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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Well, OpenAI workers do own shares. Tech companies are significantly more socialist than any other large scale enterprises in modern history (I don't know enough about pre-modern history to say).

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Why do you say that?

What do you mean why?

I mean why do you say that large tax evading organizations, operating in an extremely capitalist environment, steered by a small, unfathomably rich, group of people with uncommon and often ultra liberal ideologies, are more socialist than typical manufacturing companies with a largely unionized workforce?

Unions aren't socialist, the employees don't own the means of production while engineers for example at Google literally own shares of the company and can vote. Don't confuse your screed with the literal definition of the word.

What fraction of Google is owned by the engineers at Google? 5%? That's nothing compared to the bargaining power obtained by organized labor, actual socialist organization.

You are misunderstanding me, I never said it was good or bad or better or worse than unions, just that unions are explicitly not socialist by the definition of the word as they are an external organization, not internal to the company. It is true that a tech company issuing voting shares like Google is explicitly more socialist than any union simply because shares are ownership of the means of production. As I said, I am arguing as to the definition of the word itself because most people get it wrong and think any labor movement is socialism which is wrong, it has a very specific definition.

That is not socialism.

Workers owning the means of production, and shares are ownership. So yes it is (one form of) socialism.

Shares are not the means of production. They are a mutually agreed upon fiction and sit firmly within the realm of capitalism.

Leaving aside that market socialism also exists, in which shares do as well, not just Marxist Leninist, what do you define as ownership then? Especially in today's age where value is in software not only hardware. How would a worker own a means of production?

In today's age of exclusive capitalism? There is no worker ownership of the means of production. If you can't use a mine to get some coal, or use some tools to make widget, or use a GPU to do inference I guess, then you don't own it, do you? The point is anyone who needs to do those things can, and that ownership is tangibly available to everyone. Not in the "this is public property" but the state actually owns it sense.

Not at all. They maybe get portion of future valie, but have no decision power and no power at all.

Voting shares exist. In fact, worker cooperatives are the end result by this method, where every worker does indeed have a vote and therefore decision power.

Employees dont get voting shares. These are carefully designed so that there is no risk of employees getting any rights. They are deferred potential compensation.

And no, the companies we talk about dont produce worker cooperatives.

Employees can, if they work at companies that do give them, nothing fundamentally stops them from receiving voting shares.

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