#university #corporate-dynamics #business-university-cycle #no-one-knows-what-they-are-doing #cohost-repost
2023-07-08

there's been a lot on "late capitalism" and it all feels the same but none of them really nail that whole thing about "low wage" and "low skill" jobs? A lot of people will talk about "low skill" jobs as if they're blue collar jobs. and, they often are but not in the way you think. same goes for low quality goods. how could you not have those at that wage, at that quality?

they're cheap. the companies, the owners, bosses, shareholders there are cheap. penny-pinching.

• they decided not to pay people a living wage
• they decided not to invest in training people
• they offload their failures to customers

why do people need cheap goods?

• they don't get enough pay to buy anything else
• education badly prepares for the ways you're stolen from, gates training with university such that your job skills won't be transferrable (at least, as far as you know working for them), no one trains, "years of experience"
• class based advertising, locations, etc to keep the great-but-affordable products from being juxtaposed with the cheap (in the US this was much more true until ~ecommerce and massive all in one stores)

but:

• because they don't have enough pay, they need support, from taxes the jobs that have it don't pay
• because the jobs aren't going to train them, it needs to be public schools, and universities, or private tuition supports, or student loans
• the companies are making you pay as much as you would for your goods, for the cheap ones. the price is just hidden very boldly as taxes. It's literally just a shareholder shell game.

But so many people, even a few who consider themselves left of progressive, just miss it.

So.

might be worth remembering that the current level of leftist thought didn't bring most of you to the left: the early 2010s era stuff, with all it's faults, realized that it's not about expressing ideology/actions as yourself that matters, even as part of a collective. it matters, sure, for developing the leading and trailing edges. But.

But: the thing that matters is getting everyone else to get it. the core of it. and remember that your 10-15 years ahead of the wave, and aim for people who would have been you, when you started that path.

because anything else is going to cause even worse than the last eight years of people learning all the fancy words, but never to a level they can actually think in them.