialism.

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So let’s talk about what’s really on the table. Some progressive U.S. politicians now describe themselves as socialists, and a significant number of voters, including a majority of voters under thirty, say they approve of socialism. But neither the politicians nor the voters are clamoring for government seizure of the means of production. Instead, they’ve taken on board conservative rhetoric that describes anything that tempers the excesses of a market economy as socialism, and in effect said, “Well, in that case I’m a socialist.” What Americans who support “socialism” actually want is what the rest of the world calls social democracy: a market economy, but with extreme hardship limited by a strong social safety net and extreme inequality limited by progressive taxation.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines
by Richard Heinberg and James Howard (frw) Kunstler
Published 1 Sep 2007

Bellamy’s vision inevitably proved myopic: while Looking Backward was popular and influential (it sold over a million copies and inspired many Progressive reforms throughout the next two decades), it did not successfully anticipate the world of the early 21st century. Bellamy saw our era as one in which government would control the means of production and divide wealth equally between all people and in which all citizens would receive a college education and be given freedom in choosing a career, from which they would retire at age 45. In short, Bellamy foresaw a socialist utopia and entirely missed the realities of globalization, sweat shops, and environmental devastation.

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And so what we are saying (once again, but in a slightly different way) is that understanding energy sources is essential to understanding human societies. Anthropologist Marvin Harris identified three basic elements that are present in every human society:• infrastructure, which consists of the means of obtaining and processing necessary energy and materials from nature — i.e., the means of production; • structure, which consists of human-to-human decision-making and resource-allocating activities; and • superstructure, consisting of the ideas, rituals, ethics, and myths that serve to explain the universe and coordinate human behavior.6 Change at any of these levels can affect the others: the emergence of a new religion or a political revolution, for example, can change people’s lives in real, significant ways.

Thinking in Systems: A Primer
by Meadows. Donella and Diana Wright
Published 3 Dec 2008

• “God created the universe with the earth at its center, the land with the castle at its center, and humanity with the Church at its center”—the organizing principle for the elaborate social and physical structures of Europe in the Middle Ages. • “God and morality are outmoded ideas; people should be objective and scientific, should own and multiply the means of production, and should treat people and nature as instrumental inputs to production”—the organizing principles of the Industrial Revolution. Out of simple rules of self-organization can grow enormous, diversifying crystals of technology, physical structures, organizations, and cultures. Systems often have the property of self-organization—the ability to structure themselves, to create new structure, to learn, diversify, and complexify.

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Disorderly, mixed-up borders are sources of diversity and creativity. In our system zoo, for instance, I showed the flow of cars into a car dealer’s inventory as coming from a cloud. Of course, cars don’t come from a cloud, they come from the transformation of a stock of raw materials, with the help of capital, labor, energy, technology, and management (the means of production). Similarly, the flow of cars out of the inventory goes not to a cloud, but through sales to the households or businesses of consumers. Whether it is important to keep track of raw materials or consumers’ home stocks (whether it is legitimate to replace them in a diagram with clouds) depends on whether these stocks are likely to have a significant influence on the behavior of the system over the time period of interest.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
by Franklin Foer
Published 31 Aug 2017

She compared AI, with its theory about the programmable mind, to psychoanalysis and Marxism—as “a new way of understanding almost everything.” In each case a central concept restructures understanding on a large scale: for the Freudian, the unconscious; for the Marxist, the relationship to the means of production. . . . [F]or the AI researcher, the idea of program has a transcendent value: it is taken as the key, the until now missing term for unlocking intellectual mysteries. Carl Page was a rationalist. Yet some biographical accounts of Larry’s childhood note that his father had instructed him with religious intensity.

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This isn’t simply a slogan, it is a highly developed theory of history. The narrative goes like this: Once upon a time, the world needed gatekeepers. Resources were limited, so they had to be prudently rationed by enlightened elites. Scarcity, however, has now faded into the past thanks to the collapsing price of computing. This was a revolution in the means of production. Cheaply and easily, anyone could publish a book, broadcast an opinion, launch a company, create a Web site. Bureaucracies and clunky corporations continue to ploddingly exist. But really, who needs them? One by one, they have begun to suffer and fade. “I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,” Bezos said.

Brave New World of Work
by Ulrich Beck
Published 15 Jan 2000

Knowledge, not work, will become the source of social wealth; and ‘knowledge workers’ who have the capacity to translate specialized knowledge into profit-producing innovations (products, technological and organizational innovations, etc.) will become the privileged group in society. The basic economic resource – the ‘means of production’ to use the economist's term – is no longer capital, nor natural resources (the economist's ‘land’), nor ‘labour’. It is and will be knowledge. The central wealth-creating activities will be neither the allocation of capital to productive uses nor ‘labour’ – the two poles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic theory, whether Classical, Marxist, Keynesian or Neo-Classical.

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The leading social groups of the knowledge society will be ‘knowledge workers’ – knowledge executives who know how to allocate knowledge to productive use; knowledge professionals; knowledge employees. Practically all these knowledge people will be employed in organizations. Yet unlike the employees under capitalism they own both the ‘means of production’ and the ‘tools of production’ – the former through their pension funds which are rapidly emerging in all developed countries as the only real owners, the latter because knowledge workers own their knowledge and can take it with them wherever they go. The economic challenge of the post-capitalist society will therefore be the productivity of knowledge work and knowledge worker.20 Many have objected that there is nothing new in this line of argument, since knowledge already played a central role in the industry and services era, perhaps in all epochs of work.

The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
by Branko Milanovic
Published 15 Dec 2010

Inequality rose almost everywhere and was not regarded as negatively as during the heyday of welfare capitalism. So the postcommunist countries just “imitated” their Western counterparts in letting inequality shoot up in the 1990s. How did socialism realize that greater equality? There were several things, like a package, that led to it. First, nationalization of the means of production and of land (or the agrarian reform in several countries) obliterated the large industrial and landowning fortunes. This was particularly the case in countries like Russia (after the revolution in 1917) and Hungary and Poland (after 1947) where large landholdings still existed. Private industrialists in all countries disappeared, their assets were nationalized, and stock markets were closed.

…

It also corresponded broadly to a division in economic policies followed by the countries. The first world was capitalist but not monolithic. There were welfare-oriented central and North European countries and the more private-sector-dominated United States. The second world’s distinguishing characteristic was state ownership of the means of production, but heterogeneity existed there, too, between the centrally planned Soviet Union, on the one hand, and market-oriented Yugoslavia, on the other. The third world, it could be easily averred, was dominated by “developmentalist” policies, where the state played an active role, not only in taxation and spending (as in many Western economies) but also in production.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig
Published 15 Mar 2020

Lessons of History What does history tell us? The Luddites were undoubtedly right about their own trade—handloom weaving. Whereas spinning had been mechanised in factories, weavers were primarily using a handloom which was operated on a domestic basis up until after the Napoleonic wars; in other words, they still owned their means of production. Wages in weaving were very high, as it was a skilled craft. It was not until the early 1840s that the number of power looms in production exceeded the number of handloom weavers. The introduction of the power loom had three primary results: it concentrated the weaving aspect of cotton production in the factories, it led to the displacement of the handloom weavers, and it destroyed the wages they had received.

…

Statistics speak a clear language reflecting the destruction of the Indian economy, based on exports producing within the 5 Patterns and Types of Work in the Past: Wageworker… 47 household economy. Instead of giving way to a rising proletarian class of wageworker and housewife couples the family households adapted to the new situation. If they could not maintain their means of production, that is land, farmhouses, workshops, devices, they transformed into income-­ pooling households. This is not only true for India, but applies to global peripheries in general. In the global South the modern couple did not gain momentum. It was only attractive for postcolonial upper and upper-middle classes.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer's Guide to Thinking Free
by Cody Wilson
Published 10 Oct 2016

I was comfortable charting out the organization and the networking, finding the human and financial means to get it done. I didn’t know a thing about engineering, ballistics, or plastics. Before the call could end, I was already spinning out the rhetoric in my mind. This is what access to the means of production was always going to look like. Defense Technology? As opposed to what? I did a little reading about the Maker Movement the day after hanging up with Ben. I had so quickly persuaded myself that besides American gun politics, ours would be a story of the history of the use of 3D printing. Running with an abstract and still undefined technology, we’d get to claim the highest ground of political realism.

…

As I waited to speak, I watched the latch windows above and the plunging darkness below. I took in the filth, as the phone filled the spaces with its tinny soundings. At last I grew impatient with the reporter’s standard liberal shit. “Look, you’re a good socialist, right?” I thrust out my arm toward the grimy ceiling dropping above me. “Well, we finally got the means of production! What the hell did you think it would look like?” I couldn’t find Amir when I returned, and I wouldn’t stay. Without a word I left the squat, searching the orange-tinted streetscapes for a room. I wandered between the sold-out hotels, watching the colors pool in the blacktop further ahead.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

In the 2000s and 2010s, it became an empire of the modern internet, in large part by imitating its main competitor, and with a rigor and a ruthlessness that eBay never quite achieved. In doing so, Amazon not only created a marketplace for consumer goods in these years, it also created a marketplace for capital goods. Capital goods are the means of production. The means of production that Amazon sold would be the machinery needed to make software for a commercializing internet. The Internet’s Factories When capitalism transforms something, it tends to add more machinery. The internet was no different. In the post-dot-com period, as firms began to find more promising paths to profitability, they also made the internet more complex.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership
by Andro Linklater
Published 12 Nov 2013

For the group of nineteenth-century reformers who backed Wakefield, including such key contemporaries as Bentham’s social utilitarians and Mills’s economic liberals, Durham’s advocacy of free-market principles was taken as a decisive blow against the mercantile attitudes still entrenched in London. Karl Marx added his own backhanded compliment: “Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative—the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will. He discovered that capital is not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things.”

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Despite Marx’s cautious endorsement of the mir, Lenin quickly dispensed with any thought of retaining small peasant strips. Learning from the mechanization of the American prairies, he argued in his 1899 text, The Development of Capitalism, for the creation of large farms that could be mechanized and fertilized on an industrial scale, and for communal ownership to give poor and landless peasants a share in the means of production. Middle peasants, those working their own small plots, might be allowed to keep them, but Lenin had an almost superstitious fear of the social impact of land ownership. “Small-scale production,” he declared, “gives birth to capitalism and the bourgeoisie constantly, daily, hourly, with elemental force, and in vast proportions.”

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A tug at the broken banking thread pulled out the political failure of regulation, and that in turn led to the Austrian school of economics, and the particular meaning that Friederich Hayek and his colleagues gave to property and liberty. Thus step by step the focus of the book turned to ownership. To 19th century Whig historians who took property to be the foundation-stone of democracy and to their Marxist successors who identified possession of the means of production as the central agent in shaping society and class consciousness, the impact of ownership across history was obvious. But that context is largely ignored by today’s historians. Even those studying wills and inventories of possessions or specialists in consumer economies and gender politics, rarely examine their topics in the context of a need to assert possession.

Idoru
by William Gibson
Published 2 Jan 1996

Rez raised his eyebrow. "A water filtration plant, something like that?" The Russian kept his eye on the big man's axe. "In Tallin," he said, "we soon are building exclusive mega-mall, affluent gated sub- urbs, plus world-class pharmaceutical manufakura. We are unfairly denied most advanced means of production, but we are desiring one hundred percent modern operation." "Rez," the man with the axe said, "give it up. This boon and his mates need that thing to build themselves an Estonian drug factory. Time I took you back to the hotel." "But wouldn't they be more interested in… Tokyo real estate?"

…

Rez raised his eyebrow. "A water filtration plant, something like that?" The Russian kept his eye on the big man's axe. "In Tallin," he said, "we soon are building exclusive mega-mall, affluent gated sub-o 0 263 urbs, plus world-class pharmaceutical manufakura. We are unfairly denied most advanced means of production, but we are desiring one hundred percent modern operation." "Rez," the man with the axe said, "give it up. This hoon and his mates need that thing to build themselves an Estonian drug factory. Time I took you back to the hotel." "But wouldn't they be more interested in… Tokyo real estate?"

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment
by Sangeet Paul Choudary
Published 14 Sep 2015

As we progress through this section, we will increasingly note that all platform design decisions are built around the core value unit. PLATFORM SCALE IMPERATIVE The age of the industrial economy accorded inordinate power to those who held the means of production. In the age of platforms, production is decentralized. Whether it is the decentralization of manufacturing through 3D printing, the decentralization of marketing and journalism through social media, or the decentralization of service providers in the collaborative economy, the means of production are no longer limited to large companies or entities. With decentralized production, the platforms that enable and aggregate this production are the new winners.

Big Three in Economics: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes
by Mark Skousen
Published 22 Dec 2006

Marx applied Hegel's dialectic to his deterministic view of history. Thus, the course of history could be described by using Hegelian concepts— from slavery to capitalism to communism. Figure 3.1 The Hegelian Dialectic Used to Describe the Course of History THESIS According to this theory, slavery was viewed as the principal means of production or thesis during Greco-Roman times. Feudalism became its main antithesis in the Middle Ages. The synthesis became capitalism, which became the new thesis after the Enlightenment. But capitalism faced its own antithesis—the growing threat of socialism. Eventually, this struggle would result in the ultimate system of production, communism.

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Marx's theory of class consciousness and class conflict has engaged historians and sociologists. To what extent are behavior and thought reflections of bourgeois or proletarian values? To what point does the ruling class protect and advance its interests through the political process? Does the group that owns or controls property and the means of production dominate? Is it true that "law and politics are in the service of industrial capital"? If so, asks Wolff, "why are trade unions allowed? Why do universities have Arts Faculties as well as Engineering (indeed, why allow the teaching of Marxism)? Why don't the multinationals win every one of their court cases?"

GDP: The World’s Most Powerful Formula and Why It Must Now Change
by Ehsan Masood
Published 4 Mar 2021

And it was at Yale that Rostow became obsessed with the ideas of Karl Marx. Never short of self-belief, he vowed one day to match the communist thinker for global influence.6 To an extent, Rostow shared Marx’s desire to help the poor to live more prosperous and fulfilling lives. Marx wanted citizens to seize control of the means of production, ushering in the communist revolution where ownership would be shared between people, and where there would be equality of income, wealth, and opportunity.7 Rostow could see how Marx’s ideas would appeal to countries fighting liberation struggles against colonial powers, and so he came up with his own “non-communist manifesto”—that being the subtitle given to his bestselling Stages of Economic Growth,8 part three of a trilogy of books on growth.9 In Stages Rostow claimed to have found the formula, the elixir through which any poor country could become as prosperous as Europe or America.

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For biographical details on Rostow, see David Milne, America’s Rasputin: Walt Rostow and the Vietnam War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2008), 23–25. 7. According to Rostow’s reading of Marx, a feudal or traditional society is one in which a small number of people are very rich. They own property and the means of production, while everyone else works for poverty wages. Sooner or later, the poor become desperate to escape and make a better life for themselves. In some countries these desperate poor have helped to create a socialist economy, where the state allows more people to own property and establish businesses, thereby helping them to become richer.

What's Wrong With Economics: A Primer for the Perplexed
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 3 Mar 2020

Social organisation has always been shaped by a dominant class for its own purposes, whether the purpose was military glory or booty, with a strong connection between the two, and both involving exploitation of the labouring class according to the prevalent mode of production (slavery, serfdom, ‘wage slavery’). Its basis has always been class ownership of the means of production. In capitalist society, class power is wielded by the capitalist class and stems from their ownership of capital. Mostly this is blunt power: either workers accept the capitalist-determined wage or they starve to death. But hegemonic power is not lacking as reinforcement. Control over the means of production includes control over the production of ideas. Marx wrote, ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in any epoch the ruling ideas . . . The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships that make the one class the ruling one; therefore the ideas of its dominance’.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future
by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
Published 30 Jun 2014

The fallacy rested on an incomplete analysis, which considered only physical by-products of combustion, particularly in electricity generation, and not the other factors that controlled overall energy use and net release of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. capitalism A form of socioeconomic organization that dominated Western Europe and North America from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, in which the means of production and distribution of goods and services were owned either by individuals or by government-chartered legal entities called “corporations.” Typically these entities were operated for-profit, with the surplus value produced by workers funneled to owners, managers, and “investors,” third parties who owned “stock” in a company but had lia-bility neither for its debts nor its social consequences.

Basic Income And The Left
by henningmeyer
Published 16 May 2018

will be increasingly In its admittedly noble striving for increased social justice, the political left has historically had several ideas that, one might dare claim, were not particu‐ larly well thought out. For example, the idea of the centrally planned economy, the nationalisation of all the means of production, forced collectivisation of agriculture and, I can add, the Swedish wage earner funds. One reason for these, sometimes monstrous, failures is a reluctance to take the implementation process into account and think through how the policies will actually work when they meet reality and with what consequences.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us
by Nicholas Carr
Published 28 Sep 2014

“My body is geared into the world when my perception provides me with the most varied and the most clearly articulated spectacle possible,” explained Merleau-Ponty, “and when my motor intentions, as they unfold, receive the responses they anticipate from the world. This maximum of clarity in perception and action specifies a perceptual ground, a background for my life, a general milieu for the coexistence of my body and the world.”13 Used thoughtfully and with skill, technology becomes much more than a means of production or consumption. It becomes a means of experience. It gives us more ways to lead rich and engaged lives. Look more closely at the scythe. It’s a simple tool, but an ingenious one. Invented around 500 BC, by the Romans or the Gauls, it consists of a curved blade, forged of iron or steel, attached to the end of a long wooden pole, or snath.

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As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face the same existential question that the Shushwap confronted: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? That sounds very serious. But the aim is joy. The active soul is a light soul. By reclaiming our tools as parts of ourselves, as instruments of experience rather than just means of production, we can enjoy the freedom that congenial technology provides when it opens the world more fully to us. It’s the freedom I imagine Lawrence Sperry and Emil Cachin must have felt on that bright spring day in Paris a hundred years ago when they climbed out onto the wings of their gyroscope-balanced Curtiss C-2 biplane and, filled with terror and delight, passed over the reviewing stands and saw below them the faces of the crowd turned skyward in awe

How to Speak Money: What the Money People Say--And What It Really Means
by John Lanchester
Published 5 Oct 2014

The fact that it was the IMF announcing this, though, was a big part of the shock, since the IMF is the organization whose off-the-shelf package of measures for troubled economies always includes a huge dose of austerity. nationalization The taking into state ownership of private assets or industries. It used to be the central pillar of the Labour Party’s economic policy, in the form of clause 4f of the party constitution, calling for common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, until Tony Blair led the charge to abolish it in 1994. Nationalization had gone entirely out of favor in most of the developed world until governments found they had to nationalize banks in order to save the financial system in 2008. A partial list of nationalizations since 2008 would include AIG and General Motors in the United States; two of the UK’s four biggest banks, Lloyds-HBOS and RBS; the Belgian bank Dexia, much of the Spanish banking system; and so on.

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Smith had something of a novelist about him, of the novelist’s ability to describe a society to itself, and it was this aspect of his work that gave it such power: he made modern life, the tangled web of relationships and producers and consumers and livelihoods and forces, comprehensible to the people who were tangled in its mesh. He came up with a way of looking at the whole of modern society as a single mechanism. socialism The system where the ownership of natural resources, property, and the means of production is held collectively. socialism for the rich The expression is supposed to be a joke, but in the aftermath of the credit crunch it looked a lot like the reality of the financial system, because the fact was that when banks were making huge profits, they paid themselves huge bonuses, but when they were facing collapse, taxpayers had no choice but to step in and bail them out to keep the financial system functioning.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

In Florida’s optimistic view, the demise of career stability has unbridled creativity and eliminated alienation in the workplace. “To some degree, Karl Marx had it partly right when he foresaw that the workers would someday control the means of production,” Florida declares. “This is now beginning to happen, although not as Marx thought it would, with the proletariat rising to take over factories. Rather, more workers than ever control the means of production, because it is inside their heads; they are the means of the production.”26 Welcome to what Florida calls the “information-and-idea-based economy,” a place where “people have come to accept that they’re on their own—that the traditional sources of security and entitlement no longer exist, or even matter.”

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success
by Ross Douthat
Published 25 Feb 2020

This internationalism carries more than just a whiff of the old socialist internationale; Varoufakis argues explicitly that for all the errors of their disciples, the authors of The Communist Manifesto set the agenda that should still guide the contemporary left: While we owe capitalism for having reduced all class distinctions to the gulf between owners and nonowners, Marx and Engels want us to realise that capitalism is insufficiently evolved to survive the technologies it spawns. It is our duty to tear away at the old notion of privately owned means of production and force a metamorphosis, which must involve the social ownership of machinery, land, and resources. Now, when new technologies are unleashed in societies bound by the primitive labour contract, wholesale misery follows. In the manifesto’s unforgettable words: “A society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work
by David Frayne
Published 15 Nov 2015

It usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It higgles over a meal-time, incorporating it where possible with the process of production itself, so that food is given to the labourer as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, reparation, refreshment of the bodily powers to just so many hours of torpor as the revival of an organism, absolutely exhausted, renders essential. It is not the normal maintenance of the labour-power which is to determine the limits of the working-day; it is the greatest possible daily expenditure of labour-power, no matter how diseased, compulsory, and painful it may be, which is to determine the limits of the labourers’ period of repose.

…

They are exploited: paid less than the true value of their labour, so that an elite class of owners (the bourgeoisie) may profit from the fruits of their work. The Marx who students usually first encounter is the one who calls for ‘collective appropriation’: abolition of the class system and an end to exploitation, via a workers’ struggle to take collective ownership of the means of production. Alienated work can then become non-alienated work – a true expression of the workers’ productive capacities. However, Marx’s call for collective appropriation – or the ‘Plain Marxist Argument’ (Booth, 1989: 207) – can be contrasted with ideas in his later writing, where some believed he tempered his earlier enthusiasm for work.

A Little History of Economics
by Niall Kishtainy
Published 15 Jan 2017

Communism would get rid of the division of society into different classes constantly fighting against each other. Marx believed, then, that capitalism is all about turmoil and stress – no sign here of Adam Smith’s invisible hand through which moneymaking leads to harmony. Under capitalism, the capitalists own the ‘means of production’: the capital needed to make the goods. The workers own nothing but their own labour. Unlike peasants in a feudal society who are tied to a lord, the workers are free to work for anyone. But all they have is their labour so their only option is to work for a capitalist and be exploited. Capitalists are able to build up their capital and get rich because the country’s laws and political system allow them to own capital and to keep as profit the surplus value created by the workers.

…

(i), (ii) Kerala (India) (i) Keynes, John Maynard (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Keynesian theory (i), (ii), (iii) Klemperer, Paul (i) Krugman, Paul (i), (ii) Kydland, Finn (i), (ii) labour (i) in ancient Greece (i) and market clearing (i) women as unpaid (i) labour theory of value (i), (ii) laissez-faire (i) landowners (i), (ii), (iii) Lange, Oskar (i) law of demand (i), (ii) leakage of spending (i) Lehman Brothers (i) leisure class (i) leisured, women as (i) Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (i), (ii) Lerner, Abba (i) Lewis, Arthur (i) Lincoln, Abraham (i) List, Friedrich (i) loss aversion (i) Lucas, Robert (i), (ii) MacKay, Charles (i) Macmillan, Harold (i) macro/microeconomics (i) Malaysia, and speculators (i) Malthus, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Malynes, Gerard de (i), (ii) manufacturing (i), (ii) division of labour (i) see also Industrial Revolution margin (i) marginal costs (i), (ii) marginal principle (i), (ii), (iii) marginal revenue (i) marginal utility (i), (ii) market, the (i) market clearing (i) market design (i) market failure (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) ‘Market for Lemons, The’ (Akerlof) (i) market power (i) markets, currency (i), (ii) Marshall, Alfred (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Marx, Karl (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) Marxism (i) mathematics (i), (ii), (iii) means of production (i) mercantilism (i), (ii) Mesopotamia (i) Mexico, pegged currency (i) micro/macroeconomics (i) Microsoft (i) Midas fallacy (i) minimum wage (i) Minsky, Hyman (i) Minsky moment (i), (ii) Mirabeau, Marquis de (i), (ii), (iii) Mises, Ludwig von (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) mixed economies (i), (ii) Mobutu Sese Seko (i) model villages (i) models (economic) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) modern and traditional economies (i), (ii) monetarism (i) monetary policy (i), (ii) money (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also coins; currency money illusion (i) money wages (i) moneylending see usury monopolies (i), (ii) monopolistic competition (i), (ii) monopoly, theory of (i) monopoly capitalism (i), (ii), (iii) monopsony (i) moral hazard (i), (ii) multiplier (i) Mun, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Muth, John (i) Nash, John (i), (ii) Nash equilibrium (i) national income (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) National System of Political Economy (List) (i) Nelson, Julie (i) neoclassical economics (i) net product (i) Neumann, John von (i) New Christianity, The (Saint-Simon) (i) new classical economics (i) New Harmony (Indiana) (i) New Lanark (Scotland) (i) Nkrumah, Kwame (i), (ii) non-rival good (i) Nordhaus, William (i), (ii) normative economics (i), (ii) Obstfeld, Maurice (i) Occupy movement (i) oligopolies (i) opportunity cost (i), (ii) organ transplant (i) output per person (i) Owen, Robert (i) paper money (i), (ii) Pareto, Vilfredo (i) pareto efficiency (i), (ii) pareto improvement (i) Park Chung-hee (i) partial equilibrium (i) pegged exchange rate (i) perfect competition (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) perfect information (i) periphery (i) phalansteries (i) Phillips, Bill (i) Phillips curve (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) physiocracy (i), (ii) Pigou, Arthur Cecil (i), (ii), (iii) Piketty, Thomas (i), (ii), (iii) Plato (i), (ii), (iii) policy discretion (i) Ponzi, Charles (i) Ponzi finance (i) population and food supply (i), (ii), (iii) of women (i) positive economics (i) poverty (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) in Cuba (i) Sen on (i) and utopian thinkers (i) Prebisch, Raúl (i) predicting (i) Prescott, Edward (i), (ii) price wars (i), (ii) primary products (i) prisoners’ dilemma (i) private costs and benefits (i) privatisation (i) productivity (i), (ii), (iii) profit (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and capitalism (i), (ii) proletariat (i), (ii) property (private) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) and communism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) protection (i), (ii), (iii) provisioning (i) public choice theory (i) public goods (i) quantity theory of money (i) Quesnay, François (i) Quincey, Thomas de (i), (ii) racism (i) Rand, Ayn (i) RAND Corporation (i), (ii) rate of return (i), (ii) rational economic man (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) rational expectations (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) real wages (i), (ii), (iii) recession (i) and governments (i), (ii), (iii) Great Recession (i) Keynes on (i), (ii) Mexican (i) redistribution of wealth (i) reference points (i) relative poverty (i) rent on land (i), (ii), (iii) rents/rent-seeking (i) resources (i), (ii) revolution (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Cuban (i) French (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Russian (i), (ii) Ricardo, David (i), (ii), (iii) risk aversion (i) Road to Serfdom, The (Hayek) (i) robber barons (i) Robbins, Lionel (i) Robinson, Joan (i) Roman Empire (i) Romer, Paul (i) Rosenstein-Rodan, Paul (i) Roth, Alvin (i), (ii) rule by nature (i) rules of the game (i) Sachs, Jeffrey (i) Saint-Simon, Henri de (i) Samuelson, Paul (i), (ii) savings (i), (ii) and Say’s Law (i) Say’s Law (i) scarcity (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Schumpeter, Joseph (i), (ii) sealed bid auction (i) second price auction (i) Second World War (i) securitisation (i) self-fulfilling crises (i) self-interest (i) Sen, Amartya (i), (ii) missing women (i), (ii), (iii) services (i) shading bids (i), (ii) shares (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) see also stock market Shiller, Robert (i), (ii) signalling (i) in auctions (i) Smith, Adam (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) social costs and benefits (i) Social Insurance and Allied Services (Beveridge) (i) social security (i), (ii) socialism (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) socialist commonwealth (i) Socrates (i) Solow, Robert (i) Soros, George (i), (ii), (iii) South Africa, war with Britain (i) South Korea, and the big push (i) Soviet Union and America (i) and communism (i), (ii) speculation (i) speculative lending (i) Spence, Michael (i) spending government (fiscal policy) (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii) and recessions (i), (ii) and Say’s Law (i) see also investment stagflation (i), (ii) Stalin, Joseph (i) standard economics (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Standard Oil (i) Stiglitz, Joseph (i) stock (i) stock market (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) stockbrokers (i) Strassmann, Diana (i), (ii) strategic interaction (i), (ii) strikes (i) subprime loans (i) subsidies (i), (ii) subsistence (i) sumptuary laws (i) supply curve (i) supply and demand (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) and currencies (i) and equilibrium (i), (ii) in recession (i), (ii), (iii) supply-side economics (i) surplus value (i), (ii) Swan, Trevor (i) tariff (i) taxes/taxation (i) and budget deficit (i) carbon (i) and carbon emissions (i) and France (i) and public goods (i) redistribution of wealth (i) and rent-seeking (i) technology as endogenous/exogenous (i) and growth (i) and living standards (i) terms of trade (i) Thailand (i) Thaler, Richard (i) theory (i) Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen) (i) Theory of Monopolistic Competition (Chamberlain) (i) Thompson, William Hale ‘Big Bill’ (i) threat (i) time inconsistency (i), (ii) time intensity (i) Tocqueville, Alexis de (i) totalitarianism (i) trade (i), (ii), (iii) and dependency theory (i) free (i), (ii), (iii) trading permit, carbon (i) traditional and modern economies (i), (ii) transplant, organ (i) Treatise of the Canker of England’s Common Wealth, A (Malynes) (i) Tversky, Amos (i), (ii) underdeveloped countries (i) unemployment in Britain (i) and the government (i) and the Great Depression (i) and information economics (i) and Keynes (i) and market clearing (i) and recession (i) unions (i), (ii) United States of America and free trade (i) and growth of government (i) industrialisation (i) and Latin America (i) Microsoft (i) recession (i), (ii) and the Soviet Union (i) and Standard Oil (i) stock market (i) wealth in (i) women in the labour force (i) unpaid labour, and women (i) usury (i), (ii), (iii) utility (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) utopian thinkers (i), (ii) Vanderbilt, Cornelius (i), (ii) Veblen, Thorstein (i), (ii), (iii) velocity of circulation (i), (ii) Vickrey, William (i) wage, minimum (i) Walras, Léon (i) Waring, Marilyn (i) wealth (i) and Aristotle (i), (ii) and Christianity (i) Piketty on (i) and Plato (i) Smith on (i) Wealth of Nations, The (Smith) (i), (ii) welfare benefits (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) welfare economics (i) Who Pays for the Kids?

Accelerando
by Stross, Charles
Published 22 Jan 2005

"You are very unusual. You earn no money, do you? But you are rich, because grateful people who have benefited from your work give you everything you need. You are like a medieval troubadour who has found favor with the aristocracy. Your labor is not alienated – it is given freely, and your means of production is with you always, inside your head." Manfred blinks; the jargon is weirdly technical-sounding but orthogonal to his experience, offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding itches. Gianni taps his balding temple with a knuckle like a walnut.

…

Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving True Communism, which is a state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like, um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of the means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He's not your enemy, I mean. He's the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in Conservative Party Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension funds – which in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide their raison d'être.

…

And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people to buy insurance policies with money that is invested in control of the means of production – Bayes' Theorem is to blame –" Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: "I don't think feeding him guarana was a good idea," he says in tones of deep foreboding. Manfred's mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He's rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the singularity.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism
by Ed West
Published 19 Mar 2020

But then, although Gramsci is seen as some Svengali-like manipulator-genius by conservative opponents, in reality progressive domination was something that mainly happened because of rising living standards, technology, education and greater freedom – the latter, of course, partly thanks to Tory and Republican governments. Gramsci’s ideas have often been called ‘cultural Marxism’, although since the term has become very popular with the extreme Right, using it is bad optics, to say the least. The idea is that economic Marxism is based on the idea that all history is determined by who owns the means of production; the capitalists own it, and therefore they exploit the workers, who are the victims. Cultural Marxism simply transposes this into the cultural sphere, and views history as a question of power and privilege. What people mean by ‘cultural Marxism’ might be simplistically surmised as opposition to tradition and hierarchy; radical gender politics; the Marxist theory of race in which whites are the bourgeoisie and non-whites the proletariat; intolerance towards non-orthodox thinkers; the necessity of changing the language; and the ideas that criminals are victims of society, marriage is oppressive and exploitative, and nations are artificial, imagined communities.

…

Universities had especially been influenced by Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno’s critical theory, the idea that education should be aimed at liberating people from oppression rather than just finding the truth, as traditional academic subjects had aimed for. Or as Karl Marx put it: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ Critical theory was influenced by Marx’s idea of ideology; because the bourgeoisie control the means of production, they also control the culture, and all the laws and morality reflect their class interests. So the powers that be try to convince everyone that there are these things called ‘truth and values’, which were in fact all bourgeois constructs all along. When people realised the distorting influence of power structures then they could see the world more accurately, and be liberated.

