Ownership of the Means of Production, Distribution, and Communication
Varieties of Ownership of Means
Currently, we see at least five main kinds of ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods and services—and so also of agriculture, industrial manufacture, trade/commerce, and finance:
1) private capitalist ownership by an individual, a family, a privately owned corporation or one whose shares can be bought and sold in public stock exchanges;
2) government ownership—ownership by a city, provincial/state, or national government, or by an inter-governmental organization;
3) private ownership by a ‘nonprofit’ organization;
4) collective ownership by the workers in a community or organization, including retirees, with profit-sharing among these;
5) ownership by an individual worker or family of workers.
These five main kinds of ownership also apply to the means of gathering, processing, and distribution of information—and so also of communication, including learning, teaching, news, views, and entertainment.
If one were to try to fit these things into "classical" economic categories, one might consider information/knowledge as a sort of goods, while considering the procurement and processing of information, along with communication (the distribution and exchange of information) as services.
Ownership of Means by Workers
It may be time to move towards more ownership of the fourth and fifth kinds.
This would, most importantly, ensure that a greater share of the fruits of human labor are retained by those who carry out that labor, be it physical, mental, or a combination. There would be other benefits as well, such as giving workers a greater voice in politics, and greater participation in economic decisions, while fostering commonalities of interests among workers within a country and between countries.
Nonhuman Agents
A new set of producers, distributors, and exchangers of goods, services, and information has arisen—the autonomous or semi-autonomous robots and machine intelligence agents, including AI. These are linked together in networks even more closely than humans are, with information being shared very widely between them, though constrained so far by barriers set up by corporations and governments.
This gives rise to a new set of issues. But here again, if ownership of these entities is at all possible, it seems clear that collective ownership, preferably and eventually by all of humanity, maybe the safest and wisest way to proceed.
As in everything, hubs, counters, trackers, and other structures may be needed to exert the rights of ownership, including to revenues generated by the exchanges, but most importantly to ease, for all of us, access, use, transparency, and accountability.
Finance
The financial services provided by banks and investment firms, and by real estate and insurance companies should also be open to collective ownership by those providing and using these services, including through depositing their funds in these, paying for their use, etc. Among other things, this would reduce the strength of the trends towards increasing concentration of wealth and so also of power.
In the USA, credit unions were a partial realization of this idea, competing in a limited way with privately owned banks, while sharing profits with depositors. However, they seem to have moved away from this.
Difficulties
The transition (or return—if one were to look back at human history and prehistory) to greater collective ownership is unlikely to be easy. There are at least two main barriers:
1) resistance from the private capitalists, especially the very wealthy and powerful elites that control most governments and media;
2) resistance from the remaining governments still not controlled by these;
3) the problems we ‘domesticated’ humans have developed with cooperation and with bottom-up, collective decision making.
These problems manifest themselves even at the family level, and more so in matters beyond those that are directly personal or family-related. In our workplaces and organized collectives, we are too often led by our learned (and perhaps by now inbred) inclinations to rely on ‘bosses’ and on appointed or elected ‘leaders’ to make the decisions, rather than relying on ourselves, our coworkers, neighbors, and communities .
2026 January 15th, Thu.
Berkeley, California
