• Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    7 hours ago

    Labor is entitled to all it creates, but that doesn’t necessarily mean each laborer should receive the full value of what that individual laborer creates. It means that the laboring class should receive the full value of what the laboring class creates. Following that logic all the way through, it necessitates that labor be the only class, and thus a classless system. There are… A few different ideas on what that system should look like, with various and myriad different levels of complexity (and authoritarianism), but the basic idea is that ownership of the tools by which we ensure our survival (ie, the means of production, the productive materials) should not be held by an elite few who profit wildly off the labor of the vast majority of us. They should instead be held in common (again, different models ranging from a worker co-op to a fully planned economy with the state standing in as a sort of proxy for the worker), and thus the value created by the laborers who are working those productive machines is more equitably distributed.

    Basically, if Tim Apple wasn’t around and Apple could be run as a worker co-op, each employee could be making a ridiculous amount of money. Or, more realistically, each employee could make a living wage, and the excess could be funnelled back into the business for innovation, expansion, whatever. If you extend that out and apply the model to an entire national economy, you could use those excess funds for healthcare, infrastructure, UBI, food assistance, bombing brown kids. All the stuff that nation states like to do.