…

S. 227 Liberal Democrats 8, 266, 269, 273, 355 liberal elites 5–6 Liberal Party 50, 75 formation 77 Liberal Party (Victorian) 65 Libertarian Party 207 libertarianism (Right-liberals) 203–8, 240 Library Lion (book, 2006) 257 Liddle, Rod 190–1 Lilla, Mark 125–6, 173, 184 Limbaugh, Rush 312, 313 Lincoln (2012) 228 Lincoln, Abraham 228 linear progress 227–8 Linehan, Graham 186 Lineker, Gary 195 Lipset, Seymour Martin 145, 146 Lisbon earthquake (1855) 90 literacy rates 175 Livingstone, Ken 20 ‘Lizardman’s Constant’ 302 Loaded (magazine) 169 Locke, John 51–3, 140, 288 Lollard heresy 326 Lomax, Alan 146 London 5, 18–20, 43–4, 49–53, 55, 119, 156, 163–4, 211, 245–6, 367 see also City of London London Olympics 2012 176, 230–1 Lord of the Rings, The trilogy 361 Louis XVI 55, 59 Lourdes 211 lower-middle classes 5 Loyalists 59 Lucas, Caroline 356 Luddites 91 Luther, Martin 48 Lyon 60 Lysenko, Trofim 144–5 MacBride, Séan 201 MacMillan, James 189 Mad Men (TV series) 185 Madonna 358 Magna Carta, Clause 39 205 Magorian, Michelle 106 Mahler, Gustav 337 Mailer, Norman 121 Major, John 86 Major government 85–6 Malaysia 351 Malcolm X 178 Malmesbury Abbey 125–6 Malthus, Thomas 239 Manchester 156, 173 Manchester Guardian (newspaper) 65, 83 Mandela, Nelson 11, 16, 24, 82, 89, 174, 201, 256 Mandelson, Peter 153, 159–60 mankind, nature of 31–3, 35, 36–8 Manning, Cardinal 213 Mao Zedong 99, 139, 226–7, 256, 263 Marat, Jean-Paul 59–60 Marcuse, Herbert 135, 325 Marie Antoinette 59, 178, 210 Marie Stopes International 241 marriage 127–8, 246, 282 mixed 301–2 same-sex 222–3, 228–9, 272–3, 292, 328 shotgun 128 marriage gap 247–55 Marx, Karl 41, 75, 93–4, 104, 105, 109, 135, 174, 224, 371 Marxism 82, 128, 145, 198, 202, 224, 227, 319 economic 127 see also Cultural Marxism Mary I 48 masculinity 114, 136, 140 masochists 105–6 Mass 60, 135, 291 Matrix, The (1999) 345 Matthew, Gospel of 229 Maurras, Charles 95 May, Theresa 6 McCain 28 McCarthy, Joseph 128 McCarthyism 128, 146, 148 McCourt, Frank, Angela’s Ashes 172 McIlroy, Will 104 Mead, Margaret 134 means of production 135 memes 344, 353 Menninger, Karl 121 Methodists 64, 255, 280 middle classes 9, 129, 191, 342, 357 see also lower-middle classes; upper-middle classes Middle East 236, 361 middle-aged conservatism 1, 2, 273–5 Migration Watch 250 Miliband, Ed 15, 237, 354 military 8–9 Mill, John Stuart 10, 289, 304, 325 Millar, Fiona 234–5 Millennials 2, 19, 84, 221 Miller, Arthur 128 Miller, Stephen 341 Milton, John 64 missionaries 92 Momentum 263 Momentum Kids 263 monarchy 66–7 Monbiot, George 278–9 Mondrian, Piet 98 Montesquieu 206, 288 Monty Python 191 Moon Man (2006) 257 Moore, Charles 282–3 Moore, Demi 311 Moore, Michael 268, 313 ‘moral panic’ 34 Moran, Layla 223 More, Thomas 92 Morocco 351 Morpurgo, Michael, The Pied Piper of Hamelin 258 Morrell, Frances 18–19 Möser, Justus 67, 85 mothers, unmarried 85 Mothers’ Union 197 Mount, Ferdinand 99 Mozilla 289 Mugabe, Robert 16 Muggeridge, Malcolm 46 Muller, Jerry Z. 50, 65, 66, 68, 74 multiculturalism 17, 177, 190, 238–9, 270, 292, 315, 317, 329, 341, 346, 355 multinationals 17–18 Mumsnet 198 Münster 92 Murray, Charles 152, 239, 246, 289 Murray, Douglas 307 Muslims 136, 173, 229, 264, 299, 317–18, 321, 351, 366–8 see also Islam Mussolini, Benito 94–5, 113, 126 mutation 72 My Naughty Little Sister (Edwards, 1952) 258 Myanmar 351 Nader, Ralph 313 Naked Gun, The series 22 nanny state 17 Napoleon Bonaparte 81, 190 narrative selection 299–300 nation-states 67 National Academy of Sciences 300 National Association of Scholars 320 National Blood Service 196–7 National Childbirth Trust (NCT) 296 National Health Service (NHS) 176, 195, 197, 204, 208, 230–1 National Review (magazine) 339 national socialism 96, 97 see also Nazis nationalism 94, 95, 126, 262, 345 nations 71 Native American culture 130–1 natural selection 147 Nature Genetics (journal) 349 Nature (journal) 350 nature-nurture debate 138–40 Nazis 20, 24, 87–9, 96–100, 105, 126, 139, 155, 157, 161, 172, 179, 196, 197–8, 205, 210–11, 237, 303, 312, 325, 329, 346 see also national socialism NCT see National Childbirth Trust neoconservatives 240 nepotism 70–1 Netflix 137 Netherlands 49, 52 neuroticism 108 New Atheism 215–16, 218, 224 New Atheism Internet Wars 214–15 New Deal 96 New England 49, 55, 57, 320 New Labour 153, 156–60, 163, 200, 265 New Left 146 New Model Army 49 ‘New Moral World’ 93 New Statesman, The (TV show) 89, 272 New Tories 267 New York 153–4 New York Times (newspaper) 99, 177, 178, 229, 236, 298–9, 313 News of the World (newspaper) 283 NHS see National Health Service Nicaraguan civil war 14–15 Niemietz, Kristian 197 Niemöllers, Martin 358 Nietzsche, Friedrich 229 Night to Remember, A (1958) 162 Nike 4–5 Niskanen Centre (think-tank) 295 Nixon, Richard 24, 148, 153, 154, 336 noble savage 130–1 non rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep 180 Non-Player Characters (NPCs) 344 non-whites 127 Nonconformism 65, 92 Norman, Jesse 54 norms Christian 79 cultural/moral 70 shifting 2–3 traditional gender 246 Norodom Sihanouk 17 Norris, Chuck 24 North America 362 North Korea 97, 226 Northern Ireland 5, 158, 214, 362 Norway 351 Norwich, John Julius 259 Notting Hill 42, 81, 266, 269–70 novelty seeking 137 Nowrasteh, Alex 177 NPR 313 nuclear families 246 Nugent, Ted 24 Nuts (magazine) 169, 212, 238–9 NWA 122 Oakeshott, Michael 72, 159, 358, 365 Oath of Supremacy 291 Obama, Barack 13, 24, 27, 30, 227, 249, 256, 265, 310–11, 319, 329, 335, 337 Obama, Michelle 11 Oberlin College 323 Obi-Wan Kenobi 365 O’Brien, James 186 Observer (newspaper) 245 OkCupid 302 Old Sarum 17 Oman 351 openness 108–9, 137 optimism 37–8 ‘Orchestra Pit Theory’ 313 Original Sin, doctrine of 28, 33, 129, 229 O’Rourke, P.J. 22 orthodoxy 65–6, 128, 240 Orwell, George 80, 179, 341 Animal Farm 143–4 Nineteen Eighty-Four 144 Osborne, George 250, 270 Oscars 4 Oswald, Lee Harvey 178 Owen, Robert 92–3, 97 Owenites 93 Oxfam 233 Oxford University 36, 37, 52, 80, 145, 151, 166, 326 paedophiles 18 paganism 6, 12, 173, 254, 255, 276, 291 Page Eight (play) 189 Paine, Thomas 56–9, 61, 63, 71–2, 366 Paisley, Revd Ian 296 Pakistan 292 Palestine 300, 362 Pandora’s box 29 Pantisocracy 91 Papua New Guinea 18 Paris 36, 38, 55–6, 90, 131–2, 190 Parliament 317 see also House of Commons; House of Lords Parliamentarians 36, 50, 51 Parliamentary majorities 1 partisanship 354 Partridge, Alan 24, 192 Party Politics (journal) 248 paternalism 79 Paterson, Isabel 206 Paterson, Owen 356 Patreon 290 Paul, Ron 207 Paul, St 222, 254 PBS 313 Peasants’ Revolt (1381) 46, 76 Peel, Robert 77 Peelites 77 Peep Show (TV show) 87, 88, 285 Pelagius 31–2, 349 Penn, Sean 24 Penn, William 57 Pennsylvania 57 Pentagon 339 People for the American Way 186 personality disorders 187 personality traits 139 Big Five 108–13, 137, 363 genetic 348–50 pessimism 30–3, 35, 36 Peterson, Jordan 152, 348 Pew Research 221, 238, 297, 310 Philadelphia 57 Philip, Prince, Duke of Edinburgh 18 Phillips, Kevin 338 Phillips, Melanie 46, 273 physical segregation 295–6 Picasso, Pablo 98, 179 Pierre d’Avrigny 254 pill, the 127, 155, 362 Pinker, Steven 140 Pinochet, Augusto 25, 159 Pinter, Harold 80 Pinter Prize 189 Pipes, Richard 303 Pirates Next Door, The (Duddle, 2012) 257 Platform 51 199 Plato 32, 92 pluralism 52, 290, 305–6 polarisation 295–306, 311 Politburo 21 Political Correctness Gone Mad 140, 141–52, 245, 289 political identity 8 political typing 137 polytechnics 133 Pope, Lauren 169 pornography 167–70, 212 Porter, Dame Shirley 79 Postlethwaite, Pete 24 postmodernism 136 Potter, Harry 42–3, 183 Poussin, Nicholas 227 poverty 72–3, 173–5, 199, 282 absolute 73 Powell, Enoch 131 Prague Spring 80 prejudice 58–9, 303, 350–1 Presbyterians 145 Presley, Elvis 24 Priam, King 29 Priestley, Joseph 56 Princeton 145 Profumo, John 156, 166 proletariat 127, 132 Proletariat (newspaper) 244 Prospect (magazine) 46 Protestantism 12, 13, 45, 48–9, 64, 155, 291, 294, 312, 329 Latin American 255 Low Church 50, 222 radical 48, 49, 50, 57, 64, 65 US 145 Prussia 303 Pryce, Revd Richard 56 Pryor, Margaret 299 Psychology Today (magazine) 106–7 Public Enemy 24 public morality 332 Public Religion Research Institute 238 Puritans 36, 49, 50, 53, 57, 64, 65, 70, 145, 164, 219, 292, 331 QED (TV show) 141–2 Quakers 299 quangos (quasi-government bodies) 202, 203 Question Time (TV show) 195 Quetelet, Adolphe 270 racial difference 142–3 racial inequality 178 racism 28, 94, 117, 146–7, 183, 193, 241, 280, 291, 301, 341 scientific 16–17 radical change, as negative 72 ‘radical privilege’ 10 radio 312, 314 Radio 3 371 Radio 4 4, 195, 196, 244, 245, 267, 283 Ramadan 229 Rand, Ayn 208 rapid eye movement (REM) sleep 180 Rationalism 215, 223–4 Reagan, Ronald 82, 148, 153, 155, 163, 225, 252, 313, 365 reality, as social construction 133–40 reason 69–70, 223–33 Red Dawn (1984) 185 Red Skull 237 Redmayne, Eddie 10 ‘redpilled’ 345 Rees-Mogg, Jacob 24 Reeves, Richard 111 reform 72–3 Reformation 13, 48, 51, 92, 291, 292–3, 294 ‘second’ 12 Reichstag 98 Reid, Benjamin 121 religion decline of 129 function 68–9 see also specific religions religious fundamentalism 65–6 religious liberty 52 Remain faction 173, 238, 243, 270, 275, 302, 322, 354, 355, 356–8 Republicans 7, 10, 27, 51, 82, 86, 109, 111–12, 114, 122–3, 127, 154, 224, 238, 247–8, 267–8, 270, 274, 279, 294, 297, 300–5, 307, 309, 313, 315, 319–21, 324, 326, 363, 366 Reservoir Dogs (1992) 123 Restoration 37 ‘Revolt of the Elites’ 132 Rhode Island 57 Rickman, Alan 235 rights 205 natural 70 trans-rights 328–9 US civil rights movement 84, 89, 105 see also Bill of Rights Rights of Man 58 Ritter, Carl 342 Roache, Rebecca 237 Roberts, Alderman 280 Robespierre, Maximilien 60, 230 ‘Robin Hood tax’ 200 Robinson, John 166 RoboCop (1987) 279, 361 Rokeach, Milton 107, 333 Roman Church 212 Roman Empire 276, 373 Romania 15, 46 Romans 173, 252–3 romanticism 76–9 Rome 11, 12, 187, 255, 276, 291 Henry’s split with 48 Romero, Oscar 24 Romney, Mitt 248–9, 319, 358 Ronald, Amy 353 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 96 rotten boroughs 17 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 37–41, 60, 110, 130, 178 Rowling, J.

How to Fix Copyright
by William Patry
Published 3 Jan 2012

Francis Gurry, Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, has rightly argued that successful copyright policy has to be based on neutrality to technology and to business models, and should not “preserve business models established under obsolete or moribund technologies.”69 The days of artificial scarcity are gone forever, replaced by abundance. It makes no sense in a world of digital abundance to complain about the loss of revenue resulting from monopoly power made possible only by analog means of production and distribution. The changes are even more profound, though, than a mere switch from analog to digital: Ordinary people, using the Internet and digital applications in ordinary ways, are unwittingly engaging in massive copying on a daily basis simply because of the way those technologies function.

…

Backyard Indian companies were “energetically recording and marketing all manner” of regional musical works that previously had been ignored by the dominant British record company. Rather than targeting the same broad national audience served by the large companies, the backyard companies were aiming at “a bewildering variety” of audiences, some quite narrow, such as Punjabi truck drivers. Local ownership of the means of production is “incomparably more diverse. . . . As a result, the average non-elite Indian is now, as never before, offered the voices of his community . . .”23 These passages are not about the present or about digital technology, but rather about the 1980s and the introduction of audiocassette tapes and players.

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900
by David Edgerton
Published 7 Dec 2006

Even in manufacturing trades, between one quarter and a third of workers in Germany and France around 1900 worked alone.27 Family-owned and run restaurants were serving 1 million meals a day in Paris in 1939, a figure which fell to 250,000 in 1950, due to the rise of factory and office canteens, though growth then resumed.28 A Sicilian farming family in 1931 lived in two rooms and a stable – they owned a mule and chickens and few possessions apart from some ‘rudimentary’ agricultural implements.29 In a proclamation issued in June 1944 a commander of the Greek resistance movement ELAS described the means of production of his community. He spoke of ‘The butcher with his knife, the grocer with his weights, the café owner with his chairs, the greengrocer with his scales’.30 In the 1980s the country-boats of Bangladesh were made by itinerant boat carpenters, traditionally Hindus (in a Muslim nation), so poor they could not buy the materials to make the boats, or sometimes even their own simple tools.31 10.

…

The classical Soviet view was that there was one technology, what mattered was the context in which it operated. It made all the difference in the world, they claimed, that although Soviet workers worked under the same division of labour as capitalist workers and were paid by the piece, they (indirectly) owned the means of production. Yet one finds some suggestions that Soviet technology took a different course from capitalist technology. Notably, it is argued that there was a particular tendency towards gigantism, the most recent expression of which is the Three Gorges dam in China. That seems doubtful as similarly gigantic projects can be found in the USA; indeed the Soviets were inspired by them.

Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets
by John Plender
Published 27 Jul 2015

Yet, before writing off Weber it is important to remember that his concern here related to the very specific question of whether non-European traditions had religious and cultural characteristics that were capable of giving rise spontaneously to capitalist development in the way that Protestantism had done. The fact that non-Europeans subsequently borrowed the capitalist means of production from Europeans is not, in itself, a refutation of his thesis. The ultimate watershed on business’s long march from pariah status towards semi-respectability came when the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping declared, after starting to open up China’s economy in 1978, that ‘to get rich is glorious’.

…

The Austrian-born economist worried that capitalism’s tendency to monopolistic gigantism, inequality and the encouragement of envy would, with the connivance of an anti-capitalist intellectual elite, drive the world to state socialism. What has changed since Schumpeter’s time is that while those tendencies still exist, there is no longer any systemic alternative to capitalism. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, comprehensive public ownership of the means of production is discredited. To the extent that systemic choices are available, they lie on a spectrum that runs from the market-driven model of capitalism in the US, via the social democratic models of Europe, to the heavily statist, authoritarian form of capitalism that prevails in China and much of the rest of the developing world – a model nonetheless characterised by extensive exposure to the global trading system.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

This is an odd definition, as it provides less a description of journalism than a litmus test of employment. In this version, journalists aren’t journalists unless they work for publishers, and publishers aren’t publishers unless they own the means of production. This definition has worked for decades, because the ties among journalists, publishers, and the means of production were strong. So long as publishing was expensive, publishers would be rare. So long as publishers were rare, it would be easy to list them and thus to identify journalists as their employees. This definition, oblique as it is, served to provide the legal balance we want from journalistic privilege—we have a professional class of truth-tellers who are given certain latitude to avoid cooperating with the law.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century
by Ryan Avent
Published 20 Sep 2016

The left, meanwhile, is advocating an end to austerity policies in some cases and expansions to the welfare state in others. Sanders campaigned on free college tuition and the creation of a single-payer health insurance system. They are not yet running on confiscatory taxation and nationalization of the means of production. Both political extremes might never have the opportunity to pursue their aims to their logical conclusion. But radicalism will become an increasingly real and powerful force in global politics until governments begin answering the difficult questions posed by the digital revolution. While people are dissatisfied and alienated, they will continue to demand something better.

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Britain elected its first Labour prime minister in 1924. Industrialized economies also used heavy taxes on the rich to pay for their world wars. And in the decades that followed those wars, the political power of labour led to the construction of expansive welfare states. Workers (in most countries) did not seize the means of production; they were not bashful about taking a healthy share of the returns from production, however. Coming to the present day, among the manifestations of social capital Robert Putnam cited as in decline in America in the 1990s and 2000s were labour unions. And, indeed, across many rich economies the share of jobs covered by unions shrank over the last generation.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

But sharing could also make us even more reliant on corporate whims, allowing companies to dictate how, why, when, and what we share, extracting the highest fees they can get for themselves in the process. That’s what was happening already in Paris. That’s why, in Denver, cabbies had to form Green Taxi. In a network economy, the power lies with whomever controls the points of connection—the web servers and databases and terms of use. The old means of production matter less. A sharing elite was well on the way to establishing itself; by the time I went to OuiShare Fest, the sharing sector built on venture capital and gray-area labor was a multibillion-dollar business. The idea of a real sharing economy based on shared ownership and shared governance remained mostly an afterthought.

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A big man with round, dark glasses who likes to play exotic musical instruments, Whitfield talks about the future with stories about the past. Once, in a conversation with Kali Akuno and Jessica Gordon Nembhard, I heard him point out that when their ancestors shed off slavery and demanded forty acres and a mule, they wanted the means of production, not the means of consumption.20 They wanted a hand in shaping the economy, not just a portion of its output. To keep their freedom from getting snatched away again, they knew they had to be owners. The evidence, anyway, doesn’t fully agree that the wonders of automation are doing away with jobs on their own.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next
by Andrew McAfee
Published 30 Sep 2019

In his 1971 bestseller, The Closing Circle, biologist Barry Commoner agreed, “The present system of production is self-destructive [and] the present course of human civilization is suicidal.” But, he maintained, we didn’t need to turn away from affluence altogether; we just needed to stop making chemical-laden products in big, polluting factories. The T in the IPAT was the real problem. If our means of production became smaller scale, closer to nature, and more organic, they would become sustainable (a concept Commoner helped popularize). As he wrote, “The needed productive reforms can be carried out without seriously reducing the present level of useful goods available.” Recycle In addition to consuming less, recycling the materials we use is another obvious solution to resource depletion.

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So am I, because these “mundane matters” have twice reshaped the world—first during the Industrial Era, when technological progress allowed us to prosper by taking more from the planet, and now in the Second Machine Age, when we’ve finally figured out how to prosper while taking less. Capitalism: Means of Production Capitalism and religion are the two subjects that leave the fewest people on the sidelines. People have very firmly held opinions on both topics, and few change their minds no matter what evidence and arguments are presented to them. Yet despite this clear history of intransigence, many thinkers and writers have tried to bring others around to their point of view on both topics.

Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization
by Branko Milanovic
Published 10 Apr 2016

But nationalization of enterprises changed that: wages of low-skilled workers were relatively high and wages of high-skilled workers relatively low. Massive increase in schooling on the supply side, however, would have produced some reduction in the high-skill wage premium even if these were market economies. Nationalization of the means of production had two other effects on income distribution. It abolished income from property, income that is always heavily skewed toward the rich, and it almost eliminated the entrepreneurial return, since private entrepreneurship was banned or pushed to the margins. Entrepreneurial income remained in existence only in small-scale service sectors (hotels, repair shops, etc.), and, in Yugoslavia and Poland, in agriculture, where land stayed largely in private hands but was divided into small parcels.

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This is, I think, true in many respects as far as liberal society is concerned but not in the one that we address here, namely, the effects of inequality on capitalism. For Islam itself, not only as it exists in dominantly Muslim countries, but even in theory, is indeed a kind of capitalism, in its emphasis on private ownership of the means of production, the pursuit of gain, and the rejection of unfree labor.31 The only area of economics where Western and Islamic capitalisms part ways is in the treatment of interest (as differentiated from profit, which, unlike interest, is a variable rather than a fixed source of income that depends on the success of the enterprise).

The Classical School
by Callum Williams
Published 19 May 2020

He was far from hostile to trade unions which, at that time, were regarded with nothing but disdain by most of the establishment and were in any case marginal organisations (the best figures suggest that in around 1850, just 100,000 Britons were unionised). He was also in favour of the establishment of workers’ cooperatives, where ordinary people rather than distant bosses would have control over the means of production. That would ensure that workers were paid more fairly. Mill is a big fan of the peasant management of agriculture over more “rational” methods. He praises the French métayer system of sharecropping–which François Quesnay disliked intensely because it was economically inefficient (see Chapter 5).

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Socialists today have little faith in top-down intervention by a centralised state to create prosperity and equality (the best example of this is the British Labour Party’s “Alternative Models of Ownership” report, published in 2017). Instead, just like Mill, they want to ensure that workers share in the means of production–land and capital, in Mill’s schema–and have a say over economic decisions. So, for modern socialists, that means promoting cooperatives, where workers can be their own bosses. And it means putting utilities and the like into the hands of “the community” rather than the central government. Whether one agrees or not with this economic vision, the historical lineage is clear (though frequently unacknowledged).

Capitalism: A Ghost Story
by Arundhati Roy
Published 5 May 2014

That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s one hundred richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.1 The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla.2 No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vastu and feng shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.”3 In India the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post–International Monetary Fund (IMF) “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the netherworld, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains, and denuded forests; the ghosts of 250,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us.4 And who survive on less than twenty Indian rupees a day.5 Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion.6 He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalization of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fiber, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research, and stem cell storage services.

Strategy: A History
by Lawrence Freedman
Published 31 Oct 2013

The unique advantages of communists was that they were the most “advanced and resolute” with the clearest understanding of “the lines of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement.” This was not a strategy for a state, nation, party, or institution—and certainly not for an individual. Rather it was for a class, defined in terms of the relationship to the means of production. During 1848, revolution spread like an epidemic across Europe, with the most important outbreaks in France, Germany, Poland, Italy, and the Austrian Empire. Although the contagion began in Sicily, it was France that led the way in the intensity and seriousness of its own uprising. After the fall of Napoleon, France had returned to a monarchy, supposedly constitutional.

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It was problematic for a Marxist to accept that politics was an arena autonomous from economics, with its own tendencies and passions, but allowing the possibility of a range of factors intervening between the two rendered their relationship tenuous. If ideas had consequences of their own and were more than reflections of shifts in the means of production and the composition of classes, how could it be assumed that the battle for ideas would remain linked with the underlying class struggle? Once it was admitted that individuals could hold notionally contradictory thoughts in their heads, why stop with the contest between the hegemonic ideas of the ruling class or the incipient counter-hegemony of the ruled?

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This was coupled with a more esoteric dispute over the philosophical validity of dialectical materialism. From that point anti-communism dominated his thoughts and he moved firmly to the right. In 1941, during the early stages of this journey, without changing his rigorous, quasi-scientific, predictive style, and still focusing on the means of production to see where power lay, Burnham published a highly influential book, entitled The Managerial Revolution. He identified a new class—not the proletariat—moving into a dominant position. As the title implied, the book’s core thesis was that the managers, who provided the technical direction and coordination of production, were now in charge, replacing capitalists and communists alike.

The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation
by Carl Benedikt Frey
Published 17 Jun 2019

In other words, people gradually lost ownership of the means of production and their autonomy over the pace of work, leading to the creation of what Karl Marx would call a working class. The slow but relentless divorce between capital and labor that characterizes the process of industrialization had begun. From the late seventeenth century onward, this process of alienation swept across the country, although in an uneven manner. In Yorkshire the independence of the artisan remained almost untouched, while in the district of Bradford, wealthy merchants controlled industry. But nowhere had the means of production changed. There was no mechanization.4 Why did the factory system emerge when it did?

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In fact, Marx’s belief that capitalism was set for a crisis of overproduction, in which mechanized industry extracted surpluses from working people, which led to greater wealth in the hands of the few and the impoverishment of the proletariat, seemed quite plausible at the time. Cascading levels of inequality, Marx predicted, would eventually create a shortfall in aggregate demand and lead to the collapse of the capitalist system. Such a crisis, he argued, could be avoided only though a revolution in which the proletariat would take ownership of the means of production and redistribute the benefits of mechanization. Had Engels’s pause persisted longer, some version of this outcome might well have occurred. But mercifully it didn’t. We saw in chapter 5 that things changed around the mid-nineteenth century. As Marx was writing, the modern growth pattern emerged.

Why Wages Rise
by F. A. Harper
Published 1 Jan 1957

For if all value comes from labor and is in proportion thereto, any share of the pie going to anyone other than the laborer, in proportion to his labor, must be the result of a parasitical attachment by capitalists. The devilment in the capitalist setup, according to Marx, is made possible by the private ownership of the land, materials, and tools with which labor does its work. The capitalist owner who holds title to these material means of production can, in this way, claim ownership of the product. He can then withhold any part of it he wishes from the laborer — the one who Marx claimed was the rightful owner of all of it because he is the one who created all its value in the first place. So pay for the use of capital is like loot from theft, as Marx saw it.

The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
by Donella H. Meadows , Jørgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows
Published 15 Apr 2004

These problems were solved relatively quickly, resulting in concentrations of labor around mines and mills. The process elevated technology and commerce to a prominent position in human society-above religion and ethics. Again everything changed in ways that no one could have imagined. Machines, not land, became the central means of production. Feudalism gave way to capitalism and to capitalism's dissenting offshoot, communism. Roads, railroads, factories, and smokestacks appeared on the landscape. Cities swelled. Again the change was a mixed blessing. Factory labor was even harder and more demeaning than farm labor. The air and waters near the new factories turned unspeakably filthy.

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One role of local networks is to help reestablish the sense of community and relation to place that has been largely lost since the industrial revolution. When it comes to global networks, we would like to make a plea that they be truly global. The means of participation in international information streams are as badly distributed as are the means of production. There are more telephones in Tokyo, it has been said, than in all of Africa. That must be even more true of computers, fax machines, airline connections, and invitations to international meetings. But once more the wonder of human inventiveness seems to provide a surprising solution in the form of the Web and cheap access devices.

The Upside of Inequality
by Edward Conard
Published 1 Sep 2016

These circumstances led economists to believe that income inequality narrows as countries grow richer—what economists call a Kuznets curve, after Simon Kuznets, the economist who theorized it. In agrarian economies, where a small cabal of landowners initially controls the means of production, industrialization of those economies often broadens ownership of the means of production and raises wages, which narrows income inequality. Similarly, where a broad base of uneducated talent becomes educated, income inequality again may narrow. But this provides a cautionary tale. Economists often make their bones by discovering generalizable truths.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities
by Howard P. Segal
Published 20 May 2012

His was an avowedly modern vision of a democratic world state governed by a world parliament, extending equal rights to women and men, abolishing private property, developing a universal language, and 18 The Variety of Utopias powered both by atomic energy and by a love of science and technology. Institutions would be cooperative and international in scope, the means of production would be publicly owned, goods and services would be provided for all, obsession with money would thereby cease, education would be vocational in orientation, military institutions would be greatly diminished, and the numerous other scientific and technological advances would also be highly practical.

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His prolific writings include News From Nowhere (1890), about a utopian communist society that was heavily influenced by both Ruskin and Marx. The narrator falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakens to find himself in a future society wholly different from his own Victorian London. Based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, this utopia lacks money, classes, governmental structures, congestion, poverty, crime, and industrial pollution. Like Ruskin, Morris envisions a prevalence of medieval buildings, clothing, and musical instruments. In News From Nowhere, all large towns have been downsized to increase the extent of the countryside; huge industrial cities such as Manchester have disappeared; and large-scale factories have given way to small workshops scattered throughout the land and catering to the exercise of craftsmanship and art.

Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets
by John McMillan
Published 1 Jan 2002

Albert Einstein wrote an article in 1949 called “Why Socialism?”2 His answer: the market economy brings crisis, instability, and impoverishment. “The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil.” The only way to eliminate this evil, he concluded, was by establishing socialism, with the means of production “owned by society itself.” He advocated a planned economy, which “adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.” At the time, Einstein’s position was widely shared.

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As Edmund Wilson put it in To the Finland Station, his sympathetic history of socialist thought, “Lenin’s aims were of course humanitarian, democratic and anti-bureaucratic; but the logic of the situation was too strong for Lenin’s aims.” The Communist Party “turned into a tyrannical machine.” Wilson concluded that the state’s taking over of the means of production can “never guarantee the happiness of anybody but the dictators themselves.”5 To pin the blame on the planners, however, is to overlook the deeper reasons for planning’s failures. Imagine yourself as a central planner. Your task is to design the entire economy. You want to do the best for your country: to ensure, as far as possible, that everyone’s needs are met.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

A lot of new kinds of media have emerged since Gutenberg: images and sounds were encoded onto objects, from photographic plates to music CDs; electromagnetic waves were harnessed to create radio and TV. All these subsequent revolutions, as different as they were, still had the core of Gutenberg economics: enormous investment costs. It’s expensive to own the means of production, whether it is a printing press or a TV tower, which makes novelty a fundamentally high-risk operation. If it’s expensive to own and manage the means of production or if it requires a staff, you’re in a world of Gutenberg economics. And wherever you have Gutenberg economics, whether you are a Venetian publisher or a Hollywood producer, you’re going to have fifteenth-century risk management as well, where the producers have to decide what’s good before showing it to the audience.

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner
by Po Bronson
Published 14 Jul 2020

It should still remind us of the skies of our childhood. Okay, there’s the 10 Rules for Blue we invented over coffee. I mean, it’s just a color… so this is sort of abstract at this point… but I think it’s fair to say, this is how we’d prefer to make things. If we had the chance to invent the means of production, then we’d all agree, yeah, this is better. So if you’re on humankind’s quest for a Perfect Blue, now you’re thinking harder about how things are made, and the impact on people and their governments in the process. Throughout history, blues were either insanely expensive (you had to be King Tut to afford them), or someone in the supply chain was getting royally screwed.

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We’ve made a big mistake in constructing the sociopolitical argument as a trade-off between the climate or economic growth. We’ve been led down a decades-long line of reasoning that inevitably characterizes climate-friendly policies as economic suppressors. But the desperate need to reinvent the means of production is on every front, with every natural resource. Even sand. You can imagine a G7 Summit in the year 2040. GERMANY: Well, Malaysia, it looks like your economic growth is $15 trillion below the number you promised. MALAYSIA: We implemented robots in every factory, landed a rocket on Saturn, gave everyone a basic income and free tuition, and 95 percent of our citizens now have PhDs in artificial intelligence.

MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them
by Nouriel Roubini
Published 17 Oct 2022

A neo-Marxian view of underconsumption spurred by rising inequality that technology exacerbates. Stepping back to the connections between our megathreats, this is where the debt burden and AI collide. In a world increasingly driven by AI the economic pie might become huge for those with highly developed skills that cannot be automated and those who own the means of production. “Karl Marx was right,” entrepreneur Jerry Kaplan told a tech-savvy audience at Google. “The struggle between capital and labor is a losing proposition for workers. What that means is that the benefits of automation naturally accrue to those who can invest in the new systems.”49 Massive debt disproportionately burdens the people left behind, who live off shrinking paychecks or with public assistance.

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Twists abound, including community service in exchange for UBI. We could give each individual a share of ownership of all firms. Then they would receive capital returns even if their labor incomes are challenged. If you think about it, this is a form of socialism where every worker owns the means of production. It is not hard to envision a scenario where people who demonize these choices today as socialist will clamor for them when algorithms perform brain surgery and prepare fast food. Any of these options will lead to pitched political battles. If we squabble long enough, computers may get to decide how to divide the economic pie.

The Meaning of It All
by Richard P. Feynman
Published 8 Jul 2012

The whole industrial revolution would almost have been impossible without the development of science. The possibilities today of producing quantities of food adequate for such a large population, of controlling sickness—the very fact that there can be free men without the necessity of slavery for full production—are very likely the result of the development of scientific means of production. Now this power to do things carries with it no instructions on how to use it, whether to use it for good or for evil. The product of this power is either good or evil, depending on how it is used. We like improved production, but we have problems with automation. We are happy with the development of medicine, and then we worry about the number of births and the fact that no one dies from the diseases we have eliminated.

The Hidden Wealth of Nations: The Scourge of Tax Havens
by Gabriel Zucman , Teresa Lavender Fagan and Thomas Piketty
Published 21 Sep 2015

But my method captures the bulk of offshore wealth, for one simple reason: at the top of wealth distribution—that is, for fortunes of dozens of millions of dollars and more—on average most of the wealth takes the form of financial securities. It is rare that someone invests all of his wealth in a yacht. It is one of the great rules of capitalism that the higher one rises on the ladder of wealth, the greater the share of financial securities in one’s portfolio. Corporate equities—the securities that confer ownership of the means of production, which leads to true economic and social power—are especially important at the very top. In the end, the order of magnitude that I obtain—8% of the financial wealth of households—is likely to be correct, although one might imagine that the true figure, all wealth combined, is 10% or 11%. The Post-Crisis Dynamic In a summit held in April 2009, the leaders of the G20 countries declared the “end of bank secrecy.”

Modernising Money: Why Our Monetary System Is Broken and How It Can Be Fixed
by Andrew Jackson (economist) and Ben Dyson (economist)
Published 15 Nov 2012

Yet because money is simply another physical commodity, this lending has no real effects; rather, it merely transfers resources from one person to another: “Often is an extension of credit talked of as equivalent to a creation of capital, or as if credit actually were capital. It seems strange that there should be any need to point out, that credit being only permission to use the capital of another person, the means of production cannot be increased by it, but only transferred. If the borrower’s means of production and of employing labour are increased by the credit given him, the lender’s are as much diminished. The same sum cannot be used as capital both by the owner and also by the person to whom it is lent: it cannot supply its entire value in wages, tools, and materials, to two sets of labourers at once.”

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

Some tenets of the Soviet answer are clear.5 All the means of industrial production were nationalized, and although Soviet citizens could own some “individual” (not “private”) property (including houses, apartments, and automobiles), few could afford to do so.6 The Soviet state appointed three state ministries to serve as the nation’s economic brains, budget-keeper, and managers of the nation’s vast property holdings and means of production—the Gosplan (State Planning Commission), the Gosbank (State Bank), and the Gossnab (State Commission for Materials and Equipment Supply). (Gos is short for gosudarstvo or Russian for state or government.) Gosbank, the central bank that prepared the state budget with the Ministry of Finance, played a transactional accounting role and the least critical role of the three.

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In corporate and command regimes, if the supply of one’s quality goods meets demand, one must work harder to meet future elevated demand. If the supply of one’s goods falls short of the need, the capitalist market actor will adjust or go bankrupt, and the socialist administrative actor will be punished. So long as labor is isolated from those who manage the means of production—Marx himself railed against the doyens of exchange value (Tauschwert)—management profits and alternately pays or punishes workers for past productivity. Unlike market behavior, any deviations from the plan could send culpable ripple effects down or up the chain, and the plan itself could be understood in the context of its local knowledge.

The Future of Money
by Bernard Lietaer
Published 28 Apr 2013

'Here we stand, confronted by insurmountable opportunities!' Neither left, nor right, but forward? The traditional left-right debate is itself an inheritance of the Industrial Age economic framework. The origin of that debate had to do with private or public ownership of the 'means of production', i.e. the factories and machines. As the means of production are becoming knowledge, the new political and economic vocabulary to deal with these new realities doesn't yet exist. But how about changing the monetary framework itself? To understand this, let's first play a very simple game called the 'Sufficiency of Money Game'.

The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries
by Kathi Weeks
Published 8 Sep 2011

In equally polemical fashion, Weber takes on his own enemy, the structural teleologies of the economic determinists, and presents a sharply contrasting analysis that emphasizes the unpredictable emergence and historical force of ideas. Marx and Weber each offer an account of how two classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, came to be; but where Marx focuses on their relations to the means of production as propertied owners and propertyless workers, Weber concentrates on the development of their consciousnesses as employers and employees. Weber explains the ideas that gave the political economists’ parable about the ethically deserving and undeserving its authority and insists that this story must be understood as more than an ideological cover for the use of force; it was itself part of the arsenal of historical change in Europe and North America, and part of the foundation upon which capitalism was built.

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According to this well-rehearsed story of capitalist development, these bourgeois property relations eventually become impediments to the full development of modern productive forces: “The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them” (Marx and Engels 1992, 9). Communism, in contrast, would democratize the economic relations of ownership and control. The relations of production—class relations—would be thus radically transfigured, while the means of production and the labor process itself would merely be unfettered. Although it is usually associated with the political legacy of state socialism, socialist modernization does have some points of reference in the writings of Marx and the Marxist tradition. For example, in a text from 1918 consistent with this paradigm’s theory of revolution, Lenin distinguished between two phases after the overthrow of capitalism: the first, socialist phase, in which “factory discipline” is extended over the whole of society; and the final phase of true communism.

Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought A. I. To Google, Facebook, and the World
by Cade Metz
Published 15 Mar 2021

He saw himself as the rare technology executive who understood the technology, a strategist as well as a systems architect, a visionary who read the research papers emerging from the world’s leading labs. He had a way of delivering his ideas in sharp, self-contained, slightly strange technological axioms: Computing is the intentional manipulation of information toward a purpose. Data is becoming the primary means of production. Deep learning is computation on a new substrate. Even before the meeting in Building 99, he knew where the industry was headed. Like Peter Lee, he had recently attended a private gathering of computer scientists where one of the founders of Google Brain trumpeted the rise of deep learning.

…

In the future, he said, the sensors of a car would be laser-based lidar sensors, radar, and cameras, and there would be new kinds of street signs designed just for these sensors. China’s other advantage, he said, was data. In each socioeconomic era, he liked to say, there was one primary means of production. In the agricultural era, it was about the land. “It doesn’t matter how many people you have. It doesn’t matter how brilliant you are. You cannot produce more if you do not have more land.” In the industrial era, it was about labor and equipment. In the new era, it was about data. “Without data, you cannot build a speech recognizer.

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times
by Giovanni Arrighi
Published 15 Mar 2010

Control over India meant a command over financial and material resources — including military manpower — which no state, or likely combination of states, could match, and that no ruling group could for the time being challenge militarily. At the same time, Britain’s unilateral free trade regime connected the entire world to Britain. Britain became the most convenient and efficient “marketplace” to procure the means of payment and means of production and to dispose of primary products. To borrow an expression from Michael Mann (1986), states were “caged” in a UK-centered global division of labor which for the time being further restrained their dispositions and capabilities to wage war on the leading capitalist state and on one another.

…

(I-Iobsbawm 1968: 34) As government expenditures escalated on the eve and during the Napoleonic Wars, the level of production and the pace of product and process innovation in the iron industry increased sharply, and the capital goods industry became a far more autonomous “department” of the British domestic economy than it had ever been or than it still was in any other country. The proliferation of enterprises specializing in the production of means of production quickened the pace of innovation among the users of these means and stimulated British producers, traders, and financiers to find ways and means of profiting from the greater number, range, and variety of capital goods available on the market (see chapter 3). Military demands on the British economy thus went far to shape the subsequent phases of the industrial revolution, allowing the improvement of steam engines and making such critical innovations as the iron railway and iron ships possible at a time and under conditions which simply would not have existed without the wartime impetus to iron production.

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Even if international trade had been liberalized more speedily through a unilateral adoption of free trade by the United States or through the action of the stillborn ITO, the extreme centralization of world liquidity, productive capacity, and purchasing power within the jurisdiction of the United States would have constituted a far more serious obstacle to world economic expansion than tariff walls and other governmentally imposed trade restrictions. Unless world liquidity was distributed more evenly, the world could not purchase from the United States the means of production which it needed to supply anything of value to US consumers in whose hands most of the world’s efilective demand was concentrated. But here too, the US Congress was extremely reluctant to relinquish its control over world liquidity as a means to the end of boosting world economic expansion.

A History of Zionism
by Walter Laqueur
Published 1 Jan 1972

Borokhov was convinced that by a correct Marxist analysis he had found the only practical solution: the Jewish middle class would be drawn by spontaneous forces to Palestine, and gradually build up there the means of production. Expanding industry would attract the Jewish working masses to Palestine, and the industrial proletariat, pursuing a correct policy of class struggle, would establish itself as the vanguard of the national liberation movement. Borokhov’s writings are replete with references to the contradiction between the means of production and the relations of production, and to other concepts familiar to the student of orthodox Marxist economics. He was an adept in manipulating the tools of Marxist analysis, much to the chagrin of his ideological adversaries, who had been accustomed to disputations about Zionism with enthusiasts arguing in romantic-Utopian terms.

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Much of the revisionist critique of the Zionist leadership had to do with economic and social policy. Jabotinsky had been interested in economics as a student, and under the influence of his Italian Socialist teachers had written in 1906 that class conflicts between employers and employed could not be reconciled, and that the nationalisation of the means of production was the only solution.* He had not belonged to a Socialist party but had certainly believed in Socialist ideals. Even twenty years later, when defining the revisionist programme, he wrote that the class struggle in Palestine was an inevitable, even healthy phenomenon. Revisionists would neither join the chorus of those who talked about the bankruptcy of the collective settlements nor would they attack the (‘bourgeois’) fourth aliya.

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.‡ Gradually Jabotinsky retreated from his early views about Socialism and nationalisation: the class struggle was perhaps justified in other countries; however sharp the conflict between German workers and employers, it would not destroy the German economy, whereas the building of Palestine was only at the beginning and irreparable damage could be caused by major class conflicts.§ He saw no basic difference between Socialism and Communism, and wrote that nationalisation of the means of production, if realised, would result in a society where there was even less freedom and equality than in the present one. For some time he was influenced by the original theories on the ideal economic system developed by Josef Popper Lynkeus, a figure of some literary renown in Vienna who was in contact with Robert Stricker, Jabotinsky’s chief aide in Austria.

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell
Published 31 Dec 1913

‘The hundreds of thousands of pounds that are yearly wasted in well meant but useless charity accomplish no lasting good, because while charity soothes the symptoms it ignores the disease, which is–– the private ownership of the means of producing the necessaries of life, and the restriction of production, by a few selfish individuals for their own profit. And for that disease there is no other remedy than the one I have told you of––the public ownership and culti- vation of the land, the public ownership of the mines, railways, canals, ships, factories and all other means of production, and the establishment of an Industrial Civil Service––a National Army of Industry––for the purpose of producing the necessaries, comforts and refinements of life in that abundance which has been made possible by science and machinery––for the use and benefit of the whole of the people.’ ‘Yes: and where’s the money to come from for all this?’

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‘––The State would continue to pay to the shareholders the same dividends they had received on an average for, say, the previous three years. These payments would be continued to the present share- holders for life, or the payments might be limited to a stated number of years and the shares would be made non-transferable, like the railway tickets of today. As for the factories, shops, and other means of production and distribution, the State must adopt the same methods of doing business as the present owners. I mean that even as the big Trusts and companies are crushing––by competition––the individual workers and small traders, so the State should crush the trusts by competition. It is surely justifiable for the State to do for the benefit of the whole people that which the capitalists are already doing for the profit of a few shareholders.

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In short, they were unable to disprove that the monopoly of the land and machinery by a comparatively few The Wise Men of the East persons, is the cause of the poverty of the majority. But when these arguments that they were unable to answer were put before them and when it was pointed out that the only possible remedy was the Public Ownership and Management of the Means of production,* they remained angrily silent, having no alternative plan to suggest. At other times the meeting resolved itself into a number of quar- relsome disputes between the Liberals and Tories that formed the crowd, which split itself up into a lot of little groups and whatever the original subject might have been they soon drifted to a hundred other things, for most of the supporters of the present system seemed incapable of pursuing any one subject to its logical con- clusion.

