[FRIAM] means of production take 2

[Steven A Smith]

Glen -
> I think we're converging. But I don't understand what it is about my language that you don't like.
I can't say I "don't like" what you have said, but rather that I believe
you are focused on different aspects of the conversation than I am, but
in the spirit of honestly trying to understand our differences in
perspective on something as seemingly innocuous as "ownership" I have
simultaneously tried to use what you feed back to me to refine the
points that are important to me while trying to do justice to what I
perceive is important to you.   I am seeking a higher-dimensional
understanding of the topic at hand which qualitatively exceeds my
current, and possibly undermines aspects of my current.
>  I believe I've described, albeit more abstractly, the same thing you're describing. But my attempts to repeat back to you what I think you're saying have apparently failed.
"I know you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not
sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant" is an
elaborate aphorism/truism/saying I've lived by most of my life.  It
seems to be somewhat asymmetric in that I feel others are more likely to
misunderstand what *I* have said, than vice-versa, but that may well
just be perspective.   After all, I don't know what I don't know.
> Your comment about "means of destruction" is meaningful. A few posts back, I intended to rant about how, to me, the only pragmatic conception of "ownership" is captured by "the right to destroy it". The only things I can rightly and completely claim to own are the things I can also claim to destroy. So, for your previous example of submerging a turbine vs. damming a stream, if you are allowed to destroy the stream, then you own it. If not, then you don't own it. All the rigmarole about downstream access is irrelevant *except* if it's yours to exploit/destroy.

I became familiar with this inverted or complementary sense of
"ownership" when tech gear started being made harder and harder to "open
the case" and warranties, etc. started to explicitly state that they
were voided IF/WHEN the ostensible "owner" might choose to "open the
case".   I've a friend who liked to use the phrase "run it through a
bandsaw" to describe the deliberate act of opening up a piece of tech so
as to A) Understand it; B) Possibly repair it; C) Possibly modify it's
funciton; D) Reverse Engineer. 

If you can't destroy something, then perhaps you can't *own* it by some
measure, but I think this might be problematic as a primary definition
of "ownership".   It feels to be more of a "trump card" in what is
otherwise a social convention.   If by being able to destroy something
(or it's utility in a certain mode?), you thereby deprive everyone else
of it's use, then in some convoluted sense you "own" it more than anyone
else?   I think murder-suicides are often armatured around this kind of
logic.

"possession is 90% of the law" (whatever that really means) suggests
that "might makes right" in the sense that physical possession of an
object implies a significant amount of "ownership".  

>
> And in the context of your text below about both workers having some (illusory) stake in Ford just because they worked there and the scarcity of oases, asymmetric power, etc. are mostly about unconsidered consequences/extensions. You can phrase it in terms of asymmetry (haves vs have nots), if you want. But it strikes me more as the haves not thinking about the consequences of their actions and the have nots, not thinking about their potential remedies ... i.e. unconsidered extension.
>
> The reason "right to destroy" is so useful as a determinant of ownership is because there's no hem-and-haw over what happens *afterwards* ... or can the rabble seize it ... because it's been destroyed. 

I'm not sure if you are distinguishing "right to destroy" from "ability
to destroy".   This leads us back to the language you referenced earlier
of "owning someone".   Mutual Assured Destruction implied *that* kind of
ownership.   The handful of nation-states with enough nuclear capability
to destroy *any* other in *some sense* owned all of the others, but this
feels like a fairly perverse sense of "ownership".

Perhaps I can concede that the only model of "ownership" of something
that does NOT depend on social convention is the ability to deprive
others of the use of same by others.   The ability to destroy the
utility of that object is an extreme form of depriving its use by
others.   This also opens my curiosity about whether the limit to the
ability to destroy something limits the ability to "own" it in your
model, in the sense that while I can burn my house and garden down and
"salt the earth" to make growing anything possible (for some time), the
earth itself cannot really be destroyed (though I suppose I could dig a
deep hole and remove the earth).   Does this imply a limit to how much I
*own* this home/property?   I would contend that my "ownership" depends
a lot more on the social/legal convention of those around me (including
the bank and the tax collector) than it does on my ability (or not) to
destroy it.

