I have a question that's been in the back of my mind for a while now.
In socialism, is studying (a career at university, for example) considered "labour"?
If the answer is yes, is that "labour" payed back when you enter the workforce? As in, a doctor or an engineer receives more "labour vouchers" than, say, a taxi driver or construction worker, because the doctor or engineer required more training and years of studying.
What am trying to get at is, how do you measure labour "intensity" when it's not physical labour? Do you account the years of studying that were needed to perform such labour? Or do you account for some other factor that I'm missing?
Memorization helps if you can get in with rich crowds. For instance, a Lawyer or Accountant.
Understanding History, Literature or Philosophy only gets you far if it suits the bourgeoisie.
Charles Myers
Also, being able to design good malware, spyware and internet applications.
Joseph Turner
What are you even on about? All my questions where on the context of socialism, i.e. no bourgeoisie.
David Ortiz
I mean technically all work can be described as labour. The question should probably be whether or not it falls under 'useful labour'.Useful labour is labour that produces use value and use value is described as the usefulness of a thing . Im a brainlet so I can't really answer all your questions.
Levi Johnson
I believe I read something about the USSR considering studying socially necessary labor but they still wanted a year or so in normal labor as a payment back to society I'm not sure that answers your question, and I don't have a source, so take it with a grain of salt.
Mason Martinez
Studying isn't labor in the sense we use it, no. Even in situations where it's superficially similar to actual labor (like how doing research for a school paper is functionally identical to doing research for your job) it isn't labor for the reasons laid out.
Logan Allen
But couldn't you say that studying produces "potential use value", if you will? In the sense that applying what you studied when you enter the workforce produces actual use value that wouldn't be there without those years that you studied.
Jace Ortiz
Meant to quote too
Landon Bennett
Well.. Your capabilities of production determine the value of your labor. If you're capable of designing a computer or networking between rich people. If you're only capable of cooking a shitty McDonald's burger you're labor isn't value. That's why people go to learn at college. They learn to be valuable to the bourgeoisie.bThey learn how to promote propaganda, and make shit that entertains or helps the bourgeoisie. The more the fruits of your labor help or interests the bourgeoisie… well the more you make.
Are you implying somehow that scientists, doctors, engineers, etc. aren't valuable to society as a whole independently of the socio-economic system? Because I think that's bullshit.
A-are we paving the ground for some new developments in Marxian economic theory, comrades?
Connor Garcia
Quite the opposite!. They produce very useful stuff for the bourgeoisie!
That being said a good Plastic Surgeon or expert Tax Lawyer with Harvard Judge friends will make more money. That's not because they are smarter. It's because they are skilled in helping the rich. The less helpful you are to the disgustingly rich the more your labor is exploited by the other labor aristocracies.
Kayden Gray
Read Capital vol. 1 dingbat.
Gabriel Russell
Yes If the answer is yes, is that "labour" payed back when you enter the workforce? As in, a doctor or an engineer receives more "labour vouchers" than, say, a taxi driver or construction worker, because the doctor or engineer required more training and years of studying. No, you get paid during studying. All labour is worth the same. An hour is an hour. You get paid for the hours you studied. Its not that complicated. Its like having your employer paying you to be trained, except your employer is society.
Carson Carter
Forgot to add: Read cockshott
Brandon Nguyen
Labour = production (in the case of STEM proving something wrong can be just as productive as producing something new). You can learn all the math or history you want but if you're not applying it then it's worthless to the rest of the world.
Yes. Studying is work, so you get paid while you study. If you didn't get paid during study time as proposed in TANS, how could you afford to study? Either by having rich parents or by running into debt and paying interest, so in the long term you would need to pay more money than the guy with rich parents. Having to pay interest on student debt would amount to a fine for having poor parents. Who needs to pay back whom here? You were already paid while studying and teachers put effort into making you who you are. So, the skilled work you do as an engineer now creates more expensive products and services than the result of unskilled work and this is part of what covers the institutions that made you skilled.
