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[Jimmy]

Workers controlling the means of production hardly means anything when the factory machinery runs on proprietary software licensed under an EULA, the goods they produce are subject to patented copyright protection, and profitability is bounded by rental lease agreements and utility fees that have built in scaling increases based on business profits.

[Reelya]

Let me give a few ideas there.

Some of those things wouldn't be relevant in such a model. Generally the concept of rent-seeking and private property in terms of real-estate are some of the idea that socialism and anarchism reject. So "rental lease agreement" might not even be a meaningful concept in such a system.

In such a system you could make it so that if your org uses land then you pay land rates to central body, that's shared by all other orgs and used for stuff like infrastructure. That's based on equity since if you use land then nobody else can use it, so you compensate the community as a whole how much allowing you exclusive access to that land is worth to them. So, there can be freehold leases on land but you need to pay rates based on the loss-of-access to everyone else. These types of systems don't distinguish between "renting" and "owning". Everyone has a freehold lease.

The same with extracting raw resources. If you pull iron out of the ground then you need to pay some "raw value" of iron into the shared kitty, because you taking it means nobody else can take it. It wouldn't be the same price as iron you dug up: there would be some agreed value of iron that's been extracted, and then there's the effectively price someone would pay for the right to dig up some iron. The iron belonged to everyone, you pay for the right to dig it up, then it's your iron then. The value the org gains for themselves is the value-added value.

[Max™]

I know it's a serious discussion but I wonder how far down the rabbit hole of valuations for value-added valuable values we can go?

[Jimmy]

So, under your proposed model, how would a company like Netflix function?

Say that I live in a worker utopia, and want to watch a movie at home. Currently, I would have an EULA on my computer locking the wealth made from that device into the hands of the company that owns it. I have the subscription I pay to another company that supplies my internet line. Then I have another license I pay separately to Netflix to access their particular library of works. Netflix itself separately pays the rightsholders of the movies I watch for the right to offer those to me. Those companies might pay royalties to the writers of the work it was based upon, the license fees for the music created or adapted for that work, and a bunch of other stuff.

If the concept of rent-seeking and private property isn't legal, who would ever go through the veritable mountain of work it would take to duplicate the above? Take the profit incentive away, and nobody's gonna go putting in the effort to offer me stuff without the hope they can gouge me for my cash doing so.

[Reelya]

Point being: I never said that you can't make a profit in my example. Rent-seeking is when you get ownership of something then get someone else to do the work and skim profits off without actually applying more labor. People can still make a profit but you just can't be a passive investor. You're kind of assuming more there than I actually said.

If the internet provider provides a service then that service costs them something to operate, then you just need to give them something of equivalent value for the service which is made by the org you work for. Consider that vs what we do now. You work for some company, making something, and your company exports that product. You then get tokens to buy stuff with, and you use some tokens to get internet access or any other service. Now, say your company becomes a worker-owned company, and the internet service provider also become a worker-owned company. The only difference is that now neither company has shareholders skimming profits off the top. Your profit is the labor-value of what you did to make something. That's why I said when you dig up iron it's yours if you pay the royalties to the public purse for the in-the-ground value. It's worth something in the ground, but it's worth more once you dug it up. You pay the in-the-ground rights value, then it's yours to sell or further process, and the profit is the value-added amount, which represents the effort of digging it up.

The core relationship stays the same. In fact, it's more efficient.

99% of people just turn up to work and get paid for it now. Not having "owners" isn't going to disincentivize the vast majority of wage-earners from going to work. If you remove the "owner" then split the profits between the 99% existing workers, how, exactly would that "disincentivize" labor? We get paid less now and work more. If there aren't shareholders skimming off the top, you could raise wages while dropping prices.

[martinuzz]

Meanwhile, in the few months that the corona crisis exists, the billionaires in the US alone saw their wealth increase by 497 billion euros.

[scriver]

In a workers control the means of production utopia the most powerful people will be the janitors. Because everyone controls their means of production but the janitors controls the keys to the production

[Loud Whispers]

Meanwhile, in the few months that the corona crisis exists, the billionaires in the US alone saw their wealth increase by 497 billion euros.