My maunderings about ownership tend to be focused on trying to
understand which aspects are unequivocal and which are not.  The notion
of destructionability as ownership is perhaps the most unequivocal.  
Simply denying access to others (holding tight, placing inside of a safe
bolted to the bedrock, building a castle around, etc.) and therefore
"use" would be slightly more equivocal, with depending on the
generosity/agreement of others yet more with "force of law" somewhere in
between?

My interest is mostly based in trying to understand what
"post-Capitalism" might look like, especially from the inside.

- Steve

>
> On 11/19/19 1:43 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> Glen -
>>
>> I'm not sure we are converging, though I sense we are both trying to.
>>
>>> OK. Yes, I'm slightly familiar with the Marxist origins of the term. And yes, I'm wasting e-ink and your time talking about things, here, when I could go read a bunch of Marx and Marx commentary. But even in what little I've read, there remains a conflation along the same lines we've covered, here.
>> I didn't mean to suggest that the Marxist (and related)
>> origins/popularization of the phrase gave it extra credibility, etc...
>> if anything, I have my own doubts about much of that rhetoric.   The key
>> for me is that I imagine that a transition occurred during that time
>> from two other views of personal property.   1) Those things which an
>> individual or a group can maintain physical control over (e.g. clothing,
>> tools, weapons in physical possession); 2) Real and material property
>> whose "ownership" was roughly hierarchical in the sense of feudalism.  
>> I believe that Capitalism follows the pattern of the latter more than
>> the former.
>>
>>> There's some sense that workers are abstracted away from the thing being made (or the returns/royalties/satisfaction with a job well done, whatever). So, the separation of production into "means" versus whatever other parts is, rhetorically, intended to convey that separation ... e.g. the assembly line worker makes a tiny bit of an automobile and, hence, loses any sense of contextual integration ... the worker's *identity* is orthogonal to car-making.
>> I'm not sure the point you are making here, but I would say
>> industrialists (say car-makers) discovered/intuited that tying their
>> worker's identities to their product was valuable to them (the
>> industrialist)...  say for example, Henry Ford's idea that making the
>> Model A (T?) affordable to his own workers followed by a
>> multigenerational legacy of auto-workers identifying strongly with their
>> industry and the specific brands (I've been a Ford Man myself, though I
>> have also owned GM/Chrysler and myriad foreign models) they have a stake in.
>>> To me, this has absolutely nothing to do with ownership, money, or even production. It has more to do with one's understanding of groups, collective behavior, and unconsidered consequences ... a lack of ability to think about *extensions* of our selves. So, when a teenager throws fireworks out into a dry forest, that's the exact same thing as what you describe in (3) below ... our ill-described separation of "means of production" from other forms of property.
>> Your example of the teen/firecracker/forest doesn't seem to be *exactly*
>> the same, as what is afoot is a "means of destruction" unless said
>> teenager thought he was doing something good/productive but was merely
>> misguided?
>>> A nomad may not feel the need to *own* some parcel of land or the plants/animals within it in order to feel connected to that land. So why would a worker feel disconnected from the produce of the machine in which she's a cog?
>> I think this is an important sub thread and at the risk of digging a
>> deeper chasm between us will extemporize a bit.   There was a time when
>> I believed the common perspective that "sedentary" peoples were somehow
>> more "righteous" than "nomadic" peoples.   This was mainly characterized
>> by the nomads *raiding* the settlements and *stealing* the hard-won
>> (agriculture/craftsmanship) private property of the sedentary folks.  
>> What I *didn't* take into account was a model, for example, of the end
>> of the Pleistocene in say northern Africa where a huge Savannah was
>> giving away to what we now know of as the Sahara desert.   In such a
>> situation, what had been possibly a veritable "garden of Eden" for
>> humans with abundant game and wild plant-foods dotted with watering
