Whenever people talk about non-capitalist systems of economy, I’ve seen stuff about the people owning the means of production. I know the means of production are the way we make things, but why do communists want the workers to seize the means of production?
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It means that the workers own the things that make the products, rather than a guy owning a building and everyone working for them
Co-ops. Think of a regular corporation, but the majority stockholders are the employees.
The means of production is the machines and physical goods we use to make things.
A worker will operate a machine and use it to make stuff.
An owner (capitialist, literally) has to rights to all the revenue the worker generates using that machine, and only has to retroactively pay their worker. And get keep any revenue after they pay their worker. An owner could hypothetically never once set foot within a thousand miles of the machines they own. But they still get all the revenue.
As a concrete example I own several dividend paying stocks and get money every month, for companies I’ve never worked for. Thats because I own a slice of the means.
Seizing the means is saying workers should just… be the owners.
Saying whether or not you think thats a good idea is subjective and not what this subreddit is for, though.
Nationalization of industry.
In Communist nations instead of big industries being owned by individuals or shareholders, the Communists take over those industries by force and they become the property of the State. In theory this makes every citizen in the country a shareholder of that company, so one or a handful of individuals don’t get all the profits. That industry is then (in theory) run for the benefit of all citizens.
Where-as in oil rich nations like the gulf states the oil companies are State owned in a similar way. However the ruler of that nation (The King) gets the majority of the profits.
We do have examples of this in the West. State-owned enterprises in the US include the US Post office, while in Canada numerous power companies, telco’s, insurance companies, and other industries are state owned. They are referred to as Crown Corporations. These companies are in turn run in trust for the people, and can be forced to lower prices or even operate at a loss if it’s to the peoples advantage.
Another option is Co-ops. A co-op is structured similarly to a normal Corporation but each employee is an equal shareholder as a condition of employment. This means that the staff profit from the success of the company, and can vote on key decisions like who gets to be the CEO.
Imagine the following scenario:
You have a woodshop. Inside the woodshop are several very expensive machines. There’s also the building that houses the woodshop, and the land that the woodshop is built on.
Each year, the woodshop brings in raw materials worth $1 million, and processes those raw materials into finished goods that it sells for $5 million.
Who does the $4 million in profits belong to? The investor(s) who purchased the land, paid for the building, and paid for all the machines? Or the workers who took those raw materials and turned them into $4 million in profits?
Under capitalism, the $4 million in profits would belong to the investors – the people who paid for everything to get set up. Under communism, the workers – the people who actually made the products – would own the $4 million.
And that’s the big difference: Under one economic system, the most important question to ask is, “Who paid for this?”. Under the other, the most important question is, “Who made this?”
Of course in reality the question is more complicated. The workers are paid a salary under capitalism, and the costs of those salaries eat into the $4 million. The workers are also insulated, to some degree, from the risks associated with business. They won’t lose money by going to work in the woodshop, but it’s entirely possible for an investor to lose money investing in an unprofitable venture.
On the flip side, though, if the market for their products suddenly explodes and the $4 million in profits becomes $8 million in profits, the workers don’t see anything from that unless the investors choose to share with them – which doesn’t usually happen, especially these days.
On the other hand, if the workers own the means of production, then instead of the profits going to the investors, the profits would simply be split among the workers. If the workers aren’t very good at running the business, then they could actually lose money by trying to operate their woodshop. If they are good at running the business, though, then they would all benefit whenever the shop does well.
That’s a very high-level, abstract view. Reality is always considerably messier than economic models predict.
Others have given the general idea, so an example of workers owning the means could be something like a co-op. Members put in labor, share costs and share profit (or decide what to do with the profit), non-members pay full cost plus labor of the members.
You may think grocery store but one of our local electric companies is a co-op. Workers are hired and paid accordingly, the company is run like a normal company except the only owners/stockholders are the members that subscribe/join in order to receive electricity. So the electric is cheaper you technically own the means so you are charged th minimum, and any profit is split and sent to members once per year.
