One of my teachers back in school said that school was an education factory and we were the product.
Shows that you can pay to be a worker who follows stringent (often bullshit) expectations. College isn’t without its upsides, but this is the real reason they want that degree.
Isn’t it historically the other way? Universities were bullshit refinement for the upperclass learning anthropology & philosophy since labor was optional for their class, while other education options were all about churning workers thru apprenticeships?
This is stupid - in either system you want scientists and engineers. They need an education. You only are more marketable because employers expect people with degrees to have better critical thinking skills.
Do you even understand what it means for the workers to be commodities under capitalism?
I don’t think I do. At least not in the way you do. I guess you mean that they are a means of production and are considered to be kind of fungible. I don’t know how that relates to the post though.
What? The post is about how under capitalism, with the workers being commodities, schooling and education are just processes to add value to a product. That’s THE point of the post.
Commodity in this context means something produced just for its trade value. Capitalism in pursuit of profits, which tend to fall in existing markets, must expand commodification into every aspect of reality. Including humans, and their labour. It was one of the first markets capitalism expanded into actually. It’s the whole reason slavery ended basically.
This is basic shit we learn in school the “Global South”.
What do you mean about this being the reason slavery ended?
It was more profitable for the nascent capitalist class to have a wage workers than slaves, it’s just that.
Why was that more profitable for them? Isnt the permanent maintenance of a slave underclass the most profitable structure imaginable? Assuming you aren’t meaningfully concerned about them revolting
Slaves don’t earn wages to buy products. The slave-owners have to spend funds to feed, house them etc.
But it was really more about creating consumer markets. There is no capitalism without vast consumer markets for mass produced goods.
Mercantile slavery produced less, more artisanal goods, for a very small class of people (aristocracy and nascent bourgeoisie).
And it wasn’t possible to expand the consumer markets without creating a new class of people who had an income to spend on commodities.
This is extremely simplified, but it’s the main interpretation for the end of slavery. Like, when we study the Industrial Revolution, the British empire and the end of slavery in school, it’s always under that lens, of creating new consumer markets.
But just to make it clear, slavery is still lucrative, to this day. Which is why we have more slaves in absolute numbers now than at any other point in history. But it can’t be the main relation of production, because capitalism depends on mass consumption by masses of people. So slavery can only ever exist as a marginal system.
Yeah, this take is coming from someone thinking business school is part of academia. Base sciences and applications of them are absolutely essential for both long and short term functional societies. Scientists are working class and the majority of them are quite left leaning*.
* Does not apply to the shitbags that patent their public funded results after getting lucky once.
