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Comment by spaceribs | Hacker News Reader

> As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practicing your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them!

Friedrich Engels: The Condition of the Working-class in England

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I'm not familiar with Engel's view, but my gut feeling here is that he was complaining about the way profit was made ("sucking out their very life-blood") and not about profit itself. But, even if he somehow saw profit as something bad regardless of how it is made, I would still disagree. It is definitely possible to make profit without exploiting people.

this doesn't argue whether existence of profits necessarily implies exploitation of workers but asserts it and then proceeds to argue against philanthropy funded by profits. This line of reasoning only makes sense if one already accepts the initial assumption, whereas the original poster questions that very assumption, so it's a bit irrelevant quote.

I read the parent’s comment as arguing that the existence of profits implies exploitation of workers in the quoted instance (p perhaps broadly in England at the time) and that there is some similarity with DeepSeek. No hard-line assertions, just suggested similarities.

I have no idea about this but am curious to know if the wealthy Engels family who 'owned large cotton-textile mills in Barmen and Salford, England' showed the way for your other 'mighty benefactors'? What belongs to who is a mighty question as Obama reminded us with his lead pencil example. No easy answer though.

It feels really odd seeing Engels' quotes used like this.

The focus of Engels' criticism when he made these statements was on *capitalist production relations*, where capitalists control the means of production and obtain profits by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers. This is precisely what DeepSeek and open-source initiatives are challenging. They are turning the means of production from the private property of capitalists into public property.

I hope you did not intentionally misquote this passage.

Free Software is not the same as expropriation. It's perhaps more the social-democratic smoke mirror kind of thing than lifting the dependency.

Regardless of free software, capitalists control the means of production and obtain profits by exploiting the surplus labor time of workers.

Free software may make it more obvious though, at least for some.

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