🌸 lily's bunny blog 🐇

entrepreneur or marxist?

self-employment is marxism,, and people pretend it isn't.

recently, right around december of 2023, i submitted a rather scary form that would incorporate my second private limited company here in iceland. its statement of purpose was (is) "sale and production of domestic business software, and related activities."

after roughly 3-4 months we struck our first round of contracts for software development, all for foreign based businesses (oops!), and money started to come in as we clocked more hours of work done. it felt almost magical. to do something for someone, send an invoice with a time sheet, get paid, and see them happy with the result.

but in the midst of all of this i had a slightly hilarious realisation: this is the exact outcome seizing the means of production has.

for the uninformed, karl marx in his writings (or rather his wife's? idk) describes how ownership and control over the means of production (that is factories and other workplaces) shapes how an economy works. an economy where mostly private individuals hold ownership and control over the means of production is defined as capitalist. an economy where the workers hold ownership and control over the means of productions is defined as socialist.

these ideas are intentionally not very robust or strictly defined. you can apply them to an entire economy to define it. and you can just as easily apply it to a single workplace, and define it.

using this framework for thinking about work and ownership of that work, we can rather neatly argue that a company made up of three people, each holding a shareholding in the company, who all work to produce the company's product is marxist/socialist. even if the economy around it isn't.

this feels even more cut and dry for sole proprietors: you work for yourself, set your own rates, control all decisionmaking of the business, and ultimately reap all the benefits of your work. you may not vote socialist (or even leftist at all) but you actively experience the benefits certain socialist policy would carry.

maybe i am just crazy,, but i don't think this thought is entirely stupid.