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.

  • nephs@lemmygrad.ml
    3·
    1 year ago

    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.

    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.

    • albigu@lemmygrad.ml
      1·
      1 year ago

      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.