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How to Survive Late Capitalism as a Worker
- mjfl 11y agoI agree with many of the points in this article and I'd like to add to it: What astounds me about these back and forths is that I never hear the argument that I hear every time I go home to my parents, what my grandparents are always yelling at me about: my education. Your education is the key to the combinatoric explosion of specializations that will keep you afloat in a modernizing economy. Your education will also give you the general ability to adapt when your specialization is not in demand. Your education is still the most powerful driver of social mobility. Yes there are ruts that exits, large ones that trap many people in the inner cities and elsewhere. But you can still be an immigrant in America and have a child that becomes a doctor, a lawyer, a software engineer. Furthermore, an education is a form of human capital, one that is getting easier and easier to acquire (besides college, which could be becoming an increasingly foolish investment). Google and stack overflow are the equivalent of an expert tutor that could have set you back thousands of dollars a month 25 years ago. So I guess I would offer an additional solution to the worker trying to survive capitalism: become a capitalist. Don't settle for a wage, find a job the builds your skills, and use those learned skills to find better jobs and better skills. Leave the job that isn't paying you market price, that isn't building you, and use your investments to find a better one. Isn't that a better scenario than the labor-apocalypse that everyone else seems to be predicting, since Marx? I hope in 100 years, there will be no more laborers. Not because they've all starved to death, but that the marginal cost of capital itself is so low that everyone is able to pursue their craft, take ownership of it, and profit.