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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

>All the more reason why we need workplace democracy. The elites clearly do not know how to run a business and the economy is the final frontier for democracy to expand into.

One might almost say workers should... own the means of production?

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Every programmer owns the means of code production (unless they forgot how to code without Claude). Turns out it's not necessarily enough to make money.

Code production is not code distribution nor code advertisement, nor code marketing in general, etc.

Yeah, that's the thing. You need the whole business to turn code into money, and you need this business to be run well, and either do what people with big money want it to do or to make lots of people with small money pay for its product regularly. Either way, it's not what autonomous programmer commune will do well in my opinion

It's usual for the programmers (or laborers in general, perhaps) to assume that their portion of the business does all the "real work" and the 60-70% "rest of the company" do nothing and add no value.

Although, Facebook doesn’t produce much, right? Some glasses I guess. “Workers should own the means of collecting data to influence people towards some sources of production” doesn’t have quite the ring to it.

Workplace democracy would work better than democracy does anywhere else?

And, of course, every tech worker already has a vote. As the saying goes: they can vote with their feet.

It's a catchy turn of phrase, but of course a vote and an option to leave aren't the same thing at all.

The means of production are for sale, they can own them if they want!

But we don't pay for coding tools, we want them for free!

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