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How would a technocratic socialist society promote meritocracy while also avoiding overbearing credentialism/credential creep in the workplace and in Universities?
There are some occupations which used to require a high school diploma, such as construction supervisors...
James Morris
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Ethan Hall
The easiest way to gut academic inflation and immediately stop it is to require all public universities to only select students from a predetermined school district like K12s do. In this way the amount of students has a hard cap and the school can't overfill itself using students from all over the world therefore increasing the likelihood in the graduates in any given area are from that actual area. Likewise we can stop giving out student loans and explicitly ban the practice (say by disallowing any loan to people under 21) which would quickly cut down on the ability for students to stay in school for so long, meaning fewer will opt for degrees.
But this is all just vain hope. In the real world liberals absolutely refuse to modify the current academic system beyond reforms that strictly increase capacity, the most infamous example being online learning which is used to increase a given school's clientele without any new hires or lecture halls. The other example are "extension" programs, colleges growing and sprawling out across entire regions leveraging their brand to offer random certificates that used to be only the domain of fully private schools like DeVry or Wyotech. Instead of encouraging growth of local colleges they compete directly against them. Same for the expansion of "retraining", which liberals use as a fix-all for the problems their free trade plans create. The result is a massive amount of adults reentering academia as customers, a situation that shouldn't exist because we have public libraries.
It is immensely profitable and only gets stronger each day. California recently made the first year of college free, a nice giveaway but demonstrates how worthless the first year of college is now accepted as. And it won't stop until student loans melt down like housing loans did.
Carter Gray
Also again I want to stress: look at how liberals incentive the paid university and student loans over free libraries. Whereas colleges could be made largely irrelevant through online courses done through libraries combined with existing trade licensing programs, liberals instead chose to work with conservatives on building up proprietary establishment systems that cost shittons of money to attend and give only very questionable results.
It makes me wonder what will come after the market inevitably crashes. Because as inflation eats at degree-gated jobs, those wages will collapse unless degree holders pay more and more money for new retraining and new continuing education certs. This money directly hurts their ability to buy homes, cars or TVs - or start a family. It's why this system cannot self perpetuate because as it continues banks will find themselves with smaller and smaller deposits hurting their ability to lend in the first place.
Jason Allen
You don't run a meritocracy. The educated shut the fuck up and get in line like the rest of us unwashed plebs.
Parker Gutierrez
wut
Jacob Flores
The academic system doesn't exist for some class, it is a self-perpetuating institution. Certainly there is a great deal of ideological education, like say Liberty University, that isn't part of the system proper, but generally the universities exist to perpetuate their own hierarchy and their own people. The educated professionals are the ones who would be tasked with any reform, and they don't want to share with the uneducated scum, and especially not with the people they've deemed mental defectives. It is simply impossible to fix the universities because the educated as a group want to preserve their privleges, and have the ability to bargain with capitalism to a degree unlike the plebs. Shitty for-profit education rackets are one of their money sources in the capitalist system, and divert wannabes from ever receiving a "real" degree. The academic system will fight reforms tooth and nail, and they'll win, capitalism or not. (Porky, for their part, wants to do everything possible to suppress skilled (educated) labor, because Porky recognizes their greatest long-term threat are the educated technicians that they can't just reduce to proletarian slaves like the disposable factory workers, who exert enough control over the machinery of industrial capitalism to stage an effective rebellion. Porky itself isn't so attached to credentialism.)
Parker Rodriguez
I'll admit that I am highly suspicious of the "professional" sector by we would still need their labor under socialism. For instance we definitely want to have a lot of well trained doctors. We would probably also need lots of civil engineers to fix all the degraded shit that capitalism had left us. Professionals aren't entirely useless.
Matthew Powell
Oh definitely, the professionals are useful. Industrial civilization can't function without doctors, engineers, computer programmers (with computerization), etc., and it is unlikely those skillsets will become as common as the ordinary pleb on the street even in the most ideal scenario.
The conflict will arise in a industrial system when the educated laborers put in a disproportionate amount of labor to keep the system running, both in the hours they have to work and the labor involved in learning. This applies to capitalism as well as socialism; in capitalism, the educated are antagonistic to the capitalists who own everything for no real reason, and in any economic system the educated are intensely antagonistic towards the uneducated. The class interest of the educated, when they can become a true ruling class, would be to build a system in which their status, their credentials, are made permanent and transcendent. Knowledge and information would become completely proprietary to the class, and enforced stupidity of the lower orders would be mandated.
Ethan Howard
This. I'm a highly educated professional but there's nothing about me that makes me more qualifies to make decisions outside of my field of expertise compared to an average joe. See also the problems of the CPSU after it became dominated by college educated professionals.
Asher Turner
This is why the development of some form of general AI is essential to the survival of socialism once established. General AI would turn professionals into proles whose only jobs would be to interpret the decisions of the machine(s) (much like how traditional proles are charged with manipulating machinery in order to produce goods.)
Hudson Sanders
In that event, we would in actuality be ruled by the AI.
Benjamin Peterson
Well I mean we are already largely "ruled" by machines so that's not really a problem.
Chase Wilson
I think being ruled by capital itself is a pretty big problem. So is being ruled by "credential", if we are to liken the idea of credential to Marx's idea of capital as a force itself.