Locke: A Very Short Introduction
by John Dunn
Published 31 Jul 2003

But this comparatively casual acknowledgement of what was, after all, a fairly central feature of English economic relations in his day can hardly establish an enthusiasm for the central role of wage labour in capitalist production. In particular Locke denies explicitly that a man who has been deprived of the means of production (given by God to all men) can be forced into subjection through control over these means (T I 41–2). Charity gives every Man a Title to so much out of another’s Plenty, as will keep him from Extream want, where he has no means to subsist otherwise; and a Man can no more justly make use of another’s necessity, to force him to become his Vassal, by withholding that Relief, God requires him to afford to the wants of his Brother, than he that has more strength can seize upon a weaker, master him to his Obedience, and with a Dagger at his Throat offer him Death or Slavery.

The New Prophets of Capital
by Nicole Aschoff
Published 10 Mar 2015

Sustainable practices enable firms to make bigger, deeper footprints as they expand into new markets and tap new sources of supply. As long as production is designed to increase profits, as it must be in capitalism, rather than to meet the needs of humans, the environment will never escape and never be healed. As geographer Neil Smith argued: In capitalism “nature becomes a universal means of production in the sense that it not only provides the subjects, objects, and instruments of production, but is also in its totality an appendage to the production process.”38 Competition is a defining feature of capitalism, one that will eventually steamroll all warm, fuzzy versions of capitalism, and even if long-term, virtuous growth were possible, the imperatives of the profit motive require that capitalism keep expanding and growing, consuming and destroying the planet as it goes.

Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
by Tom Wolfe
Published 1 Jan 1970

“Let me answer the question—” “You dun‟t eefen listen to de kvestion,” says Preminger. “How can you answer de kvestion?” “Let me answer the question,” Cox says, and he says to Lenny: “We believe that the government is obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income . . . see . . . but if the white businessman will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessman and placed in the community, with the people.” Lenny says: “How? I dig it! But how?” “Right on!” Someone in the back digs it, too. “Right on!” Julie Belafonte pipes up: “That‟s a very difficult question!” “You can‟t blueprint the future,” says Cox. “You mean you‟re just going to wing it?”

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)
by Andrew M. Lobaczewski
Published 1 Jan 2006

Originally referred to the grey-cloaked Capuchin friar Francois Leclerc du Tremblay, confidant of Cardinal Richelieu. [Editor’s note.] * * * [49]: Specific characteristics of a disease. [Editor’s note.] * * * [50]: From the Communist Manifesto: “By proletariat [is meant] the class of modern wage laborers, who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor-power in order to live.” [Editor’s note.] * * * [51]: Fascism seems to be the diametric opposite of Communism and Marxism, both in a philosophic and political sense, and also opposed democratic capitalist economics along with socialism and liberal democracy.

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Fascism is also typified by totalitarian attempts to impose state control over all aspects of life: political, social, cultural, and economic which accurately describes what was passed off under the name of Communism. The fascist state regulates and controls (as opposed to nationalizing) the means of production. Fascism exalts the nation, state, or race as superior to the individuals, institutions, or groups composing it. Fascism uses explicit populist rhetoric; calls for a heroic mass effort to restore past greatness; and demands loyalty to a single leader, often to the point of a cult of personality.

Roads to Berlin
by Cees Nooteboom and Laura Watkinson
Published 2 Jan 1990

And what are they to do with themselves, once the semblance of activity offered by an army in peacetime has been removed? Words need to be tapped like a tuning fork. Does it sound the same? Is it really the same? The S.E.D. is based on a “democracy” that politically secures the socialist ownership of the means of production. According to the article in Der Tagesspiegel, this should be seen in the light of the “Grundsatz der Stabilität,” the principle of stability, along the most sensitive border in the world, the one I am now crossing. According to this principle, the division of Germany is essential to maintain this stability.

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Power has a gentle face here; somewhere behind all those windows sits a person who does not believe that German savings should be handed out to all of those other Europeans who have been living on credit on such a grand scale, a person who embraces old-fashioned values and will not be forced by friend or foe to push up inflation until the dollar becomes so cheap that America can pay off its immense debts to China and the whole game can begin all over again. The world as a roulette table is not an attractive image; protectionism is not an option, nor is the state as the owner of the means of production, or Lafontaine as a reincarnation of Marx. These are confusing times. The people are grumbling, quietly for now, but their complaints may soon become louder. There is a constant stream of foreign guests here, the man from Russia and the man from China. This building may not be the center of the world, but it is an intersection that no one can avoid.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia
by Adrian Shirk
Published 15 Mar 2022

It seems to me utopianism is almost always responding to the same things: capitalism, war, tyranny, inequality, persecution, the impending end of the world, or a belief that the world has already ended. There are surface differences in the response, generation to generation, group to group, but not foundational ones. The makers of utopias are responding to the dregs of a violent empire by dropping out and simplifying the means of production. Owen saw the terrors wrought by industrialization, how the machine of capitalism was, among other things, killing child laborers and natural ecosystems, sowing sexual oppression and robbing any possibility for a happy human life. The Harmonists, I think, saw something similar at the turn of the nineteenth century, though interpreted a step further that the rise of industrialization and colonial violence might mean that, finally, yes, the world is coming to an end shortly, because for how much longer can this hold, really?

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I’m a good white person, could save you from it. Consciously or not, this is what a lot of the other white European utopians came to build in America, or found themselves building in the nineteenth century, or later on, too. They were dredging themselves from the slime of a violent empire and trying to simplify the means of production, simplify the world down to a single element, because they could not square their understandings of God or heaven or the good life or the eschaton with all of this trauma, all of this horror, all of this will toward torture and conquest, coursing through their veins like the River Styx. utopianotes Lost Valley Intentional Community I’m seventeen, and my friend Maggie and I have both graduated from high school early.

What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems
by Linda Yueh
Published 4 Jun 2018

These were the peasant labourers who rose up, under Mao Zedong, against the capitalist and landowning classes. It was the type of revolution that Marx predicted: social conflict between the exploited labourers and the capitalist classes that would lead to the overthrow of the old system and the adoption of a communal or communist system of ownership. Marx was opposed to private ownership of the means of production and described bankers as ‘a class of parasites’.18 In the Communist Manifesto there was a programme which would carve ‘despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production’.19 It included:   1.  Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes   2.  

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Still, China followed some of the principles set out in The Communist Manifesto and Capital, at least for a time. For instance, Marx believed that a worker’s condition could only be improved by abolishing private property, so China created a state-owned sector comprising firms and banks. China ridding itself of private enterprises after 1949 meant state ownership of the means of production, so everyone was a worker as Marx espoused. Marx also believed that in the initial stages of a communist society, workers would be paid not in money but in notes denoted by labour time. Pay would correspond to hours worked, after a deduction of a ‘common fund’ for investment and maintenance.

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination
by Adom Getachew
Published 5 Feb 2019

These reforms would be instituted alongside a gradual movement toward independence that required a period of “responsible self-­government” before achieving sovereignty.3 Azikiwe argued that the economic and social reforms required democratic self-­government. Only “the crystallization of democracy in the social, economic and political life of the territories,” which entailed “the full control of the essential means of production and distribution by the indigenous communities of the territories,” would “effectively promote social equality and communal welfare.”4 If Azikiwe hoped that postwar reconstruction offered an opportunity to overcome the “factors of capitalism and imperialism [that] have stultified the normal growth of these territories,” the United Nations appeared to entrench the status quo.5 According to Azikiwe, in San Francisco “there is no New Deal for the black man. . . .

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Echoing Marcus Garvey, whom he had once dismissed as “national reformist misleader,” Padmore argued, “Pan-­Africanism seeks the attainment of the government of Africans by Africans for Africans.”26 In this aim, Padmore argued that Pan-­Africanists endorsed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and sought to From Pr inciple to R ight [ 77 ] achieve the right to self-­determination as a “prerequisite to the federation of self-­governing states on a regional basis, leading ultimately to the creation of a United States of Africa.”27 While Pan-­Africanism was independent of official Communism, it recognized “much that is true in the Marxist interpretation of history” and strove for “Democratic Socialism, with state control of the basic means of production and distribution.”28 In staking out Pan-­Africanism’s autonomy in these terms, Padmore was not claiming authenticity or demanding the recognition of difference on the model of Berlin’s “pagan self-­assertion.” As Padmore’s references to human rights, self-­determination, Marxism, and democratic socialism suggest, autonomy did not mean that Pan-­Africanism was a self-­contained tradition of thought that stood outside the idioms and terms of Western political thinking.

The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today
by Linda Yueh
Published 15 Mar 2018

These were the peasant labourers who rose up, under Mao Zedong, against the capitalist and landowning classes. It was the type of revolution that Marx predicted: social conflict between the exploited labourers and the capitalist classes that would lead to the overthrow of the old system and the adoption of a communal or communist system of ownership. Marx was opposed to private ownership of the means of production and described bankers as ‘a class of parasites’.18 In the Communist Manifesto there was a programme which would carve ‘despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production’.19 It included: Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes A heavy progressive or graduated income tax Abolition of all right of inheritance Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels Centralization of credit in the hands of the state by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan Equal liability of all to work; establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the populace over the country Free education for all children in public schools; abolition of child factory labour in its present form; combination of education with industrial production, etc.

…

Still, China followed some of the principles set out in The Communist Manifesto and Capital, at least for a time. For instance, Marx believed that a worker’s condition could only be improved by abolishing private property, so China created a state-owned sector comprising firms and banks. China ridding itself of private enterprises after 1949 meant state ownership of the means of production, so everyone was a worker as Marx espoused. Marx also believed that in the initial stages of a communist society, workers would be paid not in money but in notes denoted by labour time. Pay would correspond to hours worked, after a deduction of a ‘common fund’ for investment and maintenance.

The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America
by Timothy Snyder
Published 2 Apr 2018

History was a struggle, but its sense was man’s overcoming of circumstance to regain his own nature. The emergence of technology, argued Marx, allowed some men to dominate others, forming social classes. Under capitalism, the bourgeoisie controlled the means of production, oppressing the mass of workers. This very oppression instructed workers about the character of history and made them revolutionaries. The proletariat would overthrow the bourgeoisie, seize the means of production, and thereby restore man to himself. Once there was no property, thought Marx, human beings would live in happy cooperation. Ilyin was a Right Hegelian. In a typically sharp phrase, he wrote that Marx never got out of the “waiting room” of Hegelian philosophy.

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019

Many social quantification platforms have similar ways of rewarding users, but in general, the more “social” a platform is, the less expectation there is that users will be recompensed for their work, since the joy of social interaction facilitated by the platform is presented as enough payment. Julian Kücklich refers to this phenomenon in which participation itself generates value as playbor (part play, part labor), suggesting that from the perspective of capitalism, the means of production here are the players themselves.78 Companies in the social quantification sector use unpaid labor not only to exploit users but to undermine other competitors in the cultural production sector. For instance, Jonathan Taplin points out that YouTube is the largest music-streaming platform in the world, to which users (unpaid laborers) have uploaded practically every song in existence.

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Datafication thus meets Lawrence Crocker’s necessary and sufficient conditions for exploitation: “That there be a surplus product [data] which is under the control of a group [the social quantification sector] which does not include all the producers of that surplus [the public].”67 Capitalists also continue to exploit workers in the traditional way (by collecting more in profit than they pay in wages), but now they are able to exploit individuals who do not even work for them and to whom they do not pay anything. Thus, while the original Marxist definitions of exploitation should be respected, the important point is that the absence of direct exploitation (that is, through a regular job) does not mean exploitation is not happening indirectly (by workers being “excluded from the means of production and from their benefits,”68 as Raymond Murphy observes). For these reasons, the thesis that datafication technologies can have democratic potential must be treated with extreme suspicion. It has become acceptable (even fashionable) to admit that while the platforms of the Cloud Empire are exploitative, they can still be used as ad hoc tools in the fight against capitalism.

Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life
by Kristen R. Ghodsee
Published 16 May 2023

After World War I, when the British took over this territory from the Ottomans, they initially encouraged Jewish migration from Eastern Europe and Russia, much to the consternation of the local Arab and Bedouin populations. Many of the Ashkenazi youth who traveled to Palestine were enthusiastic pioneers filled with ideals of egalitarianism. The socialist principle of “self-labor,” of not having one’s work exploited by owners of the means of production, meant that all members labored together, including the women. Living on desolate land with few resources, these early kibbutzniks did everything themselves, including growing their own food and sourcing their own water. By 1928, there were forty-one kibbutzim in British Palestine, with a population of roughly 2,400 adults and 300 children.35 The kibbutz movement continued to expand rapidly until the Holocaust drastically reduced the population of potential new immigrants from Europe.

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Wales benefited from their desperate position by accruing to himself the sums he earned in excess of the wages he paid them and the costs necessary to run the website. It is against this second type of expropriation of the value that workers create for the owners of productive property (sometimes called “the means of production”) that the communists and anarchists railed. Peter Kropotkin, the Russian prince who became an anarchist, argued that humanity’s progress toward a more advanced and harmonious state of collective living, where everyone could have their basic needs met, was impeded by the state’s violent protection of private property rights.

The Chomsky Reader
by Noam Chomsky
Published 11 Sep 1987

When the legal system itself denies the natural rights of working people in the name of the prerogatives of capital, and this denial is sanctioned by the legal violence of the state, then the theorists of ‘libertarian’ capitalism do not proclaim institutional robbery, but rather they celebrate the “natural liberty” of working people to choose between the remaining options of selling their labor as a commodity and being unemployed. Considering such questions as these, we can hardly rest comfortably with the assumption that freedom declines as equality—for example, in control over resources and means of production—increases. It may be true that equality is inversely related to the freedom to dispose of and make use of property under the social arrangements of capitalism, but the latter condition is not to be simply identified as “freedom.” I do not even consider here the immeasurable loss incurred when a person is converted to a tool of production, so that, as Adam Smith phrased it, he “has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention” and “he naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become,” his mind falling “into that drowsy stupidity, which, in a civilized society, seems to benumb the understanding of almost all the inferior ranks of people.”

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Much the same is true of the vague musings about a “generalized drive for power” which often appear in discussions of American foreign policy. It may well be true that any autocratic system of rule will support and intensify the “drive for power” and give it free rein. In a capitalist society, the operative form of autocratic rule is the private control of the means of production and resources, of commerce and finance, and further, the significant influence on state policy of those who rule the private economy, and who indeed largely staff the government. Elements of the private autocracy who have a specific concern with foreign affairs will naturally tend to use their power and influence to direct state policy for the benefit of the interests they represent.

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It is interesting that such analyses of foreign policy, which incorporate the material interests of private or quasi-private capital as a central factor interacting with others, are often characterized as “vulgar economic determinism” or the like when put forth by opponents of the system of private control of resources and the means of production. On the other hand, similar formulations receive little attention when they appear, as they commonly do, in official explanations of state policy. What is more, explanations that emphasize, say, vague emotional states, or ideological elements, or error, are not similarly characterized as “vulgar emotional (ideological) determinism” or “vulgar fallibilism.”

The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality From the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
by Walter Scheidel
Published 17 Jan 2017

The putative driving forces are all in some way predicated on economic development and its social and demographic consequences: gains that the well-positioned reaped from the control of trade flows, the need to empower leaders to manage the problems arising from growing population densities and more complex relations of production and exchange, class conflict over access to the means of production, and the pressures created by military conflict over scarce resources that favored scaling up, hierarchy, and centralized command structures.30 From the perspective of the study of inequality, it may not, strictly speaking, be particularly important which of these factors mattered most: to the extent that state formation introduced steep and stable hierarchies into societies with significant surpluses, inequalities of power, status, and material wealth were bound to grow.

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All of this was implemented as a direct consequence of the war, which had resulted in foreign occupation.15 Interventions in the economy explicitly pursued leveling as a means to achieve the desired outcomes. The “Basic Directive” for the American occupation authorities entitled “Democratization of Japanese Economic Institutions” urged the promotion of a “wide distribution of income and of the ownership of the means of production and trade.” Aiming for the creation of a social welfare state, occupation policy goals were closely associated with those of the New Deal. In 1943 and 1945, American researchers assessed that the low distribution of wealth to Japanese industrial workers and farmers had stunted domestic consumption and driven overseas economic expansionism.

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Although population levels declined during the first quarter of the century, subsistence crises continued for another generation, and epizootics depleted livestock.12 It appears that much of Europe was caught in some sort of modified Malthusian trap, in which endogenous problems such as an unfavorable land/labor ratio driven by prior demographic growth and exogenous shocks in the form of climate change that lowered output made life precarious for the laboring masses and favored elites who controlled the means of production—above all, land. The Black Death led to a dramatic downturn in population numbers that left the physical infrastructure untouched. Thanks to productivity gains, production declined less than population did, causing average per capita output and incomes to rise. Regardless of whether the plague actually killed more people of working age than it did those younger or older, as is sometimes maintained, land became more abundant relative to labor.

From Peoples into Nations
by John Connelly
Published 11 Nov 2019

5 This Wilson did not say, and though he had studied the problems of Habsburg politics as far back as the 1880s, the US president did not specify what “oppressed peoples” in East Central Europe he hoped to liberate, let alone what boundaries might be drawn to separate them into new national states.6 For both Lenin and Wilson, the promise of national self-determination was also tied to an ideology of international peace, though in different ways. Socialist revolution would efface the differences across peoples, ending the basic sources of human conflict by making the means of production social property. Wars were the result of capitalist conflict over markets. But liberal democracy, peoples governing themselves, would also make war unthinkable, because peoples had no interest in oppressing, let alone killing, one another. One peace activist, the Swedish diplomat August Schvan, expressed the point well in 1915: “With the principle of nationality—that is, the right of every nationality to govern itself as it thinks best—only those will quarrel who want to exert dominance over alien nationalities.”

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People in one part of the country valued a cuisine that was different from that of other parts, and people of different ages liked different kinds of music. Market mechanisms would make the socialist system flexible enough to communicate the desires of specific groups, helping producers and consumers find each other and communicate perceptions of value. None of these reforms questioned socialist ownership of the means of production, but to build a consensus about tastes and desires, citizens had to speak and gather freely in the public sphere. In the view of reformers, this too was not a problem; permitting people to articulate their interests could only strengthen socialism. Younger party cadres of this period were called “technocrats,” because they possessed skills and education lacking in an older generation forged by war and revolution.

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Most said it could not be counted as socialist, a word that evoked life in peace and freedom, with people realizing their worth as human beings; not simply receiving orders but deciding for themselves what to produce and what to say. Marx had wanted to place the economy in the hands of “society,” meaning individuals united in control of the means of production, and Engels had warned against taking decisions on production and distribution from one ruling group and simply placing them in the hands of another. At its core, socialism meant workers ruling themselves. That evidently had not been the case in the East Germany of Erich Honecker. But with good reason the historian sided with Honecker, and by extension, Leonid Brezhnev.

Architecture: A Very Short Introduction
by Andrew Ballantyne
Published 19 Dec 2002

Hector Guimard is best known for the entrances that he designed for the Paris Métro, which have droopily heavy-looking flower heads, with dull red lights that glow mysteriously. They seem to beckon the traveller into a dreamworld, rather than into an efficient transport system, but in their fabrication they were highly rational and depended not on individual craftsmanship but on repeated castings in iron from moulds. The imagery may look soporific, but the means of production was efficient. This use of mass-production methods in architecture will have helped to prepare the way for Le Corbusier’s exhibition of mass-produced furniture, but in the avant-garde circles in which Le Corbusier moved another crucial influence would have been the provocateur Marcel Duchamp’s practice of exhibiting ready-made objects of mass manufacture in an art-gallery setting.

Literary Theory for Robots: How Computers Learned to Write
by Dennis Yi Tenen
Published 6 Feb 2024

We’ll give such textual-­philosophical distractions a good go throughout the book. In conclusion, we will move to a few practical, that is to say political and economic and even personally psychological, considerations. Insert a wise, pithy aphorism about the social good, career choice, the means of production, and the future of creativity. This is the “So what?” part. How will my life change and what is to be done? The mistake, if I may spoil the punchline, was ever to imagine intelligence in a vat of private exceptional achievement. Thinking and writing happen through time, in dialogue with a crowd.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

The percentage of people in any given economy who are capitalists—able to live securely and very comfortably off their capital without having to sell their labor power and with significant ownership of the means of production and finance—is quite small. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels depicted nineteenth-century England as a society in which 10 percent of the population owned the means of production.7 Today we talk about society being owned by the 1 percent, and even that figure is too high. In fact, as capitalist nations get wealthier, there is no marked increase in the percentage of the population that is capitalist, but there is often an increase in the standard of living for the workforce, including a well-paid upper-middle professional class.

The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. le Guin
Published 30 Apr 1974

One solution to this paradoxical situation was to inaugurate representative democracies; but the anarchists found even this solution too confining, for they argued that all governments, whatever their official form, quickly become plutocracies (societies governed by the rich). Many socialists and communists argued that the path to reform lay through collective ownership of the means of production to ensure that there would be no rich. The transition to full economic democracy would be managed by a centralized, all-powerful government. Anarchists argued that such centralization could never lead to the hoped-for decentralized egalitarian society: centralization leads only to more centralization, they claimed.

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A “syndic” would be a representative of a “syndicate.” Although now the term is used almost exclusively in the popular press in the expression “crime syndicate,” syndicalism was at one time an important movement for social reform, urging the formation of voluntary groups to own and democratically control factories and other means of production. Syndicalists are anarchists in that they oppose any form of formal, centralized government, preferring society to be organized through voluntary labor unions. The most successful syndicalist organization in American history was the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), which peaked in the years before World War I.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone
by Sarah Jaffe
Published 26 Jan 2021

“I got into the idea of food as a community-based, social project,” she said. She returned to school for a one-year course, still not sure she could make it as an artist, but that year convinced her that she could and should do it. When she discovered printmaking in art school, it felt akin to her work in the café, a different way to control the means of production. She made art prints, printed little political ’zines, and then published a book, bringing her activist work to her art, and did a master’s degree researching printmaking as a space for solidarity. As part of that research she studied everything from the Paris Commune to the radical print shops of the movements of the 1960s to present-day movements.

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Capitalism has taken the members of the so-called creative class, in the terms of its most famous advocate, Richard Florida, from outsider status, as “bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe,” and placed them “at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.” In Florida’s framework, the Protestant work ethic has now fused with the “bohemian ethic,” and the bohemians suddenly had the power; it was no longer necessary for workers to struggle over control of the means of production, because those means were all in their heads anyway. It’s another gloss on the artistic critique, synthesized into the revitalized, sprawling capitalism of the 1990s and 2000s. Who needs public funding when creativity is an engine of economic growth itself? 29 THE ART MARKET OF THE NEOLIBERAL AGE MIGHT AS WELL HAVE BEEN designed purely in opposition to the demands of radical art workers of the past century.

Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can't Explain the Modern World
by Deirdre N. McCloskey
Published 15 Nov 2011

And “socialist” Sweden even nowadays is bourgeois and “capitalist,” and not much less so than the United States. Sweden allows property and profits. It allocates most goods by unregulated prices. The Swedish government, though busybody by historical standards—as are most governments nowadays—does not own much of the means of production. Unlike socialistic Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, who intervened to save General Motors and Chrysler during their post-2007 troubles, the Swedish government refused to bail out Saab Motors (sold in 2010 by that same GM) when it went bankrupt. Nor did the Swedes object when the Chinese bought both bankrupt Saab and solvent Volvo.

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In those unhappy days before the word “globalization” became common and before the word “neoliberalism” was known and before the wretched Washington Consensus and before the horrible Friedman got his Nobel Prize in economics, the world faced a bottom four billion out of a total human population of merely five, with no prospects.2 The well-intentioned policies of job protection and import substitution and state ownership of the means of production had kept the poor very poor indeed. Almost nowhere in the world, 1800 to the present, and contrary to pessimistic theories such as Malthusianism or Marxism or radical environmentalism, did real income per person decline for long, the rare exceptions being places with one-party socialism on the model of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania, or thuggish tyrants on the model of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, or entirely uncontrolled robbers on the model of Somalia.

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The monotheistic, universalist religions of what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age, 600 BCE to 200 BCE, arose it seems from the conversation of ideas between different civilizations, made possible by the material condition of improved trade.16 No one would deny that monotheism thereafter had gigantic material effects on politics and the economy. But monotheism after all is an idea, not a means of production, spreading for example from Temple Judaism (or it may be, as Freud dubiously claimed, from the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE) to Christianity to Islam, with remoter contacts in Zoroastrianism (providing the notion of reincarnation at the end of history) and even perhaps ideas from some versions of sophisticated Hinduism and Buddhism.

The Extreme Centre: A Warning
by Tariq Ali
Published 22 Jan 2015

The state must come, in some way or another, to own a very large chunk of the land and capital of the country. This may not be a popular policy: but, unless it is pursued, the policy of improved social services, which is a popular one, will become impossible. You cannot for long socialize the means of consumption unless you first socialize the means of production. The rulers of the world will see in these words little more than an expression of utopianism, but they would be wrong. For these are the structural reforms that are really needed, not those being pushed by the EU. What is needed is a complete turnaround, preceded by a public admission that the Wall Street system could not and did not work and has to be abandoned.

Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
by Noam Chomsky
Published 6 Sep 2011

They cast over society the shadow that we call “politics,” as John Dewey later commented. One of the major twentieth century philosophers and a leading figure of North American liberalism, Dewey emphasized that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communications, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” He held further that in a free and democratic society, workers must be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by employers, ideas that can be traced back to classical liberalism and the Enlightenment, and have constantly reappeared in popular struggle in the United States as elsewhere.

Automation and the Future of Work
by Aaron Benanav
Published 3 Nov 2020

For forty years, in an environment of worsening overcapacity and slowing economic growth, capitalists have threatened the use of this weapon to force political parties and trade unions alike to capitulate to their demands: for looser business regulations, laxer labor laws, slower-growing or stagnant wages, and, in the midst of economic crises, private bailouts and public austerity. A left that wants to use UBI to usher in a different sort of world would therefore need to present us with its Meidner Plan, bringing about the progressive socialization of the means of production via a planned transfer of asset ownership to society at large.47 The problem is that it was precisely the threat of capital disinvestment during the crisis of the 1970s that led to the abandonment of the original Meidner Plan in Sweden. Such a plan would be even harder to realize today, when mass working-class organizations are much weaker and economic growth slower.

The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought
by Ayn Rand , Leonard Peikoff and Peter Schwartz
Published 1 Jan 1989

There is no tyranny worse than ethnic rule—since it is an unchosen serfdom one is asked to accept as a value, and since it applies primarily to one’s mind. A man of self-esteem will not accept the notion that the content of his mind is determined by his muscles, i.e., by his own body. But by the bodies of an unspecified string of ancestors? Determinism by the means of production is preferable; it is equally false, but less offensive to human dignity. Marxism is corrupt, but clean compared to the stale, rank, musty odor of ethnicity. As to the stagnation under tribal rule—take a look at the Balkans. At the start of this century, the Balkans were regarded as the disgrace of Europe.

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Rational knowledge is not achieved by your brain grasping a logical argument; it is “agreement in results of problem solving”—and if men happen not to agree, for whatever reason or lack of reason, then there is no rational knowledge. This is nothing less than public ownership of the means of cognition, which, as Ayn Rand observed, is what underlies the notion of public ownership of the means of production. If you want to see both Kantian elements—skepticism and the worship of the social—come together, consider the field of history today. Here is an excerpt from a course description at the University of Indiana (Bloomington); the course is titled “Freedom and the Historian.” History is made by the historian.

St Pancras Station
by Simon Bradley
Published 14 Apr 2007

For the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement did more than carry forward the ideals of the Gothic Revival; they were also in revolt against some of its most deep-rooted practices and assumptions. The Arts and Crafts men ultimately had more success making beautiful things than they did in transforming the means of production, but their influence on architecture was none the less profound. By 1900 designers such as C. F. A. Voysey and M. H. Baillie Scott (no relation) had developed a kind of styleless idiom of plain walls and well-made detailing, inspired by the vernacular traditions of farmhouses and cottages but inventive and flexible in its planning.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5
by Taylor Pearson
Published 27 Jun 2015

While the rate of return on capital for the average adult has been 2.1% since 1987, it’s been 6.5% for the average billionaire. Yet, there are two ways of looking at this. The first is continuing with Piketty’s view: the rich are going to get richer and we’re doomed to live in an unequal society. The other is that Piketty’s view is short-sighted and historical facing. That those same tools, the means of production, available exclusively to the wealthy for all of human history, are now in your hands. Multimillion-dollar businesses are run using a laptop, Skype, and an internet connection. That is the world in which we live. One where the future is not defined. One where it’s up to each individual, group, and society to write the future for themselves.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics
by John B. Judis
Published 11 Sep 2016

In the diary he kept of his Senate campaign in 1972, he wrote of a campaign stop, “I even mentioned the horrible word ‘socialism’—and nobody in the audience fainted.” He would recommend Albert Einstein’s essay, “Why Socialism,” to anyone interested. In that essay, Einstein wrote that the only way to remove the “evils” of capitalism was “through the establishment of a socialist economy. . . . In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion.” As mayor, Sanders fretted that he couldn’t bring socialism to Vermont. “If you ask me if the banks should be nationalized, I would say yes,” Sanders told the Baltimore Sun. “But I don’t have the power to nationalize the banks in Burlington.”

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future
by Julia Hobsbawm
Published 11 Apr 2022

Worker identities mushroomed, as a reflection of the wider culture but perhaps also as a way of asserting control in an environment largely outside of most people’s control. Now an enormous amount of choice and flexibility is suddenly available and working identity is shifting into simplified focus: are you a hybrid have or hybrid have-not, and are you a Learner, Leaver or Leader? 3 Shift 3: The Productivity Puzzle Where I stood in relation to the means of production and the rest was a blank to me. Nowhere, I preferred to think. Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me Mondays you’re still fresh from the weekend. Wednesday you already look forward to Friday. But Tuesdays… Tuesdays are No Man’s Land. Shirley Hazzard, ‘Official Life’ Picture the scene: a windswept beach in Normandy, northern France.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 29 Sep 2014

Each of these three classes wanted a different political outcome: the traditional landowning class wanted to preserve the old authoritarian order; the bourgeoisie wanted a liberal (i.e., rule of law) regime protecting their property rights that might or might not include formal electoral democracy (they were always more interested in the rule of law than in democracy); and the proletariat, once it achieved consciousness of itself as a class, wanted a dictatorship of the proletariat, which would in turn socialize the means of production, abolish private property, and redistribute wealth. The working class might support electoral democracy in the form of universal suffrage, but this was a means to the end of control over the means of production, not an end in itself. One of the most important scholars working in a post-Marxist tradition was Barrington Moore, whose 1966 book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy has already been noted in connection with Japan (see chapter 23 above).

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Thus, from a political standpoint, the important marker of middle-class status would be occupation, level of education, and ownership of assets (a house or an apartment, or consumer durables) that could be threatened by the government. Marx’s original definition of “bourgeoisie” referred to ownership of the means of production. One of the characteristics of the modern world is that this form of property has become vastly democratized through stock ownership and pension plans. Even if one does not possess large amounts of capital, working in a managerial capacity or profession often grants one a very different kind of social status and outlook from a wage earner or low-skilled worker.

End the Fed
by Ron Paul
Published 5 Feb 2011

Free-market choices under socialism aren’t permitted; the government sets the price and plans production. Government bureaucrats can’t know what only markets can determine. Vital in the decision process is the profit-loss mechanism that rewards success and punishes failure. Government ownership of the means of production eliminates the benefits of bad decisions by business managers being punished. Under the socialism and interventionism that we have today, the successful are punished by being forced to bail out the unsuccessful. We don’t have socialism of our markets yet. When we do place wage and price controls on our economy, the market economy teeters or collapses, but generally in the past they have been removed and the economy recovers.

Team Human
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 22 Jan 2019

Advocates of the commons seek to optimize the economy for human beings, rather than the other way around. One economic concept that grew out of the commons was called distributism. The idea, born in the 1800s, holds that instead of trying to redistribute the spoils of capitalism after the fact through heavy taxation, we should simply predistribute the means of production to the workers. In other words, workers should collectively own the tools and factories they use to create value. Today, we might call such an arrangement a co-op—and, from the current examples, cooperative businesses are giving even established US corporations a run for their money. The same sorts of structures are being employed in digital businesses.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility
by Zack Furness and Zachary Mooradian Furness
Published 28 Mar 2010

Ecobici, a set of programs designed to teach people how to locally manufacture and utilize pedal-powered machines, is not only the precursor to Maya pedal but also the outgrowth of CESTa’s longstanding commitment to non-motorized transportation and community empowerment. indeed, navarro’s 1985 book La Bicicleta y los Triciclos: Alternativas de Transporte para America Latina articulates a substantive plan for non-motorized transportation, domestic bicycle production, and bike advocacy in latin america: it offers one of the clearest and most comprehensive assessments of the role that appropriate transportation technologies can potentially play in any country.73 Transportation organizations that emphasize the role of aT, whether tacitly or as prominent part of their objectives, are not neglectful of the realities faced by poor people who need to make do in a capitalist economy. at the same time, the goal of utilizing appropriate technologies is to foster a level of ecological sustainability and democratic control over the means of production that is otherwise absent. Jordan Kleiman, a historian of the aT movement, explains that early theorists of aT did not reject industry itself, but rather the ideology of industrialism: “The relentless push for economies of scale and labor-saving technologies even when the result is to aggravate poverty and degrade work, overpower nature to the point of threatening the biological systems necessary for human survival, and undermine economic and political democracy.”74 Kleiman’s analysis reveals the extent to which the condemnation of aT as politically visionless or naively consumed with the goal of improving society through the production of “a better mousetrap,” as aT critic langdon Winner puts it, is actually a gross misrepresentation of a paradigm that poses unique possibilities for interrogating the prospects and limitations of technological productivity itself.75 Similarly problematic is ivan illich’s critique of the “intermediate technologist” as one who operates as a “superior tactician paving the road to totally manipulated consumption.”76 indeed, to see groups like Maya pedal, CESTa, or BnB as economic tacticians is to assume that the promotion of appropriate or intermediate technologies necessarily causes, rather than critically responds to, the realities of poverty and ecological crisis prompted by capitalism and free market ideology. in this respect, illich’s otherwise prescient critique of so-called Third World development work is flawed not because it lacks nuance but because it fails to account for what people can or should do when industrial capitalism is already in full swing, whether altering the cultural landscape, destroying ecologies, or funding right-wing militias in service of year-round banana supplies in Midwestern grocery stores.77 populations are certainly capable of organizing resistance movements to radically transform structural inequalities, but such movements take time and are entirely dependent on a host of circumstances beyond any one group’s capacity to address.

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Bikes not Bombs, CESTa, Maya pedal, and Working Bikes are just a few of the organizations that either operate or contribute to effective development-focused micro-businesses that see appropriate technology, ecological sustainability, and social justice—rather than bootstrap capitalism—as the end goals of their work. They recognize that even within the constraints of capitalism, bicycle transportation and pedal-powered technologies can be part of a larger shift in the way people potentially organize their communities, care for their environment, and exercise more democratic control over their means of production. Sadly, their collective critiques of corporatism and free trade policies compromise the minority position within a network of aid organizations hoping to cultivate the budding entrepreneur ostensibly trapped inside every postcolonial subject. The prospects of creating a sustainable or viable business in virtually any postcolonial country are dependent on a multitude of tenuous factors, the least of which are the whims of international markets, the lending and trade policies of transnational bodies like the World Bank, iMF, and WTO, the price of oil, and the general economic stranglehold that multinational corporations have on both global resources and trade.

Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government
by Robert Higgs and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr.
Published 15 Jan 1987

Only after the attack on Pearl Harbor did Roosevelt move in the direction advised by the old war-horse. 16 In mid-1940 Congress enacted important legislation expanding the powers of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, still the bailiwick of the politically durable conservative Democrat, Jesse Jones, (1) To make loans to, or, when requested by the Federal Loan Administrator with the approval of the President, purchase the capital stock of, any corporation (a) for the purpose of producing, acquiring, and carrying strategic and critical materials as defined by the President, and (b) for plant construction, expansion and equipment, and working capital, to be used by the corporation in the manufacture of equipment and supplies necessary to the national defense, on such terms and conditions and with such maturities as the Corporation may determine; and History 204 (2) When requested by the Federal Loan Administrator, with the approval of the President, to create or to organize a corporation or corporations, with power (a) to produce, acquire, and carry strategic and critical materials as defined by the President, (b) to purchase and lease land, to purchase, lease, build, and expand plants, and to purchase and produce equipment, supplies, and machinery, for the manufacture of arms, ammunition, and implements of war, (c) to lease such plants to private corporations to engage in such manufacture, and (d) if the President finds that it is necessary for a Government agency to engage in such manufacture, to engage in such manufacture itself. 17 During the war these powers, which Jones described as "perhaps the broadest powers ever conferred upon a single government agency," would be exercised on a grand scale as the federal government became an investor, producer, and commercial dealer through numerous RFC subsidiaries: Metals Reserve Company, Defense Plant Corporation, Defense Supplies Corporation, Petroleum Reserves Corporation, Rubber Reserve Company, U.S. Commercial Company, War Emergency Pipelines, Inc., War Insurance Corporation, and others. (See the appendix to this chapter.) Here was wartime socialism in the strict sense of governmental ownership and (sometimes) management of the means of production. Jesse Jones was truly an economic czar. 18 (There were others: Harry Hopkins in charge of Lend-Lease, Donald M. Nelson at the War Production Board, and eventually above all the rest James F. Byrnes at the Office of War Mobilization. Of them, more is said later in this chapter.) When the Japanese bombs rained down on Pearl Harbor the United States was not totally unprepared for war, nor did the government lack authority to mobilize the nation's economic resources.

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At that time, however, Nixon's declarations-along with FOR's of 1933 and Truman's of 1950, which remained in effect-gave force to 470 provisions of federal law delegating extraordinary powers to the President. As a congressional committee report described them, the emergency powers conferred "enough authority to rule the country without reference to normal constitutional processes." Under the powers delegated by these statutes, the President may: seize property; organize and control the means of production; seize commodities; assign military forces abroad; institute martial law; seize and control all transportation and communication; regulate the operation of private enterprise; restrict travel; and, in a plethora of particular ways, control the lives of all American citizens. 39 Not until the passage of the National Emergencies Act of 1976 did Congress provide for the termination of existing declared national emergencies and for the systematic oversight and termination of future declared national emergencies.

All the Money in the World
by Peter W. Bernstein
Published 17 Dec 2008

Udvar-Hazy and his business partner Leslie Gonda (Gonda’s Venezuelan-born son, Louis Gonda, is also a billionaire), the late real-estate mogul and Holocaust survivor Laszlo Nandor Tauber, and former Microsoft programmer Charles Simonyi. Simonyi, for one, knew at a young age that Communist Hungary, where he was taught that workers could never own the “means of production,” was not where he wanted to be. He showed an early interest in computers, and his father, an electrical-engineering professor, let him tinker with the antiquated vacuum-tube computers used in late-1950s Budapest. Meanwhile, the elder Simonyi was quietly charting an escape route for his son.

