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Comment by guerrilla | Hacker News Reader

Worker ownership of the means of production (i.e. democracy at work) is an alternative and that's most certainly not what you lived through, nor did you live through a stateless, classless and moneyless society. What you lived through was fascism with red flags.

If you check the sidebar of that subreddit you'll find anarchism and mutualism as the solutions to the problems it identifies.

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> What you lived through was fascism with red flags.

What makes people believe that further attempts at implementing this utopia will not just end as another cases of fascism with red flags? Certainly so far all previous attempts ended up this way, and there was a good amount of them so the sample size is not small.

Prefigurative politics. Your groups to change the world operate in the same way that you want to see the world be in the future, not in ends-justify-the-means vangaurdism. If you intend to implement democracy, you operate as a political group democratically, etc.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics

*Solutions that nobody anywhere has ever implemented successfully.

It's almost as if there's a class of people who own most of the world's resources and entire heavily armed states who have an interest in ensuring that failure at all costs, you might say.

Then again, it's been tried plenty of times. That's what cooperatives are, family farms are, what you owning your laptop as a programmer are. We just cut down on the coup d'etats and union busting and expand that kind of democratization of the work week to everyone.

It's also a silly argument considering you could have said the same before agriculture and before capitalism succeeded.

> That's what cooperatives are, family farms are, what you owning your laptop as a programmer are.

These are just different kinds of organization within capitalism. Clubs are a thing too, you know.

These aren’t ‘solutions to capitalism’.

> It's also a silly argument considering you could have said the same before agriculture and before capitalism succeeded.

It’s only a silly argument if someone presents a solution. So far nobody is doing so.

All of human history was workers controlling the means of their production until about 10,000 years ago, when class society was introduced in parts of the world, with one class who worked, and an idle class that did not, expropriating surplus labor time from those who worked.

Unexplained labor still exists deep in the Amazon and elsewhere, but mining companies finding new traces of valuable minerals are extinguishing the last of the old free way.

Ok, so you want a pre-literate hunter-gatherer society.

I say give it your best shot!

What exactly are the means in production in software companies though? The code bases and the patents?

This shouldn't be a hard question for you to answer for yourself. What do software companies produce? Software. What's used to produce that software? That's your means of productions: IP, desks, chairs, laptops, routers, development software, etc.

Everything on this list but IP is entirely inconsequential. The primary means of production are the workers' brains, which they already own. This shows how the XIX century Marxist thinking is completely outdated in XXI century.

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