In Village A poor farmers rent a tractor for a day to do their spring plowing. A big chunk of the profit for the year goes to the owner of the tractor.
In Village B the farmers got together and BOUGHT a tractor, which they take turns using for spring plowing. It was a big investment but now they don’t lose so much of the years income.
In Village C the farmers had a revolution and they killed the owners of the company that owned the tractor, and stole the tractor. Now they get to keep all of the years profit… until someone decides that owning farmland is evil and kills THEM.
In ye olden times, if you were, say, a carpenter, you owned your tools. You could go out there with an axe, chop a tree, then work that wood into a chair and sell that chair for money that you could use to support yourself and your family.
In an industrialized society, most goods are not made by skilled individuals, but by automated machines in a factory setting. A fleet of chair-sculpting robot arms can make many more chairs than the carpenter could ever make by themselves. But the chair-bots are expensive to build and maintain, and a carpenter can’t afford to buy them.
Enter someone who has inherited a bunch of money. The person who has money, or capital, buys the machines that the carpenter needs to make chairs, or, the means of production. The capitalist then offers the carpenter a small wage to operate his machine. Because the capitalist owns the machine, the capitalist claims ownership of the chairs produced by the machine, and collects all the profits from the sale of those chairs. They make all the profit, while the carpenter does all the work.
That is how things work in a capitalist system. There are a lot of… problems with this system, but it has its benefits, too.
Like, for example, wages are consistent in a capitalist society. If your weekly pay is tied directly to how many of the chairs your factory makes were bought this week, and the business has a slow week, you might struggle to feed your family. Assuming you’re paid well enough to meet your basic needs, being employed and getting a consistent wage, regardless of how well or poorly the business is doing, means that work is less of a gamble. You might not get a bonus when sales are high, but you’ll still get paid even when sales are low. The capitalist is the one paying for the whole operation, and that means the capitalist is the one taking on all the risk.
Seizing the means of production would mean removing the capitalist from the equation. Workers would have to pool their funds together to purchase the machines, assuming the risk unto themselves. And instead of a consistent wage, how much money the workers can take home would depend entirely on how well their products were selling.
This would, theoretically, result in a flattening of the gap between wealthy classes and everyone else, as the working classes get to enjoy a larger share of the profits than they used to. And working together alongside your fellow man leads to much better working conditions than if you have some faceless corporate overlord calling the shots. But it also means a lot of instability, as pay becomes irregular. If the business loses money, everyone who works there also loses money, which can quickly cause the whole house of cards to collapse.
There are two options for seizing the means of production. They both result in the same end state.
The first is to attempt to do so peacefully by electing candidates who support your goals who will then engage in the necessary legislative and executive actions to nationalize industries, i.e. transfer them to the control of the state. After that is complete, a process can be put into place to give control to the workers of those industries. This is the Capitalism → Socialism → Communism pipeline.
The second is to engage in violent revolution to overthrow the current government and then assuming the revolution is a success, remove the current owners and place the workers in charge directly.
Both of these will possibly result in a system where there is no ownership of the factory and the workers will make decisions on how the factory is run and receive the profits of their endeavors.
In most countries, like the US, the first option will not work, as the slightest hint of socialism/communism will unite the majority of people to defeat such candidates.
The second option will almost always fail, because either A) most likely, the revolution fails, or B) the revolution succeeds, but then all the intelligent people who might actually run the companies are dead and the chaotic personalities necessary to win revolutions rarely make good stewards of the economy, which is unlikely to work anyway, since no one has ever figured out how socialism/communism could actually work in principle and all previous attempts have failed miserably. Those chaotic people then turn into maniacal dictators and destroy whatever low chance the economic revolution they had planned had to succeed.
Ultimately, the actual best way to “seize” the means of production, which is open to anyone, is to start your own business and then grow it. While it may seem like this avenue is not open to the average worker, small side businesses do not need to be fancy or large or have their own locations or space.