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A pilot with more than two thousand hours of flying time, Simonyi paid $25 million to Russia’s space agency for a thirteen-day orbital space flight in spring 2007. To keep himself grounded at home, Simonyi has a machine shop in the basement of his house; there he keeps a lathe and drill press to remind himself of the means of production he was once told he could never own. * * * The real value of an MBA, believes Franklin Otis Booth Jr., who graduated from California Institute of Technology and then got an MBA from Stanford, is that it “teaches the conventions by which businesses are conducted.” But would Booth have amassed his $1.9 billion fortune without the degree?

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

Even diehard capitalists who vehemently resisted the Marxist prognosis still made use of the Marxist diagnosis. When the CIA analysed the situation in Vietnam or Chile in the 1960s, it divided society into classes. When Nixon or Thatcher looked at the globe, they asked themselves who controls the vital means of production. From 1989 to 1991 George Bush oversaw the demise of the Evil Empire of communism, only to be defeated in the 1992 elections by Bill Clinton. Clinton’s winning campaign strategy was summarised in the motto: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Marx could not have said it better. As people adopted the Marxist diagnosis, they changed their behaviour accordingly.

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If I suggest that perhaps I am depressed because I am being exploited by capitalists, and because under the prevailing social system I have no chance of realising my aims, the therapist may well say that I am projecting onto ‘the social system’ my own inner difficulties, and I am projecting onto ‘the capitalists’ unresolved issues with my mother. According to socialism, instead of spending years talking about my mother, my emotions and my complexes, I should ask myself: who owns the means of production in my country? What are its main exports and imports? What’s the connection between the ruling politicians and international banking? Only by understanding the surrounding socio-economic system and taking into account the experiences of all other people could I truly understand what I feel, and only by common action can we change the system.

Investment: A History
by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing
Published 19 Feb 2016

For example, the long bull market following World War II made stocks seem like an attractive option for investing. In addition, the culture of the Cold War spurred the American public’s eagerness to participate in the capitalist system and to support domestic industry. In contrast to the Soviet-style economic system, in which the means of production were taken over by the state, Americans hoped to show that workers could also own the means of production through equity shareholding in a capitalistic society.92 Other reasons for increasing market participation were more carefully constructed. The development of such investment products as mutual funds, retirement accounts, and equity derivatives offered new opportunities to investors.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016

As the Greek legein-logos corresponds to the German spechen-Sprache, so too, the German nehmen-Nahme corresponds to the Greek nemein-nomos. At first, it meant the seizure of land, and later it also meant the appropriation of the sea, much of which is part of our historical review here. In the industrial sector, one speaks of the appropriation of the means of production. The second meaning is the division and distribution of what was seized. Hence also the second sense of nomos, the basic division and repartition of the soil and the resulting ownership order. The third meaning is to tend, that is, to use, exploit, and turn to good account the partitioned land, to produce and to consume.

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In accounting for that transformation, it is not at all clear whether the computational technologies are more or less foundational than the economics that organized them and that they organize (even assuming that we could analytically separate the two, so as to put one in the fore and the other in back). Instead of locating global computation as a manifestation of an economic condition (as both its means of production and its superstructural expression), the inverse may be equally valid. From this perspective, so much of what is referred to as neoliberalism are interlocking political-economic conditions within the encompassing armature of planetary computation. The entwined polar positions of Sunnyvale, Caracas, Beijing, Brussels, Tribeca, and Tel Aviv don't integrate capital and resource markets into network societies on their own, but are themselves “computed” into these arrangements.

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We may anticipate that to some significant extent, the dovetailing of the future evolution of both agendas will transform one another and may even allow one to fully envelop the other: neither state as machine nor market as machine because the platform is state, market, and machine at once. Some Marxian articles of faith (such that once global technological means of production and valuation have reached some threshold level of efficiency and ubiquity, such that continuance of management by capital is not needed, then things will give way to a self-regulating infrastructural commonwealth) may have surprising interpretive value for the next century even if it works out in ways utterly different than originally and normally conceived.

Global Catastrophic Risks
by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic
Published 2 Jul 2008

Most nanoscale technologies involve the use oflarge machines to make tiny and relatively simple substances and components. These products are usually developed to be integral components oflarger products. As a result, the damage that can be done by most nanoscale technologies is thus limited by the means of production and by the other more familiar technologies with which it will be 482 Global catastrophic risks integrated; most nanoscale technologies do not, in and of themselves , appear to pose catastrophic risks, though the new features and augmented power of nano-enabled products could exacerbate a variety of other risks.

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It is this type of nanotechnology molecular manufacturing - that offers the greatest potential benefits and also poses the worst dangers. None of the many other nanoscale technologies currently in development or use appear likely to present global catastrophic risks. A nanofactory, as currently conceived, would be able to produce another nanofactory on command, leading to rapid exponential growth of the means of production. In a large project requiring scale-up to large amounts offabrication capacity, the nanofactories could still weigh a fraction of the final product, thanks to their high throughput. This implies that the resources required to produce the product - not the nanofactories - would be the limiting factor.

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Another political risk factor for totalitarianism is the rise ofradical ideologies. At least until they gain power, a tenet common to all totalitarians is that the status quo is terribly wrong and must be changed by any means necessary. For the Communists, the evil to abolish was private ownership of the means of production; for the Nazis, it was the decay and eventual extinction of the Aryan race; for totalitarian religious movements, the great evils are secularization and pluralism. Whenever large movements accept the idea that the world faces a grave danger that can only be solved with great sacrifices, the risk of totalitarianism goes up.

The Retreat of Western Liberalism
by Edward Luce
Published 20 Apr 2017

Between 1880 and 1890, during one of the West’s periodic depressions, more than 2 per cent of each of the populations of Italy, Sweden, Germany, Ireland and Britain made the passage to America.27 That sheer weight of late-Victorian movement has only been rivalled in recent decades by the internal migrations that have convulsed China, India and elsewhere. Uprooting is what happens when societies reinvent their means of production. People go to where the money is. Both history and theory told us that the rising inequalities created by industrialisation would be followed by the strong forces of equalisation as societies became richer. In the newly created Germany, Otto von Bismarck set up the world’s first social insurance system for the working classes in the late nineteenth century.

Status Anxiety
by Alain de Botton
Published 1 Jan 2004

To satisfy domestic demand, companies start to import more and export less, a trend that soon results in a balance-of-payments deficit. The economy is now officially out of kilter, freighted by overinvesting, overconsumption, overborrowing and overlending. Here begins the slide into recession. Prices are pushed higher by the use of less efficient means of production, by the growth in the money supply and by speculation. Tighter and much more expensive credit raises the cost of outstanding debt. Asset values, inflated in the upswing, are punctured. Borrowers can no longer make their payments, and the collateral available for new loans is restricted. Incomes, investment and consumption all fall off.

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham
Published 17 Jan 2020

So far in this chapter we have discussed the ways that workers are beginning to shape and reshape gig work in their own interests. In all of these cases, we see workers pushing back against the owners and managers of platforms. However, in none of the cases do we see a situation in which workers are ever truly taking control over the means of production or distribution. In this final section, we therefore wish to explore potential ways to do just that. Figure 8 Democratic ownership Illustration by John Philip Sage At the core of the platform cooperative idea is the fact that platforms operate as mediators: bringing together workers and customers.

Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 7 Apr 2008

Marx believed that although violence was inevitable, by his day already an old Hobbesian notion, that it was also irrelevant to the outcome. The outcome depended on socioeconomic conditions, just as the power of the state, according to him, did not reside in its ability to use force but in its control of the means of production. So it appears Marx believed that the violence, or force, that was a midwife came from the old order and was not necessarily the prescribed path for a new one. But Marx, like most people interested in power politics, was deeply distrustful of pacifists. Ironically, one of his concerns was that pacifist policies might leave Western Europe vulnerable to an invasion by Russia.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It)
by Elizabeth S. Anderson
Published 22 May 2017

People can be sanctioned for their consensual sexual activity or for their choice of spouse or life partner. They can be sanctioned for their political activity and required to engage in political activity they do not agree with. The economic system of the society run by this government is communist. The government owns all the nonlabor means of production in the society it governs. It organizes production by means of central planning. The form of the government is a dictatorship. In some cases, the dictator is appointed by an oligarchy. In other cases, the dictator is self-appointed. Although the control that this government exercises over its members is pervasive, its sanctioning powers are limited.

The Gone Fishin' Portfolio: Get Wise, Get Wealthy...and Get on With Your Life
by Alexander Green
Published 15 Sep 2008

“Steady as she goes,” has never described long-term equity investing. DON’T GET CAUGHT ON THE SIDELINES Despite the inevitable volatility, there are good reasons to be grateful for the stock market. Capitalism does a better job than any other economic system of creating prosperity. The essence of capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production and distribution. Most of us, however, don’t have the capital or the experience to run our own business. (And statistics show that less than half of all new businesses survive their four years.) Enter the stock market, the mechanism that makes capitalism truly democratic. Even people of modest means can own a stake in a profitable business by investing in stocks.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are?
by Chris Rojek
Published 15 Feb 2008

If the New Right referred to long nhs hospital waiting lists and truancy and poor exam performance at school as evidence of the bankruptcy of the welfare state in the 1970s, New Labour seized upon the privatization of the rail network as the primary symbol of the folly of relying upon the market to solve issues of the common good. New Labour presented itself as a modernizing party. It discarded some of the ideological baggage that had kept it out of power for nearly two decades. In particular, it rejected Old Labour’s Clause iv, which committed the party to seek common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. The politics of both the traditional Left and Right were regarded to be obsolescent in an age in which voters were judged to have ceased to be ideological. The ‘Third Way’ principles espoused and practised by New Labour sought to generate relevant policies to deal with the central dilemmas of globalization, the new individualism (the retreat of custom and precedent as arbiters of life choice), ecological risks, multiculturalism and multi-ethnicity.

In the Flow
by Boris Groys
Published 16 Feb 2016

Writers or artists worked in seclusion – beyond that panoptic, public control. However, if the so-called creative worker uses the Internet, he or she is subjected to the same or an even greater degree of surveillance as the Foucauldian worker. The results of surveillance are sold by the corporations that control the Internet because they own the means of production, the material and technical basis of the Internet. One should not forget that the Internet is owned privately. And the owners’ profits come mostly from targeted advertisement. Here we have an interesting phenomenon: the monetization of hermeneutics. Classical hermeneutics, which searched for the author behind the work, was criticized by the theoreticians of Structuralism, Close Reading, etc., who thought that it made no sense to chase ontological secrets that are inaccessible by definition.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

I’ve had a lot of advantages and a lot of help along the way,4 but the beauty of the Internet is that you don’t need these advantages to change the world. The near ubiquity of the Internet (in the developed world, for now) has brought with it the promise of a global stage on which ideas can come to fruition. For centuries, invention was limited to those who had access to the means of production and access to labor. Today, you can simply create and present your ideas online. Granted, if it’s that easy for you, it’s that easy for everyone. Having your content discovered, let alone appreciated, is not guaranteed. There continues to be innovation that will help new and interesting content come to the surface, but even as a work in progress, it’s better than the old world of gatekeepers.

Twilight of Abundance: Why the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short
by David Archibald
Published 24 Mar 2014

Cold enough to shrink the planet’s grain belts a few hundred kilometers toward the equator. My own work4 in this field has been corroborated by work done with great statistical precision by a Norwegian group of scientists led by Professor Jan-Erik Solheim.5 So we can thank the UN-EU establishment for one thing. If they had not attempted to take over the means of production and exchange in the name of global warming, humanity would be blundering completely unsuspectingly into a cold period that will cause widespread crop failures and starvation. We will still have the crop failures and starvation, but we will understand what is causing it while it is happening and be able to take some steps to mitigate the damage.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle
by Jamie Woodcock
Published 17 Jun 2019

Our erstwhile quest giver in Syndicate, Karl Marx, had this to say about commodities: A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference. Neither are we here concerned to know how the object satisfies these wants, whether directly as means of subsistence, or indirectly as means of production.35 Videogames do satisfy a “want” of some sort, despite the fact Marx notes it is not important what that actual “want” is. However, what is important is that videogames are a “commodity” because they are made as “a product…transferred to another, whom it will serve as a use value, by means of an exchange.”36 They are not (the majority of the time) made as a work of art, but rather commissioned by publishers who then seek to make returns on their investment.

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order
by Benn Steil
Published 14 May 2013

His motives always baffled me.”63 As regards the economics White advocated, they were hardly Marxist. They were by this time what would be described as thoroughly Keynesian. He insisted that government should take an active role in supporting economic activity; certainly more so than was orthodox before the Great Depression, but he never pushed for broad government control of the means of production. His writings on international monetary affairs express a concern with the need to fashion a system that “reduces the necessity of … restrictions on private enterprise.”64 As for White’s domestic politics, these were mainstream New Deal progressive, and there is no evidence that he admired communism as a political ideology.

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Keynes’s controversial claim of having erected a new General Theory was a transparent mimicking of Einstein’s “general” (as contrasted to his merely “special”) theory of relativity.89 Classical economists—that is, the only ones who were reputable in the 1920s—believed in Say’s Law, expressed by Keynes as “supply creates its own demand,” and Keynes set out to prove that this was false.90 Say did not write the precise words Keynes ascribed to him, and there is endless controversy over what exactly “Say’s Law” comprises. Say did write that “a glut can take place only when there are too many means of production applied to one kind of product and not enough to another.” This does imply that demand cannot fall short of potential supply; supply the right sort of goods and services, and the demand will be there. This owes to the fact that “the mere circumstance of creation of one product immediately opens a vent for other products”; the creator supplies because he demands.91 Keynes argued that Say’s Law had everything the wrong way around; in fact, it was “expenditure [that] creates its own income.”92 It was demand, not supply, that determined the level of economic activity.

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 2 Jun 2021

The two most sophisticated thinkers about meritocracy on the British left were the husband-and-wife team Sidney and Beatrice Webb, who, among other things, invented Fabian socialism, founded the London School of Economics and persuaded the Labour Party to adopt Clause Four, which committed it to nationalizing the means of production, distribution and exchange. Sidney (1859–1947) and Beatrice (1858–1943) burned with an all-consuming vision of a world that was completely different from the class-ridden society in which they had grown up: a society nurtured by the state, ruled by bureaucrats, guided by science and bent on efficiency.

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Parties of the left have based their support on the working class, particularly the trade unions, and favoured more state activism to stabilize the economy and redistribute wealth. Parties of the right have tried to temper state activism and redistribution while also moving with the times. This is changing fast: increasingly, the key division is not class but education, and not your relationship to the means of production but your relationship to the machinery of meritocracy. This is because the great meritocratic machine determines not just how much you earn but also how much status you command. This revolution is also reconfiguring the relationship between the masses and the political elite – by which I mean not just the politicians but also the upper bureaucracy that shapes and administers the politicians’ decisions and the media that reports on them.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
by Brett Christophers
Published 17 Nov 2020

Noting the historical fact – some would say curiosity – that traditional agrarian classes ‘either led or survived every major political upheaval that opened the way to the modern capitalist state, not only in Europe but in North America and Japan as well’, Perry Anderson has argued that nowhere did those tenacious traditional landowning classes prosper, both politically and economically, from the transition to capitalism more than in the UK: ‘The English estate-holders had no rivals in this regard.’ For reasons including the particular thoroughness with which peasants were divorced from the means of production in the countryside, agriculture in the UK assumed a capitalist cast more rapidly and more comprehensively than anywhere else in Europe. So, consequently, did the nation’s major landowners, who by at least a century in advance of the Industrial Revolution had become what Anderson describes as ‘a capitalist stratum proper’.1 The UK was now characterised by a political economy later described by Martin Daunton as ‘aristocratic rentier capitalism’, dominated by a landowning class that was ‘capitalist rather than feudal’ – or, in Martin Wiener’s words, ‘basically rentier, not entrepreneurial or productive’.2 When industry arrived on the scene, the UK’s landed-property establishment succeeded to a remarkable degree in reshaping the emergent industrial bourgeoisie in its own image.

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Insofar as private ownership is the institutional centrepiece of capitalism, of course, a significant transformation of the landscape of asset ownership of the kind I have gestured towards here would be enormously meaningful. To return, then, to the question I raised earlier: What ‘system’ should the UK move towards in moving beyond rentierism? To the extent that key economic assets, including but not limited to the means of production, are taken out of private hands, one would in practice be moving away from capitalism itself and towards something else. The further the hegemony of private ownership is eroded, the less the mixed ecology that takes its place will look like capitalism. The advocates of augmented competition policy whose arguments I discussed earlier – such as Philip Stephens at the Financial Times and Andrew Tyrie at the CMA – all agree with Ian Jack that the UK economy is not ‘working’, and needs urgent reform.

The Rise of the Israeli Right: From Odessa to Hebron
by Colin Shindler
Published 29 Jul 2015

Thus he could comment positively on the liberal legacy of Luigi Luzzatti, a former prime minister of Italy, on his death in 1927 and his commitment to nineteenth-century ideology.16 Jabotinsky commented that although he had never belonged to a socialist party, he did once believe in socialism. Jabotinsky referred to a booklet, written in 1910, in which he argued that ‘the socialisation of the means of production is an inevitable and desirable result of the social process,’ but ‘I would not say that now. I do not consider the establishment of a socialist order either desirable or inevitable – humanity is not moving towards socialism; it is going in the reverse direction.’ Jabotinsky made a distinction between an ideal and a conviction.

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In the 1930s Jabotinsky wrote about ‘the spiritual mechanism’ that defined a people which had nothing to do with its so-called purity: The quality of the ‘spiritual mechanism’ depends on the ‘race’, the strength of the intellect, a stronger or weaker leaning to search for new ways, the preparedness to be resigned to the prevailing situation or the daring which urges to invent; the stubbornness or on the contrary the character that gets tired with the first failure. The supreme means of production is in itself a product of race. This is why each race has an explicit uniqueness, and aspires to become a nation.23 19 20 21 22 23 Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘The Aims of Zionism’, The Zionist, 14 May 1926. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Islam’, Rassviet, 19 April 1924. Vladimir Jabotinsky, ‘Awesome Islam’, Morgen zhurnal, 26 June 1927.

Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929
by Markus Krajewski and Peter Krapp
Published 18 Aug 2011

Reviewing excerpts at regular intervals so as to remember not merely the citations, but the material as a whole, according to the Baroque rhetorical tradition—both Moser and Jean Paul declare this method their proper production aesthetic.26 Moser describes the rereading of excerpts in detail to generate a new text by means of productive recombination: Then I take all those slips of paper with the excerpted or otherwise used references, and put them between the divider and the octavo sheet that contains the rubric it belongs to, though not in any particular order: once I have them there, I take one chapter after another from the box, bring the slips of paper into a specific order, and add marginalia.

When Things Start to Think
by Neil A. Gershenfeld
Published 15 Feb 1999

Focus groups help companies figure out when they've done something dumb, but they can't substitute for a personal vision since people can't ask for things they can't conceive of. Companies are trying to flatten their organizational hierarchies and move more decision making out from the center by deploying personal computing to help connect and enable employees. But the impact of information technology will always be bounded if the means of production are still locked away like the mainframes used to be. For companies looking to foster innovation, for people looking to create rather than just consume the things around them, it's not enough to stop with a Web browser and an on-line catalog. Fabrication as well as computing must come to the desktop.

Utopia for Realists: The Case for a Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, and a 15-Hour Workweek
by Rutger Bregman
Published 13 Sep 2014

Even now, 3D printers are rolling out entire embryonic cell structures, and people with chips implanted in their brains are operating robotic arms with their minds. Another factoid: Since 1980, the price of 1 watt of solar energy has plummeted 99% – and that’s not a typo. If we’re lucky, 3D printers and solar panels may yet turn Karl Marx’s ideal (all means of production controlled by the masses) into a reality, all without requiring a bloody revolution. For a long time, the Land of Plenty was reserved for a small elite in the wealthy West. Those days are over. Since China has opened itself to capitalism, 700 million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty.7 Africa, too, is fast shedding its reputation for economic devastation; the continent is now home to six of the world’s ten fastest-growing economies.8 By the year 2013, six billion of the globe’s seven billion inhabitants owned a cell phone.

Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That's OK: How to Survive the Economic Collapse and Be Happy
by Pistono, Federico
Published 14 Oct 2012

I have planted a hundred trees in a day. I have pressed 5,000 bricks in one day from the dirt beneath my feet and built a tractor in six days. From what I have seen, this is only the beginning. If this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant. A greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity. We’re exploring the limits of what we all can do to make a better world with open hardware technology.“ Together, we can begin to transition towards of society of openness that benefits all, instead of one of secrecy that serves the powerful.

How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid
by Franck Frommer
Published 6 Oct 2010

Above all, PowerPoint is a universal language that makes it possible to promote the virtues of the new management: the ability to synthesize, simplification, an aptitude for visualization, an inclination toward collegiality, collaborative work, and horizontality. The software makes it possible to technify and automate the means of production of ideas and institutes a new kind of circulation of activities, relations, and exchanges in the workplace. In short, PowerPoint contains the qualities demanded of the neomanagers of the twenty-first-century company. The three types of meeting defined above correspond to three uses of the software that Robert Gaskins planned for, according to the audience and the quality required for presentations.

Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World - and How Their Invention Could Make or Break the Planet
by Jane Gleeson-White
Published 14 May 2011

In Sombart’s view, capitalism and double entry are so intimately connected it is difficult to tell which was cause and which effect: ‘one may indeed doubt whether capitalism has procured in double-entry book-keeping a tool which activates its forces, or whether double-entry book-keeping has first given rise to capitalism out of its own spirit.’ Sombart defines capitalism as a particular economic system, recognisable as an organisation of trade, consisting invariably of two collaborating sections of the population, the owners of the means of production, who also manage them, and property-less workers, bound to the markets which they serve; which displays the two dominant principles of wealth creation and economic rationalism. Sombart’s definition derives from Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels, Marx’s collaborator and editor, wrote of Sombart’s work: ‘It is the first time that a German professor succeeds on the whole in seeing in Marx’s writings what Marx really says.’

The Rise of the Quants: Marschak, Sharpe, Black, Scholes and Merton
by Colin Read
Published 16 Jul 2012

For some, the analysis was rhetorical and straddled the boundary between politics and economics. The political economy of Karl Marx (1818–1883), John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), David Ricardo (1772–1823), or even Adam Smith (1723–1790) treated such topics as trade, economic systems, and the ownership of resources and the means of production with unsophisticated graphical tools and with the strength of philosophical argument and logic. Alternatively, others, most notably Léon Walras (1834–1910), Antoine Augustin Cournot (1801–1877), Francis Ysidro Edgeworth (1845–1926), and Irving Fischer (1867–1947), enhanced our understanding of individual markets by introducing to the discipline increasingly sophisticated mathematical tools. 16 The Times 17 While the insights of these early great minds in economics remain valid today, their theories were not sufficiently rigorous and analytic to answer questions in modern finance.

The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport: Second Edition
by David Levinson and Kevin Krizek
Published 17 Aug 2015

They eventually gave way to the national (mall-centric) chain (e.g., Sam Goody, Tower, Musicland), then big boxes like Best Buy and the booksellers started to get in on the act. Thomas Edison first captured sounds as waveforms and recorded them as physical deviations (i.e., grooves) etched into a disc. The means of production, acquisition, and sound dissemination changed over the years. Physical reminders of this progression are apparent every time Kevin visits his parent's home. His grandparents phonograph sits next to the turntable stereo (his mom's first purchase after she graduated from college in 1960), next to the compact disc player, next to the recent streaming device.

Defending the Free Market: The Moral Case for a Free Economy
by Robert A. Sirico
Published 20 May 2012

It cannot be achieved by way of the “commonality of goods” proposed by socialists, but rather through the institutions that the socialists worked so hard to discredit. Let me list some of the conditions that are especially important for human flourishing: rule of law in the sense of courts acting in a non-arbitrary manner; secure private property in the means of production; stable money to serve as a reliable means of exchange; the freedom of enterprise that allows people to start businesses to pursue their dream; the freedom of association that permits people to reach mutually unforced agreements for employing or being employed; the enforcement of contracts to ensure that people keep their reasonable promises and that disputes are arbitrated justly; and vibrant trade within and among nations to permit the fullest possible flowering of the division of labor.

Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley
by Cary McClelland
Published 8 Oct 2018

SAAD KHAN (CONT’D) Perhaps in part because he spent much of his childhood in Pakistan, something challenged him to ask the hard questions of the tech industry and push his work in it to serve the right mission: “Getting off of a plane from Karachi and driving into San Francisco—or going back—it was always a bit of a phase shift. It gave you a sense of the bigger world out there and that there’s a lot of people in the Valley not connected to it. So how can technology affect that bigger world? And how can we get the means of production in the hands of as many people as possible?” Starting his own firm, he has become a bridge figure between Silicon Valley and the rest of the world and works to put the industry’s vast resources and creativity to the world’s most urgent challenges. It was always clear that the kinds of problems you could go after could be infinite.

Humankind: Solidarity With Non-Human People
by Timothy Morton
Published 14 Oct 2017

Consider the examination of Victorian capitalism’s micromanagement of the precise minimum space required to live and breathe, from which Marx generalizes: [Capital] usurps the time for growth, development, and healthy maintenance of the body. It steals the time required for the consumption of fresh air and sunlight. It haggles over the meal-times, where possible incorporating them into the production process itself, so that food is added to the worker as to a mere means of production, as coal is supplied to the boiler, and grease and oil to the machinery. It reduces the sound sleep needed for the restoration, renewal and refreshment of the vital forces to the exact amount of torpor essential to the revival of an absolutely exhausted organism … What interests it is purely and simply the maximum of labour-power that can be set in motion in a working day.

The Joy of Tax
by Richard Murphy
Published 30 Sep 2015

They move from the right-wing position that the state has to exist but should play as small a role in the economy as is consistent with the maintenance of law and order, defence and protection of the weak and vulnerable, through the position that has largely persisted in the UK for the last seventy years where the state thinks it has both the right and the duty to intervene to achieve a wide range of social and economic goals, to the socialist viewpoint, now little heard, that the state should not just intervene in the economy but own, control and manage large parts of it. Just as I dismissed the anarchist position on the role of government so too am I going to dismiss the overtly socialist one that implies state ownership of much of the means of production, because I think it lacks the balance needed to make any society work. I also believe it has little mass appeal. That leaves two options on the political agenda when it comes to deciding upon the role of government, and so taxation. If the volume and quantity of media comment was to be the basis for decision-making, rather than democracy, then the second option, of minimal state intervention, would appear at present to have much support.

Me Talk Pretty One Day
by David Sedaris
Published 4 Jun 2001

Everybody had a font, and I was told that I should get one, too. The authors of these letters shared an enthusiasm with the sort of people who now arrived at dinner parties hoisting expensive new video cameras and suggesting that, after dessert, we all sit down and replay the evening on TV. We, the regular people of the world, now had access to the means of production, but still I failed to see what all the fuss was about. A dopey letter is still a dopey letter, no matter how you dress it up; and there’s a reason regular people don’t appear on TV: we’re boring. By the early 1990’s I was living in New York and working for a housecleaning company. My job taught me that regardless of their purported virtues, computers are a pain in the ass to keep clean.

The Right Side of History
by Ben Shapiro
Published 11 Feb 2019

First, the proletariat would “use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State”—and naturally, this would entail “despotic inroads on the rights of property” that could appear economically untenable, but would soon work themselves out. This would involve abolition of property in land, a heavy progressive tax, confiscation of all property of emigrants and rebels, centralization of credit in the state, centralization of all means of communications and transportation by the state, extension of those means of production by the state, forced labor (“equal liability of all to work”), forcible resettlement of populations, and free education. Then, magically, the ills of modern society would disappear—the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms will disappear, and the glory of the collective will be established for all time: “In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.”

Undoing Border Imperialism
by Harsha Walia
Published 12 Nov 2013

Production within capitalism is disconnected from human need, collective creativity, and the natural world—all of which become commodities to be bought and sold on the market. As the dominant global economic system, capitalism is based on a model of private property, production for profit, waged labor, and private ownership of the means of production and distribution. During the Industrial Revolution in late eighteenth-century England, peasants were displaced from their farmlands and forced to migrate to cities and work for scant wages in growing privately owned industries. Neoliberal capitalist globalization, as the current formation of capitalism, intensifies these processes of dispossession and impoverishment.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 31 Aug 2015

In other countries, a vision of a more pervasive economic role of government was held by socialists or communists.c What socialists and communists had in common was a belief in government central planning of the economic system as a whole, based on government ownership and control of the principal means of production in industry, agriculture, commerce and finance. Where they differed was in whether the government officials who were to wield this power should be elected by the general public, as advocated by democratic socialists, or chosen by some autocratic process, including dictatorship, as advocated by the communists.d Although both socialist and communist governments began by replacing market economies with centrally planned economies in the twentieth century, by the end of that century most democratic socialist governments and most communist dictatorships had abandoned central planning after experiencing its results.

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c Although some Scandinavian welfare states have been called “socialist,” they might more accurately be called redistributionist states, using high tax rates to transfer large amounts of wealth in money and in kind, rather than states concentrating on government officials directly operating industrial, commercial and financial enterprises. d Other central planners included fascists, who allowed private ownership of the means of production, but with these owners subject to government dictates. In Germany, a special xenophobic form of fascism was called National Socialism, more commonly known by a contraction of this party’s name in German as Nazis. e Similar group preferences in other countries have been called “positive discrimination” in Britain and India, “standardization” in Sri Lanka, “sons of the soil” preferences in Malaysia and Indonesia and “reflecting the federal character of the country” in Nigeria.

Termites of the State: Why Complexity Leads to Inequality
by Vito Tanzi
Published 28 Dec 2017

This topic has interested and fascinated me for a long time, at least since the years spent in graduate school, at Harvard, in the early 1960s; or, perhaps, without the full awareness of the importance of the topic, even earlier, while I was living in post–World War II Italy in the 1950s, during a highly politicized period. In those years there were frequent, heated debates among high school students. On one side of those debates were ignorant leftist students, some of whom, who called themselves socialists or communists, saw private property as theft and wanted to nationalize all the means of productions. They saw the elimination of private-sector activities and of private property as the obvious and simple solution to the Italian economic problems of the day. On the other side of these debates were equally ignorant students with centrist or rightist views and, in some cases, even with Fascist-inspired views, who did not believe in socialism or communism.

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That idea received the support of many intellectuals who had some leftist tendencies. These individuals had absorbed the increasingly popular socialist ideas. Since the previous century, socialist thinkers had been critical of the capitalistic form of economic organization, and some of them had pushed for the nationalization of the means of production, and for the replacement of the market with economic planning. However, mainstream economists and policymakers, who continued to endorse the laissez-faire ideology, rejected those ideas as coming from “low radicals.” 26 Termites of the State In the 1920s, economic planning had had its first real-life experience in Russia, when it had been put into practice by the Soviet government, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000
by Paul Kennedy
Published 15 Jan 1989

By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, industrialization was spreading to certain other regions, and was beginning to tilt the international power balances away from the older leading nations and toward those countries with both the resources and organization to exploit the newer means of production and technology. Already, the few major conflicts of this era—the Crimean War to some degree but more especially the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War—were bringing defeat upon those societies which failed to modernize their military systems, and which lacked the broad-based industrial infrastructure to support the vast armies and much more expensive and complicated weaponry now transforming the nature of war.

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All that the statistics can do is give rough indications of a country’s material potential and of its position in the relative rankings of the leading states. The “Industrial Revolution,” most economic historians are at pains to stress, did not happen overnight. It was, compared with the political “revolutions” of 1776, 1789, and 1917, a gradual, slow-moving process; it affected only certain manufactures and certain means of production; and it occurred region by region, rather than involving an entire country.1 Yet all these caveats cannot avoid the fact that a fundamentally important transformation in man’s economic circumstances began to occur sometime around 1780—not less significant, in the view of one authority, than the (admittedly far slower) transformation of savage Paleolithic hunting man to domesticated Neolithic farming man.2 What industrialization, and in particular the steam engine, did was to substitute inanimate for animate sources of power; by converting heat into work through the use of machines—“rapid, regular, precise, tireless” machines3—mankind was thus able to exploit vast new sources of energy.

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It claims to require absolute security along its extensive borders, yet its hitherto unyielding policy toward its neighbors’ own security concerns worsens Moscow’s relations—with western and eastern Europe, with Middle East peoples, with China and Japan—and in turn makes the Russians feel “encircled” and less secure. Its philosophy asserts the ongoing dialectical process of change in world affairs, driven by technology and new means of production, and inevitably causing all sorts of political and social transformations; and yet its own autocratic and bureaucratic habits, the privileges which cushion the party elites, the restrictions upon the free interchange of knowledge, and the lack of a personal-incentive system make it horribly ill-equipped to handle the explosive but subtle high-tech future which is already emerging in Japan and California.

Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
by Richard Wrangham
Published 15 Aug 2010

Women and men were equally capable of attaining the prestige of being “big” (important) people. Domestic violence was rare and strongly censured. There was “tremendous overlap in the roles of men and women” and a great deal of personal control over how they chose to spend their time. Women had “the same kinds of personal autonomy and control of the means of production as men.” Yet despite the apparent escape from patriarchy, women on Vanatinai did all the domestic cooking. Cooking was regarded as a low-prestige activity. Other chores for which women were responsible included washing dishes, fetching water and firewood, sweeping, and cleaning up pig droppings.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away
by Doug Henwood
Published 9 May 2005

(Wars usually lessen the degree of inequality; they require the mobilization of unskilled workers to make armaments, pushing up low-end wages, and wartime inflations can ravage old fortunes.) Inequality quickly returned to prewar levels during the 1920s (Williamson and Lindert 1980; Steckel and Moehling 2000). The driving forces were industriaUzation, which created great wealth alongside great poverty, and urbanization, which separated workers from the means of production.^ But aside from those macro relations, wealth inequality also appears to have increased within population groups as well—a feature that would reappear in the next great polarization, the one that began in the 1970s. The 1929 crash, depression, and another world war ended the long polarization of wealth.

Does Capitalism Have a Future?
by Immanuel Wallerstein , Randall Collins , Michael Mann , Georgi Derluguian , Craig Calhoun , Stephen Hoye and Audible Studios
Published 15 Nov 2013

Here, for all our multidisciplinarity and our celebration of intellectual diversity, is an occasion when it seems to me one line of theory stands head and shoulders above all others in dealing with the mechanisms of crisis and the direction of very long-term structural change. The theory I will extol is a stripped-down version of the fundamental insight that Marx and Engels had formulated already in the 1840s. It is a stripped-down Marxism indeed. No labor theory of value, no reference to expropriation of labor from the means of production, no alienation from species-being. It makes no ontological claims and does not posit any final emancipation at the end of the crisis. I have stripped it down to a theory of long-term economic crisis; we need other lines of sociology for what happens in response to the crisis, and what arises politically and socially afterward.

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy
by Kevin Mellyn
Published 18 Jun 2012

The Chevy Volt and Solyndra are but two of the poster children of this adventure in central planning, industrial policy, and crony capitalism pursued with the best of intentions. The Point: Power Which brings us to the point of why financial repression and industrial policy are two sides of the same coin. The point is power. Power today isn’t about owning the means of production in the classic socialist formula, but the ability to direct who gets credit and investment in a public policy framework designed by the great and good. The great and good know who they are, whether products of the grandes écoles or Harvard and Princeton. Their frustration with the markets rather than the government picking economic winners and losers based on the irrational preferences of mere consumers is quite understandable.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More
by Luke Dormehl
Published 4 Nov 2014

In his 2004 book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, the American psychologist Barry Schwartz argues that the overwhelming amount of available choice in everything from shopping to, yes, dating has become for many people a source of anxiety in itself.21 In terms of relationships, this “paradox of choice” is dealt with by subjecting individual lovers to segmentation: an industrial term that denotes how efficiency can be gained by dividing up and isolating the means of production. In an age of mass customization, relationships become just any commodity to be shaped according to fads, changing desires and flux-like whims. Such a postindustrial approach to dating runs counter to what we have been culturally conditioned to believe. The Lover is supposed to be unique; not just a combination of answers to set questions, each one to be answered correctly or incorrectly.

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy
by Dr. Jim Taylor
Published 9 Sep 2008

Wealth ‘‘ghost towns,’’ like Newport, Rhode Island, stand as mute testimony to the power and grandeur of those heady, aristocratic days. They were not only rich, they were powerful. The wealthy owned the mines, the lumber, and the other sources of raw material. They owned the factories and the means of production. They owned the inventions and the patents and the intellectual property. They owned the railroads, the steamships, and other means of distribution. They set the prices. They owned the public stock, the private bonds, and had strong relationships with the merchant bankers who financed it all.

Chomsky on Mis-Education
by Noam Chomsky
Published 24 Mar 2000

Democracy requires that the source of the shadow be removed not only because of its domination of the political arena but because the very institutions of private power undermine democracy and freedom. Dewey was very explicit about the antidemocratic power that he had in mind. To quote him, “Power today”—this is the 1920s—“resides in control of the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Whoever owns them rules the life of the country,” even if democratic forms remain. “Business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda,” that is the system of actual power, the source of coercion and control, and until it’s unraveled we can’t talk seriously about democracy and freedom.

Hubris: Why Economists Failed to Predict the Crisis and How to Avoid the Next One
by Meghnad Desai
Published 15 Feb 2015

Even after 166 years, it makes fascinating reading and remains one of the best introductions to the global nature of capitalism. Marx and Engels saw capitalism not as a haven of static, tranquil equilibrium, but as a story of constant expansion and change accompanied by crises. Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells. … It is enough to mention the commercial crises that by their periodic return put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.

Shorter: Work Better, Smarter, and Less Here's How
by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Published 10 Mar 2020

When Blue Street adopts DocuSign, Farnell Clarke moves to cloud-based accounting systems, and Normally uses collaborative software, they do so with the aim of helping individuals and teams work faster. Second, because companies moving to four-day workweeks give workers the power to adopt and experiment with new tools, they are letting workers own the means of production (and algorithms and data). IIH Nordic’s bottom-up approach to technological innovation, which gives programmers the freedom to try out new methods and practices, gives workers a lot of power in the workplace. When workers own their own technologies, they’re more likely to prosper, to become more skilled over time, and to seek out opportunities for higher-value work.

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl
Published 7 May 2018

Select Committee on the Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery), Report from the Select Committee on Stoppage of Wages (Hosiery) (HC 421-XIV, 1854–5), iv. Duncan Bythell agrees: So long as outwork labour remained plentiful and its price fell ever lower, manu- facturers had little incentive to turn to alternative means of production . . . contem- poraries often believed that the very cheapness of hand-labour actually delayed the adoption of newly invented labour-saving machines. (Duncan Bythell, The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth-Century Britain (St Martin’s Press 1978), 177) The example given is the development of power looms in the textile industry in the 1830s and 1840s, with manufacturers reporting before parliamentary com- mittees that low labour cost made it unnecessary to invest.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir
by Anna Wiener
Published 14 Jan 2020

What were we doing, anyway, helping people become billionaires? Billionaires were the mark of a sick society. They shouldn’t exist. There was no moral structure in which such a vast accumulation of wealth should be acceptable. “Please don’t start quoting Marx, telling me that our coworkers need to seize the means of production,” the engineer said, shaking his head. He had grown up poor, he reminded me; he had spent years working on actual assembly lines before teaching himself to code. “It’s not about a means of solidarity or longevity for them. It’s just about personal leverage. When I was exposed to asbestos, nobody doing comp-sci at an Ivy League was showing up to help.”

Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain's Underclass
by Darren McGarvey
Published 2 Nov 2017

Some will argue that this introspection is merely another form of structural oppression; an extension of neo-liberal economics that encourages individuals to avert their eyes from the injustice of the world and, instead, focus on self-improvement. Others will argue that it’s a cop-out because it doesn’t challenge power. To them I say this: you are no use to any family, community, cause or movement unless you are first able to manage, maintain and operate the machinery of your own life. These are the means of production that one must first seize before meaningful change can occur. This doesn’t mean resistance has to stop. Nor does it mean power, corruptions and injustice shouldn’t be challenged, it simply means that running parallel to all of that necessary action must be a willingness to subject one’s own thinking and behaviour to a similar quality of scrutiny.

The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations
by David Pilling
Published 30 Jan 2018

He sought to discover how America’s economic capacity could best be employed so that it struck a balance between building a fighting machine and maintaining the domestic consumption necessary to keep the economy ticking over. Within the government and military establishment there was sharp disagreement between those who wanted to commandeer, even nationalize, the means of production so that they could be diverted to the war effort and others, including those working with Kuznets, who concluded that the economy had plenty of spare capacity that could be marshaled without curtailing domestic consumption. These economists may even have influenced the timing of America’s entry into the war in Europe, having concluded that the US would better be able to sustain its effort if it delayed involvement until late 1943 or early 1944.13 Just as Germany had lacked an atomic bomb that could have tilted the war in its favor, so it was missing the statisticians and economists who could also have helped it.

To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death
by Mark O'Connell
Published 28 Feb 2017

(Amazon was, at that point, on the verge of launching a drone delivery program, whereby consumer goods made and packaged by robots could be delivered into your hands by an unmanned carrier-drone within thirty minutes of you placing your order.) Robots don’t need toilet breaks, and drones don’t get tired, and neither are likely to form unions. And so this seemed like the ultimate fulfillment of the logic of techno-capitalism: the outright ownership not just of the means of production, but of the labor force itself. Čapek’s term “robot” was, after all, taken from the Czech word for “forced labor.” The image and valence of the human body has always shaped how we think about machines; humans have always succeeded in reducing the bodies of other humans to mechanisms, components in systems of their own design.

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Thomas Ramge
Published 27 Feb 2018

before copycats appear and free ride: In his famous book The Theory of Economic Development, Joseph Schumpeter argued that entrepreneurs, by definition, have discovered a category of exclusive information. They’re the first people to identify a new market, patent an invention, launch an efficient means of production, or introduce some other “new combination”—a way to coordinate human activity—before anyone else is aware of it. For Schumpeter and his acolytes, the resulting information asymmetry creates an economic incentive. Even though the market becomes less efficient, that is the price we pay for innovation.

How to Do Nothing
by Jenny Odell
Published 8 Apr 2019

And PeoplesOpen.net’s mission statement seems to echo that of Community Memory: [W]e believe in the creation of local internets and locally-relevant applications, the cultivation of community-owned telecommunications networks in the interest of autonomy and grassroots community collaboration, and ultimately, in owning the means of production by which we communicate.19 But for those networks that aren’t locally specific, it might simply be the case that the network that allows you to “listen to a place” is just one that doesn’t demand that you use it all the time. After telling me about mesh networks in an email, Taeyoon added: To me, listening to a place is about discovering a sequence of encounters.

Fully Automated Luxury Communism
by Aaron Bastani
Published 10 Jun 2019

Most importantly, however, within the context of the Third Disruption they offer a practical means by which society can navigate the forward march of automation and, ultimately, artificial intelligence. Despite the immense challenges of both, there is a political solution to a world where labour may well become capital: giving the means of production to workers themselves. In addition to this network of local banks, central government would create national and regional investment bodies to fund not only businesses but also key infrastructure that delivers social returns – be it reducing emissions or purchasing fixed capital that allows worker-owned enterprises to make more with less.

When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession With Economic Efficiency
by Roger L. Martin
Published 28 Sep 2020

Concern for the Future of Democratic Capitalism Their responses got me increasingly worried for the future of America’s much lauded combination of democracy and capitalism. Simply put, the democratic part of the combination means that a majority of voting citizens determines who populates the government, which sets the rules for the functioning of the country and its economy. The capitalist part ensures that the means of production are largely in private hands and that markets allocate resources based substantially on supply and demand. For democracy and capitalism to thrive together, Americans like Sarah, Amy, and the others we interviewed must consent to it, as they traditionally have done. But for that to continue, they need to feel that capitalism is working for them—because otherwise the possibility exists that they will use their voting power to choose some other way to allocate resources and manage production.

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business
by Alan Murray
Published 15 Dec 2022

History had taken a turn. THE CONTRARIANS Not everybody, of course, was so enamored with this new declaration of stakeholder capitalism. The breakthrough came with a lot of baggage. Generations of Americans had learned to equate social responsibility with socialism and state control of the means of production, and held a stubborn mistrust of anything that strayed from the traditional purpose, fearing that corporations would be unable to protect shareholders if they invited additional stakeholders in. Others who distrusted any action by business cynically viewed the Roundtable’s statement as a head fake—an effort on the part of corporations to look “woke,” and perhaps derail the aggressive regulatory actions of a coming Democratic administration.

Planes, Trains and Toilet Doors: 50 Places That Changed British Politics
by Matt Chorley
Published 8 Feb 2024

He remained as leader, though, and the fight with the left continued. Believing that public opposition to nationalisation was in part to blame for the election defeat, Gaitskell launched an attempt to rewrite Clause IV of Labour’s constitution, which committed to ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. He was defeated by the left, and it would be thirty-six years before Tony Blair finished what Gaitskell started. However, when his party conference defied him to back unilateral disarmament he vowed to ‘fight, fight and fight again to save the party we love’. He did, and it worked, surviving the power struggle stronger for it.

The Idea of Decline in Western History
by Arthur Herman
Published 8 Jan 1997

Horkheimer and his allies in the institute, including Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno, were also drawn to the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács, who had suggested that the eventual victory of the proletariat would resolve not only the contradictions of capitalism but modernity itself. They were particularly impressed by Lukács’s revelation that bourgeois capitalism functioned as a totality, encompassing institutions, attitudes, and habits of mind as well as the means of production—in fact, Lukács claimed, “the concept of totality, the all-pervasive supremacy of the whole over the parts” was the essence of Marxism as a social and historical theory. The Marxist theorist’s job was to combat “the insidious effects of bourgeois ideology on the thought of the proletariat.” By making workers aware of their present misery and their power to change it, by giving them a sense of their own “class consciousness,” the intellectual provided an indispensable service to his working-class partners.6 Unlike Lukács, Horkheimer himself had no interest in promoting a revolution in the streets.

…

It reflected the modern nation’s industrial and therefore foreign character. Like Stalin’s Russia, the sins of Eisenhower’s United States formed part of a larger historical totality. “There is,” Mills wrote, “a fairly straight line running upward throughout the history of the West; that oppression and exploitation, violence and destruction, as well as the means of production, have been progressively enlarged and increasingly centralized.” By means of a manipulative mass media, “the decline of politics as a genuine and public debate of alternative decisions,” the loss of personal autonomy, and the commercialization of wishes and desires, the “power structure” had organized every aspect of American society to conceal its manipulative power.

Cage of Souls
by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Published 4 Apr 2019

Emil was that spark, and he had just started to shout for his missing staff when the mob roared with one voice (as he put it) and came for him. This might have been the first time Helman and the others became aware of what was happening. Every worker and factory hand who could manage it surged onto Emil’s shopfloor, taking Emil with them. There, seeing the accursed means of production that had churned out our heretical tome, they began to break things. Once that kind of business starts there is really no stopping it. As Emil watched, horrified, they smashed all but one of his presses (and that one was missed through carelessness – let no-one tell you a mob is thorough). They smashed him, too, when he tried to interfere.

…

I had to wake up a few old contacts, do some things I wouldn’t normally touch, take a few risks with the kind of people I would work for, just to keep the creditors away.” I nodded, generally uninterested. “Here.” Emil rummaged behind a stack of rubble and old boxes. “Get this.” It was a poster, roughly drawn out, that said, “WORKERS of Shadrapar, seize the Means of Production! Free Men and Women need NO LEADERS. SMASH the AUTHORITY!” with a picture of working men with linked arms. I thought they were dancing at the time, but now I know they were showing solidarity. “What the hell is this?” I asked. “Ironic, no? Let me give you a little background. Years ago, when I was just starting in this business, fresh out of the Academy and apprenticed, I knew someone.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
by David Brooks
Published 1 Jan 2000

These people have different aspirations than the old country club and martini suburban crowd, and naturally enough want their ideals reflected in the sort of things they buy and images they project. Shopping may not be the most intellectual exercise on earth, but it is one of the more culturally revealing. Indeed, one of the upshots of the new era is that Karl Marx may have had it exactly backward. He argued that classes are defined by their means of production. But it could be true that, in the information age at least, classes define themselves by their means of consumption. The Historical Roots of Bobo Culture The story of the educated class really begins in the first third of the 18th century. It’s necessary to go that far back because, while demographically the educated class has only exploded in the past few decades, the values this class embodies are the culmination of a cultural struggle that began with the first glimmerings of the industrial age.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world
by Michael Pollan
Published 27 May 2002

Even today, when only a handful of big companies are left standing in most American industries, there are still some two million farmers. What has stood in the way of concentration is nature: her complexity, diversity, and sheer intractability in the face of our most heroic efforts at control. Perhaps most intractable of all has been agriculture’s means of production, which of course is nature’s own: the seed. It’s only in the last few decades, with the introduction of modern hybrids, that farmers began to buy their seeds from big companies. Even today a great many farmers save some seed every fall to replant in the spring. “Brown bagging,” as this practice is sometimes called, allows farmers to select strains particularly well adapted to local conditions.* Since these seeds are typically traded among farmers, the practice steadily advances the state of the genetic art.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

A concept of human nature is also seen when he describes how, when during cooperation, man “strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species” (Marx, Capital Volume 1, p. 447). He also uses nature as a synonym for “in essence,” as when he writes “these means of production are in and for themselves, by nature, capital” (Marx, Capital Volume 3, p. 963). And finally, he lets nature stand in for history, albeit an anti-essentialist history that is opposed to capitalist history, when he boldly claims that “one thing, however, is clear: nature does not produce on the one hand owners of money or commodities, and on the other hand men possessing nothing but their own labour-power.

Curation Nation
by Rosenbaum, Steven
Published 27 Jan 2011

We’re going from making things to finding and organizing things. Whatever you do though, you’d better be extraordinary at it. “The industrial revolution is over,” Godin says. “Karl Marx and Adam Smith said there are two teams, owners and workers. I’m saying there’s a third team now, people who own their own means of production. They own the factory and they’re a worker. That could be a blogger or a designer.” Godin thinks there’s power in being the one irreplaceable thing: the “linchpin.” And increasingly, the linchpin in the content world will be aggregators, not creators. Blogger Arrington says that today each piece of news lives and dies by its own meritorical links; aggregators and the real-time Web provide the curatorial fabric to help important and useful content rise above the noise.

The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life
by Steven E. Landsburg
Published 1 May 2012

In the second example, a ruling against Sturges leads him to close down his consulting room Of Medicine and Candy, Trains and Sparks 85 and curse Bridgman for his noise, while a ruling for Sturges leads him to close down his consulting room and happily collect a weekly check from his neighbor. If we were being more precise, then, we would say that while the judges' decision does matter to Sturges and to Bridgman, it doesn't matter to anyone else. The decision does not affect the allocation of resources. That is, it does not affect what gets produced, or the means of production. Economists are usually far more concerned about the allocation of resources than they are about transfers of income between individuals. We reveal our priorities when we say that judicial opinions don't "matter." The conflict between Sturges and Bridgman is a conflict over who should control a resource.

Bureaucracy
by David Graeber
Published 3 Feb 2015

On the other hand, in their obsession with jailing poets and playwrights whose work they considered threatening, they evinced a profound faith in the power of art and creativity to change the world—those running capitalist regimes rarely bothered, convinced that if they kept a firm hand on the means of productions (and, of course, the army and police), the rest would take care of itself. One of the reasons it is difficult to see all this is because the word “imagination” can mean so many different things. In most modern definitions imagination is counterposed to reality; “imaginary” things are first and foremost things that aren’t really there.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism
by David Harvey
Published 2 Jan 1995

Unlike many other social democratic and dirigiste states, Sweden had refrained from nationalizing any of the commanding heights of the economy (with the exception of transportation and public utilities). While there were many small businesses, a few families owned a disproportionate share of the means of production. As in almost all advanced capitalist societies, labour unrest burgeoned in the late 1960s, sparking a wave of regulatory reform that curbed the power of capital and extended the power of labour even into the workplace. The proposal that most threatened the capitalist class was the Rehn–Meidner plan.

Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star
by Tracey Thorn
Published 7 Feb 2013

The Chris & James mix got a respectable amount of play in UK clubs, but the single stalled at number 69 in the charts. I’d long since stopped thinking of ourselves as a hit-single group, and though it had worried me for a while, I was now far less concerned. Hell, I had my own plans now; I felt like we’d seized back the means of production. We booked a tour, of clubs not concert halls, playing as a revved-up acoustic duo, deliberately visiting every tiny dive you could think of. The Moles club, Bath, Liverpool’s Lomax, King Tut’s in Glasgow. Looking at these tour dates, you could have been forgiven for thinking, ‘Poor old EBTG, what a comedown, eh?

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present
by Thomas J. Dilorenzo
Published 9 Aug 2004

That is why, for example, businesses compete fiercely for niche markets with relatively small pockets of customers.5 THE CENTRAL IMPORTANCE OF PROPERTY RIGHTS As the quotation of Ayn Rand at the beginning of this chapter denotes, private property is the most important distinguishing feature of capitalism. The only alternative is communal or governmental ownership—that is, socialism. And socialism is economic poison wherever it is implemented.6 Private ownership of the means of production is the only way to ensure a workable system of human cooperation and division of labor. The American founding fathers were students of the British philosopher John Locke, whose famous Second Treatise of Government proclaimed that individuals are willing to join in society with others, and form governments, primarily for the mutual preservation of their “lives, liberties, and estates [that is, property].”

Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
by Chris Hayes
Published 11 Jun 2012

Chapter 5 WINNERS We are the 1% — SIGN IN THE WINDOW OF THE CHICAGO BOARD OF TRADE NEXT TO “FREEDOM” THERE IS PROBABLY NO MORE contested word in the American political vocabulary than “elite.” Each side of the political spectrum has its own definition, but in our contemporary politics it is the right that has most assiduously cultivated anti-elite animus. In the right’s imagination it is not the owners of the means of production that compose the elite, but rather intellectuals, academics, members of the media and government. “Washington and the media elite,” Sarah Palin thundered at a Republican fund-raiser in March 2010, “quit disrespecting the wisdom of the American people!” Pressed by Brian Williams during the 2008 campaign to define just who the elite were, Palin alluded to a state of mind.

The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy
by Peter Temin
Published 17 Mar 2017

Lewis argued that the capitalist sector grows from retained earnings. He assumed that members of the capitalist sector reinvest their retained earnings. In other words, both models rely on savings, but the determinants of investment are quite different. Lewis and Solow were working within a Keynesian framework in which capital referred to the means of production: factories and machines are the prime examples. Simon Kuznets, a third Nobel Laureate in economics, also was focused on economic growth in the 1950s. Using the data available to him, he formulated what came to be called the Kuznets Curve that asserted that income inequality would first rise and then fall during economic growth.

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It)
by Salim Ismail and Yuri van Geest
Published 17 Oct 2014

Location, status, preservation and safety of most substances can be monitored (chemical substance traces, pollution, quality of life). Biological production Biology has the unique trait of being software that can create its own hardware. Leverage bio-based materials and synthetic biology as alternative means of production. Bio-production remains difficult to scale, but in the medium term promises to transform current production methods. It is important to note that the need for long-distance transport will drop over time due to the rise of localized production and a growing circular economy (recycling). More and more products will be produced on the spot through local partners (Leveraged Assets), access to 3D printers and cheap labor provided by highly customizable robots.

Stuffocation
by James Wallman
Published 6 Dec 2013

They also proposed that, after the agrarian, manufacturing, and service economies, the experience economy is the logical evolution of capitalism. By that, they meant that, just as the creation and delivery of food and drink was the hallmark of the agrarian system, and the people who owned the means of production were the wealthiest – and just as the creation and delivery of material goods was the pillar of the manufacturing economy, and the people and businesses which owned the factories were the most successful, and so on for the service economy – so the creation and delivery of experiences will be the essential characteristic of the experience economy.

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality
by Oded Galor
Published 22 Mar 2022

In such conditions, workers benefited from having a broad and flexible education, rather than exclusive, vocational skills that complemented a particular task or occupation.[35] By this account, contrary to Marx’s conjecture that the Industrial Revolution would erode the importance of human capital, allowing the owners of the means of production to exploit their workers more viciously, ongoing technological transformation of the production process in fact made human capital an increasingly critical element in the boosting of industrial productivity. Instead of a communist revolution, therefore, industrialisation triggered a revolution in mass education.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less
by Emrys Westacott
Published 14 Apr 2016

Yet although he fully recognizes its disruptive effects on traditional society, this is not the basis for his critique of the system. He criticizes capitalism for its exploitative character, its proneness to crisis, and its immiseration of the masses, but he virtually celebrates the way it continually revolutionizes the means of production, thereby releasing the hitherto unimagined power of human intelligence and labor. Nevertheless, his vision of socialism still carries some traces of the tradition that praises simplicity. The rational harnessing of the technological power unleashed by capitalism is expected to release us from the drudgery of tedious, unwanted work.

The Lies That Bind: Rethinking Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Published 27 Aug 2018

The clergy and the nobility usually counted for two; the peasants, merchants, and shopkeepers could be lumped together or split up in various ways. Modern theories of class start with Karl Marx’s mid-nineteenth-century writings, and in his highly stylized picture of the British economy in the early days of industrial capitalism, he described two main classes, defined by their “relations to the means of production.” There were the capitalists, who owned the factories; and the workers, who earned wages for making things. Marx called the capitalist class the bourgeoisie, taking up a word that had once referred to the shopkeepers and artisans who lived in towns (les bourgs, in French). The workers he called the proletariat.

The Green New Deal: Why the Fossil Fuel Civilization Will Collapse by 2028, and the Bold Economic Plan to Save Life on Earth
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 9 Sep 2019

Randy and I then put the question directly to the states and cities of the northeastern and midwestern regions of the country and local and national labor unions: Would they “continue to allow their own capital to be used against them,” or “would they assert direct control over these funds in order to save their jobs and their communities”?17 Although the question we posed was more pragmatic and strategic, behind it was an ideological question that has plagued capitalism since Adam Smith penned The Wealth of Nations in 1776. We asked, “Who should control the means of production?”18 This question, we observed, was becoming more salient than ever as the financial community and global companies were using the deferred savings of union workers in the form of pension capital to relocate, not only to the Sunbelt but also beyond, setting up operations around the world, beggaring workforces in country after country, pitting workers and communities against each other to enlist the cheapest labor available and locating in communities where they could depend on lax or nonexistent environmental standards and few, if any, checks on the working conditions in their factories.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen
by James Suzman
Published 10 Jul 2017

To him the urge to produce was the essence of humanity, and his anxieties about capitalism had their roots in his belief that capitalism robbed people of the profound fulfillment that came from producing things. Marx’s communist Utopia, in contrast to Keynes’s post-labor Utopia, was one in which everyone continued to work but was liberated to seek a more profound fulfillment from their work by owning the “means of production.” The evidence of hunting and gathering societies suggests that both Marx and neoliberal economists were wrong about human nature: we are more than capable of leading fulfilled lives that are not defined by our labor. But if this is so, then why is it proving so hard for humans to embrace abundance the way hunter-gatherers did?

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World
by Fareed Zakaria
Published 5 Oct 2020

In those days, the term “socialism” was often used interchangeably with “communism,” and frequently to describe the system practiced by the Soviet Union, the West’s mortal foe—and a dictatorship. Many of the people who claim to support socialism today in fact have in mind something entirely different from what the term has meant in its historical origins. The textbook definition of socialism is government ownership of the means of production—factories, farms, and enterprises. That was the plan pursued by the socialist politicians of the twentieth century, from India’s Jawaharlal Nehru to Israel’s David Ben-Gurion to Britain’s Clement Attlee. In these countries, the state usually owned and ran the electricity, telephone, water, and gas utilities; airlines, trains, and bus services; coal, oil, and steel companies.

The Capitalist Manifesto
by Johan Norberg
Published 14 Jun 2023

High inflation, he wrote, makes economic relationships ‘so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.’19 The voluntary economy According to Karl Marx, we have capitalism when the economy is based on privately owned means of production, with workers who voluntarily sell their labour, and when coordination is market-based. He put it in a slightly depressing way, setting up a false dichotomy between classes (he had a hard time imagining a thriving capitalism where capitalists are also wage earners, workers own companies through pension funds and there are a multitude of partnerships, cooperatives and companies owned by workers), but in essence it is a decent working definition.20 Property rights are the foundation, so that we make a distinction between yours and mine, defining who has the right to decide how property is to be used, divided, transferred or sold.

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks
by Keith Houston
Published 23 Sep 2013

Only the arrival of printing could deliver the defibrillating jolt necessary to bring this ragtag army of “debased” diples into line. * * * Printing, as has been seen in previous chapters, fundamentally and permanently changed writing and punctuation. Time-consuming luxuries such as handpainted illustrations and rubricated marks of punctuation* fell victim to the economies of scale enabled by this new means of production.30 The marking of quotations was affected too, and deeply so: Gutenberg’s system of movable type made underlining and printing in colored ink time-consuming and impractical; not to mention that early printers were curiously resistant to cutting punches for the diple’s divergent ranks of descendants.31 Thus, the earliest printed books relied on a battery of temporary measures such as alternative typefaces and parentheses, along with nontypographic methods such as verbs of speaking.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
by Richard J. Evans
Published 31 Aug 2016

By 1838, British-made steam-pumps were routinely used in all the deeper Belgian pits – and the average depth of pits in Belgium was 689 feet at this point. By the 1820s coke blast furnaces and puddling and rolling mills were being constructed around Liège and Charleroi, using technology imported from Britain. Import duties protected the industry from British competition, and the reduction of costs undercut traditional means of production. By the 1830s, coked pig iron made up virtually 100 per cent of all pig iron produced in Belgium, as it did in Britain, whereas in Germany and France traditional charcoal-based methods continued to dominate. Charcoal continued to be used in Sweden for refining pig iron in an adaptation of the British puddling technique until the 1860s.

…

The middle classes, in all their variety, were still socially and in many ways also politically dominant at the beginning of the century, but increasingly they had to share their power with competitors lower down the social scale. THE PETTY BOURGEOISIE For Karl Marx and his followers, the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class was a transitional social stratum doomed to extinction, torn apart by the owners of the means of production on the one hand and those they exploited, the workers who had nothing to sell but their labour, on the other. Writing at mid-century, Marx categorized the petty bourgeoisie as a disparate collection of subsistence farmers, traditional artisans and small independent retailers. The gigantic social upheavals of the second half of the century did indeed create serious competition for these social groups.

…

‘More inspiration for the work,’ he said, ‘has been drawn from the teachings of Jesus than from any other source.’ In 1893, Hardie founded the Independent Labour Party, based in Bradford, with representatives from Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation and the Fabians. It aimed to achieve the ‘collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. Initially dependent on local electoral pacts with the Liberals, the party won twenty-nine seats in the House of Commons in 1906, alongside twenty-six miners’ union representatives elected on the Liberal Party ticket. In 1910 more than forty Labour candidates were successful, though Labour was not to displace the Liberals as the main party of the left until after the war.

The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy
by Sasha Issenberg
Published 1 Jan 2007

Nearly a halfcentury earlier, a worldwide trade had been built based on new capacities in transport and storage. Continued technological innovation ever since— straight through the ability to breed a tuna in a cage and to move high-quality meat without depreciation on a super-frozen container ship—had slowly altered the means of production. Some tuna entrepreneurs attempted to introduce factory-style standardization, and others continued to work the risky margins, creating what were, in essence, two parallel sushi trade networks: one slow-moving, predictable, and capital-intensive; the other quick, nimble, and volatile. With Iida’s fish, value was maintained through a chain of deeply held personal ties, played out over generations.

From Gutenberg to Google: electronic representations of literary texts
by Peter L. Shillingsburg
Published 15 Jan 2006

It has been suggested that textuality might find a better metaphor in the coral reef.7 A sense of natural development and symbiotic relations and mutually dependent developments in a hugely complex natural interaction under the control of no one in particular and eventuating in breath-taking beauty may be an attractive alternative vision. But I cannot go there. Texts are human inventions constituted by humanly devised sign systems and mechanical means of production and distribution. Their conventions are of human invention and agreement. Humans ruin rather than build coral reefs. It is true that language grows and changes in spite of French Academies and Webster’s dictionaries, but insofar as humans create texts of great complexity and dexterity through the conscious manipulation of the conventions of writing, it seems necessary to provide conscious ways to enhance one’s ability to comprehend the functions, meanings, purposes, and even intentions of their creation and manufacture.

The Data Revolution: Big Data, Open Data, Data Infrastructures and Their Consequences
by Rob Kitchin
Published 25 Aug 2014

These ethical positions are often contested, with different groups taking contrasting views on values themselves and the extent to which ethical stances should be legislated for, and their debate is an exercise in moral philosophy. Such contestation also exists with respect to data, especially concerning what data are generated and the means of production, how data are shared, traded and protected, and to what ends data are employed. While some data are considered relatively benign, for example measurements relating to the weather, other data are considered to be highly sensitive, for example those related to individuals which can be used to produce a detailed picture of the lives they lead and to regulate those lives.

Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution
by Wendy Brown
Published 6 Feb 2015

Subjects, liberated for the pursuit of their own enhancement of human capital, emancipated from all concerns with and regulation by the social, the political, the common, or the collective, are inserted into the norms and imperatives of market conduct and integrated into the purposes of the firm, industry, region, nation, or postnational constellation to which their survival is tethered. In a ghostly repetition of the ironic “double freedom” that Marx designated as the prerequisite of feudal subjects becoming proletarianized at the dawn of capitalism (freedom from ownership of the means of production and freedom to sell their labor power), a new double freedom — from the state and from all other values — permits market-instrumental rationality to become the dominant rationality organizing and constraining the life of the neoliberal subject. This is also, of course, the significance of 108 u n d o in g t h e d e m o s economic models and methods spreading across the social sciences, becoming notably dominant in political science, but gaining ground in anthropology and sociology, as well.

Milton Friedman: A Biography
by Lanny Ebenstein
Published 23 Jan 2007

Interviewer: So you see the march of liberty and free markets going forward into the 21st century, not taking a detour backward in China or elsewhere? Friedman: Yes. The world as a whole has more or less embraced freedom. Socialism, in the traditional sense, meant government ownership and operation of the means of production. Outside of North Korea and a couple of other spots, no one in the world today would define socialism that way. That will never come back. The fall of the Berlin Wall did more for the progress of freedom than all of the books written by myself or Friedrich Hayek or others. Socialism today has only come to mean government extraction of income from the haves and giving it to the have-nots.

World Economy Since the Wars: A Personal View
by John Kenneth Galbraith
Published 14 May 1994

The charge may have been unfair, but no one has suggested that Ricardo was a man of passion. Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a man of passion and of Jovian wrath, and this is a matter of first importance. For the Ricardian conclusions—the inevitable impoverishment of the masses, the progressive enrichment of those who own the natural means of production, the inevitable conflict between wages and profits and the priority of the latter for progress—could become, in the hands of an angry man, a call to revolution. As noted, Marx's conception of capitalism was no more gloomy than that of Ricardo or of Malthus. But unlike Ricardo and Malthus, Marx's mission was to identify fault, place blame, urge change and, above all, to enlist disciplined belief.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work
by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal
Published 21 Feb 2017

If the plant didn’t grow nearby, if it wasn’t on the list of socially sanctioned substances, potential explorers were out of luck. Pharmacology is such a potent force for ecstasis because it changes the nature of this game. With chemical cookbooks, rigorous neuroscience, crowdsourced lexicons, and now, democratized means of production, we’re freed from the geographic and cultural limitations we inherited. By giving us access to not just the botany of desire but the molecules of desire, we can continue to shape these compounds even as they inevitably shape us. It’s coevolution compressed from millennia into minutes. Chapter Seven Technology Dean’s Dark Secret The why was never in question.

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era
by Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith
Published 17 Aug 2015

Mann was instrumental in getting Massachusetts to adopt tax-supported elementary public education, and set the stage for the scaling of a new kind of education in the United States. At the end of the nineteenth century, America needed to educate large numbers of immigrants and refugees from farms for basic citizenship and for jobs in a growing industrial economy. As work-flow experts like Frederick Winslow Taylor formulated efficient means of production, the level of expertise of workers in the production chain narrowed. The economy needed single-task interchangeable employees, not skilled artisans. And we needed schools to teach the surging numbers of factory workers the basic skills needed for jobs in our emerging cities—to follow orders, be punctual, and perform rote tasks.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High
by Mike Power
Published 1 May 2013

This may be intentional omission to reduce liability, but if so, why bother? It is my opinion, then, that this book review is worth far more than the book itself. Enjoy! An amused audience worldwide tuned in to this bizarre new entertainment channel. The conversation made little sense to many, but its impact was clear enough. Media was changing, as the means of production and, crucially, distribution were quietly seized. This would change the drug culture, in common with every other area of human experience. Eleusis was a fascinating character to anyone interested in the drugs subculture and net culture at this time – his arguments with Zwitterion were technically impenetrable, but full of humour and clever literary and mythological references to ancient Greece and Homer.

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee
Published 20 Jan 2014

We need to let the technologies of the second machine age do their work and find ways to deal with the challenges they will bring with them. We are also skeptical of efforts to come up with fundamental alternatives to capitalism. By ‘capitalism’ here, we mean a decentralized economic system of production and exchange in which most of the means of production are in private hands (as opposed to belonging to the government), where most exchange is voluntary (no one can force you to sign a contract against your will), and where most goods have prices that vary based on relative supply and demand instead of being fixed by a central authority. All of these features exist in most economies around the world today.

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Steve Coogan
Published 1 Sep 2011

So I eventually decided to take my notes and Dictaphone to the public library and do my work there. In fact, I became such a fixture there, I heard one member of staff quietly refer to me as Karl Marx. I don’t think so! I’d take his ideas about the redistribution of wealth and shove them where the sun don’t shine! The workers own the means of production – I ask you! I was determined – absolutely adamant – that I wouldn’t outstay my welcome at the Lamberts. And so, after 14 weeks, I saddled up and hit the road. ‘Thanks for having me,’ I said. ‘Don’t mention it,’ Fran Lambert seemed to say with the good side of her face. ‘You can come and stay any time you like.’ 167 He’s moved to America now so he won’t mind me talking about it, but his wife did used to beat him quite a lot.

Microserfs
by Douglas Coupland
Published 14 Feb 1995

It just doesn't mesh with her computer image. I get the impression she should be discussing exfoliation or tanning factors instead, but then, bodies are political, too. Or so Dusty has informed the office. I surprised Dusty. I said, that "since Marxism is explicitly based on property, ownership, and control of means of production, it may well end up being the final true politik of this Benetton world we now live in." She said, "Hey, Danster - I underestimated you." It was interesting to briefly enter the political realm - as such. SATURDAY Dusty made a "Bulimia Top Ten List." Dusty is so incredibly willing to discuss her body.

The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State
by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge
Published 14 May 2014

You might assume that Marx was a fan of big government, but in fact he had little interest in the size or scope of the state. As far as he was concerned, the engine of history lay in the forces of production rather than in epiphenomena such as ideas or constitutions. The conflict of interest between people who owned the means of production and those who sold their labor led to perpetual class struggle. The state was nothing more than an instrument of class rule: a committee to run the common affairs of whoever happened to be on top at the time—the bourgeoisie in Marx’s time—and an instrument of oppression to keep down the workers.

The Fields Beneath: The History of One London Village
by Gillian Tindall
Published 1 Oct 2002

It must have been partly a genuine objection to noise and smell which drove the middle classes to seek the new dormitory area further out, but it was also a matter of hardening lines of class demarcation. Unlike their immediate ancestors, ‘gentlemen’ in the nineteenth century did not live over the workshop, did not soil their hands, did not even contaminate their vision by seeing the means of production to which they owed their comfortable position in life. The late eighteenth-century ‘master’s house’ standing right next to its factory in stern pride, as the Wedgwood mansion did at Etruria, had given way to a carefully segregated existence. The mediaeval cottager who hung around at the back door of Bruges’s mansion hoping for the leftovers from the feast may have lived a very different life from that of his social superiors, but they inhabited the same landscape.

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business
by Julie Battilana and Tiziana Casciaro
Published 30 Aug 2021

Heavy, unrelenting work in hot, dangerous conditions made maiming and death commonplace. The very act of leaving home for work carried a substantial risk that you would not make it back at the end of the workday.67 At the same time, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick amassed fortunes through their control of the means of production. Their enormous power ensconced them in the upper echelons of American society, with lavish residences in New York City and vacation homes in places like Newport, Rhode Island, that have today become magnets for tourists curious to discover the opulence of America’s first mega-rich. The new industrialists and their bankers accumulated so much wealth that they quickly became the most powerful people in America.

Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change
by Dieter Helm
Published 2 Sep 2020

This is a pragmatic as well as a principled point: the policies needed are going to be painful in the short-to-medium term, and if there is not wide democratic consent then there will be revolt, as witnessed among many populist movements, not least the Gilets Jaunes in France whose first demand was the reduction of fuel taxes. Educate and inform, yes; replace and decide with the chosen climate elite, no. It is not only undemocratic. It will not work. With citizens’ assemblies shaping the decisions, the left argues that the State needs to control the means of production. It has long argued for the State to own the commanding heights of the economy. For much of the twentieth century it did, and in much of Europe it still does. This gives governments direct control over investment, and here the left’s argument has further reinforcement. It can channel savings into investment.

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy
by George Gilder
Published 16 Jul 2018

You may wonder how I can depict as “neo-Marxists” those who on the surface seem to be the most avid and successful capitalists on the planet. Marxism is much discussed as a vessel of revolutionary grievances, workers’ uprisings, divestiture of chains, critiques of capital, catalogs of classes, and usurpation of the means of production. At its heart, however, the first Marxism espoused a belief that the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century solved for all time the fundamental problem of production. The first industrial revolution, comprising steam engines, railways, electric grids, and turbines—all those “dark satanic mills”—was, according to Marx, the climactic industrial breakthrough of all time.

Hooked: Food, Free Will, and How the Food Giants Exploit Our Addictions
by Michael Moss
Published 2 Mar 2021

Or, as one of the evolutionary biologists who are probing this aspect of our eating habits put it, “It’s not so much that food is addictive, but rather that we by nature are drawn to eating, and the companies changed the food.” And oh, how they changed the food. * * * — In their rise to power, the processed food companies have wielded salt, sugar, and fat not just in pursuing profits through the cheapest means of production. Theirs has been a concerted effort to reach the primeval zones of our brain where we act by instinct rather than rationalization. Intuitively, we like sweet, and so they’ve given us sweet. The food manufacturers have more than sixty types of sugar that they’ve added to things that didn’t used to be sweet, thereby creating in us the expectation that everything should be cloying.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet
by Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore
Published 16 Oct 2017

Like most work under capitalism, we experience nature in a way that’s highly alienated. (Nature becomes a place we visit, not where we live.) Work and nature are given to us as separate domains of reality, a perception that has shaped environmentalist as well as labor politics. Marx’s main point was that peasants, artisans, and others lose their direct access to the “means of production” under capitalism: someone else owns the tools, workshops, land, and stores, and capitalists pay workers to apply their labor to these means. Marx wanted to show that capitalism sees reality through the dualism of work and nature; at the same time, he reminds us that no such separation is possible: what happens to workers affects “external nature” and vice versa.

Corporate Finance: Theory and Practice
by Pierre Vernimmen , Pascal Quiry , Maurizio Dallocchio , Yann le Fur and Antonio Salvi
Published 16 Oct 2017

It is a way of securing the value of assets and liabilities of the target company as the contract does not provide a detailed valuation. Representations and warranties are not intended to protect the buyer against an overvaluation of the company. They are intended to certify that all of the means of production are indeed under the company’s control, that the financial statements have been drawn up in accordance with accounting principles and that there are no hidden liabilities. Well-worded representations and warranties clauses should guarantee to the buyer: the substance of fixed assets (and not their value); the real nature and the value of inventories (assuming that the buyer and the seller have agreed on a valuation method); the real nature of other elements of working capital; the amount and nature of all of the company’s other commitments, whether they are on the balance sheet (such as debts) or not.

…

Regardless of the chosen procedure, certain elements are common to every deal: memorandums of understanding and agreements in principle serve to describe the general agreement found between the parties and are a milestone along the path to full commitment of the parties to the deal; representations and warranties guarantee to the buyer that all of the means of production belong to the company and that there are no hidden liabilities; the seller certifies substantive aspects of the company and the amount of equity capital; in some cases, earnout clauses link a portion of the purchase price to the company’s future profits; the final outcome of negotiations is the signing of a share purchase agreement.

…

Borell, Do private equity owners increase risk of financial distress and bankruptcy?, Journal of Corporate Finance, 18(1), 138–150, February 2012. Chapter 47 Bankruptcy and restructuring Women and children first! Every economic system needs mechanisms to ensure the optimal use of resources. Bankruptcy is the primary instrument for reallocating means of production from inefficient to efficient firms. Theoretically, bankruptcy shakes out the bad apples from sectors in difficulty and allows profitable groups to prosper. Without efficient bankruptcy procedures, financial crises are longer and deeper. A bankruptcy process can allow a company to reorganise, often requiring asset sales, a change in ownership and partial debt forgiveness on the part of creditors.

The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Dec 2009

It was the dawn of psychological consciousness that propelled these diverse efforts forward. All of these movements—perhaps with the qualified exception of the anticolonial ones—shared a common theme: that the individual being is precious, unique, mortal, and of ultimate worth and transcends abstract ideological concerns around class consciousness and who controls the means of production. History professor Theodore Roszak, in his book The Making of a Counter Culture, cuts to the great generational shift that occurred in the 1960s, which separated the first generation raised on therapeutic ways of thinking from their parents and former generations reared on ideological consciousness.

