Socialism

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On owning your labor in perpetuity (self.socialism)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by EthicalAI to c/socialism

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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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[–] Rentlar 4 points 1 year ago

I'm not an expert either and maybe not the ideal socialist to answer your question, but I think people will need to ask themselves, do I need to benefit/profit from this perpetually, or will it be more beneficial to have my work be part of the common good? I think individuals of sound mind will be fine with allowing their work to go to charitable use, just as old furniture and items often are donated for good causes after a long time. The fact that they get something from your work doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing for you, but sometimes capitalistic tendencies want to profit from your benefit while harming others, such as an artist's estate starting frivolous lawsuits when the artist would never think to do such a thing.

In the copyleft sphere as it exist in today's society, almost all licenses say that creators should assert their intellectual property right in order to allow for free and libre development/improvement, and discourage and dispel corporate fuckery.

[–] meteorswarm 3 points 1 year 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 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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!

[–] meteorswarm 3 points 1 year ago

You're on a roll with the good questions :)

Different people imagine different solutions to this, and I think in a general "socialist" forum I will avoid prescribing one. But the general theme is that given abundance - which we already have - and given equitable distribution of that abundance - through workers owning the means of production - why wouldn't people just give away their production? The alternative is hoarding, which people in aggregate don't generally do.

If you could work for a few hours a day - two? four? - and provide software needs for a hundred people, I bet you'd do it for the clout, thanks, and solidarity with your fellow humans. Maybe you wouldn't, but lots of people would. Your counterparts in farming, construction, textiles, medicine and all the other needs of life share that feeling too. People are generous when they have abundance, and as soon as we stop allowing the rich to take that abundance for themselves we can live within that generosity.

There are of course models of socialism that don't imagine this, that continue to imagine a state, a money economy, laws which compel labor, and so on, and I think they're incremental improvements on what we have today but are not revolutionary. Social democracy is often used as a label for this. But this is really the shallow end of the pool of socialist thought, and many (perhaps a majority of?) socialists imagine to some degree the "classless, stateless, moneyless society" that Marx holds up as the ideal of communism.

I'm not as well-read on socialist authors as I would like to be so I'm not a great source for quotes for further reading. One that I do think gets at your question is chapter three of Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of-bread#toc10, which talks about his answer from an anarchist perspective, but I find a bit insufficiently persuasive on his own. Perhaps other readers here can offer better links.