When Marx was writing in the 1840s and 1850s, it meant the a factory’s workers would literally rise up and take control of the machinery. Or that a farm’s workers would literally seize the land and the livestock.
Marxists since then have tried to push the meaning to cover all the other areas of economic activity but it doesn’t work very well. There’s no means of production for hospital staff or university staff to seize, and even if you just mean the buildings and the facilities those types of organizations function in large part due to confidence. No one is going to go to a hospital that’s the focus of violent conflict, and no one is going to fly on a plane that’s been hijacked by the pilots.
Marxism has never remotely worked in practice largely because Marx was a spoiled college boy who never worked a real day of labor in his life, telling labor how they should behave. And because he was the subject of an absolute monarchy, who was willing to accept dictatorial norms that don’t translate at all to democracies. Seizing the means of production and installing the dictatorship of the proletariat is all well and good for oppressed 19th century Prussian factory workers with almost no rights, but in today’s day and age you should be educated enough to realize that a proletariat that has the power to walk all over a factory owner’s rights is also a proletariat that can and will walk all over any and everyone else’s rights as well. Which is exactly what history shows happens.
It’s a Euphemism for theft. The means of production are factories and tools and vehicles that people or corporations use to make things, essentially letting investors turn their existing money and resources into even more money and resources by being super productive.
Communists don’t like that. They believe that the people doing the physical labor are owed 100% of the profits, and so we should steal all of the factories and tools and stuff from whoever currently owns them and give them to the workers (or to the government which will supposedly hold them on behalf of the workers), that way workers earn more money and investors don’t get rich without having to work.
In theory. In practice it means the people in charge of companies don’t care if they are efficient or useful because they can’t benefit themselves by doing that the way they can under capitalism. Therefore you get tons of waste and famine, as evidenced by literally every country it’s ever been tried in. (also the people the means of production are being seized from usually try to resist and then get genocided during the seizing process)
They want the workers to take up a firearms and attack the owners of capital and their hired security, or at least threaten to. They literally want war and violence over what is clearly somebody else’s property.
Fuck ’em and their murderous ways.
Very Simply:
“The Means of Production” = the non labor assets that go into producing all the goods we use in modern life. The Tractors that plow our fields, the presses that print our books, the machines that power our factories, and the land / structures all of that is in.
“To Seize” = These things should be collectively owned by all of humanity, so that their output benefits all of us. How, exactly, the seizing happens, is a matter of much scholarly debate.
Getting into whether this is a good or bad thing is a bit outside the scope of this subreddit, but the argument mostly boils down to the idea that a business owner is incentivized to pay their employees as little as possible, and is able to take advantage of the worker because our ability to buy food, make rent, and receive healthcare is directly tied to our continued employment. This means that, no matter how much value our labor produces, the owner is still incentivized to pay us as little as they can get away with, while all the rest goes into the pockets of the shareholder. If the means were all owned collectively, then (in theory anyway), all the value produced by said means would go right back into benefiting all of us.
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According to Marx the means of production was anything used to produce goods and services for the economy. This at the time primarily referred to land, but is also extended to include what we would call private businesses in our system. In practice a fully communist system means the government collects all the money from the economy, than doles it out per everybody’s needs. They set prices, wages, etc.
Marx outlined his final stage of communism eventually would be: from each according to his means and to each according to his needs. I don’t think I need to explain how this has been proven out over time to be quite naive.
Centralizing the entire economy under the only institution that can also legally kill you (the government) you give random people unimaginable power, and that power is so vast it requires a huge infrastructure to administer which lends itself well to real authoritarian dictatorships.
No matter the system, there is always someone on top and someone below them. This is human tribal nature, we see it all over the animal kingdom and I’m pretty sure nobody has ever seen a lion hunt a gazelle to feed a pack of dogs.
Communist societies always seem to end up heavily stratified, and the host countries proclivities persist or are even heavily magnified: see China and their emphasis on family history.