…

Baby boomers broke through the older class-based politics that had characterized the age of ideological consciousness, with its emphasis on rational approaches to achieving material success and happiness. As mentioned in Chapter 10, the 1968 student revolution was really a shift in consciousness from ideological to psychological, as a generation of activists began to focus on what they called personal politics. The emphasis no longer simply revolved around who should control the means of production and how best to assure the fair distribution of the economic rewards of society. Instead, the counterculture generation began to look inward to probe feelings and emotions and outward to establish meaningful relationships and empathetic bonds. The 1960s saw a great surge in the empathetic bond.

The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (Hardback) - Common
by Alan Greenspan
Published 14 Jun 2007

Encouraging, as I noted, was the passage of the amendment with only minor changes by the National People's Congress meeting in March 2007. For the past generation, the Chinese leadership has been quite inventive in avoiding what virtually everyone has concluded: despite his brilliance, Karl Marx was wrong in his analysis of the way people can organize to successfully create value. To Marx, state ownership of the means of production was the essential fixture in a society's ability to produce wealth and justice. The right to virtually all property in Marx's society was thus to rest with the state, in trust for the people. Property rights granted to individuals were instruments of exploitation and could come only at the expense of the "collective," that is, society as a whole.

…

Marx's economic model in practice—in the USSR and elsewhere—could not produce wealth or justice, as is now generally recognized. The rationale for collective ownership failed. Socialists in the West, adjusting to the failure of Marxist economics, have redefined socialism to no longer require that all the means of production be owned by the state. Some simply advocate government regulation rather than state ownership to foster societal well-being. Deng Xiaoping, confronting Marx's fall from favor, bypassed Communist ideology and rested Party legitimacy on its ability to meet the material needs of over a billion people.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1945-1956
by Anne Applebaum
Published 30 Oct 2012

—Walter Ulbricht The definition of socialism: an incessant struggle against difficulties that would not exist in any other system. —Hungarian joke of the 1950s IN CLASSIC MARXIST thought, base determines superstructure. In other words, traditional Marxists believed that the shape of a society’s economy—the division of labor, the means of production, the distribution of capital—determined its politics, culture, art, and religion. No country, according to this way of thinking, can change its political system without changing its economic system first. That was the theory. In practice, the new communist bosses of Eastern Europe had a chicken-and-egg problem.

…

The wealthy had “sought confirmation of their own worth through possession of the most ostentatious objects.” Those lacking means had been forced to seek cheap and tacky imitations. Factories, mostly belonging to foreign capitalists, “followed foreign design—third-rate of course, since the better designs were reserved for their own means of production—as a result of which output for the masses was ugly, and above all incompatible with our culture.”38 Telakowska did not begin her career using the language of orthodox Marxism. At different times an art teacher, designer, critic, and curator, Telakowska had previously been best known for her association with a Polish artistic group called Ład.

China: A History
by John Keay
Published 5 Oct 2009

Moving all but his most reliable troops out of the city, and availing himself of the services of the Green Gang, an underworld organisation of well-armed thugs used by industrialists to intimidate strikers, Chiang Kai-shek launched an all-out assault on the labour unions. Hundreds of union leaders were gunned down, thousands arrested. Similar acts of repression followed in Wuhan and Guangzhou. The CCP’s hopes of a Marxist revolution based on the seizure of the means of production by the industrial proletariat had always been a long shot in an overwhelmingly agrarian economy. Now those hopes were dashed. Likewise, the strategy of using the Guomindang to turbo-charge a communist grab for power had spectacularly backfired. As of 1928 Nationalists and communists were locked into a disastrous pattern of ideological detestation and military confrontation.

…

Caution was thrown to the wind; anything seemed possible in a climate of hysterical mass endeavour. Instead of grinding through the geared stages of growth laid down in the Marxist-Leninist manual – heavy industry first, then mechanisation, collectivisation and eventually state-ownership of all the means of production – Mao revved the engine and let fly the clutch. But already there were rumours of famine; the reports were suppressed, the observers silenced. Instead of an investigation, the communes were favoured with a new wave of young urban ideologues intent on teaching the peasants how to grow corn, albeit ‘larger, faster, better, cheaper’.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017
by Ian Kershaw
Published 29 Aug 2018

The SPD leadership drew its conclusions and in 1959, at a party conference in Bad Godesberg, on the Rhine adjacent to Bonn, dropped the Marxist rhetoric – it had in practice been no more than that – which by now appealed at best to a minority of its core vote in industrial regions. Aiming to court the middle classes and win the centre ground of politics, the SPD turned away from its hostility to capitalism and rejected the ultimate objective of state ownership of the means of production. The party had already abandoned its insistence on a foreign policy directed towards reunification. The following year, 1960, it confirmed its acceptance of Western integration, (West) German rearmament and membership of NATO. The fundamental changes in the SPD’s programme were an indication that West Germany had turned into a modern democracy which, for all its own peculiarities arising from its history and the division of the Cold War, had a party-political system in essence similar to that elsewhere in Europe.

…

Universities, as part of the general social change that saw the age of majority reduced from twenty-one to eighteen in many European countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, ceased to assume moral responsibility for students. But the drama, excitement and memory of ‘1968’ were not in the main evoked by the modest changes within universities. Changing the world – or at least their own societies – was the ambition that had galvanized thousands behind the protests. There had been talk of worker ownership of the means of production, factory democracy, work that made for contentment, not alienation, learning that was fulfilling, not channelled towards the needs of the capitalist economy, and above all peace, not violence. The achievements fell well short of these lofty goals. The protesters had everywhere to come to the realization that they had underestimated the resilience of the existing state systems.

Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State
by Paul Tucker
Published 21 Apr 2018

In each of those European jurisdictions, the structure of the administrative state has been profoundly affected by developments in the confederation of states to which they belong, the European Union (EU). This story and the concerns it has generated are highly distinctive in detail but not in essence. With the central budget always much smaller than national (member state) budgets, public ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange was never really part of the EU project even in the heyday of “producer-side” social democracy. Hence a “single market” in goods and services required unified minimum standards: in other words, an EU regulatory state. Initially, that endeavor was pursued by having designated national agencies apply EU laws that either required local incorporation (“directives”) or were directly applicable (“regulations”).46 As time passed, the project was underpinned by requiring that in some fields, notably utility regulation, those national regulators should be formally insulated from political interference.

…

Perhaps more important, liberalism and republicanism have been intertwined in the political history of many states, notably the US, as discussed in Kloppenberg, Virtues of Liberalism, especially chapter 4, “Premature Requiem: Republicanism in American History.” It can also be confusing that in some countries, again including the US, social democrats call themselves liberals, perhaps because they see the state’s role in terms of regulatory and constitutional (rights) intervention rather than in public ownership or control of part of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. 41 For example, in Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent, an acid test of freedom is “to share in governing a political community that controls its own fate.” This leaves open how far into day-to-day government “controlling one’s own fate” goes. 42 Wilson, New Freedom, VIII–XI; Amato, Antitrust.

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

In The Engineers and the Price System, a book published in 1921 that fell into 68 G O OG LE’S WAYS AND MEA NS immediate obscurity, the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen identified a new class of what we now call knowledge workers. In the late years of the American Industrial Revolution, Veblen saw that the increase in efficiency of the production and distribution of goods was creating tremendous wealth for the class that owned the means of production yet who were unable to do the mathematics necessary to understand the systems that enriched them. This situation would not stand for long, Veblen surmised. Unlike Karl Marx’s unreliable proletariat, waiting to be sparked into revolutionary action by the sudden realization of historical exploitation, the engineering class might actually capture some of the wealth it created.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

I believe this is too narrow a point of view, both for creative problem solving and for the production of goods. Online tools can be used to subsume both markets and conventional organizations as special cases, and also enable many new forms of production and creative problem solving. Thus it’s not that we now have a third form of production. It’s that we now have a means of production that includes all our former forms as special cases, and enables new forms. Chapter 4. Patterns of Online Collaboration p 44: Insightful accounts of open source software development include [12, 13, 178, 235]. Even more useful are the innumerable open source projects maintained online at sites such as GitHub (http://github.com) and SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net).

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 26 Dec 2007

John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the most profound economic thinkers of the 20th century, once famously said:‘Under capitalism, man exploits man; under communism, it is just the opposite.’He was not suggesting that there is no difference between capitalism and communism, he would have been the last person to do so; Galbraith was one of the leading non-leftist critics of modern capitalism.What he was expressing was the profound disappointment that many people felt about the failure of communism to build the egalitarian society it had promised. Since its rise in the 19th century, the key goal of the communist movement had been the abolition of private ownership of the ‘means of production’ (factories and machines). It is easy to understand why the communists saw private ownership as the ultimate source of the distributive injustice of capitalism. But they also saw private ownership as a cause of economic inefficiency. They believed that it was the reason for the ‘wasteful’ anarchy of the market.

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
by Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz
Published 4 Nov 2016

Manufacturers are building cars, electronics, and other devices that we can’t truly own; DRM keeps them loyal to another master. Publishers are launching digital-only imprints.7 And despite the recent resurgence of vinyl, there are only twenty pressing plants in operation in the United States, and they struggle to meet demand.8 Without the means of production and delivery, ownership becomes more expensive, if not impossible. Once the record stores are gone and the CD plants have closed, the competitive checks on the price of services like Spotify weaken. Just as important, when we trade ownership for access, we sacrifice reliability. Most of us have had the experience of realizing the movie we were hoping to watch has disappeared from our Netflix queue.9 Titles come and go all the time as licenses expire and new deals are negotiated.

Economists and the Powerful
by Norbert Haring , Norbert H. Ring and Niall Douglas
Published 30 Sep 2012

Thus economists began to divorce themselves from the pressing 6 ECONOMISTS AND THE POWERFUL socioeconomic problems of the era. They took the focus away from social phenomena and put it instead on the individuals as the “atoms” of society (Screpanti and Zamagni 1993). Within this artificially simplified framework, and with a number of auxiliary assumptions, the marginalists showed that the allocation of goods and means of production would be optimal in a free market economy. All prices and quantities would be such that the economy was in equilibrium, and workers would receive the fair value of what they produced with any additional hour of work. This result was the core of the neoclassical defense of capitalism against the Marxist charge of exploitation (Screpanti and Zamagni 1993).

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Some pointed out that the only thing that made aged wine more valuable than young wine was time in a cellar, not work. But before the idea could die, Karl Marx took it to what seemed like its logical conclusion. He used the labor theory of value as a basis for the proposition that capitalists used their leverage as the owners of machinery and other means of production to filch value from their workers. A product, Marx maintained, is worth all the labor that went into making it, including the labor used to make the necessary tools, the labor in the tools used to make the tools, and so forth. Capitalists made money by usurping part of this value—paying workers only enough to guarantee their subsistence and keeping the rest of the value they created for themselves.

Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity
by Ha-Joon Chang
Published 4 Jul 2007

He was not suggesting that there is no difference between capitalism and communism, he would have been the last person to do so; Galbraith was one of the leading non-leftist critics of modern capitalism. What he was expressing was the profound disappointment that many people felt about the failure of communism to build the egalitarian society it had promised. Since its rise in the 19th century, the key goal of the communist movement had been the abolition of private ownership of the ‘means of production’ (factories and machines). It is easy to understand why the communists saw private ownership as the ultimate source of the distributive injustice of capitalism. But they also saw private ownership as a cause of economic inefficiency. They believed that it was the reason for the ‘wasteful’ anarchy of the market.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions
by Paul Mason
Published 30 Sep 2013

You had to find a way to take control of this big stuff—finance, industry and agribusiness—and create enough wealth so that, when you redistributed it, it would eliminate human need. Only then, said Marx, could you begin to address the alienation and unfreedom at the heart of human existence. Capitalism itself, he believed, had created a social group whose material interests would force them to seize the means of production: the proletariat, owning nothing but their own capacity to work. However, there was nothing in the lifestyle of the workers themselves that could foreshadow the freedom they would create. It is often forgotten that Marx’s goal was not ‘class solidarity’ or ‘proletarian power’ but the liberation of individual human beings.

Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb
by William Poundstone
Published 2 Jan 1993

He was a doctrinaire socialist who applied the prescriptions of Marx and Lenin literally. When visionary acts failed to produce a promised utopia, Kun seemed unable to do much more than repeat revolutionary slogans. Under Kun, Hungary became a compendium of mismanagement. One of Kun’s first acts was to issue a decree transferring ownership of land, businesses, and means of production to the proletariat. This threw the centuries-old ruling classes from power overnight. Important jobs were filled with inexperienced socialists or opportunists. It was claimed that the new commissar of finances had to be shown how to endorse a check: he had never done it before. This story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the tragicomic predicament.

Can Democracy Work?: A Short History of a Radical Idea, From Ancient Athens to Our World
by James Miller
Published 17 Sep 2018

This analysis was one of the reasons that Marx repudiated conspiratorial insurrectionists like Babeuf and Blanqui—just as it persuaded some former insurrectionists, like Julian Harney, to adapt instead Marx’s more painstaking and public strategy of preparing the workers themselves to develop an understanding of objective economic conditions, as a precondition for assuming control of the means of production. Yet even Marx conceded the need for at least one “political act” of will: a great collective act of “overthrow and dissolution,” a revolution that would destroy the existing order. That was one reason why in Brussels he was involved with a clandestine political organization, the Communist League, which eventually became allied with Harney’s Fraternal Democrats.

Red Flags: Why Xi's China Is in Jeopardy
by George Magnus
Published 10 Sep 2018

With the Party maintaining internal order and a monopoly of power to mobilise resources for defence and economic development, China’s goals were to change the socio-political order, improve China’s geopolitical standing, and boost economic growth. The last of these would be accomplished by owning the ‘means of production, distribution and exchange’, including land, factories, transportation, enterprises, finance, communications, and foreign trade and tariff administration. Heavy industry and capital-intensive production would be priorities. Foreign trade became a state monopoly, the main objectives of which were self-sufficiency and an import structure tailored by the demand for essential producer goods.

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

The emergence of the multinational corporation is itself both a recent development and a return to formations that had been effectively brought under democratic control only with the most intense and directed efforts of both voters and workers. Despite the extreme claims of computational advocates to a general democratization of all forms of information and political control—which on some readings must be identified with something like Computation, Globalization, and Cultural Striation p 145 the means of production for an information age—it is much less noted that the resurgence of neoliberal economics and politics has created a vast array of entities with extra-State political power and control, no longer subject to either the internal (labor union) or external (governmental) oversight that had been the hallmark of liberal political economy.

Corbyn
by Richard Seymour

A survey of 494 articles across the press found that 60 per cent of the coverage was negative, with only 13 per cent positive.34 The right-wing newspapers predictably augured ‘chaos’. The Telegraph predicted that union leaders would try to use ‘coordinated strikes and demonstrations’ to ‘topple the Government’, while another columnist warned of Corbyn’s supporters ‘seizing the means of production and distribution directly through strikes and organised demands’.35 The Daily Mail published a delirious fantasy about Jeremy Corbyn taking office and the first days of his administration, which began: ‘The night sky over London was thick with choking black smoke…’.36 Invoking an indebted basket-case economy torn apart by rioters, demonstrators and revolutionaries, it was practically salivating over the apocalyptic scenario it conjured up.

Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire
by Rebecca Henderson
Published 27 Apr 2020

Fortunately the Danish experience suggests that this is not necessarily the case. Denmark: Business Responds to National Weakness Bernie Sanders’s championing of Denmark has led many business leaders to roll their eyes. But Denmark is not a socialist country, if by socialism is meant state ownership of the means of production. Its economy is a strongly pro-business system in which business, labor, and government work closely together to sustain economic growth—within a structure that was championed by the private sector. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Denmark was a nation in trauma. In 1864 the country had lost the Second Schleswig War to Prussia and Austria, losing the Duchy of Schleswig and the Duchy of Holstein—territories that had been under some form of Danish control since the twelfth century.

The Pyramid of Lies: Lex Greensill and the Billion-Dollar Scandal
by Duncan Mavin
Published 20 Jul 2022

The factor buys the IOUs, or receivables, paying a small discount to the invoiced amount and then chases the customer for the full amount later. Sometimes the factor loses out if the customer never pays up. Mostly they make a small profit. In the past few decades, factoring has evolved. Rapidly. Starting in the 1980s, economies quickly globalized, seeking out cheaper workers and means of production. That led to more complex, longer supply chains, spanning several countries. There were more components, more suppliers, more transactions. The consultants McKinsey & Company estimate that a single car manufacturer such as Ford or Volkswagen might have 18,000 suppliers, spanning just about every continent on the planet.

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
by David Graeber and David Wengrow
Published 18 Oct 2021

Second of all, is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human? That is, beings with the capacity for self-creation, even freedom? The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together. Of course, to exercise that capacity implies that there should be something meaningful to decide in the first place. If, as many are suggesting, our species’ future now hinges on our capacity to create something different (say, a system in which wealth cannot be freely transformed into power, or where some people are not told their needs are unimportant, or that their lives have no intrinsic worth), then what ultimately matters is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place.

…

Marxists, who refer to ‘modes of production’, do sometimes allow for a ‘Tributary Mode,’ but this has always been linked to the growth of agrarian states and empires, back to Book III of Marx’s Capital.38 What really needs to be theorized here is not just the mode of production practised by victims of predation, but also that of the non-producers who prey on them. Now wait. A non-productive mode of production? This sounds like a contradiction in terms. But it’s only so if we limit the meaning of ‘production’ strictly to the creation of food or goods. And maybe we shouldn’t. ‘Capturing societies’ in the Americas considered slave-taking as a mode of subsistence in its own right, but not in the usual sense of producing calories. Raiders almost invariably insisted that slaves were captured for their life force or ‘vitality’ – vitality which was consumed by the conquering group.39 Now, you might say this is literally true: if you exploit another human being for their labour, either directly or indirectly, you are living off their energies or life force; and if they are providing you with food, you are in fact eating it.

The Cold War: A World History
by Odd Arne Westad
Published 4 Sep 2017

While almost everyone wished for a welfare state in which governments influenced the commanding heights of the economy, most also believed that private enterprise should play a role in the economy of the future. Even the Left was divided on that question. The Communists, of course, wanted a transition to full government ownership of the means of production, but Socialists, Social-Democrats, and Labourites may have wanted, at times, to nationalize key services and industries, but rarely wanted the state to take over the corner store. All western European countries set out a role for the market in their economies. But they wanted capitalist successes to help the overall economy, not failures like in the 1920s and ’30s.

…

The new government was an alliance of Socialists and Communists dedicated to overcoming capitalism in Chile. While drawing inspiration from the Russian revolution, it intended to carry out a peaceful transition to a socialist state, through “the principle of legality, the development of institutions, political freedom, the prevention of violence, and the socialization of the means of production,” as Allende noted in his first presidential address to Congress.22 But Chile was a very conservative society, in which the old bourgeoisie and the new middle class had no intention of allowing a transition to socialism, peaceful or not. The reforms of Allende’s government were met with growing protest, with the Chilean people split down the middle.

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 2 Jul 2009

Workers were encouraged to derive increasing satisfaction and status from their lives outside of the office or factory. Thanks to high wages and solid benefits, they had both the time and the means to invest in outside interests such as sports, gardening, and travel. They could move uptown for better schools or to a larger home in a leafier suburb for more space. Equality meant not access to the means of production (well out of reach for most workers) but to a growing range of consumer goods. Cultural historian Christopher Lasch noted, “The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services.” To meet the needs of this growing consumer class, discounting was quietly on the rise.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organizations under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available in this realm of sharing, so we might as well redeem this most direct one: social, social action, social media, socialism. When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism. What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
by Christopher Lasch
Published 1 Jan 1978

Seeley noted in 1959, " helpfer the trans of hood-the appropriation of childrearing techniques by the parental knowledge to other agencies parallels the expropriation worker s ' of the technical knowledge by modern the taking over from the worker of the " ment- manage- sad necessity of " providing himself with the means of production." By "helpfully relieving the worker from such onerous responsibilities" as thed provision of his own and his children s needs, society has free " ' him, as Seeley wrote, "to become a soldier in the army of produc- tion and a cipher in the process of decision. " t , " , . , the parent should express his annoyance instead of condemnin the child or the action If the child expresses emotions that seemg

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

While Stallman and others may have accurately described some of the economic and legal conditions transforming programming and hacking in the 1980s, hacking never actually died. Contrary to Stallman’s predictions, but in part because of his actions, hacking did not simply survive; it flourished, experiencing what we might even portray as a cultural renaissance whose defining feature is the control over the hackers’ means of production: software and source code. Between Stallman’s dramatic declaration of the death of hacking and its current worldwide vibrancy thus lies a palpable irony about the unexpected outcomes that mark social life, political action, and broader historical transformations. The fact that these dire speculations and predictions turned out to be spectacularly false is more remarkable given what has transpired in the realm of intellectual property law in the last thirty years.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

In 2006 Yochai Benkler, then a law professor at Yale, concluded that the network economy was ‘a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world’.30 Benkler had been trying to define a legal framework for Open Source publishing, known as the ‘Creative Commons’. In The Wealth of Networks, he described the economic forces that were undermining intellectual property, causing common ownership models and unmanaged production to spread. First, he said, the rise of cheap physical computing power and communications networks had put the means of production of intellectual goods into the hands of many people. People can blog, they can make movies and distribute them, they can self-publish e-books – in some cases creating a million-strong audience before the traditional publishers even know the authors exist: ‘The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system.’31 This, he argued, leads to the rise of non-market mechanisms: decentralized action by individuals, working through cooperative, voluntary forms of organization.

The Einstein of Money: The Life and Timeless Financial Wisdom of Benjamin Graham
by Joe Carlen
Published 14 Apr 2012

Recalling what he (slightly inaccurately) refers to as the “Depression of 1921 to 1922”5 in his memoirs, Graham describes this period as being “when the world had perhaps its first real exposure to poverty in the midst of plenty.”6 Ever the logician, upon examining this state of affairs in greater detail, he came to see it as a gross and indefensible failure of common sense on the part of policymakers. As he wrote in his memoirs, If a nation lacks the means of production—in fertile land, manufacturing capacity, technical knowledge—then its standard of living must necessarily be low. But it seems logically absurd for a country like ours, blessed with so many resources, to find itself unable to buy it own products, suffering at once from an excess of goods in the warehouses and too few on the shelves of its families.7 During this severe (albeit relatively brief) downturn of the early 1920s, Graham noticed that gold producers were “exempt from the difficulties that bedeviled the rest of us.”8 This perplexing situation was a direct consequence of the gold standard: American dollars had long been “backed” by gold (and, to a lesser extent, silver) in the sense that each dollar represented a defined quantity of the metal.

The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise
by Eric Ries
Published 15 Mar 2017

Today, global communications means that new products can be conceived and built anywhere, and customers can discover them at an unprecedented pace. What’s more, individuals and small companies have unprecedented access to these new global systems, compared to a small number of owners of capital in the past. This setup flips Karl Marx’s old dictum on its head. What he called the means of production can now be rented. Entire global supply chains can be borrowed at little more than the marginal cost of the underlying products they produce. This dramatically lowers the initial capital costs required to try something new. In addition, the basis of competition is shifting. Today’s consumers have more choices and are more demanding.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond
by Daniel Susskind
Published 14 Jan 2020

See Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 170, where he writes that “if all we do is redistribute income from those who own productive assets to those who do not, then we will still have classes, exploitation, and hence the kind of contradictory interests that make justice necessary in the first place. We should instead be concerned with transferring ownership of the means of production themselves. When this is accomplished, questions of fair distribution become obsolete.” 57.  Joshua Brustein, “Juno Sold Itself as the Anti-Uber. That Didn’t Last Long,” Bloomberg, 28 April 2017. 58.  Susskind and Susskind, Future of the Professions, p. 34. 59.  Jesse Bricker, Lisa J.

We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages
by Annelise Orleck
Published 27 Feb 2018

People are eager to join hands in building a global voice.”16 Corporate land grabs and mass dispossessions of farmers are endangering global food supplies, congress participants argued, sparking mass migrations and generating “new forms of slavery.” Attendees at the summit vowed to protect “rights to land, water and natural resources, to seeds, biodiversity, decent income and means of production. . . . Our collective future,” they wrote, “and the very future of humanity, is bound up with the rights of peasants.” They called for global unity. “Although we come from countless different backgrounds, we suffer intersecting forms of oppression and must stay in solidarity with each other.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab
Published 7 Jan 2021

The writings of Karl Marx and others on the exploitative nature of this first globalized capitalist era also led to revolts in many countries and the overthrow of existing regimes. It led in a space of a few decades to a world marked by two systems: one where private ownership and management dominated the means of production (capitalism) and one where production facilities were owned and objectives set by the state (communism). In the years between the World Wars, the financial markets, which were still connected in a global web, caused a further breakdown of the global economy and its links. The Great Depression in the US led to the end of the boom in South America and a run on the banks in many other parts of the world.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet
by Klaus Schwab and Peter Vanham
Published 27 Jan 2021

The writings of Karl Marx and others on the exploitative nature of this first globalized capitalist era also led to revolts in many countries and the overthrow of existing regimes. It led in a space of a few decades to a world marked by two systems: one where private ownership and management dominated the means of production (capitalism) and one where production facilities were owned and objectives set by the state (communism). In the years between the World Wars, the financial markets, which were still connected in a global web, caused a further breakdown of the global economy and its links. The Great Depression in the US led to the end of the boom in South America and a run on the banks in many other parts of the world.

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing
by Rachel Plotnick
Published 24 Sep 2018

Workers had to negotiate what push buttons meant for their industries and for the kinds of work performed in spaces ranging from offices to factories. These worries over manual labor fit within changes occurring to the American labor force, which included a shift from agriculture to industry, greater separation between producers and means of production, and declining control over the way work was conducted.10 Using technological mechanisms to amplify human bodies for work particularly accelerated at this time period as human beings increasingly gave tasks over to and worked alongside machines.11 In line with these negotiations prompted by electrification and industrialization, proponents of electrical machines strove to redefine “work” both in and out of traditional workplaces.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World
by Tim Marshall
Published 14 Oct 2021

Relations with Washington were broken, and Ethiopia realigned itself with the Soviet Union, which poured in arms and military advisers. When conflict again broke out with Somalia Moscow switched support from Mogadishu and facilitated the arrival of thousands of Cuban troops, allowing another Ethiopian victory. Marxist economic policies nationalized the means of production and tried to force subsistence farmers to grow extra crops and sell produce at prices below market rates to feed the cities and the military. Most farmers concluded there was little in this for them, and the policy was a disaster. In the early 1980s the lowland rains failed completely and famine ensued.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
Published 10 Mar 2014

The solution to the problem of capital suggested by Karl Marx and many other socialist writers in the nineteenth century and put into practice in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the twentieth century was far more radical and, if nothing else, more logically consistent. By abolishing private ownership of the means of production, including land and buildings as well as industrial, financial, and business capital (other than a few individual plots of land and small cooperatives), the Soviet experiment simultaneously eliminated all private returns on capital. The prohibition of usury thus became general: the rate of exploitation, which for Marx represented the share of output appropriated by the capitalist, thus fell to zero, and with it the rate of private return.

…

Furthermore, if demographic growth is also zero, one would have to accumulate an infinite quantity of capital: as long as the return on capital is even slightly positive, it will be in the interest of future generations for the present generation to consume nothing and accumulate as much as possible. According to Marx, who implicitly assumes zero demographic and productivity growth, this is the ultimate consequence of the capitalist’s unlimited desire to accumulate more and more capital, and in the end it leads to the downfall of capitalism and the collective appropriation of the means of production. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, the state claimed to serve the common good by accumulating unlimited industrial capital and ever-increasing numbers of machines: no one really knew where the planners thought accumulation should end.44 If productivity growth is even slightly positive, the process of capital accumulation is described by the law β = s / g.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
Published 14 Feb 2023

Without those guarantees, U.S. investments abroad were subject to the political whims of local populations, and being subject to the political whims of local populations degrades an investment’s expected return. As California’s capitalists (such as Hoover) experienced so personally in the first half of the twentieth century, workers everywhere in the world were willing and able to seize control of their natural resources and means of production. By the end of the Second World War, socialism was as global as capitalism: two directly opposed systems vying for control wherever people worked. U.S. capital, hopped up on a decade of expansionary government infrastructure and war spending, was determined to win. In 1959, in the middle of its own related expansionary run, Hewlett-Packard opened its first international manufacturing facility, located in Böblingen, Germany.

…

Here was an alternative road to socialism: Workers could buy the companies, just like anyone else.v But the unions didn’t generally manage their voting shares—that job went to the banks they hired, and the banks voted with management when it came to undermining workers. Instead of purchasing the means of production, they ended up loaning their retirement accounts back to their bosses. Labor bifurcation drove stock and home prices higher as the economic surplus flowed to upper-income Americans, who were more likely to buy houses and stocks. The Bay Area led the trend; median home prices nearly tripled in San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties during the 1980s.16 Consumer credit expanded via loans, home equity lines, and credit cards.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
by Michelle Alexander
Published 24 Nov 2011

As legal scholars Eric Blumenson and Eva Nilsen have explained, the provision was justified as an effort “to forestall the spread of drugs in a way criminal penalties could not—by striking at its economic roots.”46 When a drug dealer is sent to jail, there are many others ready and willing to take his place, but seizing the means of production, some legislators reasoned, may shut down the trafficking business for good. Over the years, the list of properties subject to forfeiture expanded greatly, and the required connection to illegal drug activity became increasingly remote, leading to many instances of abuse. But it was not until 1984, when Congress amended the federal law to allow federal law enforcement agencies to retain and use any and all proceeds from asset forfeitures, and to allow state and local police agencies to retain up to 80 percent of the assets’ value, that a true revolution occurred.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
by Kate Raworth
Published 22 Mar 2017

THE ECONOMY, which is diverse – so support all of its systems Embedded within this rich web of society is the economy itself, the realm in which people produce, distribute and consume products and services that meet their wants and needs. One basic feature of the economy is rarely pointed out in Econ 101: that it is typically made up of four realms of provisioning: the household, the market, the commons and the state, as shown in the Embedded Economy diagram. All four are means of production and distribution, but they go about it in very different ways. Households produce ‘core’ goods for their own members; the market produces private goods for those willing and able to pay; the commons produce co-created goods for the communities involved; and the state produces public goods for all the populace.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
by Matt Ridley

The most famous of these voices was Friedrich Hayek’s, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had ‘fundamental similarity of methods and ideas’, that economic planning and state control were at the top of an illiberal slope that led to tyranny, oppression and serfdom, and that the individualism of free markets was the true road to liberation. Ignoring Hayek, within months of victory Britain embarked on a comprehensive nationalisation of the means of production in industry, in health, in education and in society. There were few politicians prepared to resist. Even the returned Conservative government of Winston Churchill in 1951 would have continued to mandate identity cards for citizens, had it not been for a libertarian radical named Sir Ernest Benn, a fervent admirer of Herbert Spencer and Richard Cobden, who managed to get the things abolished.

What’s Your Type?
by Merve Emre
Published 16 Aug 2018

But Chief’s politics no longer appealed to his wife, who now worried about having enough money to support their six hypothetical children. She expressed to him her mature belief that social and political improvement originated with exceptional and enlightened individuals, not with a revolution in the means of production. “Professors, legislators, governors, and presidents—they are all such mere people, when their jobs call for something special,” Isabel complained as she and Chief watched the uninspiring 1920 election contest between Ohio senator Warren G. Harding and Ohio governor James M. Cox. (Debs was on the ballot too, but she did not acknowledge him.)

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex
by Rupert Darwall
Published 2 Oct 2017

“Some day, political conservatism will once again be defined as contented living within limits,” he wrote in 1993.53 Thus environmentalism united enemies of capitalism and the Western ideal of freedom from otherwise mutually antagonistic ideologies. Anarchists were other foes of capitalism who founded environmentalism. The aim of the anarchist movement, Murray Bookchin wrote in an extraordinarily prophetic 1964 essay, was a stateless, decentralized society based on communal ownership of the means of production. Burning fossil fuels showed modern man’s disruptive role. The amount of carbon dioxide had increased by thirteen percent since the Industrial Revolution. The growing blanket of carbon dioxide would lead to rising temperatures, more destructive storm patterns, rising sea levels, and, in two to three centuries, the melting of the polar ice caps, Bookchin wrote.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
by Katharina Pistor
Published 27 May 2019

The social historian Fernand Braudel traces it back to the thirteenth century, when it was used to denote interchangeably a fund of money, goods, or money rented out for interests,25 at least where this was permissible.26 Definitions abound, even today, as Geoffrey Hodgson has shown in a careful review of the literature.27 To some, capital is a tangible object, or “physical stuff.”28 To this day, many economists and accountants insist that capital must be tangible; if you can’t touch it, it ain’t capital.29 To others it is one of the two factors of production; or just an accounting variable.30 And to Marxists, capital is at the heart of fraught social relations between labor and its exploiters who own the means of production, which gives them the power to extract surplus from labor. The historiography of capitalism does not offer much clarity either. Some historians confine the “age of capital” to the period of heavy industrialization; others, however, have pushed the concept back in time, to periods of agricultural or commercial capitalism.31 Our own post-industrial age has been labeled alternatively the age of financial or global capitalism.

The Great Railway Bazaar
by Paul Theroux
Published 1 Jan 1975

She was a patient, intelligent woman who spoke English so well I didn't dare to compliment her on it for fear she might say, as Thurber did on a similar occasion, 'I ought to – I spent forty years in Columbus, Ohio, working on it like a dog.' Thilda sees to the practical side of his affairs, negotiating contracts, answering letters, explaining Yash-ar's harangues about the socialist paradise he envisions, that Soviet pastoral where the workers own the means of production and complete sets of Faulkner. It was unfortunate that Thilda didn't come swimming with us because it meant three hours of talking pidgin English, an activity that Yashar must have found as fatiguing as I did. Carrying our bathing trunks, we walked down the dusty hill to the beach. Yashar pointed out the fishing village and said he was planning a series of stories based on the life there.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 29 Aug 2018

In ancient times land was the most important asset in the world, politics was a struggle to control land, and if too much land became concentrated in too few hands – society split into aristocrats and commoners. In the modern era machines and factories became more important than land, and political struggles focused on controlling these vital means of production. If too many of the machines became concentrated in too few hands – society split into capitalists and proletarians. In the twenty-first century, however, data will eclipse both land and machinery as the most important asset, and politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. If data becomes concentrated in too few hands – humankind will split into different species.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories)
by Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf
Published 27 Sep 2006

Still, his belief in the urgent necessity of a more equitable social order led Nehru as prime minister to support ever more wide-ranging measures on behalf of agrarian reform and state control of India’s economy. Initially put forward as a policy objective in 1947, by 1955 the Congress had formally committed itself to the principle that ‘planning should take place with a view to the establishment of a socialistic pattern of society where the principal means of production are under social ownership or control’. The first measure to be taken up was zamindari abolition. Incorporated in the Congress Party platform in 1946, it took legislative shape in the early 1950s. Although the provisions of these acts varied from state to state, they generally set land ceilings, and vested the proprietary rights of the large estate holders in the state governments.

Transaction Man: The Rise of the Deal and the Decline of the American Dream
by Nicholas Lemann
Published 9 Sep 2019

Peter Drucker, by now a famous man, considered to be the world’s leading expert on managing the corporation, published a book in 1976 called The Unseen Revolution, in which he announced, with typical flair, that the United States was the first truly socialist country in world history. That was because the workers now owned the means of production through their union and company pension funds’ new role in the stock and bond markets. Drucker’s adopted country, he wrote, had actually achieved what “all the Marxist church fathers, saints, and apostles before Lenin had been preaching and promising, from Engels to Bebel and Kautsky, from Viktor Adler to Rosa Luxemburg, Jaures, and Eugene Debs.”

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI
by Frank Pasquale
Published 14 May 2020

Managers can easily look back at how stock markets responded when other firms deployed similar tactics. So, too, is stacking the board that determines one’s own compensation a tried, true, and repeated CEO tactic. A robot could do it. Automating the automators—an idea often seized upon by left accelerationists—is less a revolutionary proposal to seize the means of production than it is an encapsulation of what is actually happening now in the world of finance and management. Robotization does not merely mean deploying a mechanized mannequin in place of a worker. It conveys standardization and repetition: one best way of doing a task is found and replicated. Managers may have many tools but habitually choose the same ends and the same means of achieving them.

Legacy of Empire
by Gardner Thompson

It also overrode another variant of Zionism embodied in Poale Zion (Workers of Zion), a socialist political party with origins in Russia. Looking for a synthesis of Zionism with Marxism, one of its Russian founders, Ber Borochov, looked to a time when middle-class Jews would emigrate to Palestine in sufficient numbers to build up the means of production there and so attract working-class Jews. In turn, these would come to be the vanguard of a revolutionary movement.48 At a Poale Zion conference in Jaffa in 1906, Marxists advocated support for Arab workers, as brothers in struggle. But the synthesis foundered. Recognising the historical force of nationalist as well as class struggles did not remove the contradiction.

Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
by Harsha Walia
Published 9 Feb 2021

Frantz Fanon offers us poignant insight in distinguishing national liberation from nationalist exclusion: “National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.”19 One of the most pernicious forms of white supremacy on the left today is the animation of the working class along nationalist lines. Like appeals to whiteness, the conditioning of class through citizenship is not simply a social identity; it is imbued with economic value as a form of property. Calls on citizens to “protect our jobs” puts working-class movements on a path away from collective ownership of the means of production and, instead, toward an ambiguous sense of ownership of the nation-state. Uplift for the people becomes synonymous with uplift of the state, thus aligning labor interests with the state. Welfare nationalism then emerges to control public services, not as egalitarian institutions based on social solidarity, but as a form of bordered exclusion to allegedly defend the nation’s workers.

Luxury Fever: Why Money Fails to Satisfy in an Era of Excess
by Robert H. Frank
Published 15 Jan 1999

On the contrary, free-market economies all over the globe, whose institutions were inspired by it, have prospered to a degree that even Smith himself would have found difficult to imagine. Contrast theirs to the experience of the former Soviet Union and other collectively managed economies. Organized on the principle that government ownership and management of the means of production would best serve society’s ends, these experiments have invariably proved dismal failures. We must be careful, however, not to infer too much from this contrast. It tells us not that the economy-as-free-for-all is the best of all possible arrangements, but only that it works far better than the economy-as-bureaucratic-committee.

Chokepoint Capitalism
by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow
Published 26 Sep 2022

We explored some of the factors that drive this, like the 30 percent vigs being charged by Apple and Google on mobile and by Steam on PC, earlier in the book. Game Workers Unite (GWU) is a new advocacy organization setting out to organize workers, and Marx is excited about its potential to achieve change—especially if workers manage to take over the means of production: “GWU Australia, in particular, has placed a focus on promoting worker cooperatives because its industry is primarily small studios, and organizers feel that’s how they can make the biggest impact in the short term.”26 Bordeaux’s Motion Twin is one small studio that has already co-operatized successfully.

The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
by Steven W. Thrasher
Published 1 Aug 2022

Drug companies wanted to protect the intellectual property of what they had made and to treat it as a private, profit-generating good, even though their research was largely funded by state grants and even though sales were guaranteed by government purchases. Capitalism also creates a sense of alienation, as people become separated from the means of production that make life itself possible (i.e., farmers can’t eat their own goods because they need to sell them to turn a profit; carmakers learn only one part of making a car but not how to make the whole thing, in order to maximize assembly-line productivity; a housekeeper like Moon-gwang in Parasite doesn’t get to enjoy time in her own home, and her husband, Geun-sae, learns to live without sunlight).

