Jonathan Blow

I mean it in the Marxist sense; the worker produces value, a part of which the employer takes. Maximizing the amount that is kept is a logical consequence of the profit motive, particularly once everything else has been squeezed as far as it can be.

Yeah, but "the worker produces value, a part of which the employer takes" is exactly what I am saying is conceptually incorrect.

If workers can just produce value like that, then they would just sit around at home and produce value and keep most of it. Some people do manage to do this, though it's a small fraction of the population!

workers don’t own the resources to produce value on their own. you have to have means of production... "workers" refers to a class of people who have no choice but to sell their labor

Correct. That's what defines a worker - their relationship to the means of production. (The people who can produce their own value, like artists, are technically not workers, though this gets very complicated under current conditions.)

This idea of “the means of production” being like some big assembly line or something, and that this being kept out of peoples’ hands is the problem, is shown to be plainly false in the modern environment, where the “means of production” is, like, typing on a computer.

The actual main thing, that most individuals do not manage because it is hard, is *knowing what to do at any given time*. That is what gets companies to a point where they can actually produce value, and usually it is very hard to get a company there and keep it there over time.

That knowledge is what enables the company to build a context within which everyone’s work has the value that it does. Outside that context, the value of effort becomes tremendously less because it is not coordinated.