>> holes, was becoming an unwelcoming wasteland punctuated by rich Oases
>> where the most persistent of watering holes remained.   The humans with
>> enough foresight or luck or aggressiveness settled there and built
>> various fortifications specifically to be able to repel other humans who
>> might want access to the resources around the Oasis. 
>>
>> In my "just so" story here, there may have been ideas of territory which
>> were maintained by various pressures, but at best I believe, one
>> particular group/tribe might be able to control a slightly richer region
>> than others, but not to the exclusion of the other's well being.   There
>> simply *were* no unique resources that *must* be shared.   The watering
>> holes, being the most likely, and those shared either by timing
>> (even/odd days) or spatial (you approach from the north, we''l approach
>> from the south) or social (we are all cousin/clans here and we can have
>> mini-parties when we meet up at the watering hole, as long as we all
>> agree not to defecate into  it while we are there).
>>
>> Once such a resource becomes more scarce, my just so story suggests that
>> there will emerge two classes of people... the "haves" and the "have
>> nots"... at least when it comes to water, and by extension when it comes
>> to cultivated crops (e.g. dates, figs, etc.).   Those who were more
>> inclined or able to live a nomadic lifestyle may well have had a very
>> symbiotic relationship when the resources were not overly scarce... a
>> wandering pastoral culture could more effectively build large healthy
>> herds of beasts adapted to the new environment (camels, sheep, goats)
>> which they could then trade those beasts/products (wool, meat, milk,
>> cheese) effectively and synergistically with those who could better
>> raise dates/figs/grains.   By the time we discover these two cultures in
>> dynamic tension, possibly violent tension, these qualities and possible
>> ideas about "ownership" have changed.   For example, the nomads might
>> feel resentment toward those who are in the position to "hoard" access
>> to the water they need for their flocks, the oasis-dwellers might
>> naturally feel fear of the nomads who are likely to fight to the death
>> for access to water periodically and who might use this same asymmetry
>> to demand better rates of exchange (camels for dates)...   likely
>> creating a positive feedback loop speciating their cultures even more.
>>
>> "just so" here not because I think anything precisely like this ever
>> occurred as described but more to circumscribe how different contexts
>> could easily yield different "righteous" ideas of ownership which are in
>> strong contrast if not actual conflict.
>>
>> - Steve
>>
>>> On 11/19/19 11:05 AM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>>>> Thanks for circling around on this one.   I had not forgotten the frayed
>>>> thread I left with you on this, but as you suggest, might be lacking the
>>>> tools/perspective to explain.  I take this to mean that your questions
>>>> are requiring me to think deeper/differently.
>>>>
>>>> 1) I *don't* think I am using the term "ownership" in the sense of "to
>>>> own someone" or "pwn", though I suspect others (this may be
>>>> generational) might.
>>>>
>>>> 2) I struggle with the distinction between a very simple, vernacular
>>>> sense of "ownership" of physical objects and perhaps (small regions) of
>>>> real property and a *larger* sense as we find it in modern culture,
>>>> particularly in the context of capitalism as it has emerged in the
>>>> industrial (and beyond) period.
>>>>
>>>> 3) "means of production", in my lexicon is derived from the social/labor
>>>> movements that arose in response to the capitalism as developed around
>>>> industrialization.  I believe it's frailty is derived from the question
>>>> of "a commons".   When capital "owns" the "means of production", it
>>>> means that through the leverage of it's technology it has an "unfair"
>>>> advantage in exploiting the commons.  In fact, one might note that a
>>>> commons only remains viable as a commons if it is NOT exploited.  
>>>>
>>>> Your example of Hearst is well taken...  but framed by "the commons",
>>>> whether it is spectrum (FCC) or right-of-way (cable/phone/???
>>>> franchises) a key point is that when a single (or small-number of)
>>>> entity takes effective control of said commons, there is a risk which
>>>> suggests responsibilities which may or may not be accounted for.
>>
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