Socialism

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On owning your labor in perpetuity (beehaw.org)

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by EthicalAI@beehaw.org to c/socialism@beehaw.org

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I have a question about prevailing ideas on socialism. I am a software developer. Say I start a company and I am the sole employee and I write some code that is profitable. Then I decide to leave, I transfer the business to someone else or a group of people. The buisnesses is still running, under other workers, but I still have productive code in the pipelines. Do I get to “own” a share of this business for the rest of my life like a capitalist?

Similarly, let’s say I’m an artist who wrote a book. I write the book and want to distribute it. Do I get to own a permanent share in the distribution profit, even if my work is complete, in perpetuity?

I guess both are examples of intellectual property, which I’m usually against, but assume a libertarian socialist society not a society where markets are eliminated or welfare is plentiful, just one where capitalists no longer own the means of production.

I suppose the ethical anti capitalist solution is to sell your rights to the production workers. Or maybe to cap potential profits off a work (but that would require government intervention id assume?)

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[–] meteorswarm@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think you are spotting good contradictions! If we mean to abolish private property - that is, private ownership of the means of production - we must include productive software.

I don't see a big difference between "I built this widget making machine, while supported by the community, so it will be managed by the community," and "I wrote this widget making software, while supported by the community, so it will be managed by the community."

Part of this comes down to why you want to "own" the software. If it's to extract an income, why? In a society that has socialized production and no longer has scarcity, you don't need an income. I think there's interesting nuance around using software for purposes that you don't like, but that's no different from a machinist making tools.

Transitioning into this is pretty hard to dictate, and I think we shouldn't try to. The next steps from here are towards collective ownership - workers seizing software companies - and they can work out something equitable based on their local conditions.

(I also think your definition of libertarian socialism is not the same as mine: a libertarian socialist society to me is classless, stateless, and has abolished hierarchy)

[–] EthicalAI@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

I was going to make another post about this other topic, but how am I necessarily supported by the community under socialism? Eliminating capitalists and the workers owning the means of production just means the elimination of “bosses”, workplace democracy, ownership over your labor, etc. It doesn’t obligate a form of welfare. I do see socialism having nationalized industries, especially those that provide needs which make for bad markets, and I can even see taxes paying for goods from these industries, but I feel like that’s an entirely different question than workers owning their labor, namely because we could literally do that right now under social democracy too!