Comments on: People Make Things — Not Corporations, Not Government

By: Kevin Carson

Kevin Carson — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 23:49:07 +0000

I tried to make it clear that “labor” includes the broad context of social relationships and human capital among the employees of Apple. As far as the organizational layer itself goes, the structure of the human relationships within the corporate walls is roughly comparable to that within open hardware and software design communities, with the main difference being that those at the top of the hierarchy can override the values and sensibilities of those directly engaged in the productive relationships — i.e. making designs increasingly authoritarian and closed to user repair and modification. So I think my general observation that Apple enclosed the productive social relationships and labor of its workers, and extracts rents from them, stands.

By: Poigator

Poigator — Mon, 28 Mar 2016 11:22:37 +0000

You can not see “the production side” in a simple way, like mere Labor. Apple contributed with the organizational function, not only as toll-gate, but also in a positive way: as a framework with its own logistic, goal fixing, and so on. Apple design the plan. Apple is an organizational layer over the “everyday communism”.

Maybe other “plans”, other forms of organization to achieve large and complex projects can emerge from “everyday communism”, but even this forms of organization could not be reduced to mere Labor. If you ignore these superior layers of organization, you are missing a lot of information to understand the production system.

By: gregorylent

gregorylent — Thu, 24 Mar 2016 15:11:54 +0000

very cool how the future is creeping in 🙂