Thread by @thucydiplease, Having or not having a college degree does not, by itself, say [...]

Having or not having a college degree does not, by itself, say anything about or change your class position. At all. There may be *correlations* because it’s easier for some people to *get* degrees, but the *degree itself* does not have a class character. It’s just a credential.

Why are college degree credentials special?

Consider an IBEW apprentice electrician. The program lasts four or five years (residential vs industrial/commercial), you have to pass entry and exit exams, and you go to classes and learn theory as well as real world work

A union apprentice electrician’s credential is therefore *very* analogous to a college degree. You have to study. It takes years. You have to meet certain stands to get in, and to get out. It demonstrates expertise.

Now, you could argue it’s more narrowly applicable than a bachelor’s degree, as a credential for a worker to have. And that’s true.

But it also costs nothing—the union pays for your books and classes are free. And you make money working as an apprentice while you study

It also has a very clear, objective impact on your future earnings that you know ahead of time, because there are pay scales with objective qualification metrics like hours work and tests passed, specific credentials obtained

So, completing an apprenticeship in a trade union like IBEW isn’t the same as getting a bachelor’s degree, but there are trade offs either way. Broad applicability on the one hand, and probably more networking, vs predictability and low cost on the other hand

What is the same is that they’re both credentials that take years to complete and which workers obtain for the purpose of being able to earn hire wages when selling their labor. From a class perspective, neither one makes a worker no longer a worker.

Higher*

But *college* education, solely and specifically, keeps being used in America to denote *class*. No other type of education is treated this way, even when it is also a credentialing program workers undertake to (hopefully) improve wages

In fact we’re so addicted to using education as a proxy for class that you see people all the time talking about “college educated baristas” etc as if they are not working class, not workers. Because they have a credential?

How does that make any sense? A credential is NOT capital. I’m sorry but it’s just not. It is not the means of production, you can’t survive on it. It’s not land or labor or technology or natural resources. It’s a piece of paper that CAPITAL *might* think makes you more hireable

Ultimately though a credential by itself in *no way* changes the fundamentals of what you’re doing after you get it: you’re selling your labor for wages. Because all you have is your labor. Your credential? That’s four years of labor (or more) that YOU put in! That’s your labor!

If you went to college, you paid for the privilege to labor without pay for several years, in order to exchange that labor and tuition cost for a credential, in the HOPES but by no means the GUARANTEE that it will help you sell your labor for higher wages LATER

That’s not capital. That’s not what capital is. Capital is the university. Capital is Pearson, their printing presses and logistics and employees and intellectual property and oligopolistic market control that makes you pay $700 for a textbook. That’s capital.

Here’s a basic test: Does your degree come from someone else’s surplus value? If it doesn’t, guess what, it’s not capital.

And your degree ISN’T the coagulation of the surplus value of someone else’s labor. You didn’t steal anyone’s labor to obtain it.

Now, yes, universities and colleges steal the surplus value from their staffs (even the “nonprofit” ones). But that surplus value doesn’t go to you, it doesn’t get collected and compacted into your degree. It goes to the elites at the top of the university.

Which is also where some of your tuition ends up, in the pockets of the bourgeois administrators at these colleges. In the pockets of millionaire coaches (they say it doesn’t but it does), in the pockets of ed-tech companies and contractors and Aramark and god knows who else

And your labor? Well we know how universities depend on cheap student labor—especially grad student labor—to function. Universities take not only your money but for many people they actually steal surplus labor value too! Directly from students!

No, what *you* get out of a university doesn’t have stolen labor in it. You can’t sell it, transfer it, put it on the market. You can’t use it to produce anything, you can’t use it to survive. It. Isn’t. Capital.

So why do we fixate on college as a class marker in this country, to such inane and obsessive ends?

I can think of three reasons in particular but there are surely others

1) Correlation

2) Propaganda

3) Class warfare

The most good-faith issue I can suggest as a reason for the confusion around class is that college degrees are correlated to class to some extent. Mostly because college is expensive and the richer you are the more like you are to go and to graduate

College is certainly something the rich value, and it’s something they do. This correlation can confuse people into thinking that going to college puts you in the same *class* as those rich people. It does not. It’s correlation, not causation.