Where my robin hood at

[martinuzz]

Try downtown's facemask store

[Max™]

It would be really awesome if we managed to get people to use eutopia rather than (o)utopia, the former means "good place" and starts with a yoo sound, while the latter means "no place" and starts with an oo sound, as it would normally be spelled outopia.

[Loud Whispers]

It would be really awesome if we managed to get people to use eutopia rather than (o)utopia, the former means "good place" and starts with a yoo sound, while the latter means "no place" and starts with an oo sound, as it would normally be spelled outopia.

Use eudaimonia instead, a lot easier to distinguish from utopia

[McTraveller]

Cool, you guys have already covered my thoughts about government being orthogonal to (but intertwined with) who owns factories.  The discussion on efficiency is interesting too.  Notably this line:

then you just need to give them something of equivalent value for the service which is made by the org you work for.

If we only ever exchanged things of "equivalent value" we would never have progress.  Progress only arises when we get more value out than we put in. For instance: You spend a week making a shovel so you can dig a well in 1 week, instead of taking 4 weeks to dig a will without a shovel.  Also, a good economic trade is where both parties increase their own value by making the trade*.  An ideal trade is one that increases the wealth of both parties.

 This relates to efficiency - economic efficiency isn't "making the most profit" it is "getting the most value out for the least resources in." This definition of efficiency is more broad than the one that is focused on profit, because you can expand 'value' to include things like "long term stability."  So in that sense, our current systems (at least in the "west") are only locally efficient, not globally efficient: you can get a lot of value for some resources, but only in a particular sensitive environment (see: COVID-19, natural disasters, a fire at a factory producing components that are a bottleneck for the overall product for some simple examples).

As for "public ownership" of production and social systems: as I've stated elsewhere in this forum, I think what we have to do is not have something like UBI which is kind of arbitrary, but really have a universal public dividend.  This dividend would not be some arbitrary fixed monetary amount, but would be a share of the overall produce of some "sufficiently large" jurisdiction.  It would be something like every taxable entity is taxed at, oh, maybe 50%. A portion of that tax is used for government, and the remainder is divided up per-capita.  This way the "rich" can still have personal benefit from their higher income, but there is guaranteed "trickle down" because their profit is explicitly shared with everyone, rather than by "market forces."

*This is incidentally how "late stage capitalism" happens:  a single trade may be "good" in that both parties gain value.  But if the trade is wealth for a service, or a durable good for a consumable good, then this is how capital gets concentrated: I trade rights to my land for some food. I gain value, because I can eat. But I have lost wealth - I have lost the ability to produce food.

[Max™]

Even starting at raw steel I need to forge myself into a blade and unhewed logs I have to split and shave down into a handle, if I spend a week making a shovel it better goddamn dig wells by itself! I mean I get the point of your example but jesus that is a weird sounding timescale, as someone who makes tools and all. Though I suppose you could have meant "make a shovel, ladder, pulleys, and bucket dumping system" which would be a good week of working hard easily.

[Red Diamond]

If we only ever exchanged things of "equivalent value" we would never have progress.  Progress only arises when we get more value out than we put in. For instance: You spend a week making a shovel so you can dig a well in 1 week, instead of taking 4 weeks to dig a will without a shovel.  Also, a good economic trade is where both parties increase their own value by making the trade*.  An ideal trade is one that increases the wealth of both parties.

No, because there is a difference between use-values and value-values.  The former can be increased by productivity and indeed by trade in some cases, but the latter is only increased by the amount of work needed to facilitate the trade. 

That is because value-values are actually decided by the amount of work that was expended in order to give the item it's use-value.  So in your example, your well dug with a shovel is actually worth 1/2 of the amount that the well dug by hand.  This is called the diminishing rate of return, over time more and more of the total labour is invested in tools, which the Capitalist has to pay for as opposed to the labour done by his workers, so the Capitalists may less profits.  So you make less profits for digging the well out using a shovel than you get from digging it out by hand.

[Zangi]

Barter doesn’t seem that great when I make some kind of candy and an individual from the bars of steel group wants some of my candy, but only has bars of steel to trade.

So you either have some sort of currency or intermediary agency/marketplaces that would make this trade possible.   Possibly hundreds of billions of times a day, depending on population.

EDIT 1st line