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.
Some (hopefully) constructive criticism/feedback. You might want to look at the Bureau of Labour Statistics for some data on those professions too.
I fail to see how “capital controlled” and “non-capital controlled” industries don’t match 1:1 with the private and public sector and could just be named that. Some of the conclusions are already well known (labour today is too expensive to the bourgeoisie, specially in the first world), but others seem too broad and deterministic. Similarly, the third group also seems to basically just mean “self-employed” unless I’m missing something.
I don’t really follow on either of these. Since there is less of an incentive to “de-skill” these industries, I’d assume that they require a lot of skill (and dedication) to work. Good examples might be public sector education or public healthcare, which are usually very hard jobs that only get worse by the active sabotage from the privatising sector. They are also usually the most populous professions.
And on the interesting part, it’s obviously subjective, but as Graeber points in Bullshit Jobs, it’d be really hard to maintain jobs that require big qualifications, have terrible workplace conditions and don’t pay well. Teaching fits the bill and I don’t think many people would classify that as “uninteresting” despite it being very stressful.
You might want to separate this into a whole different orthogonal axis. For instance, software development is usually very reliant on a highly trained workforce and has small capital requirements, but it is still the realm of capital accumulation. The same applies to surgeons, the few employed engineers. Whether those serve capital accumulation or not depends mostly on them being in the public or private sector, though in the end in bourgeois countries all industries will be converted to serve that purpose anyway.
Maybe that could be just me misunderstanding the definition, but going off of the previous paragraph, software developers are one of the top 20 most employed professions. Other less popular industries that might fit the bill are artists of any kind. They are not that rare, and definitely not things that only “luddites” would want to preserve. Labour for the sake of production and meeting needs, with no accumulation of capital as you put it, is exactly the sort of thing communists might want to preserve. From your examples, builders are also something worth keeping or even expanding. Right now there is no automated alternative to builders in sight.
I agree with your conclusions on which industry to go to. I’d just like to point out that in many cases we have very little individual choice on that. One might have all sorts of qualms about working at an Amazon warehouse, but if it is the job most likely to keep them alive and to be hired, there’s not much one can do.
Another facet of it that usually correlates is the presence of unions. They always serve as a counter-balance to capital accumulation by forcing the employers to provide rights, and are generally easier to find in the public sector. UPS, teachers, nurses. So by going into a private sector job you’re already on an uphill battle for rights, but on the other hand you have “ease of hiring” since they can just keep firing workers to get fresh blood.
From your assessment they are a small proportion of the population, so that’d be much harder to organise. I’m not sure exactly what would make them a more attractive demographic than the other two, since the first is where the majority of proletarians already are, and the second is where the labour movements are traditionally stronger and can provide real life examples of the benefits.
Feel free to elaborate and correct me.
For software development, there is the FOSS based licenses, which are a way to de capitalise the industry, in my view.
The hard part is that as software engineers we’re not trained on how to sustain ourselves through our work in any other way that isn’t just serving the capital.
I believe there is space for creating cooperative businesses, disruptive to the capitalists through GPL based technology. I’ve been happy to read about China investing in gpl based processors, the RISCV.
Yeah, there are spaces for it in every industry, which is why I think the analysis here is a bit simplistic to begin with. But in general, even in the FOSS area we are usually still subject to capitalist interests because the FOSS projects that get the most funding are usually those that are already useful to corporations directly or indirectly.
I noticed this a lot with Godot because they used to get plenty of grants to develop specific systems from proprietary gamedev corporations, probably because those corporations would then go on to use that as cheap R&D to copy for their own internal engines. It’s really hard to de-capitalise industries under capitalism without nationalising the vast majority of it because the bourgies will learn how to use what is public to their own benefit. I always use Discord vs XMPP as a good example of that.