MeanwhileOnGrad

See, Marx saw the workers owning the means of production on a local scale. The example being factory workers owning the factory they worked in. Workers would directly profit from their own labor.

Yeah, that's fucking stupid and based entirely on Marx's completely unrealistic view of the world being divided in "the workers" and "the bad people who exploit them".

Tell me this: If I am a repairman, and I want to "own the means of production" what do I do?

Are my means of production my tools? If so, then every and all self-employed workers are already living the communist dream, and no revolution is necessary.

But then, if I improve someone else's means of production, and they are therefore able to produce more value, are they not stealing my surplus value? Am I now somehow a co-owner? Do they owe me royalties until they replace the machines? Would them changing the machines make any difference, since one could argue they were able to upgrade at least in part thanks to my intervention?

Also I fundamentally disagree that simply turning every business into a co-op takes us away from a fundamentally capitalist system. It just makes the "capitalists" into companies instead of single individuals.

Capitalism according to Marx isn't bad because individuals create this relationship of value-theft with the proles, it's bad because these relationships are allowed to exist and fundamental to the system's survival and function.

But in a world where workers own the entirety of their businesses, companies/outfits/co-ops will still produce surplus value and that value will still need to be re-circulated in the economy in order for new enterprises to be created.

This has to be the case because if the non-vital productive endeavors didn't produce surplus, there would be no way for society to compensate the labour of the producers of necessary goods like food or maintainers of vital infrastructure like acqueducts and electrical grids, whose work is necessary no matter what, unlike say a factory making lava lamps somewhere.

So then you have 2 options, either:

1. this surplus exists and will need to be allocated somehow, and no workers would waste it without some return, since the alternative is to just pay themselves more and be done with it, hence returning straight back to the concept of capital injections and investments or,

2. this surplus is requisitioned and redistributed by some central authority, and that's how you become a tankie. Doesn't matter how many layers of "democractic" decision making you tack onto how this central authority works or is selected, at the end of the day you are giving a specific group the power to decide who eats and who doesn't, by virtue of deciding the allocation of society's surplus into different endeavors.

If I want to go out and create something, I'll need resources to do it. In a capitalist world all I need to get that done is to find someone willing to believe my idea can make them back the money they invested plus some interest. This is to offset the risk of losing the money in case their assessment is wrong.

In a world where "the workers own the means of production" I will have to convince a group of people of the same basic contention and will probably have the same deal with them instead than a single person. Probably harder as groups tend to be slower at making decisions and less likely to take big risks.

In a world where a single entity controls the allocation of surplus I still have to convince them, and if they don't see value in my idea, I have to either give up on it and do whatever they assign me to do, or starve (no communist society is a work-free society).

Automation takes off fast enough to put everyone out of work, and the governments realize that money is just something we made up and decides to just let anyone have whatever they want (within reason) because it takes no human effort to produce anything.

My guy, did you just erase the second law of thermodynamics from reality?

Entropy is inescapable. All this premise does is make labour worthless, it does nothing to provision resources to actually make the "whatever they want (within reason)."

That shit would still be valuable even if it were endless, and most of what we use daily is made with finite resources (petrol, metals) anyway so you would still need to trade in some way, which means you will still need to make surplus to compensate, or worse you'll need to conquer the regions that have the materials your society needs to be able to fulfill the needs of this society.

Ancient Rome had free food and free circus shows for everyone, it did it by exploiting an entire continent and parts of others. Resources are finite, labour among them. Making labour infinite (or rather a byproduct of a different resource, power as opposed to food) doesn't make the other resources less scarce.