Brandon Nelson
With the abolition of the division of labour the dichtomy between intellectual and physical labour will vanish. To this end the communist government will treat education as a job.
Hudson Bennett
What about theoretical physics or mathematics which may seem completely absurd or useless, but turn out to be the key to a major breakthrough which betters the lives of billions of people? Whos to say what is useful and what isn't? In a system where only "useful" labour is encouraged we might never had a Max Planck or a Niels Bohr.
Caleb Mitchell
Labor is literally anything humans do. A great quantity of labor-time is unpaid, for example child-rearing by mothers. Such labor is not directly quantified and commodified, but it is real nonetheless.
Trying to quantify and commodify this unpaid labor is missing the point. If the purpose is to force, cajole, or manipulate people to advance education for the purposes of the rulers or some vague ideological goal, what good is that? In capitalism, one of the problems is that exchange-value of education, and of skilled labor, is difficult to gauge. It is a mistake to think paying into education for a credential is the same as actually learning the skill - universities churn out many, many incompetents who rise by cheating and scheming, and it is entirely possible to learn skills just from reading textbooks rather than going through the bullshit of academia. Further, many people who do go through the academic system get royally screwed, because of the constant competition for skilled labor jobs. It is quite damning when an education produces vast swaths of failure by design, and I'm not even including the for-profit university scams in that assessment.
I think the important question to ask, rather than what an education is worth, is why we're learning in the first place, and what the goals of education should be if we want to do this socialism thing. I don't see any reason for crippling overspecialization of education (which, by the way, was by design so that the ruling class would have a legion of docile, pliable specialists to support the system, while the ruling class receive education of a different sort; why else do you think STEMlords are so fucking blind and socially retarded, they've been fed ideology from a young age).
William Foster
The experts in a field that has produced useful ideas or goods. If the physics tells me string theory is worth pursuing then I just have to take their word for it, as they've produced to many useful things in the past and present. There might be a homeopathy community, but they haven't produced anything useful in over a century, so I won't trust even an "expert" in the subject.
Henry Parker
To expand on my point: There is no clear cut answer. I know a lot of anons on this board want some Lenin/Stalin-esque figure to swoop in and make all the big decisions and save the day, but the world isn't that simple. We'll simply make progress and decide what's "productive" by feeling and poking around, like humanity has been doing for thousands of years. yeah sometimes we'll invest in pseudo-science or nonsense, but in the grand scheme of things it don't matter much as long as we make sure to stay progressive and abandon old ways that aren't working.
I worded that last bit wrong, wasn't trying to imply homeopathy ever produced anything useful, but rather it has been around so long and hasn't done jack shit.
Luke Thompson
String theory is complete malarkey and shouldn't be taken seriously. I don't need to be a physicist to see that, I just need to have some sense and rudimentary knowledge to know it's a completely untestable theory that makes a million assumptions in order to make the math work. It is far more likely that there is something wrong with our models of physics or our understanding of observations.
Surrendering our thought processes to experts is a plague of modern society, and incidentially one that was encouraged by capitalist rulers who want a seperate sort of education for the masses which renders them docile and just able enough to be used as cattle.
Like I was saying in , I don't think we should be anal-retentive about quantifying who is worth what, as if that is the point of existence. That's really capitalistic thinking. I don't see any reason why the educated should be rated and sortitioned based on some productivist criteria. If it is important to provide time for someone to study without work obligations, then a stipend of resources and a place to live is enough regardless of the field of study. Then again, I have a very low opinion of academia and don't see how a world where everyone is an academic is any sort of laudable goal.
