[P2P-F] Worker Ownership, Scale of Production, and Use Value

Tue Mar 15 19:43:13 CET 2011

Worker Ownership is a very widely accepted as
being the obvious answer to wage slavery.

It is said that Workers must have at least *some*
Ownership in the Means of Production lest they
otherwise be exploited by those owners.

But when the situation is on a very small scale,
the idea seems to break-down and become almost
absurd - for would you have a network technician
become part owner of your home network because
you hire him to install some wires and configure
your router?

Let's try "stepping through" the logic of this - the way
a programmer might "step through" a program as he
is trying to debug what, *exactly* is wrong, and so
what *exactly* must change.

We will do this by reducing the scale to just one
owner, and then slowly increasing the scale...

Imagine you own a single Olive tree.

You pick the fruit yourself and turn some of them
into oil - all for your own, personal use.

You use all of the outputs of that tree and you do
all of the work.

One day you slip and hurt your back. You can no
longer pick the Olives, but the work must be done.

If you hire someone to work for you, should that
worker have some ownership in your personal tree?

If yes, then should the mechanic that fixes your
car become also co-owner of that vehicle?

What about a plumber that fixes your pipes?
Should he become part owner of your home?

What if you hire someone to fix your laptop?
Should he become a stakeholder of that device?

Why do these questions seem illogical?

What if the Olive tree is co-owned by you and your
neighbor?  What if an orchard is co-owned by 10
people?  What if by 100?  And 1,000?  1,000,000?

The same of the other questions.

What if the car is co-owned by 2 people?  3 people?
4, 5, 6, 7, etc...

What if the house has more than one owner?  What
if it is an apartment complex?

What if the laptop is a massive datacenter?

When does the answer to the question of "Should
the worker have ownership in the Means of Production"
switch from "Obviously NO" to "Obviously YES"?

But maybe this is simply the wrong question.

What am I missing here?  Why should the end-user
retain full ownership in some cases, and under
what circumstances should the workers become
shareholders?

I suspect it has something to do with whether the
owners are using the product directly as compared
to them selling it to other agents.

When the product is used directly, it seems we do
not have a problem with the users retaining ownership
of their trees, cars, houses, etc.

But if those owners intend to *sell* some of the
product, then I think we feel the workers then
deserve part of the Profit that will likely be
collected from those buyers.

So when Production is Imputed - where the owners
of the Means of Production use all of the outputs
of that production and nothing is sold - it seems
under that condition, that Workers do not need
ownership ... since I guess it would do them no
good anyway.

When the owners do not sell the product, there is no
Profit to divide-up.

Also, when all user-owners have sufficient ownership in
the Means of Production, the usual tactic of stopping
other Workers from accessing those Means (to increase
wages) cannot be achieved by Workers gaining ownership
for themselves, for when the users have sufficient
ownership, they can allow any worker to reverse-bid
for that job.