You could talk about this regarding anything popular among the rich that other people also do, or buy. The latest iPhone, skiing, travel. Workers who sell their labor for wages also buy iPhones, also ski, also travel. There are correlations, but we can see it’s not causative

Generally speaking, people will not say you’re bourgeois for having an expensive truck, or for being someone who skis, or because you traveled abroad once. (There are surely some assholes who will but *most* good faith interlocutors understand this)

The second source of confusion is propaganda. For decades we have been preached to by the elites about the value of a degree. They specifically frame it in terms of higher wages, framing it for us as if it’s an asset that has guaranteed appreciation

Not unlike they way housing was framed in the public mind even before that...and well, we all remember 2008.

But treating degrees as capital, as money in the bank, is even more a charade than housing, because you can live in a house, and you can sell it. It’s a physical asset, even if it isn’t a fail safe commercial asset that can only go up forever!

Still, we’ve all been propagandized to. By the media, by the government, by the education industry. College is big business and they want us to see it as utterly necessary. They want us to see it as a secure, failsafe investment. They want us to buy in.

Breaking out of that can be hard. But it’s frustrating when people “on the left” treat this bourgeois propaganda as truth. When a “left” personality says college educated workers aren’t working class, they’re just regurgitating the elite propaganda that treats degrees as capital

When some self-styled fire breathing leftist decries the college educated as bourgeois, or PMC, or whatever, they’re not contradicting the line that power spews. They’re in full agreement. They are doing the elite’s work.

Which brings us to the third, most critical problem. We‘re told that college education is a proxy for class because this divides working people. It serves the interests of the bourgeoisie to say that a secretary with a degree and a custodian without are irrevocably divided

Even if both sell their labor to the same employer. Even if neither makes a living wage. Even if neither owns the means of their own reproduction, even if both have nothing but labor to sell, and sell it they must or face annihilation.

These two workers have a great deal in common, in material reality. Most critically, they have identical *class* interest. This interest isn’t just similar, in the scenario I’ve described, it’s identical.

But the bourgeoisie benefits if these workers see each other as belonging to different classes. Better yet if they see each other as antagonists! It’s a knife driven into the heart of solidarity and shared class interests among working people. And the bourgeoisie thrives on it

Ultimately this is why using education as a proxy for class should be unacceptable to any leftist. Education has material implications for lots of things, yes. It’s not fake. It’s real, the education industry and its credentials have real consequences.

But a degree *is not* something that can *determine or change* your class. At the best, it is a very poorly correlated proxy for the things that *do* determine your class identity. But in a world where the vast majority of the degreed sell their labor for wages, it’s a shit proxy

It’s too shit for anyone serious about materialist politics to use as a proxy for class. It’s too broad, too inaccurate, too riddled with complications and counter examples and exceptions.

And, importantly, why bother to use a shitty proxy when we can see the thing itself?

When science uses a proxy to observe something else, it’s usually because that something is unobservable! We can’t see dark matter but we can see things that suggest its existence. So using the proxies make sense—it’s the best we’ve got, for now.

But this makes no sense when one is trying to analyze class. Class is something you can look at directly, with no confusion. It is not only observable it can be observed very easily, by just about anyone who wants to see it.

But you have to want to see it. You have to care about *class*. You have to *want* to look at it, with clear eyes.

And, truth be told, many don’t. What gets them worked up, angry, righteous, lionizing, is cultural signaling.

What gets them champing at the bit is Team Red and Team Blue, and the shibboleths that denote membership in each group. And there are just as many shibboleths now that denote your membership in neither. Your membership in Team Socialism or Team Fascism are culturally denoted too

But socialism, at least, if not the others, is not *supposed* to be like this. Socialism’s principles are anathema to this kind of cultural proxy war, because socialism is founded so concretely on a scientific, material analysis of the political economy

Whether or not you have blue hair or a piccrew avi, whether or not you hate Marvel movies, whether you say Latino or Latinx, these are not things that have a class character. Your position on any of them does not make you salt of the earth.

That doesn’t mean these things are all *totally* irrelevant (Tho, caring blue hair seems totally pointless aestheticism). Marvel movies are imperial propaganda and people should note that and explain it. The word Latinx has a feminist political valence.

But neither of these things has ANYTHING to do with your CLASS POSITION. Your words, your consumption choices, hell even your own political values don’t determine what class you belong to. Working class libs and working class chuds alike are both working class. Period.

So, it’s not incompatible with socialism to care about these things insofar as they have a political valence—like blockbusters’ imperial propaganda. These things can still be *political*. But what’s incompatible with socialism is saying they are proxies for class. Just stop.

Class is class. Nothing else is class. Other things matter, other things interact with class, but that doesn’t change what class IS. Stop trying to. It just cuts apart solidarity, it just dulls the consciousness of the working class.

Latest Threads Unrolled: