Something I've always puzzled over is whether the means of production are our laptops, or our knowledge and expertise. I still work for a wage, but expect to be paid above subsistence. I don't own the laptop that I use at work, but also don't own the carpeting on the floor. Both are commodities.
Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?
For factory workers, the means of production is the factory.
What’s “the factory” for software? Our equivalent of the factory is the organization we work in, and our connection to the people who turn our software into money.
You can write software at home by yourself, just like you can do machining on your own. But there are a lot of steps between making software, or machining, and turning that output into money. By working for a company, you can have other people handle those steps. The tradeoff is that this structure is something owned by someone else.
The means of production are the software you produce, the servers they run on, and the patents, proprietary data, algorithms, and other intellectual property that are the byproduct of your labor.
Is the concept of "intellectual capital" a figment of my imagination, or a flaw of the traditional class identifiers? Or both?