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Comment by nateabele | Hacker News Reader

> "Those of us with nothing to sell but our labour power"

This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles. In literal terms, our 'labour power' is fingers on a keyboard. Doesn't the real value in our work come from our ideas? Technology is a lever for ideas, and that lever can be exploited by creativity in a way that few other areas of human endeavor can match.

So, if the value (benefit? effectiveness?) of our work is measured by our ability to be creative, how does one reconcile that with pure labour valuation, which is evocative of the standard-dollars-for-hours exchange?

I'd be interested to hear from any self-professed communists about this.

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Now you've basically made people wary to respond to you in fear of being labeled commies ;)

HN is supposed to be a forum for entrepreneurs but many of the visitors here are hired workers doing stuff for BigCos and that means trading our ability to close tickets for money. As a junior engineer you are told: "here is this nagging bug, go fix it", and as you become a senior you may hear something more glorious like: "ok we are going to expand to this new market so our system needs to scale tenfold. go figure how to do it" and reap some substantial material benefits along the way but it's really the same thing. Sure the whole process requires creativity and novel ideas in the small but nobody cares about your ideas in the large. I guess much of the sympathy for the workers' ideals of old comes from growing appreciation that we are in fact the lever - wielding great power but unable to do something meaningful with it.

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." - Jeff Hammerbacher.

Not a communist, but having ideas isn’t labor, execution of ideas is.

In the context of creativity, labor is the long process of rejecting all of the bad ideas before you get to the good one.

Also, part of the thesis of the labor movement was that workers should be compensated for producing value, not for working “hard”. Briefly, this means that wages don't have to decline as advances in technology make life easier.

The modern tech industry is weird because the laborers build the machines that they use (where “machine” means things like algorithms, not laptops).

> This is the weirdest thing about the dichotomy of Communism's popular resurgence in tech circles.

The weirdest thing to me is that it's pretty hard to produce and maintain software systems in the face of limited resources, interactions with the real world, bosses that don't know what's going on, etc. But somehow it seems not just possible but optimal to top-down design the ways billions of people live their lives. It really doesn't matter if the designer is one person or a committee of the proletariat. That's an NP-ridiculous problem.

In the fact of that, I'd rather individuals make decisions about their own lives.

Haha, I've often had that thought myself. Add to the above the fact that human behavior is probably an order of magnitude more complex than any software system ever designed.

I'd argue, in this regard, there is nothing qualitatively different about being an IT worker compared to any other occupation or any other time under capitalism. Marx never considered labour power to be a purely physical act. Otherwise technology alone would be a source of value, too. Of course, we are the only source of value because of our innate creativity, our ideas; our hands or interaction with others, merely sets it in motion.

The qualitative difference is that today it is trivial for a "knowledge worker" (which includes a software developer) to control his or her own means of production (basically a laptop and an internet connection).

In Marx' time, the means of production was a factory or large areas of arable land, and those weren't, and generally still aren't, possible for individual workers to own. This situation gave the owners of those means (capitalists) undue negotiating power over the workers -- hence collective ownership of the means of production by the owners.

In the first paragraph, I'm purposefully steering clear of the word "own" since there are grey areas, what with binary driver blobs on the computer, and especially the fact that you never meaningfully "own" your internet connection and many of the services you rely on. Yet I would argue that this is a very (quantitatively) different situation from the worker/capitalist class struggle of Marx' time.

I'm not sure to what extent they are adhering to the "Labour Theory of Value", but 'labour power' is a relatively esoteric concept from Marxist economics. In Marxists economics, labour value is the full price of goods produced with that labour and labour power is the stuff that employees get paid for, and it is traded. The difference is exploitation. It gets into a lot of hair splitting as classical economists poked leaks into Marx's theories and he adjusted.

The big difference between classical and Marxist economics is that Marxist use labour as the fundamental unit of value while classicals use utility as the unit/definition of value.

I'm far from a Marxist, but I've read Das Capital. Interesting read from a history of ideas perspective.

I considered myself a communist when I was younger, and would say I'm politically agnostic now. I don't think you can reconcile it with a pure labor valuation, you have to reject it. Tech people see crazy amounts of money concentrated into the hands of a small number of organizations, and at the same time pretty horrible poverty in the global south. It seems natural to connect the two, tech sweatshops producing the devices software we write runs on, and see global redistribution of wealth as a healthy productive way to even those things out and technology as the means to do so. With that being said, I think drawing on failed Marxist experiments is not the way to get people to jump on board.

Not a self-professed communist, but is not generating and applying ideas labor? Labor is not simply putting fingers to the keyboard. How would one reconcile ability to be creative with pure labor valuation, in a manner similar to dollars-for-hours exchanges? Why not simply measure the return on those ideas? If your work brings in $5000 a month, for example, that is the value of your work, of your ability to be creative.

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