[FRIAM] means of production take 2

[uǝlƃ ☣]

I suppose what I'm faced with is that if you don't recognize your own argument (albeit abstracted) in what I'm saying, I have to return to the drawing board and come up with a new inference that differs significantly from my old one.

So, here goes. The main thread you seem to have pressed is about hoarding, the commons, aggressive appropriation, stewardship, deprivation of others (those "downstream" and within-group), etc. Marcus' contribution was brief and seemed to be about truncating others' agency ("human capital"). My previous attempt focuses, perhaps wrongly, on viewing all *things* as processes. It implicitly assumes that some "thing" like a hammer has extent just like a non-thing like a human or a piece of intellectual property has extent. The difference between these types of things is a matter of *degree*, not kind, particular the larger or smaller extent of that "thing". (I am, as always, biased by BC Smith's idea of "pre-emptive registration" of an ontology.)

Disambiguating types of productive objects (labor vs. tools, etc.) attempts, I think, to be purely ontological. It asserts a fundamental difference between things like hammers and humans, things and means. My ignorance prevents me from knowing how those philosophers finagle that distinction. But I don't think I need that sophistry for the common usage like in that article on the disintegration of the information ecology.

How about if we said that there are some things that have a stronger boundary around them than others? E.g. a hammer is clearly part of the means of production because it has a pretty hard boundary around it. That boundary is defined through implied use (it fits the human hand quite well) and re-use (it works for everything from murder to cracking flint to hammering nails). The human, by contrast with the hammer, has a very fuzzy boundary around it. It's difficult to call a human a "tool" because every task the human engages becomes a dynamic process, the task changes to fit the human and the human changes to fit the task. Humans are waay more contextually defined than hammers. So, ontologically, a human is easily distinguishable from a hammer because of this contextuality. Therein lies the root of our "types of thing" we need to distinguish types of productive things.

If I think this way, then your talk of hoarding, stewardship, deprivation of others' become ways to *cut* the spectrum of things. A hammer is easy to assign to someone or some region because it has a hard boundary. A human is not so easy to assign because they have fuzzy boundaries. (So, calling a human a "capital good" that can be owned is problematic.) Similarly, something like a herd of goats or a stream that supports farmers and fish downstream is also difficult to crisply assign to another thing or region. When we consider collections of these things, it gets slightly more difficult, but not too bad. Any collection of hammers can be divided up to atomic units (doable because of their hard boundaries). Herds of goats are harder, but till doable as long as you allow for mating, nurturing, milk production, etc. Humans and streams are more difficult to divide.

How am I doing so far? Is this better or worse?


On 11/20/19 8:11 AM, glen∈ℂ wrote:
> It's these *extensions* that I think are being implied by the division of production into modes, means, and relations. And, what's worse, is that even though I've inferred this from you (and Marcus), you won't recognize it when I repeat it back to you. 8^)
> 
> On 11/19/19 8:02 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
>> 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.

-- 
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