Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

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TaylorAlexander

This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production. Whether it be the Chinese Government or Amazon, concentrated power leads that power to make anti social decisions. Harm to the environment, harm to individuals, and harm to society can be incentivized by concentration of power.

I believe a vitally important way to fight those powers is to build independent people-first power. We can do it. Our earth is so productive now that it’s possible to live like a king without hurting others. But we must abstain from buying this cheap plastic garbage like the product the woman found the note in. Buying products we know will become waste, or whose workers we can’t account for, means we are directly supporting the destruction of the earth and of society.

We have to stand up. We must. There is no other way to change. Not voting, not blogging. We must stop being consumers of harmful products and use our money to support organizations that truly represent change.

>This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production.

Absolutely. The reasons for social control/ownership of the means of production are more than economic, it is a question of democracy. Voting isn't good enough, it helps people control the part of the power that is in the hands of the government, but not the rest. The more power is in the hands of corporations, the less power is in the hands of people. Eventually, even in "western democracies" (let alone authoritarian nations), much of the power answers to an elite few and not to the people. One even reconsiders whether to truly call them "democracies" when this is the case.

Social ownership / common control of the means of production lets the people democratically decide how to best use those resources and those means to the best ends, rather than to the benefit of a select elite, whose interests may or may not, by pure coincidence, align with those of the general public. The latter system is broken by design.

> people control the means of production

Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too - they aren’t part of the government.

Should we mandate that workers own 50% of every corporation?

Decision making is going to be much harder as you have to poll the workers to get a majority vote.

What happens if the corporation gets super powerful? It’s still a concentration of power - the executive and the workers of the company.

Institutional Ownership in Amazon is 58% - so arguably most of Amazon's shares aren't owned by people. Of course, eventually all this bottoms out in people....

>> it is so important that the people control the means of production

> Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too - they aren’t part of the government.

You left out a very important word from your quote of the GP that's critical to the GP's meaning. I quoted him more fully and emphasized the unquoted word, the, above.

The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.

> Should we mandate that workers own 50% of every corporation?

> Decision making is going to be much harder as you have to poll the workers to get a majority vote.

Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.

> The people != some random group of people who aren't part of the government. The people should be understood as all the people of the nation. "People," by itself, could be a small (or large) group of oligarchs. Those are very different things.

That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares. You just have to be willing to risk your money to buy said shares that may or may not yield any returns - i.e. risk throwing away your money.

> Democracies have a lot of experience with representative bodies that can support faster decision-making while still having some accountability to the people. It's a straw-man to to present worker representation as being direct democracy for every decision.

On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.

The government can unilaterally (corporations have no real say) set laws and even break up corporations or even just outright seize them (i.e. nationalization).

> That’s the thing. Anyone can be a shareholder of a corporation. There is nothing preventing anyone from buying shares.

Are you serious? There's nothing preventing anyone from buying shares, except having lots of money to spare. The people include a great many who don't. That's the thing.

Then you have things like share classes with massively disproportionate voting power and individuals with massively more money than is typical.

The people aren't going to find representation and control through shareholding.

> On a separate note, THE people already have democratic control over the most powerful organization in the land, their government.

One difficulty with the current system is that the actions the people can take to influence the government are too remote from the use of that government's power, so in the end it does a poor job diffusing the "concentrated power" that the GGGP post was talking about. This is true especially in the present day, when that "concentrated power" has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.

> lots of money to spare

You can buy stock with just a few hundred dollars ...

You of course won’t have much voting power but you aren’t risking all that much money. If you have little to no money in it ... then you should have little to no say in how they conduct their business - it’s none of your business; Would you want random strangers to get a say in how you spend your time and money?

Regardless, no one buys stock to “have influence”. People buy stock to (ultimately) make money.

If said shareholders and their corporations are doing things that are harmful to society at large ... that’s what the government and the laws they enforce are for.

> has learned to wield its influence to blunt the people's electoral influence over the government.

And how do they do that?

Guess it’s the same everywhere. Downvotes if you disagree.

> Guess it’s the same everywhere. Downvotes if you disagree.

BTW, if you're not aware, I can't downvote you.

I doubt the downvotes are due to an ideological disagreement or anything like that. If I had to guess the reason, it's that the ideas you're expressing here just don't have much merit and are pretty tone deaf to boot. They're not that much different than saying a penniless, starving man should just buy food, which you personally find pretty affordable as a well-compensated software engineer.

>Technically speaking, Amazon’s shareholders are people too

This is a vacuous truth. Technically, everything is people, governments are people, repressive megacorps are people, oil sheiks are people. Obviously that's not what the grandparent meant.

I don’t really think we should mandate anything.

Also Amazon’s shareholders do not democratically control the company, so most shareholders are beholden to the board of directors and the few very wealthy large shareholders.

While I do not propose mandatory changes, I think it would behoove us to consider how current power structures affect our freedom and the freedom of others. Amazon has a lot of power over us.

What I advocate is that, if we find the current arrangement problematic, we construct alternative power structures that are democratic in nature. And we use those power structures in lieu of centralized corporate power.

If a single democratically operated company got very large and used its power in anti social ways, I would again advocate that people consider seriously the affects of that power and change their support as needed.

I do think, however, that the “problem” of large democratically controlled powers is a better problem to have than large centrally controlled powers, so it would be an improvement nonetheless.

Ideally, the democratic corporations would also make collective decisions through a congress of rotating company representatives. This would provide some forcing function that would reduce anti social behavior in a single corporation, at the risk of trade embargoes.

What do you think of that?

> What do you think of that?

We kind of already have that in that democratically elected government officials have the power to unilaterally (without corporations having a say) set laws to constrain the behavior of corporations.

Problem is most of the people don’t elect officials that do so - at least according to some people’s standards.

>This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production

The irony of this is palpable. The communist government, who got there trumpeting this exact ideology, would be stopped by the exact same thing? Is this the case of those who dont know history are doomed to repeat it?

"the people controlling the means of production" seems to be a much more basic demand than full-blown socialism or communism or a one-party state. I could also imply worker-owned factories or unions.

If that is already problematic, then this would imply to me that the means of production should never be controlled by the people who do the actual work, otherwise we'd get an authoritarian outcome - which seems a pretty authoritarian statement in itself.

* It could also imply

>> This to me is a reminder why it is so important that the people control the means of production

> The communist government, who got there trumpeting this exact ideology, would be stopped by the exact same thing? Is this the case of those who dont know history are doomed to repeat it?

To be fair to the GP, that's not the "exact [same] ideology" it's more like the "exact same goal." There are different ways of achieving the same goal, and obviously the methods touted by the CCP in this respect are completely bankrupt (i.e. control by the people == control by a revolutionary one-party state that does not tolerate dissent).

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