Re:Young, Unemployed and Living on the Street
by oscilloscope on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:27AM
(#4941443)
Are the means of production privately owned? It seems to me that one of the most important means of production in the 21st century is computing.
Computational power is cheaply available and open-source software is free (as in freedom). With the internet, anyone can acquire knowledge, distribute a good, or work remotely.
Re:Young, Unemployed and Living on the Street
by steveklabnik on Wednesday December 19, 2012 @01:32AM
(#4941453)
Google, for example, has some of the largest computing clusters on the planet. This entire website is dedicated towards creating a vision of computing that is privately owned and used by capitalists to extract surplus value. Not to mention most of the backbones and actual physical wires.
I think there are gray areas, for sure, but the factories, the land, much of the computing, most of the telecommunications infrastructure, etc are all privately owned. The vast, vast majority is.
Surely Marx would still say that, because the means of production are privately owned, resource allocation is provided through a market, and wage labor is dominiant, that the states would be still absolutely captialist, no? "Free public education" doesn't really matter.
> Capitalism also has obviously good effects,
Certainly, and I think this is something that we should keep repeating to people who don't know Marx.
> There are even radical, almost psychadelic strains of Marxism like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari.
<3