Better to judge a country based on social mobility rather than trying to wrap your head around “what’s fair” because nobody on earth thinks they have what they deserve in life- that’s also nature, cracking the whip of action at you.
because they are living in the 19th century. The US economy is mostly services now
they just use slogans, they don’t think. Or even worse, they do think but are just evil because they know it doesn’t work.
Name one communist country that has succeeded without capitalist reforms
The people who make stuff typically don’t own the equipment they use to make stuff. The company usually owns the machines, product, land, infrastructure, logistics, etc.
Seizing the means of production means that the workers own all of that.
The idea comes from the position of jealousy. Imagine a factory owner. He has invented a new gadget that could help millions of people in their day to day jobs, if only the device could be made. So he files a patent to protect his invention, borrows money against that patent to hire engineers to design and build a factory to make that gadget. The factory gets built and employs workers who don’t want to take on such risks, but are happy to sell their labor and time to the highest bidder. Those workers do work hard, putting in 10 hour days to make gadgets. They look at the owner of the factory and get jealous of the fact that they are working 10 hour days to make the gadgets, while he just sits back and gets rich if the gadgets sell well. If they don’t sell well, the inventor is destitute and his family starves while he goes to debtors prison, and the workers just sell their time to the next employer. Never the less, they see themselves as the ones that do the work to make the gadgets, so they should get most of the profit. By seizing the means of production, they take the factory for themselves, so that they benefit from the inventors idea. This makes them much wealthier than they otherwise would have been merely selling their labor, until a more innovative inventor comes along and renders their factory obsolete.
In a capitalist system, the physical and monetary means of production are owned by people, who can then become very rich and get even richer doing nothing. They pay people to do the work for them, of course for less than the work is worth so the owner can get paid.
You seize, or rather steal, all of that and give it to the workers, so the workers reap the benefits equally. There are a couple issues. In reality the “workers” means the state, the old owner class are now the politicians in the state, and the workers themselves are means of production so they will be owned by the state too.
Walk into a factory with a gun. Say it belongs to the people. Shoot anyone who disagrees.
This is what Marx thought was the only reliable way to take power away from the powerful. Swift violence.
If you think that’s untrue I encourage you to look into the Bolshevik Revolution
The way they did it to my grandfather they just came in one day and they said well from now on people live in only two rooms the rest of the house you give to the comrades. Then they nationalized and seized his business and his store. The other grandparents they nationalized their factories and bombed the townhouse they built with dynamite. Both sets of grandparents were allowed to keep their lives though. However most owners got shot when they came to take their stuff. My grandfather remembered smoking cigarettes on the terrace of his house looking at the muzzle flashes of the firing squads downtown. This is how the non-capitalist systems worked. They come in, they take and shoot the people they don’t like. In capitalist systems you actually work to acquire the means of production. So you need capital to do that.
Under capitalism, selling a chair to an end consumer starts with a man in a factory they don’t own, using material they don’t own and a machine they don’t own to create a chair they don’t own.
Next, a truck driver arrives in a truck she doesn’t own, on behalf of a shipping company she doesn’t own, to take the chair that she doesn’t own, to a store she doesn’t own.
Then a clerk in a store that he doesn’t own, convinces a customer to buy the chair he doesn’t own, and takes cash payment that goes into a register he doesn’t own, until the owner of the store who hasn’t even touched the chair that was sold takes the cash and decides (quite arbitrarily) how much of the money each of those people in the chain gets.
Once workers seize the means of production, that looks different.
First, a craftsman (or a co-operative shop) buys material, they use the tools they own to make a chair that now belongs to them.
A store owner (or co-operative business) buys that chair from the craftsman, and hires a truck to pick it up.
The truck owner is hired to go bring the chair from the shop to the store
The store owner takes that chair, sets a price and sells it to a customer.
The difference is that in the second scenario, the owners are the same people who are directly interacting with the product or service. Not a separate group of people. And so, the people performing labor, are able to dictate what a product or service is worth to them, and they directly benefit.
In practice, it means replacing the managers who were chosen by the owner(s) with managers who have been selected by some political process.