I don't see an AI thinking for us being a real solution, it just shifts the ruler from men doing things to control other men, to a machine controlling men. If the AI is overseen by analysts and so on that ensure the AI is conforming to human wants, then it isn't really thinking for us and the question is a matter of who can control the AI, or manipulate it to their advantage the best.
I do think in the long term an artificial intelligence must overrule humanity as it exists today, or rather than human beings will need to psychologically alter themselves to rid themselves of their vestigial humanity, in order to better cope with the contradictions of being human, but that's something quite different from building an AI because you don't want the technocrats to have power.
I really see it as a simple question - why do people have to be compelled or cajoled into doing things in the first place? In theory this shouldn't be a problem in socialism, we'd do things as people because we want them done, and there is no inherent reason why disagreements need to spiral out of control if say two villages need to argue about a particular project's effects. However, the drive of "credential" is to constantly demand progress and advance, much like the logic of capital demands economic expansion. That there must be a winner and loser is almost axiomatic, and this eventually compels the re-creation of a hierchical society and class privileges, which means that property (in some form) will re-assert itself as the credentialed need to police the unwashed masses. This isn't something that can be obscured by technological advance.
Benjamin Collins
theguardian.com
interesting and hopefully relevant article by the guy who coined the word "meritocracy" about why meritocracy is bad.
__
take or leave that, it's fascinating how ingrained the idea of meritocracy is in modern ideology. across the political spectrum everyone claims they're going to give power to the people with merit, even monarchists make their case on the basis of the monarch's particular talents for the task at hand rather than because it's their divine right. it's something quite distinct from the much older tendency to justify, ex-post-facto, why the present system is the best system there is.
Jason Hernandez
Sup Huxley
Carter Bennett
AI wouldn't rule over humanity. It would simply turn trivialize all or at least most professions, thereby depriving them of the ability to restore hierarchy in a socialist society.
William Hernandez
What I'm talking about isn't a particular problem of a society at a given level of technological development, but the impulse of "human betterment" that places a constant pressure on humanity to accept hierarchical society on principle. It wouldn't matter if that was practiced by human rulers, AI, or an abstract "collective" of the whole of humanity, it would still be the same sort of thing, kind of like how a collective capitalist of all society would still be shitty.
Brody Mitchell
So you only read Brave New World, huh
Levi Taylor
Exactly this. Education does not make anyone better or more valued.
And as a person which is educated along the conventional way, with masters in physics and working at a research institute.
The low pay really helps, as well as eating every day at cafeteria or mess hall, and wearing cheap clothes and coming from working class background.
The bourgeois aspirations do not entice me, since my mind was infected with the virus of communism.
The academic system is self-perpetuating institution providing nothing of value beyond the concentration and dissemination of knowledge, and training people into being servants of this institution. A much more effective system can be created, along the lines of public libraries. As suggests.
There is not a bit of physics education that I could not get from a public library, provided it had the appropriate books or electronics materials. An university has proven itself to be useful only in getting a diploma. And in our central european country, academic titles are important.
University only gave me incentive to study for a degree, turning the otherwise enjoyable and mind expanding theory into a necessary grind.
Zachary Rivera
The "publish or perish" system of academic research distorts the scientific work, false or dubious results get often published, the whole thing is mangled and is a giant self perpetuating machine that only serves itself to justify itself to the grant agencies and ministries of science and education. It distorts real scientific work of finding out things and information about nature into a work to appease the money giving overlords.
There was a study which has shown that absolute majority of medical research papers was false, if not highly questionable.
Ian Harris
Meritocracy cannot exist under capitalism
However, keep in mind the reason why so many talented people from socialist nations defected to capitalist ones, especially the cases where soviet aces would risk their lives just to defect to burger airbases.
They don't have to be dumped with money like kanye west but some recognition has to be given for their achievements, lest they run off elsewhere
Lincoln Garcia
Pic related makes me feel sad. Why can't the left just unite in their will to purge all right wingers?
Elijah Ramirez
it's the same with the right on left wingers tbqh
ancaps are pedos and nazis have sick fetishes
Jeremiah Foster
"""""""""""nazis""""""""""""""""
The bizarre abominations that lurk Zig Forums, those accursed subhuman magapede mutts aren't nazis.
I wish it was the same…. I really do.
Luis Johnson
well some of them are, sure their much less than the swamp of trumptards though
Xavier Sanchez
Well yah that's what I was referencing
Sebastian Ross
None of the subhumans who mod there are.
Christopher Bennett
well a good number of nazi supporters would get killed by the nazis, so i guess that makes some sense lol
Colton Robinson
There is nothing wrong people learning more stuff, we are not living in times when you had to be lucky to not work on farm or in factory 12 hours a day. There is difference between scientific research and labour which needs to be done in order to create enough resources you need to live. Because our scientific progress is so fast, universities can't correctly adapt to create new proles so companies are forced to do their own training. This creates a conflict between starving person and manager's short-term income.
I believe that solution, apart of stop moving production around the world, is to create shorter educational certification (which already exist in lot's of parts of the world, but not everywhere efficient enough) and solve unemployment by lowering working week. Everyone needs work not for the sake of working as much possible, but for everyone to work less.