Getting back to the OP… as Marx formulated the LTV, it isn't possible to say exactly how many factory workers are worth a teacher or doctor, only that it is possible - when looking at the labor pool as a whole - that so many resources are necessary to reproduce skilled labor within the pool, beyond the norm of what would be needed to produce a reliable factory worker. Being a doctor, or teacher, or physicist, doesn't just happen out of nowhere - the skillsets develop out of earlier skills, which develop out of earlier skills, going back to really basic skills like walking or speech. The level that is considered "unskilled" is just an arbitrary skillset that is more or less common enough that a man could be plucked off the street and expected to know what to do, or that training is a trivial process that doesn't require significant labor on anyone's part, within that society's labor pool anyway.
Jaxon Lewis
When you're studying you're developing your labor power. Labor power is your ability to work. In the initial stages of socialism, intellectual labor is paid more because more labor went into the development of its labor power. In later stages, most workers should receive a good education in their field, and then intellectual labor would become mixed with the work in the field. IE: A worker could spend half the week in the factory, and the other half using his experience from work in the field to develop new machines, techniques, etc. Stalin talked about how small numbers of well-educated factory workers were already beginning to accomplish this.
Leo Long
As a Physics graduate student, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. Shut the fuck up.
Jason Green
Plastic surgeons can help workers disfigured from work accidents or mishaps
Riiiiight, so you invent 7-8 dimensions to make the theory work, or whatever it is these days. I guess it's valuable in that academics can make money off of religion, but it's about as useful as epicycles. There would be a lot of money in developing a false consciousness and a false model for the plebs, especially in a totalitarian society where thought control and deliberate retardation of the masses is essential.
Chase Long
No no no. In a marxist sense the only labour is product-producing one. Can you point to a product? Then yes, that process is labour.
Bentley Russell
What the fuck? Is this just Zig Forums trolling? The 'invent' 7-8 dimensions doesn't happen. These 7-8 extra dimensions (possibly more but I'm not getting into that) likely exist as our current theories predict that these dimensions exist
Thomas Foster
Can you explain to me what this means? I have no idea.
Alexander Hill
weew, is this the power of modern physics? ditch the experimental method, keep wanking in the realm of pure mathematical models are you an adept of praxeology by any chance? system of axioms + deductive method = who needs empirical data to validate our theories anyway
Ethan Watson
This eh? You're payed back with ability to work eh?
Nicholas Thompson
That's not how any of this works. You're demolishing a strawman about a subject you don't even marginally know. Yes, you do need to know an object in order to criticize it, you absolute moron.
Long story short to whoever's interested: It's the only model that accounts for quantum gravity decently, the biggest other competing model doesn't even account for the Newtonian limit(!!!). It's a bit of an ugly kid, but it's the least ugly. Also, it contributed hugely useful things, like AdS/CFT correspondence and Supersymmetry, for example.
Anthony Campbell
Epicycles also "worked" to predict the motion of planets as seen in the sky from Earth. A theory being internally consistent does not make it correct, if it bears no resemblance to what actually happens.
Ethan Hernandez
Yes, Cockshott's Towards a new Socialism covers this in chapter 2.
Studying is indirect labor that will be reimbursed later when the student becomes a worker and uses said skills in his job. So you get "paid" later on. Some people go all REEE EVERYONE SHOULD EARN THE SAME here but Cockshott has a very sensible solution - the more labor it takes, the more it should be paid, and studying years to be able to do a task is labor.
Zachary Ramirez
In orthodox judaism studying the torah is considered to be labour and students get paid for doing so.
Yes, it takes more time to make a product that contains skilled labor because making the worker skilled is an indirect input in producing it, so the product gets expensive. This doesn't imply that the worker gets paid more though.
Landon Taylor
OP here, thread's been great. Thank you everyone for your well thought out answers!
Will definitely check that out because that sounds just like what I was unsure of.
Christian Flores
Damnit, I wish I hadn't switched IPs to post on Zig Forums now I will never know my ban message on here, got all my posts deleted, too.
This is why we cannot have nice things. What will I get off to now?!
Hey, mod who deleted my shit, like the "working on the torah earns kikes money" what was my ban message.
