I’ve been thinking about how marxism might be a reasonable guide for how to make some pretty big life choices lately, and thought I’d share.
There are three broad categories I’m placing work into at the moment: capital intensive, non-capital controlled capital intensive, and labour intensive. I’ll explain each below, but the basic idea is that this is about capital accumulation and management. Most of it is intuitive, but I’ve found it interesting to frame it in a marxist way.
Capital intensive jobs are fairly straightforward: we know that most big companies, be they banks, tech, large manufacturers etc, are both capital intensive, and capital controlled. By that, I mean they embody large amounts of human skill in their accrued capital, and that they are managed by the capitalist class. A car manufacturer, for instance, is an example of this, insofar as they’ll have de-skilled their workforce to some extent by applying Taylorist principles and embodying some skills into equipment, to automate difficult or expensive tasks.
Non-capital controlled capital intensive jobs are similar, requiring generally a larger organisation which has fixed assets or complicated enough operations that is controlled either by the state or a co-operative. It requires roughly the same skills to survive and isn’t terribly interesting in and of itself, usually. Examples might be civil service departments.
The last group is fairly interesting to me at the moment, and prompted this thought. The labour intensive group is things where there isn’t really capital accumulation at all, and skilled labour is the main source of “value add”. Skilled builders, craftspeople, anyone who can add value to a material or process simply because they’re good at something, with only very simple tools. These kinds of jobs are comparatively rare, and probably the kind of thing luddites wanted to preserve. There is an accrual of skill and experience, but not capital. I’ve found this group interesting because some jobs that fit this description don’t have to interact with accrued capital at all.
That last part is interesting because it begs the question of whether or not there is any mileage in seeking to “decapitalise” certain kinds of work. That’s to say, successfully navigating life in a capitalist economy, while eschewing the use and accrual of capital at work.
The way I’m thinking about the above, it feels like we (as marxists) can choose to either invest ourselves in capital-adjacent work that might or might not be controlled by capitalists, or we can aim to work in decapitalised industries. The requirements are, I suspect, very different, and I wonder if the embedded values might be as well.
Just a thought: I’d be keen to know what people think. It is a fresh thought, to me at least, that skilled decapitalised work might be a reasonable starting point in movement building. I suspect it is tacitly what Green minded people are up to, and although it does have a whiff of luddism, I wonder if there’s a place for it.
A scientist
The influence of private capital and capitalistic exploitation is just as prevalent for scientists working in public institutions as it is for those in private ones. This doesn’t just affect your work via the sources of funding and the ever-present risk of losing them, but it even tends to affect the direction of your scientific inquiries and stifles the types of data that are published and the types of papers that are written by such scientists.
As much as I wish it weren’t so, capitalism has sullied the scientific world just as much as any other part of our society.
That is right generally, however I think academic world is less capitalistically corrupted than industry. Scientist are generally more socially and environmentally aware than entrepreneurs. Besides, you can find a field which do not require funding or only a small one, for example mathematics, computer science or simulation-based research. Such work can be socially useful and personally fulfilling.
Oh, no doubt, academic scientists are absolutely better than industry in this regard. I only have my own experience to pull on, but it still disappoints me how much capitalism has corrupted academia as a system, not on an individual level.
Yes, it is terribly annoying that even state-owned universities are affected by capitalist thinking. I know a professor who introduces ‘corporate style management’ at an university when doing some industrial project. Let’s hope this will change in the future for good.