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America
by Garrett Neiman
Published 19 Jun 2023

So did Roosevelt’s New Deal, Johnson’s Medicare, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and Biden’s Build Back Better.32 In 2008, John McCain characterized Barack Obama’s tax proposals as “socialism,” declaring in a radio address that Obama “believes in redistributing wealth, not in policies that help us all make more of it.”33 But the reality is that none of these initiatives are socialist. Fundamentally, the distinction between capitalism and socialism is about who owns the means of production, not the level of economic inequality within that society. The idea that America’s only options are extreme inequality or socialism is a false binary. Many capitalist countries—such as most Nordic and Central European countries—have far less inequality than the United States.34 That said, America doesn’t need to succumb to rich white men’s false binary between capitalism and socialism either.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World
by Niall Ferguson
Published 13 Nov 2007

Work began in May 1932, just two months after the clashes at the River Rouge plant, and by March 1933 Rivera had finished. As Ford well knew, Rivera was a Communist (though an unorthodox Trotskyite who had been expelled from the Mexican Party).23 His ideal was of a society in which there would be no private property; in which the means of production would be commonly owned. In Rivera’s eyes, Ford’s River Rouge plant was the very opposite: a capitalist society where the workers worked and the property owners, who reaped the rewards from their efforts, just stood and watched. Rivera also sought to explore the racial divisions that were such a striking feature of Detroit, anthropomorphizing the elements necessary to make steel.

The Arsenal of Democracy: FDR, Detroit, and an Epic Quest to Arm an America at War
by A. J. Baime
Published 2 Jun 2014

See US Army Air Corps Army-Navy “E” Award for Excellence, [>]–[>], [>] Arnold, Henry Harley “Hap” on the Double Wasp engine, [>] on FDR’s early support for US Army Air Corps, [>] heart attacks, [>] introduction to HF2, [>]–[>] on Lindbergh’s testimony on the Luftwaffe, [>] on need to build heavy bombers, [>] on need to destroy Nazi means of production, [>]–[>] order to destroy German Air Force, [>] plans for using the B-29, [>] reports on heavy bomber production delays, [>] requests for changes to B-24 Liberators, [>] role in building the US Army Air Corps, [>] at the Tehran Conference, [>] arsenal of democracy concept application to individual auto manufacturers, [>] and D-Day preparations, [>] Detroit as manifestation of, [>] invasion of Sicily as example of, [>] meaning of, FDR’s continuous refinement of, [>] See also Battle of Production; war production “Arsenal of Democracy” speech (Roosevelt), [>]-[>], [>]-[>], [>], [>] Aschersleben, Germany, bombing of, [>] Asnières, France, Ford factory, [>] assembly line production Ford’s concept for, [>]–[>] increased line speed, under Bennett, [>] Stermer’s experience of riveting on, [>] use of for airplane construction, criticisms of, [>] See also bomber-an-hour goal Athens, Greece, Nazi warning system, [>]–[>] atomic bomb, [>], [>] auto industry, Germany, [>].

Innovation and Its Enemies
by Calestous Juma
Published 20 Mar 2017

Challenges to agricultural biotechnology were championed by other groups, not directly by the farmers themselves.76 Finally, the role of authority is an important factor in technological controversies. Whether the authority favors the status quo or the new innovation has significant implications—take, for example, France’s shift from protectionism of the ancien régime (1730) to a protechnology approach (1830). In France, large trade organizations (compagnonnages) controlled means of production and challenged innovation, using extralegal means to successfully deter innovation in industries such as papermaking and the manufacturing of muskets and flatware. As a result they drove innovators to Britain or the United States.77 Another example of the role of authority in technological controversies comprised attempts by “practical electricians” in the late 1880s to suppress James Maxwell’s equation of electrodynamics.

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives
by Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen
Published 22 Apr 2013

Once groups are wise to what they need to produce in order to generate a specific response, they will be able to tailor their content and messaging accordingly. Those with state resources will have the upper hand in any marketing war, but never the exclusive advantage. Even if the state controls many of the means of production—the cell towers, the state media, the ISPs—it will be impossible for any party to have a complete information monopoly. When all it takes to shoot, edit, upload and disseminate user-generated content is a palm-sized phone, a regime can’t totally dominate. One video captured by a shaky mobile-phone camera during the postelection protests in Iran in 2009 galvanized the opposition movement: the famous “Neda video.”

Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change From the Cult of Technology
by Kentaro Toyama
Published 25 May 2015

See, for example, Bhide and Mehta (2004), Deininger and Okidi (2003), Krishna (2010), and Scott (2000). But economic value isn’t everything. There’s still an argument to be made that education makes it more likely for people to demand changes to a system limiting their opportunities. Friedrich Engels (1844 [1968]), p. 125, wrote that “the middle class [who own the means of production] has little to hope, and much to fear, from the education of the workers.” The French and American revolutions were fanned by deep thinkers writing pamphlets against monarchy. A cleverly titled book called The Dictator’s Handbook notes that “no nondemocratic country has even one university rated among the world’s top 200” (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2011, p. 109).

The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter
by Peter Singer and Jim Mason
Published 1 May 2006

Tyler told us: "Ultimately, my objection is to the commercial forces that are seeking to persuade people of the poor world that their best nutritional interests are served by buying into modern, high-throughput farmed animal production processes. With that comes an addiction to high capital input systems, a loss of control over the means of production, bad health, and a nightmare animal welfare scenario." D'Silva told us of a recent trip to China, where she had seen a totally unsuitable, Western financed, intensive dairy farm that, in addition to being an inefficient form of food production and having poor animal welfare, was causing severe local pollution.

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design
by Charles Montgomery
Published 12 Nov 2013

.* In America, the advent of the automobile prompted innovators from Henry Ford to Frank Lloyd Wright to declare that liberation lay at the end of a highway. Private automobiles would free people to escape the central city to build their own self-sufficient compounds in a new kind of urban-rural utopia. In Wright’s planned Broadacre City, citizens would drive their own cars to all the means of production, distribution, self-improvement, and recreation that would be within minutes of their miniature homesteads. “Why should not he, the poor wage-slave, go forward, not backward, to his native birthright?” Wright wrote. “Go to the good ground and grow his family in a free city.” Together, technology and dispersal would produce true freedom, democracy, and self-sufficiency.

Finance and the Good Society
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 1 Jan 2012

Even though those revolutions were short lived, their manifesto came to be seen as speaking for the many who had previously remained silent. The word communism comes from the old French commun, meaning common, and refers to the original central tenet of this belief system: the common ownership of capital, the means of production. In this book I refer to the traditional form of communism, not the socialist market economy promoted by the Communist Party in China today, which allows—and even actively encourages—private ownership among members of the public. The central argument for public ownership of capital was, according to Marx in his Capital, to break a vicious cycle of poverty: It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist.

Capital Ideas: The Improbable Origins of Modern Wall Street
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 19 Jun 2005

He mentioned the idea again, calling it “Balanced Ignorance,” upon becoming a member of the American Philosophical Society. “My pearls were well received,” he recalls.23 The views of the classical economists underlie the rationale for the invisible hand that guides the free-enterprise system of competitive markets and private ownership of the means of production, propelled by workers, employers, and customers free to seek their own self-interest. In theory, at least, this system is more likely to arrive at optimal outcomes and bring greater satisfaction to a larger number of people than any other economic system. Speculative capital markets, despite their occasional penchant for distorting values, probably come as close as markets anywhere to approaching this ideal set of conditions.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard
by Fredrik Erixon and Bjorn Weigel
Published 3 Oct 2016

The separation of ownership and control, they argued, will eventually lead to companies that get led solely by management and executives because owners have far too little supervisory control.44 Management legend Peter Drucker answered the question posed by Berle and Means concerning the institutionalization of ownership and increased pension savings. In the mid-1970s Drucker stirred up feelings in corporate America by pointing out the obvious, albeit provocatively. If socialism, he said, is defined as “ownership of the means of production by workers,” then “the United States is the first truly ‘socialist’ country.”45 The accusation of socialism did not go down well in all quarters of corporate America. But Drucker’s observation is correct. Pension-savers, then as now, have limited supervisory control. However, like any other form of socialism, ownership would end up in bureaucratic rule.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

In the industrial era, it seemed to Marx that polluting factories, coupled with abandoned fields, were part of the great transformation of modern society; like proletarian labour, Nature was exploited. As early as in the Grundrisse, he wrote that, ‘Nature becomes … purely an object for men, something merely useful, and is no longer recognized as a power working for itself … men subject nature to the requirements of their needs, either as an item of consumption or as a means of production.’16, 17 It’s worth noting that only people of a certain class could make friends with Nature in a friendly way. If you were a woman who dressed à la Rousseau in simple muslin shifts at home, then you required fires blazing constantly to keep warm. Your natural near-nakedness also required a well-insulated house; the poor bundled up because their hovels were badly built.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist
by Michael Shermer
Published 8 Apr 2020

It would seem, then, that common ownership of the air and the machines that produce it through a single entity would follow, and I suggested as much to Cockell. But to my surprise he responded, “I would go in completely the opposite direction. I would fragment as much as possible. I would try to create plurality in the means of production and great competition and have many people able to produce oxygen. So what you’re trying to do is decentralize,” he and his team concluded after studying Earth-bound systems, because “centrally planned governments generally end up as not very good experiments.” What about corporations that capture a majority market share and become so dominant that they can monopolize the market and turn tyrannical, I inquire?

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits
by Richard Davies
Published 4 Sep 2019

Petty wrote that a state that kills or imprisons its subjects only harms itself, since these subjects – through their labour – are a source of wealth. Mill wrote about ‘the great rapidity with which countries recover from a state of devastation’ and explained that it is because humans constantly use, damage and rebuild physical capital (such as machines and factories) that the physical means of production can be rebuilt far more quickly that we might imagine, so long as human capital and the human population remain relatively intact. REFERENCES Albala-Bertrand, J. M. (1993), Political Economy of Large Natural Disasters (Oxford: Clarendon Press). BRR (2009), ‘10 Management Lessons for Host Governments Coordinating Post-disaster Reconstruction’ (Indonesia: Executing Agency for Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (BRR) of Aceh–Nias 2005–2009).

Paper: A World History
by Mark Kurlansky
Published 3 Apr 2016

The pulp was then poured into molds, which sat above tubs of water until the sheet set. This technique was slow, but that was not a problem at first because there was little demand for the final product. But as word of the invention spread, more people began asking for it. Looking for a faster means of production, the Chinese came up with a new mold—a two-piece bamboo screen that could be dipped in a vat and agitated as it was pulled out. The size of the vat, the size of the mold, and the strength of the dipper were the only limitations to paper size. Once the pulp covered the mold evenly—a matter of minutes—the sheet could be pulled off and a new one made.

Democracy and Prosperity: Reinventing Capitalism Through a Turbulent Century
by Torben Iversen and David Soskice
Published 5 Feb 2019

On average, these parties secured close to fifty percent of the vote up until the 1990s; and one might well have added here some parties to the left of Social Democracy, although communist parties were for the most part shut out of government. While the political right strongly opposed any infractions on the private ownership of the means of production—Swedish wage-earners funds were vigorously opposed for this reason (Pontusson and Kuru-villa 1992)—and while the right was critical of redistribution, for the most part liberal and conservative parties adopted platforms that were supportive of major swaths of the Keynesian welfare state. Distributive conflict existed but it could be bridged by cross-class commonalities in interests.

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era
by Ellen Ruppel Shell
Published 22 Oct 2018

Spence’s point is that all countries—not just developing countries—will need to reorient their growth models around this change. And that is almost certainly a good thing. The Old Economy model is once again being challenged by technology, and with it our thinking on what constitutes meaningful work. When almost anyone can have the opportunity to own the means of production, the balance of power will almost certainly shift. The hope is that this shift will result in worker-owners profiting from their enhanced productivity rather than ceding that benefit to their employers. “Once people recognize what we can accomplish here in terms of making products that really benefit consumers, the big bureaucracies of the world will have less of a hold on the great ideas,” designer Ed Jacobs told me.

The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Published 14 Jun 2018

It’s a variant of the pathological dualism that Rabbi Sacks described in the quotation at the start of this chapter. Writing during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx focused on conflict between economic classes, such as the proletariat (the working class) and the capitalists (those who own the means of production). But a Marxist approach can be used to interpret any struggle between groups. One of the most important Marxist thinkers for understanding developments on campus today is Herbert Marcuse, a German philosopher and sociologist who fled the Nazis and became a professor at several American universities.

Live and Let Spy: BRIXMIS - the Last Cold War Mission
by Steve Gibson
Published 2 Mar 2012

Indeed, given the historical evidence, one might confidently suggest that future technological development will change its conduct and character still further. But, the nature and purpose of intelligence – support to decision-making – will likely remain constant, however it is conducted. As Frank Webster argues in Theories of the Information Society, we may have ‘informatised’ data in the same way that we industrialised the means of production; but, a quantitative shift in the volume of data through digitised information combined with mobile communication technologies does not infer any qualitative shift; and, more information does not imply better interpretation. The availability of virtually unlimited data sources, in what is euphemistically called the ‘information age’, seems overwhelming.

The Powerful and the Damned: Private Diaries in Turbulent Times
by Lionel Barber
Published 5 Nov 2020

His political heroes are Fidel Castro of Cuba, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Robert Mugabe in neighbouring Zimbabwe, ‘despite all his mistakes’. Malema’s own political programme fits the same revolutionary tradition: state expropriation of land and natural resources; launching a state mining company with 45 per cent offered to private investors; and a change in the constitution to allow control of the means of production. The interview with Julius Malema – the Marxist theoretician from the township – was a high point on a 14-day tour of Southern Africa, including South Africa, neighbouring Namibia and Angola, front-line states in the war against apartheid. I wanted to write a long feature on South Africa’s second great struggle: the transition from the bush to government and the heavy expectations which come with black majority rule.

Culture and Prosperity: The Truth About Markets - Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor
by John Kay
Published 24 May 2004

In productivity theories, earnings reflect the value of an individual's contribution. If people don't earn very much, that is because what they do or make isn't worth very much. In bargaining theories, earnings reflect the distribution of power in society. If people don't earn very much, that is because they do not have control over political institutions and the means of production. Productivity theories appeal to the rich. Their good fortune is the result of their own abilities. If they take out a lot, it is because they have put more in. Bargaining theories appeal to the poor. They can blame their status on the unfair organization of society. If they receive only little, it is because others have taken out more.

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics 2007
by Sylvere Lotringer, Christian Marazzi
Published 2 Aug 2005

ugh which everyone condenses or translates himself, The struggle for the majority Is obligatory, whatever majority it might be' and the majority of a s~al1 group defers to the majority of a larger group, while the parliamentar In. stltutlons develop throughout the social fabric, and growing armies of dele~ates learn the mystery of the concllliation of the maximum divisibility of power Ith maximum concentration, w Han, With th,e majori,ty all l.s p~ssible, without the majority nothing is possible: the only recognized SOCial action IS the struggle for the majority ("it is the dictatorship of th'~hlawyer~ over American society" as was written by a journalist many years ago WI regar to the U,S, Congress); the only socia! relationship recognized Is the one of assemblage , of majority an d a f minority, . . MaXimum concentration of po:e~, Its best administration, Capitalism concentrates the means of production an 0 social wealth v.:hHe democracy administers them according to a COde, the code of the relationship between the majority and the minority: it's the best code but It belongs to the world of capitalism, ' We do not know of another code to "legitimize" Political power' the socialist Sta,t moves within ~his same horizon.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

We all have access to information in unprecedented ways. However, the Empire struck back. It has become clear that concentrated powers in business and government have bent the original democratic architecture of the Internet to their will. Huge institutions now control and own this new means of production and social interaction—its underlying infrastructure; massive and growing treasure troves of data; the algorithms that increasingly govern business and daily life; the world of apps; and extraordinary emerging capabilities, machine learning, and autonomous vehicles. From Silicon Valley and Wall Street to Shanghai and Seoul, this new aristocracy uses its insider advantage to exploit the most extraordinary technology ever devised to empower people as economic actors, to build spectacular fortunes and strengthen its power and influence over economies and societies.

Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa
by Jason Stearns
Published 29 Mar 2011

He helped them polish it and added a Congolese dateline to mask Rwanda’s involvement in their movement; the paper became known as the Lemera Agreement.12 Kabila’s outdated verbosity shines through the text: It speaks of the “imperious necessity” for their four political parties to come together to liberate Zaire and names Laurent Kabila as their spokesman. It laments the economic situation, marked by “doldrums, financial muddle, corruption and the destruction of the means of production.” The four leaders met three times with Vice President Kagame, who was constantly involved in the war preparations and seemed well-informed of the complexities of Congolese politics. The RPF strongman seemed more enthusiastic about the rebellion than the leaders themselves, exhorting the Congolese to understand their responsibilities in the struggle, but also to understand that the RPF and others were helping them liberate their country.

Open Standards and the Digital Age: History, Ideology, and Networks (Cambridge Studies in the Emergence of Global Enterprise)
by Andrew L. Russell
Published 27 Apr 2014

Their work led to a new generation of problems and, by the 1920s, a new generation of institutional and ideological innovations that anchored the vast expansion of standardization throughout the American and global economy. The institutional innovations developed by standards engineers in the late nineteenth century were implicit critiques of the existing order, where the only alternatives to monopoly capitalism were either the chaos of “wasteful competition” or the possibility of government ownership of the means of production – a possibility that was never popular among Americans or their elected representatives. When engineers were successful in creating standards committees in the late nineteenth century, it was because they were able to cast their committees as new alternatives to existing modes of industrial control.

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores
by Greg Palast
Published 14 Nov 2011

Once these capital controls were finally defeated and removed, I foresaw a dystopic world, with borders erased, with international corporations more powerful than any nation and above any one nation’s laws or regulations, markets unchained, trade barriers demolished, and finance capital racing like a wild animal from continent to continent. Few of my fellow travelers on the political Left understood what the hell I was ranting on about or thought it at all important. “Currency arbitrage” and “interest rate hedges” were not things you’d find in Karl Marx or the Little Red Book of Mao. Marx and Mao were all about “the means of production” and gargantuan factories with muscular, sweaty proletarians like the union guys I would soon work with at U.S. Steel Gary Works. But Milton Friedman got it. Boy, did he get it. But whereas I saw a banker-incubus about to suck the life out of the laws that kept economies sane, Friedman saw something hotter than a porn flick: the mechanism for erasing financial borders.

The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order
by Paul Vigna and Michael J. Casey
Published 27 Jan 2015

“Now the crowd has their own business model,” says Jeremiah Owyang, the founder of the consulting service Crowd Companies. Offering a broad definition of the collaborative economy that encompasses everything from barter to lending to gifting, Owyang suggests that the entire human populace is now taking charge of the means of production and changing the rules of the game. “They’re making their own freaking currencies, for God’s sake,” Owyang adds emphatically. But beyond these catchphrases, the picture is more nuanced. The Valley’s language about these new technologies makes it seem as if people now have a utopia at their fingertips, if only they could let go of the old ways, reach for that app on the smartphone, and bring the power of the crowd to bear.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
by Charles Eisenstein
Published 11 Jul 2011

The same holds for the accumulation of human technology and culture, which is the bequest of our collective forebears, a source of wealth that no living person deserves less than any other. But what to do with this realization? These truths are closely aligned with the Marxist and anarchist critique of property, but the Marxist solution—collective ownership of the means of production, administered by the state—does not reach deeply enough; nor does it address the real problem.1 The real problem is that in both the communist and corporate-capitalist systems, a power elite makes and benefits from the decision of how to deploy society’s wealth. The convention of property—common or private—is used in both cases to justify and facilitate the allocation of wealth and power.

A Line in the Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice
by Tony Weis and Joshua Kahn Russell
Published 14 Oct 2014

It is capitalism as a system that is the central obstacle in the transition to ecologically responsible production, work, and energy regimes.27 Marx pointed out in the Grundrisse that capitalism has a general disdain for nature apart from the use-values it can appropriate (and the accumulation regime in Canada particularly commits this sin). And this contempt extends to workers apart from the value their labour produces: “For the first time, nature becomes purely an object for humankind, purely a matter of utility … whether as an object of consumption or as a means of production.”28 This arises not from whim or malice on the part of individual capitalists, even if overt scheming and greed have always characterized the oil industry. It emerges from the competitive imperatives to maximize profits and thus to continually annihilate space (as both natural and built environments) by the acceleration of time through productivity enhancement (enabled by the energy from fossil fuels).29 The accumulation of capital is, historically and to this day, the accumulation of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere.

Year 501
by Noam Chomsky
Published 19 Jan 2016

Pinochet’s “miracle” turned into the “Chilean catastrophe” in under a decade, David Felix writes; virtually the entire banking system was taken over by the government in an attempt to salvage the economy, leading some to describe the transition from Allende to Pinochet as “a transition from utopian to scientific socialism, since the means of production are ending up in the hands of the state” (Felix), or “the Chicago Road to socialism.” The militantly anti-socialist London Economist Intelligence Unit wrote that “the believer in free markets, President Pinochet, had a more comprehensive grip on the ‘controlling heights of the economy’ than President Allende had dared dream of.”

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers
by Stephen Graham
Published 8 Nov 2016

Although intensified stacking is far from new – ancient Roman apartment buildings could be seven storeys high – the world’s major cities are thus increasingly organised as multilevel volumes both above and below ground level. And the integration of the world’s rural peripheries tightly into urban means of production, exchange and extraction means that more invisible three-dimensional architectures and geographies are growing in those places as well. In such areas, intensifying excavations deep into subterranean spaces for fuel and resources are themselves organised through vast structures analogous to the skyscrapers that rise into the urban skies, but on even more gigantic vertical scales.9 The world’s deepest mines are over four times deeper than the world’s highest skyscrapers are tall.

The Book: A Cover-To-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time
by Keith Houston
Published 21 Aug 2016

It was a revolution by any measure.88 But papermaking’s transformation had come at a cost, and trouble was brewing in papermakers’ vats. Back in the early part of the nineteenth century, as consumers became accustomed to the neatness and homogeneity of machine-made products, so the prevailing sense of aesthetics had changed to match the new means of production. Readers wanted their paper to be as bright, white, and smooth as possible, and papermakers adjusted their recipes to match. The difficulties arose when they over-egged the pudding, so to speak: the chlorine with which papermakers bleached their paper degraded the cellulose that held it together, and the more chlorine they added the worse the effect became.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives
by Danny Dorling and Kirsten McClure
Published 18 May 2020

As with almost everything that we can think of measuring, the use of writing at first accelerated after it was developed. More people learned to read, more people learned to copy script, and an explosion in written material followed. But it was a process that relied on the arduous labor of huge numbers of scribes, and because of the labor-intensive means of production, there were understandable limits to how much could be written down and also how much would survive. Then as now, the tendency of the powerful few to hold sway over the many led to controls on the generation of, access to, and spread of information. If you were a ruler, you generally preferred to have very few subjects who were able to read and write.

A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
by Rebecca Solnit
Published 31 Aug 2010

The study Fritz worked on concluded, “Under ruthless Nazi control they showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. Their morale, their belief in ultimate victory or satisfactory compromise, and their confidence in their leaders declined, but they continued to work efficiently as long as the physical means of production remained. The power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated.” The aplomb of the British under bombardment was attributed to special national characteristics that became a matter of pride; the resoluteness of the Germans was attributed to grim subjugation. Fritz noted that their surveys revealed that “people living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in the lightly bombed cities” and that “neither organic neurologic disease nor psychiatric disorders can be attributed to nor are they conditioned by the air attacks.”

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party
by David Kogan
Published 17 Apr 2019

They created strategies for reforming and managing the party. Even if Tony Blair didn’t command total support, he would be given the benefit of the doubt on almost anything. The first test was replacing Clause IV of Labour’s constitution. No one had realised he wanted to drop the commitment to ‘common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’, that had been part of Labour’s soul since 1918, and replace it with a wider definition. He saw it as a logical extension to dropping the red flag for a red rose as Kinnock had done. It was modernising the image of the party. The days of the NEC promising to nationalise Britain’s top twenty companies that had led to the creation of CLPD were well and truly over.

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World
by Simon Winchester
Published 7 May 2018

THERE IS ONE further component to this story: the use by Henry Ford of an invention that helped make it possible for the cost of his Model T to decrease almost every year during its eighteen years of production, to go down in price from $850 in 1908 to $345 in 1916, to a stunningly affordable $260 in 1925. The car was the same, the materials the same, but the means of production had become vastly more efficient. Henry Ford had been helped in his aim of making it so by using one component (and then buying the firm that made it), a component whose creation, by a Swedish man of great modesty, turned out to be of profoundly lasting importance to the world of precision.

Adam Smith: Father of Economics
by Jesse Norman
Published 30 Jun 2018

How can the doctrines of the Communist Manifesto owe anything to The Wealth of Nations? These issues are too large to be debated properly here, but we can note some parallels and points of contact. In Marx’s imagined future, history can only lead to the ultimate triumph of the proletariat, the abolition of private property rights and the common ownership of the means of production and exchange; at that point markets of any kind will cease to exist in favour of collective ownership and the administrative distribution of goods. But that historical process—indeed the course of history itself—is ultimately economically determined, according to Marx. His is a staged theory of a very broadly Smithian, though materialist and more broadly deterministic, kind.

Masters of Management: How the Business Gurus and Their Ideas Have Changed the World—for Better and for Worse
by Adrian Wooldridge
Published 29 Nov 2011

Talented people may think that their brainpower allows them to walk upon water, but in reality many are walking on the stones that their employers have conveniently placed beneath them. Organizations are also social institutions. Daniel Pink, the most prominent exponent of the free-agent school, likes to talk about Karl Marx’s revenge—the workers now have the means of production in their hands in the form of laptops and BlackBerrys. But people are social animals. They enjoy the rituals of office life. They like working with their colleagues. The future of work will be dictated by the human need to belong as much as by the logic of technology. What is happening at the moment is more complicated than the rise of “free agents.”

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future
by Noreena Hertz
Published 13 May 2020

A range of factors in recent decades contributed to this: the fact that in the United States, CEO pay had increased by 930% since 1978, whilst the average worker’s wages had grown by only 11.9%; the fact that the rules of the game seemed dictated ever more by large global corporations at a time that workers’ voices and rights were being diminished; the fact that in the UK one in eight adults in employment were, already in 2018, classified as working poor and 850,000 people were on zero hours’ contracts (not knowing how many hours they’ll be working each week or even if they’ll get any hours at all); the fact that many millions of people across much of the world were stuck at the turn of the decade in low-paid, low status jobs with no opportunity for advancement.58 Over a hundred years ago, Karl Marx cautioned in his theory of alienation that workers lacking control over the means of production, and reaping limited rewards from their hard work, would feel disconnected not only from the process and product of their labour, but also from their fellow workers, the workplace and their very selves.59 Even before the economic downturn of 2020 a new set of working conditions had created a very similar effect.

The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement - 30th Anniversary Edition
by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
Published 1 Jun 2012

He looks surprised. "Well... not bad, Alex. But you don’t get power just by virtue of manufacturing something.’’ The stewardess is pissed off. "Sir, if you’re not getting on this aircraft, you have to go back to the terminal,’’ she says coldly. Jonah ignores her. "Alex, you cannot understand the meaning of productivity unless you know what the goal is. Until then, you’re just playing a lot of games with numbers and words.’’ "Okay, then it’s market share,’’ I tell him. "That’s the goal.’’ "Is it?’’ he asks. He steps into the plane. "Hey! Can’t you tell me?’’ I call to him. "Think about it, Alex.

The Future Won't Be Long
by Jarett Kobek
Published 15 Aug 2017

Between sessions, Jon would proffer half-baked Marxist analysis, saying, “What I admire about you women, and where I’ve got a powerful sympathy for your kind, is in the amount of effort you put into sex.” “Whatever do you mean, old sport?” asked I. “Take yesterday, after I couldn’t deal with the condom, and you used your hand and your mouth. I couldn’t help it, but I felt like a factory boss and like you were the worker, and I kept you from the means of production, because there was no fruits you could reap from your labor.” “It’s not a job,” I said. “Was it a gift?” he asked. “I’ve had gift sex,” I sighed. “That was nothing like gift sex. You’re too much of a dude, dude. You’ll never understand.” Bret Easton Ellis telephoned while we fucked, leaving a message on our slightly dysfunctional answering machine.

Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss
Published 19 May 2017

And they are not accidental. In the 1990s, Michael Sorkin outlined the emerging characteristics of the modern American city. Its relation to the “local physical and cultural geography” had become destabilized, he wrote. Its ties to specific space had been loosened. “Globalized capital, electronic means of production, and uniform mass culture abhor the intimate, undisciplined differentiation of traditional cities.” So the new city has been departicularized, filled with copies of copies and featureless façades, attracting people in search of a curated and controlled theme-park experience, all for the purpose of commodifying the city.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

Unlike Mill and Jevons (and most nineteenth-century economists), Karl Marx believed that crisis was part and parcel of capitalism and was a sign of its imminent, inevitable collapse. Indeed, if Adam Smith wrote to praise capitalism, Karl Marx wrote to bury it. History, Marx believed, is defined by a struggle between two antagonistic social groups: a capitalist class, or bourgeoisie, that owns the factories and other “means of production”; and an ever-growing landless proletariat class. Central to Marx’s analysis was his argument that the real value of goods depends on the human labor that goes into making them. As capitalists replaced workers with machines in an attempt to cut costs, profits would perversely decline. This decline would spur capitalists to cut costs even more, eventually driving the economy into a crisis born of overproduction and underemployment.

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
by Steven Osborn
Published 17 Sep 2013

I have been rooted in software for a long time, so hanging out with Eric Schweikardt in his factory in Boulder, watching him tune his assembly line and work closely with his “elves” who make the actual product, is stunningly cool. I believe we are at the dawn of an era where an entirely new vector of innovation emerges. It’s as profound as the industrial revolution, the impact of electricity on society, or the Internet. No longer is the means of production of physical products limited to a small number of large organizations. Once again, anyone can, and everyone should, be a maker. Vive la Revolution! Brad Feld Foundry Group, Managing Director Boulder, CO August 2013 www.feld.com About the Author Steven Osborn is a serial start-up entrepreneur, software hacker, and hardware enthusiast.

The Tyranny of Nostalgia: Half a Century of British Economic Decline
by Russell Jones
Published 15 Jan 2023

In time, however, it became clear that Brown never fully reconciled himself to the fact that he had had to give way to Blair on the leadership. One of Blair’s most important early acts as leader was to drop Clause IV of the party’s constitution. This was a highly symbolic, but increasingly anachronistic, commitment to the public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange – a commitment that left many centrist voters fearing that the Labour Party could at any time lurch violently to the left. There were, however, many other signals to the effect that New Labour, as the party was rebranded in 1994, would be a very different, less doctrinaire, less socialist entity to previous incarnations of the movement.

Inflated: How Money and Debt Built the American Dream
by R. Christopher Whalen
Published 7 Dec 2010

As a gifted and often inspired politician, Roosevelt also responded to the widely held fear on the part of many Americans that their stake in the collective patrimony, the “American dream” was being stolen. “The ominous sense of a shrinking margin of practical liberties pervaded men,” wrote Matthew Josephson in The Robber Barons, “as each successive step in the nation wide consolidation of the country’s resources and means of production brought no tangible gains to the population at large.”8 President Roosevelt did not make money or currency issues a central part of his administration. Yet he did have a significant impact on capital finance for all manner of corporations by starting to address issues of competition and restraint of trade inside the United States.

Civilization: The West and the Rest
by Niall Ferguson
Published 28 Feb 2011

In chapter 32 of the first tome of his scarcely readable Capital (1867), Marx prophesied the inevitable denouement: Along with the constant decrease of the number of capitalist magnates, who usurp and monopolize all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows; but with this there also grows the revolt of the working class … The centralization of the means of production and the socialization of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated. It is not unintentional that this passage has a Wagnerian quality, part Götterdämmerung, part Parsifal.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Both look forward to a natural and supposedly inevitable withering away of the state, and a resulting civilization without coercion or authority figures, where free adults deal with each other under conditions of perfect independence, gravitating to any work they desire. The chief difference between these two transcendentalist world views, one “extreme left” and the other “far right,” has to do with how this result will be achieved. Marx believed that it would occur once industrial societies finish constructing the means of production. After the needed capital—factories, infrastructure, and all that—is completed, there will be no further need for the specialized skills of “capitalists.” Their services can then be dispensed with, along with the governments that protect their privileges. Anarcho-libertarians project a somewhat different path to the same goal.

Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them
by Donovan Hohn
Published 1 Jan 2010

If you didn’t know the screen was there you might have thought she was swatting at invisible flies, or practicing tai chi. This trade show, the toy industry’s largest in Asia, was the first stop on what I intended to be a kind of economic safari, a sightseeing expedition into China’s industrial wilderness. It wasn’t really China I’d traveled halfway around the planet to see but the means of production, which were to me, a child of consumerism, unimaginable. We are not meant to know where our possessions come from, we American consumers, or from what ingredients and by what mysterious processes they were spun and by whom. And so long as our possessions pose no risk to us or to our loved ones, I don’t think we really want to know.

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels
by Rachel Sherman
Published 18 Dec 2006

Braverman’s analysis spawned a generation of studies concerned with managerial control of workers within the labor process, in varying institutional and historical contexts.27 Responding to what many believed to be an overly mechanistic and pessimistic view on Braverman’s part, scholars in this tradition also began to look at worker subjectivity, agency, resistance, and gender.28 The contemporary critical sociology of work remains indebted to the work of Braverman and his intellectual descendants. For labor process theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, class was key. In this view, workers and owners by definition (in terms of their relation to the means of production) belong to different classes.29 The challenge for capitalists and their managerial representatives is to control and appropriate workers’ labor power in the service of securing profit (or other economic benefits). Thus, class relations are generated in the factory, through shop-floor domination.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000
by John Steele Gordon
Published 12 Oct 2009

Many poor white families were also sharecroppers, and about 25 percent of black farming families owned the land they worked by 1880, a remarkable accomplishment only fifteen years after the end of slavery. But the South retained the essential attributes of what today is called a Third World country: ownership of the means of production by a small, privileged elite; desperate poverty and grinding toil for most of the population; and an economy based on agriculture and extractive industries rather than manufacturing and services. Worse, while the abolition of slavery was the greatest accomplishment of the Civil War, the virulent racism engendered by it persisted unabated.

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making
by David Rothkopf
Published 18 Mar 2008

Mills was living in a society that distinguished itself from that of its Soviet adversary by its rejection of this notion of class struggle, in particular by its assertion that it had found a solution: a path to a classless society via capitalism, markets, and specifically through the idea of equal treatment of all citizens under the law. When Mills looked around, of course, he did not see anything like a classless society. Without saying it explicitly, his study of American elites resonated with classical Marxist critique: A handful of families controlled the wealth, a handful of companies controlled the means of production, a handful of political and military leaders controlled the levers of power, and they were all linked, sometimes informally, sometimes quite closely, but often with the effect of amplifying their power and securing their station—and implicitly with the consequence of heightening inequity within society.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism
by Fred Turner
Published 31 Aug 2006

Toward the end of her time on the system, she later wrote, she began to feel that she had been performing rather than conversing: “i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until, at last, i began to see that i had commodified myself. . . . i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to, and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment.” Even though the WELL never made much of a profit, and although its managers in fact struggled to keep the system in the black, Hermosillo’s point has been echoed elsewhere.

No Such Thing as Society
by Andy McSmith
Published 19 Nov 2010

Whether the Labour Party was ever really a socialist party is a moot point, but it certainly fought the 1983 election on a socialist manifesto, replete with sweeping proposals for transferring industries to state or cooperative ownership, and on every party member’s card there was an extract from Clause IV, Part IV of the party constitution, calling for the common ownership of the means of production. (Tony Blair had the clause removed in 1995, but that was several years after socialism had vanished from any Labour policy document.) Even after the 1983 defeat, each time an industry was privatized, Labour routinely promised to renationalize it. That promise was still to be found in policy documents passed by the Labour Party conference in 1989, but in the preceding year, when Tony Blair was shadow energy secretary, the main item he had to confront was electricity privatization.

When the Iron Lady Ruled Britain
by Robert Chesshyre
Published 15 Jan 2012

It was unwise to take it too far – unwise to take anything too far: look at the Swedes with their high suicide rate – but forty years after the war there would be in Britain a new society as close to an earthly paradise as flawed humanity could achieve. As people became healthier, the cost of the National Health Service (the NHS) would diminish; as schools improved, there would cease to be a market for fee-paying education. Owning the means of production would instil diligence and pride into the working man. Britain would never again be a world power, but we could show the rest of the world the middle way between the materialism of the United States and the dismal, totalitarian equality of the Soviet Union. Equality of opportunity would be a reality – scholarship boys like playwright Dennis Potter and television presenter Brian Walden had broken from their under-privileged redoubts to the commanding heights; now every girl and boy of ability would pour through the breach.

Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide
by Henry Jenkins
Published 31 Jul 2006

Cara Mertes, the executive producer for the PBS documentary program POV, itself an icon of the struggle to get alternative perspectives on television, asked, "What are y o u talking about when you say 'democratizing the media'? Is it using media to further democratic ends, to create an environment conducive to the democratic process through unity, empathy and civil discourse? O r does it mean handing over the means of production, w h i c h is the logic of public access?" Was Current going to be democratic i n its content (focusing on the kinds of information that a democratic society needs to function), its effects (mobilizing young people to participate more fully i n the democratic process), its values (fostering rationale discourse and a stronger sense of social contract), or its process (expanding access to the means of media production and distribution)?

Fifty Degrees Below
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 25 Oct 2005

If government-insured full employment reduced “wage pressure,” forcing a rise in minimum wages from the private sector, this would help pull millions out of poverty, decrease their government dependence and social service costs, and inject and cycle their larger incomes back into the economy. 4. Individual ownership of the majority of the surplus value of one’s labor. People create by their work an economic value beyond what it costs to pay them and provide their means of production. This averages $66,000 per year for American workers, a surplus now legally belonging to owners/stockholders. American workers therefore receive between a fifth and a third of the actual value of their work. The rest goes to owners. A minimum share of 51% of the surplus value of one’s work should be returned to one, this value to be measured by objective and transparent accounting as defined by law. 3. and 4. combined would tend to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, by distributing the wealth more equitably among those who have created it. 5.

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
by Antonio Garcia Martinez
Published 27 Jun 2016

“Facebook Goes Public” was the headline, with details like “once in a lifetime” and “once-in-a-generation company.” Churchill once noted in a parliamentary speech, “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Similarly, capitalism is the worst form of managing the means of production, except for yet worse ways. We should treat it as such rather than turning it into the Blue State secular religion, alongside yoga and John Oliver. What’s my big beef with capitalism? That it desacralizes everything, robs the world of wonder, and leaves it as nothing more than a vulgar market.

Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
by Parag Khanna
Published 4 Mar 2008

Beyond Indonesia and the Philippines, Oceania is the second ring in China’s strategy both to acquire resources and to build friendly relations to support its eventual blue-water navy. But China does not have to conquer weak island nations in the Pacific—it buys them. Evading foreign investment restrictions is no problem for Chinese state companies, which rather than seeking to own the means of production, distribution, and exchange (as Marx would dictate), simply maneuver to control them through financing mine exploration and the supporting infrastructure of roads, railways, and vehicles. In Papua New Guinea, China has drastically accelerated deforestation of the virgin jungle, which at present rates of logging will be mostly gone by 2030.

Turning the Tide
by Noam Chomsky
Published 14 Sep 2015

In contrast, without a background of popular understanding, it may be only a form of self-indulgent and possibly quite harmful adventurism.53 Looking beyond the ever-present need to deter particular crimes of state, there is little reason to accept the doctrine that existing institutional structures represent the terminus of historical social evolution, that their principles are graven in stone. There is no need for people to accept as a permanent condition that the vast majority of the population, in order to survive, must rent themselves to those who control capital and resources, means of production and distribution, while decisions over investment and other crucial matters are removed in principle from democratic control, with the further consequence that democratic politics includes a very limited range of social choices, operating within parameters set elsewhere in the state system.

Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri
Published 1 Jan 2004

Moss Roberts [New York: Monthly Review, 1977], 93). Second, Mao thought the Soviets did not transform ownership radically enough. The collective or communal ownership that the Soviets developed is only the first step in a process that must arrive finally at public ownership of the land and the means of production (68, 133). 27 Contemporary Chinese cinema presents several examples of nostalgia for the peasant world, but one should not confuse that nostalgia with a claim that the peasant world has actually been re-created. See, for example, Xudong Zhang’s excellent interpretation of Red Sorghum, the film by Zhang Yimou, as a peasant utopia, in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 318-22. 28 California agriculture is the classic example.

Them And Us: Politics, Greed And Inequality - Why We Need A Fair Society
by Will Hutton
Published 30 Sep 2010

After the revolutionary moment in which dispossessed labour takes over capital in a crisis of over-accumulation, falling profit and immiseration of the working class, a society will be created in which each takes according to his need and each contributes according to his ability. Achieving this fairness in the distribution of goods requires the socialisation of the means of production. The proletarian working class suffers poverty, need and disadvantage entirely because of the operation of capitalism, and the private ownership of capital. No individual desert is possible in this universe. Everything is preordained by laws of history, economics and class. Labour is coerced by capital.

More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy
by Philip Coggan
Published 6 Feb 2020

But this is far from a universally accepted model. Authoritarian regimes of the left and right have traditionally believed that the private sector’s interests should be subordinated to those of the government. The rationale for such an approach is sometimes ideological and sometimes practical. Under communism, governments controlled the “means of production, distribution and exchange”. The rationale was twofold. First, the aim was to ensure that workers received the full fruits of their labours, instead of a sizeable portion being siphoned off to owners of capital in the forms of profits, dividends and interest payments. Second, communists argued that the private sector was inefficient, and that only in a planned economy could it be ensured that the right quantity of goods was produced.

Solitary
by Albert Woodfox
Published 12 Mar 2019

Underpaid employees, benefits being thrown back, medical care being rolled back, working more hours for less pay. Q. And when you talk about unequal distribution, are you talking about it being unequal based on race? A. No, I mean being unequal period. Those who own the resources of this country, who own the means of production in this country, the industries, you know, when they pay a man for less than his work is worth, when they refuse to allow him the benefits from the wealth that they’re making from his labor, when they cut back on medical care, when they cut back on benefits and trust funds or loss, I think that’s a form of corruption.

The-General-Theory-of-Employment-Interest-and-Money
by John Maynard Keynes
Published 13 Jul 2018

(Keynes himself declared that in some respects his theory was “moderately conservative in its implications” 377). Keynes wrote during a time of mass unemployment, of waste and suffering on an incredible scale. A reasonable man might well have concluded that capitalism had failed, and that only huge institutional changes—perhaps the nationalization of the means of production— could restore economic sanity. Many reasonable people did, in fact, reach that conclusion: large numbers of British and American intellectuals who had no particular antipathy toward markets and private property became socialists during the depression years simply because they saw no other way to remedy capitalism’s colossal failures.

Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
by Joshua B. Freeman
Published 27 Feb 2018

As John Scott wrote in early 1942, the Magnitogorsk plant and the broader Ural industrial district it was part of were “Russia’s number one guarantee against defeat at the hands of Hitler,” which, of course, also helped ensure the victory of Britain and the United States.77 But if the giant Soviet factory contributed to industrialization, modernization, and national defense, its role in the creation of socialism depends on what is meant by the term. As state-owned endeavors, the Soviet giants were part of an economic and social system built around government and—to a lesser extent—cooperative ownership of the means of production. But whether this made the Soviet Union a socialist society, a state capitalist one, or something else entirely was a subject of fierce debate in the 1940s and 1950s and is still a matter of controversy in the much-shrunken universe of people who care about such things.78 Did socialism, or state ownership, change internal relationships within the factory?

Capitalism in America: A History
by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan
Published 15 Oct 2018

Russia fell victim to the Bolsheviks. France was a wreck. Britain struggled to retain its former glory with a weakened economy and a failing empire. America’s Progressives looked like teddy bears compared with Europe’s antiestablishment parties. The British Labour Party was pledged to ensure the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. Germany boasted two fiercely anticapitalist parties: the left-wing Social Democratic Party and the right-wing Nazi Party. The Russian Bolsheviks made good on their promise to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. By contrast, America’s Progressives merely wanted to make capitalism work more smoothly and its trade unions wanted a bigger share of the capitalist pie.

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt
by Russell Napier
Published 19 Jul 2021

You can just hear the cries of jubilation following the long, hard struggle for economic freedom – ‘Vive la dollar, vive le mark, vive the numbered bank account in Switzerland’. With truly wonderful timing, the communists of the Philippines are buying into the whole capitalist thing just as the workers of Asia, for the first time since the Cultural Revolution, are showing their first inclinations to rise and seize the means of production. For the contrarians among you, the sign of the Filipino communists chomping on a new Romeo y Julieta and handing in their AK47s alarmingly suggests that a bout of real social turmoil in Asia is now imminent. Following the announcement of the deal, all around the world revolutionaries are now renegotiating the terms of their own Transfer Operate Build (TOB) schemes.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech
by Brian Merchant
Published 25 Sep 2023

For their many faults, they helped popularize the epic language of revolution, and to help export it to where it was and is still needed most. Some machines must be broken, so that they stop producing monsters. Footnote 1 In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that “modern bourgeois society… has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, [it] is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.” You can’t help but hear Arthur C. Clarke’s famous dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”—indistinguishable because it benefits elites to keep it that way, because the webs of exploitation are so vast and opaque, and because the final product is, too.

The Price Is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet
by Brett Christophers
Published 12 Mar 2024

The argument elaborated in this book is different. It, too, suggests that capitalism will not save the planet, but for a different reason. Distilled to its essence, the argument runs as follows. The only things that are inherent to capitalism are the profit imperative and private ownership of the means of production. Renewable power is typically an uncertain proposition in profitability terms, and this means that capitalism – being profit-oriented by its nature – is ill-equipped to deliver it. Let us suppose, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times Martin Wolf recently wrote, ‘that it was more profitable to use solar, wind or other renewable sources of energy than fossil fuels.

Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
by Laurie Garrett
Published 15 Feb 2000

This, the Bank’s analysts felt, offered proof that populations could, indeed, tolerate “shock therapy” economic reform and, in the long run, benefited from such drastic measures. From its inception the Soviet Union’s economy was dictated by Communist Party planners in Moscow who seemingly cavalierly moved entire ethnic populations from one place to another, started industries in the middle of unpopulated tundra, demanded corn be grown in icy climes, and placed the means of production for different segments of the same industry thousands of grueling, wintry miles apart. Inefficiency was the rule of the game. When the USSR collapsed, industries fell with it, as the various segments of its typically long outmoded production were now located in different countries. Overnight millions of workers lost their jobs, and the majority of the people residing in the Eastern Bloc and former Soviet Union fell into poverty—perhaps 25 percent of them were, according to UNICEF, living in acute poverty within eighteen months of the breakup of the Soviet Union.

…

Tens of millions of workers continued for years on end to tromp to work every day, toiling in increasingly unsafe, antiquated factories, in hopes that one day a miracle would occur and months of back wages would be paid. That occasionally this occurred supplied the necessary carrot that kept the old proletariat trudging its way to the means of production throughout the dismal 1990s. Despair and gloom set in on a mass basis as the people came to appreciate that their futures were in the hands of gangsters. In Russia, for example, the Ministry of the Interior estimated that by mid-1997 forty thousand former state enterprises and five hundred banks were controlled by mobsters, and the gap between rich and poor had reached levels not seen since the days of the czars.

The Cold War
by Robert Cowley
Published 5 May 1992

Before his posting to Seoul under British diplomatic cover, he'd been assigned to take a Cambridge professor's course on the menace of Communism, which attracted the introverted young man instead of repelling him. Communist sermons—all for one and one for all; a need for the people to own the means of production because they are more important than property—echoed the moral lessons his devoutly Lutheran mother had taught him as a boy. Thus a course on Communism's dangers triggered his conversion. There was more irony in the fate of the tunnel itself. Although it was “blown” from the beginning, the Soviets couldn't blow up the American operation until it had served its purpose for Soviet, as well as American, intelligence.

The end of history and the last man
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 28 Feb 2006

Hegel was the first historicist philosopher, who understood human history as a coherent, evolutionary process. Hegel saw this evolution as one of the gradual unfolding of human reason, leading eventually to the expansion of freedom in the world. Marx had a more economically grounded theory, which saw the means of production change as human societies evolved from prehuman to hunter-gatherer to agricultural to industrial ones; the end of history was thus a theory of modernization that raised the question of where that modernization process would ultimately lead. Many progressive intellectuals during the period between publication of Marx’s Communist Manifesto in 1848 and the end of the twentieth century believed that there would be an end of history, and that the historical process would terminate in a communist utopia.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2006

If I crossed two corn plants to create a variety with an especially desirable trait, I could sell you my THE PLANT: C O R N ' S CONQUEST • 31 special seeds, but only once, since the corn you grew from my special seeds would produce lots more special seeds, for free and forever, putting me out business in short order. It's difficult to control the means of production when the product you're selling can reproduce itself endlessly. This is one of the ways in which the imperatives of biology are difficult to mesh with the imperatives of business. Difficult, but not impossible. Early in the twentieth century American corn breeders figured out how to bring corn reproduction under firm control, and to protect the seed from copiers.

Consider Phlebas
by Iain M. Banks
Published 15 Jan 2008

But that peace was the Culture’s most precious quality, perhaps its only true and treasured possession. In practice as well as theory the Culture was beyond considerations of wealth or empire. The very concept of money—regarded by the Culture as a crude, over-complicated and inefficient form of rationing—was irrelevant within the society itself, where the capacity of its means of production ubiquitously and comprehensively exceeded every reasonable (and in some cases, perhaps, unreasonable) demand its not unimaginative citizens could make. These demands were satisfied, with one exception, from within the Culture itself. Living space was provided in abundance, chiefly on matter-cheap Orbitals; raw material existed in virtually inexhaustible quantities both between the stars and within stellar systems; and energy was, if anything, even more generally available, through fusion, annihilation, the Grid itself, or from stars (taken either indirectly, as radiation absorbed in space, or directly, tapped at the stellar core).

Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink (Politics and Society in Modern America)
by Louis Hyman
Published 3 Jan 2011

Paddi, “The Personal Loan Department,” 140. 87. United States Investor, “Borrowers of Little Sums,” 3. 88. John Paddi, Manufacturers Trust Company, “Investigation Process” 1937; “Operating Techniques,” Box 92, RSF, 1. 89. The reliance on salaried employees was based on the social separation of labor from the means of production. 90. Without a universal identification number, like the social security number, keeping track of individuals across many addresses and name spellings was extraordinarily difficult. The concerns over the number’s as universal ciphers have been borne out in the past century. 91. American Bankers Association, Survey of Personal Loan Department, 10. 92.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It
by Arthur Herman
Published 27 Nov 2001

Who we are depends on whether we are hunters and gatherers, or shepherds and nomads, or farmers and peasants, or merchants and manufacturers—the latter being the makers of “commercial society,” or, to use a more familiar term, capitalism. Almost one hundred years before Karl Marx, Kames and the Scots had discovered the underlying cause of historical change: changes in the “means of production.” Kames had done two other remarkable things. First he had developed a flexible, sliding scale by which to characterize and compare different societies, in the past or the present, based on their position in the four-stage process. Modern England and France clearly fit the modern commercial stage, as did ancient Athens and Renaissance Italy.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 15 Jan 2012

Nobody talked to me, nobody asked me any questions, nobody wanted any bigger decision than if I wanted to keep the king or the ace.” It makes a twisted kind of sense that in Las Vegas, a city that the urban historian Mike Davis has called the “Detroit of the postindustrial economy,” machines are less likely to serve as a means of production from which users become alienated and more likely to serve as a means of relief from the alienation of social labor.18 Patsy recalls her work as a welfare officer at the State of Nevada’s food stamp office: “All day long I’d hear sad stories of no food, unwanted pregnancy, violence. But it all slid right off me because I was so wrapped up in those machines.

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century
by Christian Caryl
Published 30 Oct 2012

The list, which goes on for a good three pages, spanned such disparate activities as surveying, coinage and regulation of the currency, “the provision of weights and measures,” and shipbuilding. Webb lovingly enumerated all the areas that had come to be regulated or otherwise controlled by the state. If this trend toward government control continued, he concluded, private property was on the way out—and this was as it should be. Public ownership of the means of production was the only effective way to raise the “material condition of the great mass of the people.” The technological and social advance of history inevitably led toward the embrace of socialism; socialism and progress, indeed, were interchangeable. Webb concluded on a suitably uplifting note: “The road may be dark and steep, for we are still weak, but the Torch of Science is in our hands: in front is the glow of morning, and we know that it leads to the mountain top where dwells the Spirit of the Dawn.”1 With remarkable brevity, Webb’s Sunday lecture concisely anticipated one of the most powerful strains in the political thought of the century to come.

The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society
by Binyamin Appelbaum
Published 4 Sep 2019

Similarly, the government sold much of Britain’s public housing to its occupants. Nearly a third of British households lived in public housing in 1980; they were allowed to purchase their own homes at discounts of up to 50 percent off market price, based on years of occupancy. The Labour Party’s platform had long called for public ownership of the means of production, but it surrendered the fight. In 1995, the party’s new leader, Tony Blair, won removal of the public ownership clause in the same Westminster hall where the party had adopted it in 1918. In the early 1980s, American and Canadian airlines flying to Ireland were required to land in tiny Shannon, on the west coast, before flying on to Dublin.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind
by Raghuram Rajan
Published 26 Feb 2019

In their view, the industrialist exploited the worker through his ownership of the fixed plant and equipment of the factory, its capital, which was also why capitalism contained the seeds of its eventual downfall. Marx believed labor was the source of all value, and the only reason the industrialist made a profit was because the industrialist’s ownership of the means of production gave him bargaining power over workers. Any worker could go off on her own and become self-employed, but without the machines she would be unproductive. The industrialist would pay her a better wage than the self-employment alternative, but less than the value she produced for him. The difference between the value she produced working for the industrialist and her wage was the surplus value accruing to the industrialist, the source of his profits.

The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth
by Michael Spitzer
Published 31 Mar 2021

History as ‘one damn thing after another’, in the historian Arnold Toynbee’s choice phrase, stubs its evolutionary toe against the proposition that nothing has really changed since human modernity was achieved 40,000 years ago. Within the rolling chronicle of kings, empires and wars, this hyperbole can be enjoyed with a very large dose of salt. The dose is smaller in the relatively hermetic world of music, especially when the means of production – to borrow a Marxist perspective – does not appear to have changed very much over the millennia, as is the case, for instance, with the many hunter-gatherer societies across the world. The American ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger, relative of the folk singer Pete, wrote his book Why Suyá Sing based on his fieldwork with the Kisedje Indians of the Mato Grosso, Brazil.32 One of his encounters with the Kisedje opened up a wonderful crack of insight into how they conceive of time.

Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas
by Natasha Dow Schüll
Published 19 Aug 2012

Nobody talked to me, nobody asked me any questions, nobody wanted any bigger decision than if I wanted to keep the king or the ace.” It makes a twisted kind of sense that in Las Vegas, a city that the urban historian Mike Davis has called the “Detroit of the postindustrial economy,” machines are less likely to serve as a means of production from which users become alienated and more likely to serve as a means of relief from the alienation of social labor.18 Patsy recalls her work as a welfare officer at the State of Nevada’s food stamp office: “All day long I’d hear sad stories of no food, unwanted pregnancy, violence. But it all slid right off me because I was so wrapped up in those machines.

The Survival of the City: Human Flourishing in an Age of Isolation
by Edward Glaeser and David Cutler
Published 14 Sep 2021

Until the pandemic struck, the people in those labs almost always felt the need to congregate in person, to provide direction, share information, and deliver encouragement. The idea that more effective electronic interactions will simply replace face-to-face meetings is a simple, static view that misses the impact of communications technology on overall human connectivity. Just as cheaper energy led people to use more energy-intensive means of production, cheaper communication leads to more overall communication, and in turn more need to meet. Email, Twitter, and Facebook may save some meetings with existing friends, but they may also lead to having more friends, many of whom will want to meet in person. Business travel soared in the 1980s, despite the supposed ability of calls and faxes to substitute for those long-distance trips.

The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time
by Yascha Mounk
Published 26 Sep 2023

To early Christian writers, it seemed impossible to understand major historical events without paying attention to religious facts about their protagonists. To Marxists, it seems impossible to understand major historical events without paying attention to questions relating to the ownership of the means of production, the relative size of the proletariat, or the ability of an intellectual vanguard to spread class consciousness. A similar insistence on a particular prism for interpreting the world makes up the first key postulate of the identity synthesis. But according to its adherents, it is not grace or class that provides the most important lens for understanding historical events; rather, it is group identities like race, gender, and sexual orientation.

Fall of Civilizations: Stories of Greatness and Decline
by Paul Cooper
Published 31 Mar 2024

To the extent that we can fit its structure into modern definitions, many have described it as an example of state socialism, or even communism. As far as we can tell, the idea of private property didn’t exist in Inca society, and they progressed on the basis of shared ownership of assets, resources and the means of production. When an Inca couple got married, they were given a house and a plot of land by the state, which they would use to produce enough food for themselves. The state provided seeds and tools, as well as a pair of llamas for transportation, wool and manure. In return, the family would give any surplus to the common storehouse, and they would agree to perform a public service known as mit’a whenever called upon — perhaps to labour on a construction project for part of the year, or work in a particular workshop making cloth or pottery, work as message-runner, or to fight in the army.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
by Steven Pinker
Published 24 Sep 2012

The transparency and intelligibility of a country with a free market economy can reassure its neighbors that it is not going on a war footing, which can defuse a Hobbesian trap and cramp a leader’s freedom to engage in risky bluffing and brinkmanship. And whether or not a leader’s power is constrained by the ballot box, in a market economy it is constrained by stakeholders who control the means of production and who might oppose a disruption of international trade that’s bad for business. These constraints put a brake on a leader’s personal ambition for glory, grandeur, and cosmic justice and on his temptation to respond to a provocation with a reckless escalation. Democracies tend to be capitalist and vice versa, but the correlation is imperfect: China, for example, is capitalist but autocratic, and India is democratic but until recently was heavily socialist.

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The interests of an individual are submerged within a community (fascist comes from an Italian word for “bundle”), and the community is dominated by a military, aristocratic, or ecclesiastical hierarchy. Communism envisioned a Communal Sharing of resources (“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need”), an Equality Matching of the means of production, and an Authority Ranking of political control (in theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat; in practice, a nomenklatura of commissars under a charismatic dictator). A kind of populist socialism seeks Equality Matching for life’s necessities, such as land, medicine, education, and child care.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
by John M. Barry
Published 9 Feb 2004

Technology has always mattered in war, but this was the first truly scientific war, the first war that matched engineers and their abilities to build not just artillery but submarines and airplanes and tanks, the first war that matched laboratories of chemists and physiologists devising or trying to counteract the most lethal poison gas. Technology, like nature, always exhibits the ice of neutrality however heated its effect. Some even saw the war itself as a magnificent laboratory in which to test and improve not just the hard sciences but theories of crowd behavior, of scientific management of the means of production, of what was thought of as the new science of public relations. The National Academy had itself been created during the Civil War to advise the government on science, but it did not direct or coordinate scientific research on war technologies. No American institution did. In 1915 astronomer George Hale began urging Welch and others in the NAS to take the lead in creating such an institution.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley
by Leslie Berlin
Published 9 Jun 2005

This traveling distance slowed processing, and as computers became more powerful and their storage needs grew, the wait to process and access data would become increasingly unacceptable. Moreover, the core memories were built by hand. Every one of those iron donuts was individually strung on a wire by a woman in a factory, most likely in Asia. Noyce and Moore knew that this labor-intensive means of production was not sustainable for a computer market growing exponentially, just as they had known a decade earlier that hand-wired discrete components could not serve the exploding market for space-age electronics.64 Moore and Noyce also knew that the problems with cores were irrelevant to most computer engineers, who did not spend time thinking about how they would build their machines ten years in the future.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica)
by Jan Morris
Published 22 Dec 2010

Now the economic arguments for such a system seemed to be discredited. The progressive theory now was Free Trade, which would allow the goods of all nations to flow without tariffs and restrictions all over the globe, and seemed to make the possession of colonies obsolete. With Great Britain mistress both of the means of production and the means of distribution, was not the whole world her market-place? Why bother with the expense and worry of colonies? Free Trade was not yet accepted British policy, but already powerful lobbies were pressing for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts, and deriding the idea of empire.

In the Age of the Smart Machine
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 14 Apr 1988

The qualities of knowledge for which I had combed two-centuries-old documents were available here, now, in the hearts and voices of those people who were experiencing these new circumstances of production for the first time. The statements that had puzzled me in my interviews with the bank clerks and Linotype operators began to make more sense. The material alterations in their means of production were manifested in transforma- tions at intimate levels of experience-assumptions about knowledge and power, their beliefs about work and the meaning they derived from it, the content and rhythm of their social exchanges, and the ordinary mental and physical disciplines to which they accommodated in their daily lives.

Architects of Intelligence
by Martin Ford
Published 16 Nov 2018

It’s not a grim future at all: it’s a far better future than what we have at present; but it requires rethinking our education system, our science base, our economic structures. We need now to understand how this will function from an economic point of view in terms of the future distribution of income. We want to avoid a situation where there are the super-rich who own the means of production—the robots and the AI systems—and then there are their servants, and then there is the rest of the world doing nothing. That’s sort of the worst possible outcome from an economic point of view. So, I do think that there is a positive future that makes sense once AI has changed the human economy, but we need to get a better handle on what that’s going to look like now, so that we can construct a plan for getting there.

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

The more monopolized the ownership of scarce resources, the more opportunities there were to extract rent. The inequalities of wealth thus created were perpetuated and increased by inheritance. Ever alert to the existence of monopoly firms, economists were blind to the existence of monopoly conferred by ownership of the means of production. The ownership of productive tools by the class of capitalists was at the heart of under-consumption theory. This meant that the fruits of productivity growth went unduly to the saving not the consuming class. Since Hobson assumed that savings were automatically invested, this resulted in periodic gluts of production, which led to periodic slumps.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

In 1989, in a sample of several villages, Hua quantified the occurrence of these sexual modalities and found that over 85 percent of people were living lives involving only furtive or open visits.79 The Na way of life has persisted despite repeated efforts to eradicate it. Several times since 1950, the Communist government in China has attempted reforms, out of concern that Na practices sap work effort, disrupt the “means of production,” and foster immorality (mirroring the concerns of Emperor Augustus in ancient Rome, except that women have many male partners here, rather than the reverse). But the reforms have mostly failed. Overall, sexual jealousy seems rare among the Na, though it is not entirely absent, as noted above.

Fodor's Essential Israel
by Fodor's Travel Guides
Published 2 Aug 2023

Kibbutzim played a considerable role in molding the fledgling state, absorbing immigrants, and developing agriculture. By 1950, two years after Israel’s independence, there were more than 200 kibbutzim. Their egalitarian ethos meant that all shared chores and responsibility—but also ownership of the means of production. The kibbutz movement became the world’s largest communitarian movement. Growth and Challenge With time, many kibbutzim introduced light industry or tourism enterprises, and some became successful businesses. The standard of living improved, and kibbutzim took advantage of easy bank loans.

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty
by Bradley K. Martin
Published 14 Oct 2004

Vacationing teachers laud the school system: “As soon as you are born you are received by a nursery, then led through a flowery gate to eleven-year education.” Indeed, officials told me, mothers were entitled to seventy-seven days of maternity leave before turning their babies over to public day nurseries, or in some cases full-time nurseries. “Home education has an important meaning in a society-where private ownership of the means of production is predominant,” Kim Il-sung had said in a 1968 speech. “But it has no important meaning in a different, socialist society.”7 The state, taking over much of the parental role, had been training youngsters to worship Kim. “Our Great Leader is the Supreme Leader of revolution, its heart and the only center,” said one official policy statement.

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But as Kim’s “personal dictatorship continued and its political foundation strengthened,” Hwang recalled, “he became over-confident, believing that he could do anything he liked. More and more he came to regard the government as his personal property.”33 Hwang added: “In a situation where all means of production actually belong to the Great Leader, the economy itself naturally serves the interest of the Great Leader before all else. The national economy is nothing more than the household economy of the Great Leader. North Korea’s economy exists first and foremost to serve the Great Leader.”34 In one post-defection article, Hwang recalled having heard Kim Il-sung utter “relatively humble remarks” during the time when they had worked closely together.

Across Realtime
by Vernor Vinge
Published 1 Jan 1986

As the years pass, first one and then another of her systems will fail. And we will be left dependent on whatever resources we have developed. "So we have a few decades to make it... or fade into savagery. Korolev and the others have provided us with tools and the databases to create our own means of production. I think we all understand the challenge. I shook some hands this afternoon. I noticed calluses that weren't there earlier. I talked to people that have been working twelve-, fifteen-hour days. Before long, these little meetings will be our only break from the struggle." Tioulang paused a moment, and the Asian girl laughed softly.

The Making of Global Capitalism
by Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin
Published 8 Oct 2012

In the words of Henry Stimson, the leading Republican recruited to the administration to cement the truce with capital in the run-up to US participation in the war: “[I]f you are going to try to go to war, or prepare for war, in a capitalist country, you have to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work.”29 Those advisers within the New Deal administration who had a more directive and interventionist conception of planning were either increasingly marginalized, or they adapted themselves to working closely with the “dollar-a-year” corporate executives brought in by their thousands to run the war agencies—whereas the few union leaders similarly recruited quickly accepted the role of subordinate partners.30 By the beginning of the war, “democratic planning” was already being presented as a technique that did “not require totalitarian control of the means of production, for it begins by research and ends in the consulting chamber . . . [T]he planners are not the bosses, nor are they rubber stamps of the bosses; they merely act as advisers.”31 They were the custodians of an economy owned by the capitalists. The plans evolved for the postwar economic order reflected this, too.

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America
by Margaret O'Mara
Published 8 Jul 2019

From the Manhattan Project to manned spaceflight to massive Cold War–era interventions in the Third World, Americans had understood technology as a big-organization tool to solve large-scale problems—war, famine, poverty, education, transportation, and communication. Most academic seers of postindustrial society generally operated on the presumption that bigness would still prevail, even if the means of production would change. Future Shock reflected a shift in a different direction. Technology might instead become a way to fix the problems of the world, to push against social institutions, and achieve self-actualization. But the path to do so would be by going small. One of the few optimistic notes sounded by Future Shock had to do with the destiny of big and unfeeling organizations.

The Enlightened Capitalists
by James O'Toole
Published 29 Dec 2018

Labor leaders sought to dismiss his reforms as mere paternalistic salve intended to preserve the status quo, one claiming that New Lanark was “really a capitalist enterprise with an infusion of business ethics and paternalism,” which, in many ways, it was.39 Years later, Marx and Engels attacked Owen for being a bourgeois capitalist who “acted with great injustice towards the proletariat.” Indeed, Owen was opposed to communistic “class struggles” and to the state ownership of the means of production. He felt that proletarian revolutions were not only morally wrong but unnecessary because societies had the power to enact progressive legislation that would end the growing antagonism between labor and capital. Engels countered that Owen profited to the tune of some $6 million during his time at New Lanark, which was true, arguing that the sum had been “expropriated” from the workers, which was false.

The Story of Philosophy
by Will Durant
Published 23 Jul 2012

He forgets that Plato’s communism was meant only for the élite, the unselfish and ungreedy few; and he comes deviously to a Platonic result when he says that though property should be private, its use should be as far as possible common. He does not see (and perhaps he could not be expected in his early day to see) that individual control of the means of production was stimulating and salutary only when these means were so simple as to be purchasable by any man; and that their increasing complexity and cost lead to a dangerous centralization of ownership and power, and to an artificial and finally disruptive inequality. But after all, these are quite inessential criticisms of what remains the most marvelous and influential system of thought ever put together by any single mind.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber
Published 1 Jan 2010

We might call this “mythic communism”—or even, “epic communism”—a story we like to tell ourselves. Since the days of the French Revolution, it has inspired millions; but it has also done enormous damage to humanity. It’s high time, I think, to brush the entire argument aside. In fact, “communism” is not some magical utopia, and neither does it have anything to do with ownership of the means of production. It is something that exists right now—that exists, to some degree, in any human society, although there has never been one in which everything has been organized in that way, and it would be difficult to imagine how there could be. All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us acts like a communist consistently.

Hard Landing
by Thomas Petzinger and Thomas Petzinger Jr.
Published 1 Jan 1995

While there Barber became fascinated with a labor strike at a watchmaking factory in Besançon, France, where the workers had taken the unusual step of seizing the plant and resuming production on their own, without benefit of management. It was Marxism in action, with the workers seizing the means of production. Barber absorbed himself in supporting the strikers by selling “wildcat” watches. Once back in the United States Barber joined a radical writer named Jeremy Rifkind in a counterculture organization they called the People’s Bicentennial Commission. While combing the writings of Jefferson, Paine, and other Colonial intellectuals for quotes and comments with modern revolutionary relevance, Barber and Rifkind also threw themselves into real-life socialism, helping to establish a women’s chicken processing cooperative in Connecticut and supporting the worker boycott under way against the antiunion textile giant J.

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Published 11 Apr 2011

Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality traced the origins of injustice to the first man who fenced off land and declared it his own. Karl Marx set a political agenda of abolishing private property; one of the first things that all Communist regimes inspired by him did was to nationalize the “means of production,” not least land. By contrast, the American Founding Father James Madison asserted in Federalist No. 10 that one of the most important functions of governments was to protect individuals�� unequal ability to acquire property.1 Modern neoclassical economists have seen strong private property rights as the source of long-term economic growth; in the words of Douglass North, “Growth will simply not occur unless the existing economic organization is efficient,” which “entails the establishment of institutional arrangements and property rights.”2 Since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution of the late 1970s and early 1980s, one of the top agenda items pursued by market-oriented policy makers has been privatization of state-owned enterprises in the name of economic efficiency, something that has been fiercely resisted by the Left.

Cuba: An American History
by Ada Ferrer
Published 6 Sep 2021

At Havana’s Central Park he laid the obligatory wreath at the old monument to national hero José Martí. In a private meeting with President Dorticós, Mikoyan expressed his astonishment that some were calling Cuba’s agrarian reform communist. In a public speech, he urged the government to go further and to pursue “confiscation—without any compensation—of all means of production.”4 No one was especially surprised when on the last day of the Soviet exhibition, the Cuban press published news of a trade agreement between the two countries. The Soviets agreed to purchase 20 percent of the annual Cuban sugar harvest for the next five years. They would pay only a fraction of what the United States was paying, and payment would be in cash, machinery, petroleum, and the services of Soviet technicians on the island.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist
by Alex Zevin
Published 12 Nov 2019

‘The comments I make below are in the nature of footnotes rather than dissent.’34 Yet these footnotes did make clear three important concerns Crowther harboured about a post-war world of welfare and full employment, which carried over from the pre-war decade, and set strict limits to it. First, any major change in social structure must be ruled out. Crowther poured scorn on economist E. F. Schumacher, who had remarked in the draft that full employment might be hard to achieve without tackling the issue of ownership of the means of production. ‘No doubt it would be easier to achieve full employment if Control of Employment and the Essential Works Order remained in force in peacetime. No doubt it would also be easier if the whole of industry – or at least the large capital-using industries – were nationalised.’ But Conservatives would not consent to the latter, nor Labour to the former.

Collapse
by Jared Diamond
Published 25 Apr 2011

Thus, as of 1850 Haiti in the west controlled less area than its neighbor but had a larger population, a subsistence farming economy with little exporting, and a population composed of a majority of blacks of African descent and a minority of mulattoes (people of mixed ancestry). Although the mulatto elite spoke French and identified themselves closely with France, Haiti's experience and fear of slavery led to the adoption of a constitution forbidding foreigners to own land or to control means of production through investments. The large majority of Haitians spoke a language of their own that had evolved there from French, termed Creole. The Dominicans in the east had a larger area but smaller population, still had an economy based on cattle, welcomed and offered citizenship to immigrants, and spoke Spanish.

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food
by Lizzie Collingham
Published 1 Jan 2011

We looked at them as an easy source of food, of abundance.’244 However, the Americans’ post-war behaviour as colonial rulers soon lost them their reputation for being Santa Claus. Unlike the Japanese, who had invested in their colony, the new American masters viewed Palau as an underdeveloped backwater and adopted the attitude that the islanders should be given no more than their means of production could earn them. This left them living in primitive conditions. Koror, which under the Japanese had been a thriving town with electricity, pavements, restaurants, theatres and shops, was never rebuilt. In the 1980s the best buildings in the town were dilapidated Japanese ones which the islanders had patched up.

Green Mars
by Kim Stanley Robinson
Published 23 Oct 1993

Art shook his head and looked down at his lectern page, which he had filled again. Resources and capital nonsubstitutable— power saws/carpenters— house of air. “Excuse me?” Sam said. “Did you say natural capital?” Fort jerked, turned around to look at Sam. “Yes?” “I thought capital was by definition man-made. The produced means of production, we were taught to define it.” “Yes. But in a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. People talk about human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can’t inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.”

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History
by David Edgerton
Published 27 Jun 2018

The more post-industrial the commentators claimed the world was becoming, the more metals, plastics and nearly every kind of product was produced in factories the world over. These arguments in any case missed the really important transformations of the economy we have described. What had changed was not so much the means of production, as political economy, and it did so, as we have seen, in surprising ways. Capitalism, not technology, was the issue. The transformation in the nature of the labour force would indeed have dramatic impacts. The new jobs were to be found in highly routinized services of many different sorts.

The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Published 23 Sep 2019

Tajikistan was independent by the next month and Rakhamon Nabiev was elected president shortly thereafter. To follow what happened next in Tajikistan you have to understand the avlod. In the words of the Tajik sociologist Saodot Olimova, “An avlod is a patriarchal community of blood relatives who have a common ancestor and common interests, and in many cases shared property and means of production and consolidated or coordinated household budgets.” Sounds a bit like the cage of norms we saw with stateless societies, except that this system survived under the despotic reign of the Russian and then the Soviet state. Tajikistan was conquered by the Russians in the second half of the nineteenth century and then ruled by the Soviets until 1991, but the underlying social structures, the clans, persisted relatively unchanged.

Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity
by Walter Scheidel
Published 14 Oct 2019

This shift was exacerbated by the growing exclusivity of military service and the concurrent decline of assemblies—armies having served as political gatherings as well—except in England and in Italian communes. Rural dependence further debilitated rulers, who lacked autonomous means of coercion to counterbalance lordly control over the means of production.35 Following an early post-Roman hiatus, aristocratic hegemony had reached unprecedented heights. By the ninth century, hereditary landownership and office-holding by counts had become the norm in West Francia and Germany, and super-magnates of regal or quasi-regal status emerged together with new duchies and kingdoms.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond
Published 2 Jan 2008

Thus, as of 1850 Haiti in the west controlled less area than its neighbor but had a larger population, a subsistence farming economy with little exporting, and a population composed of a majority of blacks of African descent and a minority of mulattoes (people of mixed ancestry). Although the mulatto elite spoke French and identified themselves closely with France, Haiti’s experience and fear of slavery led to the adoption of a constitution forbidding foreigners to own land or to control means of production through investments. The large majority of Haitians spoke a language of their own that had evolved there from French, termed Creole. The Dominicans in the east had a larger area but smaller population, still had an economy based on cattle, welcomed and offered citizenship to immigrants, and spoke Spanish.

The River Cottage Fish Book: The Definitive Guide to Sourcing and Cooking Sustainable Fish and Shellfish
by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
Published 19 Nov 2007

In the UK we import 86,000 tons of foreign trawled and farmed prawns—on top of the 2,750 tons that our own fishing fleets catch. A high proportion of those prawns carry distinctly dubious ecological credentials. The prawns we slather in mayo and pack into sarnies are either fished from the sea by trawlers or grown in shallow tropical prawn farms. Sadly, both means of production are desperately damaging to the environment. Globally, three million tons of “wild” prawns are caught by trawlers every year, at a variety of prawn grounds all over the world: Mozambique, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Venezuela, Greenland. One big problem with prawn trawl nets is that the necessarily small mesh size used to catch pinky-sized prawns will trap all manner of other creatures and fish.

The Atlantic and Its Enemies: A History of the Cold War
by Norman Stone
Published 15 Feb 2010

It also mattered that even then there was 25 per cent abstention - and apathy was in its way a revolutionary characteristic. His minister of the economy, Pedro Vuskovic, announced that ‘state control is designed to destroy the economic base of imperialism and the ruling class by putting an end to the private ownership of the means of production’, and three of the largest copper mines, American-owned, were taken over, without indemnification. Allende’s first year went well, buoyed by spending of reserves and by high copper prices. He himself later on said that his greatest mistake had been not to hold a referendum on constitutional reform at that time.

Basic Economics
by Thomas Sowell
Published 1 Jan 2000

Since there are few, if any, people who want to return to feudalism or to the days of self-sufficient family farms, government enterprises are the primary alternative to capitalist businesses today. These government enterprises may be either isolated phenomena or part of a comprehensive set of organizations based on government ownership of the means of production, namely socialism. There have been many theories about the merits or demerits of market versus non-market ways of producing goods and services. But the actual track record of market and non-market producers is the real issue. In principle, either market or non-market economic activity can be carried on by competing enterprises or by monopolistic enterprises.

The Devil's Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America's Secret Government
by David Talbot
Published 5 Sep 2016

Mills rejected both the tired Marxist discourse that had dominated New York intellectual circles since the 1930s and the “romantic pluralism” that characterized conventional theories about American politics. According to Mills, power in America was not solely in the hands of Marx’s “ruling class”—those who owned the means of production. Nor was it a balancing act of competing interests, such as big business, organized labor, farmers, and professional groups. This ebb-and-flow concept of power—which was clung to by liberal and conservative scholars alike—was a “fairy tale,” in Mills’s words, one that was “not adequate even as an approximate model of how the American system of power works.”