As part of my apprenticeship I am doing a business management course.
I’m going to have to be careful not to out myself as an ML (if I haven’t already).
The economics portion of the course is pure lliberal bullshit.
But I guess that’s what I signed up for.
Think of it as an exercise in studying how the enemy thinks. Just like how Ho Chi Minh, or Lenin were highly educated in bourgoise institutions. Knowledge is useful, and studying liberal economic theory can help you understand why they do the things they do. How you use it is what matters.
you have to know your enemy
I didn’t study business but what do they even teach there? “To be profitable is to have more earnings than costs 🧐” idk i feel like it’s fairly obvious? Honestly i think Marx is a better teacher. Do they teach you that the key to increasing surplus value is in squeezing workers for every last drop of labour they can produce?
This was the first business economics lesson so I don’t know exactly how it’ll go but it’s more or less “starting a company in X country for dummies.” It feels like a mix of idealistic pro-capitalist-business stuff (be your own boss! passive income!) and the local laws and tax codes when it comes to companies.
Today we talked about the personal traits of a business owner and a bit about basic economics: GDP, production as a function of natural resources, labour, and capital (capital was defined as machines which make work more efficient, lol), and what money is.
I’ll probably post about class once in a while just to let it out amongst people who get it.
the bureaucracy involved in starting a business is good to know, all the other stuff seems like bullshit lol
Yeah it kinda just seems like “value comes from supply n’ demand!!1” type shit with some mysticism about how business owners are built different thrown in lol. Defining capital as just stuff that makes work more efficient sure is a… choice. I feel like so much of bougie business just boils down to “reduce cap-ex to make profits higher cuz it’s always cheaper to piss in the lemonade and charge the same price than do anything else.” And then Forbes writes like 4000 words on how innovative and august the capitalist in question is.
You have to know about the invisible hand’s job
“starting a company in X country for dummies.”
A lot of people don’t know how to do this in their own countries. All the paperwork and red tape etc. It’s left opaque because if everyone knew how to do it everyone would also realise how easy it is if you have the starting capital, and then they’d have more questions…
That would be quite interesting, at least for me.
I’d be curious to see what a ML thinks of the subject matter as its presented by capitalists in the western education system.
I’ll try to keep everyone here updated.
Going to School to become a capitalist?
lol…there’s no such thing. you go to school to be a better proletarian or a better vector of capitalist ideology, you only become a capitalist with means of production
Yeah, I think you know what I mean.
But the point of the course is to learn how to start and run a business, ie. become a capitalist.
You don’t need school for this.
Step 1: own 1 million dollar.
Nah but for real take the course. Knowledge is power.
Bring chewing gum to class. Your teeth will thank you for not grinding them into powder.
Just remember that commodity exchange, markets, buying and selling were concepts that existed well before capitalism and will exist in socialism until we reach communism.
I essentially wrnt the apprenticeship way of this and did 20 years as a class traitor before i knew what marxism was. I was very good at it but its all idealism and the liberal “revolutionary” idea is ethical companies who have a veneer of friendlyness towards the slaves. For example “less hierarchy” ie the boss has even less idea what hes doing and you sit down and sing in your unpaid break before producing more useless crap. Its devastating. Working in these new age companies ruined capitalism for me more than working in brutal, highly hierarchical companies because there you at least werent told youre free.
I know that I won’t get out of the rat race, as it were. I just needed a change of scenery. After some years of working in front of a screen and having nothing of substance to show for it I needed to do something with my hands.
Understood! I might study it at some point for the same reasons. Economics is only for you if you have no empathy.
Do what Engels did.
