this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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If I invent a means of production, why can’t I be rewarded for my creation?
Not sure if that guy is trolling or not, but you don't seem to be, so to answer that question you aren't who Engels and Marx were referring to in the communist manifesto. If you invent something, you could sell your invention, either in the form of plans which do take labor or for actual builds of that invention (also taking labor), that's you being rewarded. But Marxists also (usually) don't believe in intellectual property - it's not very intuitive but the idea here is if you trace any novel invention's steps leading up to it, it is never the product of one person but of society as a whole. An inventor consumes media, sees problems in society, may be educated by a lot of different people, essentially given the seeds for their novel invention from the rest of their society. What you then shouldn't be able to do with your invention is skim off the top of everybody who ever builds your invention or uses your invention, just by virtue of having invented it without having to actually put in any additional labor. And what somebody else in general shouldn't be able to do is give someone else money to build your invention on their land, and skim off the top of everybody who ever uses it.
This is all unrealistic ideals. Consider that in the case of Amazon it took around 15 years for Amazon to become really this huge. This doesn't come out of nothing, it comes out of the hard work and decisions of tons of people who have incentives to get rich and make the business plans to make the company succeed.
On one hand, the moment you make any of this public property, the quality will drop considerably and it'll collapse, because no one will ever gain anything by this business thriving. It's the same reason why governments' employees are well knowns for being lazy and slow once they get their jobs and can't be easily fired. I've seen that first hand in Germany.
On the other hand, consider that Amazon doesn't have a trade secret, really. There's nothing that other companies cannot do. There's no secret sauce here in this case, like you're suggesting with inventions.
Oh I wasn't really responding to OP's meme, just providing context for what that guy was asking. For what you're saying, I mean, maybe? I don't think it's a particularly good comparison to look at current government employees in the society we have and say that's what a Marxist society of workers would look like. The incentives are different because imo "job security" isn't that important in a society where people aren't being threatened with homelessness or starvation if they don't have a job. Even that bit has to tie into a lot of systems, it's a society wide change in perspective. I don't think either of us can honestly say definitively what would and wouldn't work.
I do think Amazon has a secret sauce, though, in the sense that they have privilege that other companies don't. At the time it started, it may have just been any other online store. They weren't the only ones. Now it's a well known brand, and they got there through burning a lot of money to aggressively get customers, then sellers, to only then profit. It took them almost a decade to become profitable, I don't think there's many businesses that could afford to not be profitable for that long. Their secret sauce when they were growing was tons of money that most companies don't have access to (which of course also gets you the best people since money is just about everyone's main incentive in the society we've built), now their secret sauce is their network. Because of how entrenched they are, you'd need a lot more money than they did to try to recreate it now.
because...!