The "Means" of Production

Pharisees Don’t Contribute. Indeed, They Withhold. And its Cruelty, Itself.

Introduction

When we talk about the “means of production,” most people hear Karl Marx. His theories centered around ownership of the tools of work, the levers of value, the systems that turn labor into livelihood. But there’s another aspect of “means of production” that accompanies the idea of “ownership by the people”: that is, we might consider the ways those “means” can be withheld (denied) to perverse advantages of those doing the denying.

It’s less well considered because it’s insidious and hidden: it’s not only the harvest itself that gets attacked, but the machinery and human resources that make harvest possible. The choke point isn’t necessarily the product; it’s the capital behind it — the land, tools, distribution and access to inputs that enable producers to do their jobs.

Here are three snapshots — small, large, and systemic — of what happens when the means of production become the target, as we explore facets of a particular kind of meanness.

1: The Cow

Hedrick Smith tells a story in The Russians: Bolsheviks raid a poor farmer’s home and find his one cow. They can’t take it — logistics won’t allow. So they kill it to deprive the peasant of its use.

That’s not really just about the destruction of milk. That’s the annihilation of the peasant’s agency (productive ability provided by the draft animal.) The means of survival, the capacity to add value at all, is the real target. Better to erase independence than let production exist outside sanctioned control.

2: The Solar Panels

A homeowner installs rooftop solar arrays, generating surplus power. In some states, net metering pays a fair rate back to the owner. In others — particularly under monopolies in Southern states — the response by utilities is obstruction: “rents” such as fees, restrictions and reluctance.

Utilities argue their resistance is about grid stability, costs, complexity. And yes, the grid is very difficult and expensive to manage. But beneath the tech talk lies something else: a jealous reflex. Distributed energy doesn’t just make power; it makes producers. Independent ones.

Here the meanness hides behind policy: if we “leaders” who are “entitled” to control don’t control it, then we’ll try to constrict it. Rooftop panels threaten the monopoly not with watts but with independence — the audacity of ordinary citizens to create energy outside the sanctioned gate. Our transmission lines require great effort to maintain; never mind we’re granted monopoly status in return for “public service.”

3: The Garden

A volunteer charity garden. Ten or twenty people a week show up to plant, weed, and harvest for the local food bank and other charities. The overseer is himself a volunteer leader who buys the seed, maps the planting, and and generally supervises things like maintenance. The volunteers come for many reasons: some to log hours for a master gardener program, others just to feel useful.

Among them is the “tomato guy.” One year, the overseer starts denying him space. Then the “tomato” decisions (fertilizer application, pruning regimen) are denied to the tomato guy. His role shrinks despite his proven success with his crop.

This isn’t about tomatoes. It’s about throttling someone’s position as a producer. The meanness lives in the slow squeeze around his agency — a power move that says: you only operate here with my permission. Connecting Thread

Connecting Thread

Look closely and the pattern is the same: the cruelty doesn’t target the product; the cruelty targets the producers’ position and the productive ability. What’s being strangled isn’t tomatoes, milk, or kilowatts — it’s the ability to stand as an independent actor in the economy of value.

And when you strip that away, you don’t just take someone’s output. You steal the joy of producing and the dignity of contributing — the two things that make production more than mere survival. The meanness isn’t only in denying the crop; it’s also very much in denying the humanity that comes with creating.

When the factors of production are denied, narrowed, or isolated from markets, it’s not scarcity driving the action. It’s the need to keep agency in a single pair of hands. The real “mean” in the theories around Means of Production is control at the expense of creation.

This denial isn’t just mismanagement or bad policy. It’s the parasitic instinct of the Pharisee: to live off production without producing, to define authority not in creation but in control. Whether it’s arms withheld from a president defending his country from attack, whether it’s licenses denied, or markets throttled with tariffs, the reflex is the same. It feeds on the hard work, hard-won skills, and superior competencies of those who actually produce — and savors, perversely, the dignity and joy the strangling strips from them.

So the puffed‑up people imposing tariffs, the ones assigning plots on land they don’t own, the swollen officials whose slipping control makes them tighten their grip, the “ordained” who hoard access to the church’s meeting rooms and mistake position for virtue — all of them share the same reflex. They deny the status and agency of the truly fruitful. It’s a grift that keeps on taking.

Afterthought

This post is certainly not an argument for Marx. In fact, what this seeks to show is how corrosive centralized ownership of the means of production can be. Marxian socialism, with its demand for state control over tools, service providers, and distribution, breeds the same meanness at scale: take agency away from the enterprising, smother the producer, and call it “common good.”

Nonetheless a caution is warranted: the partisan tendency of labeling (e.g., northern European) mixed economies “socialism” (because of, say, universal health care) muddies the water. Northern European economies, often maligned with the word “socialistic”, are not Marxian. There, economic agency is radically open, and independent production thrives.

The real risk in the U.S. is that by demonizing human-investment policy with the label of “socialism,” we let partisans steer voters away from reform — job development programs, shared infrastructure, and policies that can expand human wellbeing and even self-sufficiency. In doing so, we don’t just kill ideas; we choke off the very productive agency that makes dignity and joy possible.

Those who rush to brand every human-welfare program as “socialism” are being careless. They are being dishonest and morally lazy, eroding the very policies that preserve productive agency and the dignity and joy that flow from it.