solarpunk memes

I still don’t understand how this applies to intellectual property though, the person who designed the car, do they only get paid for the design as long as they co-own the company? How does it work for the pilot project engineer, are they not entitled to part of the profits from the subsequent production runs that are arguably the fruit of their labor?

And how do we compensate the scientists discovering the fundamental principles that require decades of work to implement, but then transform society?

I’m thinking Babbage/Lovelace creating the computer, whoever discovered concrete, quantum physicists, but also those who provide support for work like road layers, city planners, and teachers.

One of the classics of Anarchist thought, The Conquests of Bread by Peter Kropotkin, touches on this idea in his book, all the way from 1892:

Millions of human beings have laboured to create this civilization on which we pride ourselves to-day. Other millions, scattered through the globe, labour to maintain it. Without them nothing would be left in fifty years but ruins.

There is not even a thought, or an invention, which is not common property, born of the past and the present. Thousands of inventors, known and unknown, who have died in poverty, have co-operated in the invention of each of these machines which embody the genius of man.

Thousands of writers, of poets, of scholars, have laboured to increase knowledge, to dissipate error, and to create that atmosphere of scientific thought, without which the marvels of our century could never have appeared. And these thousands of philosophers, of poets, of scholars, of inventors, have themselves been supported by the labour of past centuries. They have been upheld and nourished through life, both physically and mentally, by legions of workers and craftsmen of all sorts. They have drawn their motive force from the environment.

The genius of a Séguin, a Mayer, a Grove, has certainly done more to launch industry in new directions than all the capitalists in the world. But men of genius are themselves the children of industry as well as of science. Not until thousands of steam-engines had been working for years before all eyes, constantly transforming heat into dynamic force, and this force into sound, light, and electricity, could the insight of genius proclaim the mechanical origin and the unity of the physical forces. And if we, children of the nineteenth century, have at last grasped this idea, if we know now how to apply it, it is again because daily experience has prepared the way. The thinkers of the eighteenth century saw and declared it, but the idea remained undeveloped, because the eighteenth century had not grown up like ours, side by side with the steam-engine. Imagine the decades that might have passed while we remained in ignorance of this law, which has revolutionized modern industry, had Watt not found at Soho skilled workmen to embody his ideas in metal, bringing all the parts of his engine to perfection, so that steam, pent in a complete mechanism, and rendered more docile than a horse, more manageable than water, became at last the very soul of modern industry.

Every machine has had the same history – a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry.

Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle – all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present.

By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say – This is mine, not yours?

The idea with Anarchist theory, as I understand it, is that if society was structured in a way that all of your basic needs were already met by default because collectively we tried to help each other, for what reason would you need to accumulate more wealth (besides, perhaps, using currency purely for luxuries), and what would motivate you as an individual if monetary reward was no longer the main driving force?

History has shown that many scientists, engineers, artists, and architects become those things not because they want to make money, but for an intrinsic interest in the act itself. Unfortunately, due to the way society is structured with capitalism, people must ensure that whatever they do in their professions, it must first and foremost be profitable, otherwise they will starve, regardless if the non-profitable thing was a net-benefit to society as a whole. One example is how Penicillian was very nearly going to be left as an interesting footnote in history and unavailable to the public until some scientists, already interested in figuring out a way to mass produce it, were able to court some rich capitalists to grant them the money to actually do the work.

Or how the creator of Insulin released the patent for free just so it would be widely available to all (choosing altruism over profit), and yet capitalism resulted in the exploitation of the substance, with the original inventors and scientists receiving little in the way of monetary compensation for the advances of the chemical into what we have today.

If monetary gain was still a consideration for those inventors, a co-op would much more fairly compensate them for their contributions. A single inventor cannot also create a factory to produce his invention at scale, so everyone involved in getting that invention produced and profitable would be equally rewarded for their effort. A single individual would not be able to become significantly more wealthy than their co-workers, as their contributions would be distributed amongst all of them, but if the result of that is everyone being quite wealthy, instead of a few people just getting by with a few absurdly wealthy people at the top, surely that's an improvement? I certainly wouldn't be bothered if my efforts helped everyone who worked with me, especially seeing as vice-versa, their contributions help me.