question for college educated people older than 25: if you had it to do over again, and you could go back to school and pursue a career in academia, what field or fields would you go into to have the greatest positive impact (from a Marxist’s point of view), which field would you choose? assuming you can start from the very beginning, i.e., get a new bachelors before moving into a masters and a phd

question for the zoomers: if you could study anything at university without having to worry about whether or not you could make a decent living afterwards, with a view to making the world less shit, what would you study and why?

long story short, my parents have come into some money and i may have this opportunity and i want to choose my field of study wisely. when i went to college at 18 i double majored in french (good choice bc i love languages and the humanities in general, and it expanded my worldview outside of amerikkka) and business (bad choice bc lmao) and i don’t want to make the same mistake again. currently i’m thinking history because a) i’ve always loved history, from literally as long as i can remember and b) history is a weapon and i want to use it to behead the capitalists. im also interested in international relations, but only from a based point of view

note that if i do go back to school, it will be somewhere in europe, bc fuck paying for a university education in america lol worst mistake of my life

basically what i’m saying is, from the ivory tower of academia i will rain hellfire on the upper class until they are utterly destroyed, or i will die trying. tell me what to study in order to accomplish this

Death to America

  • SkeletorJesus [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    If you feel like making yourself go literally insane and actively hostile to most of the people around you, you could go for a law track. Something relevant for undergrad (it doesn’t matter that much AFAIK, history’s a fun one that works.) and then on to law school. Good lawyers working for good causes can actually do a relatively high amount of good at the individual level. From union lawyer to tenants’ rights, there’s a lot of places that you can make a direct, visible difference in people’s lives. That’s a super hard road to walk down, though. It’s a frustrating and monotonous profession composed mostly of reading the driest documents in human history, the pay is rarely good if it’s something worth doing, a huge proportion of the people you’ll be going to school with will give you a full-body feeling of visceral disgust, and it requires diligently working within the confines of a system that I’m going to assume you know is a wretched abomination.

  • Parsani [love/loves, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Academics have like zero effect on the world lol

    But like, fuck it, go to school for history. Whatever you want to study, just make sure there are faculty whose work you are interested in wherever you go.

    • 2Password2Remember [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      1 year ago

      honestly a degree in communism would be lit. imagine the dunks I’d be able to do with a PhD in Marxism, my mere presence in a room would cause liberals to spontaneously combust

      serious response: I don’t think being an academic can have that big of an impact either but it’s probably going to be the best I can do given my talents and the way my life has turned out. like, becoming the millennial parenti would be as big of an impact as I could realistically make, because being the millennial Lenin is just not on the table for me. hopefully that makes sense

      Death to America

  • Maoo [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    Make as much money as you can as far away from military contractors / the state department as you can and donate half to revolutionary orgs worldwide. Find a career that has enough downtime for you to organize during it or retire early to organize full time.

    You can’t really do an actual job that directly builds revolution under capitalism, at least not until there are parties paying professional revolutionaries. Not even working for a union fits the bill. You can do more for unionization by dropping $2k on retail workers trying to form their own union than siphoning from workers’ paychecks to do “strategic” bureaucratic union work. You can make $100k more than a union organizer by going after a job in software or finance or some other pointless thing sapping industry. That’s 50 unions you can jumpstart as just one nerd every year.

    In terms of studying, this doesn’t mean you can’t minor in a subject you find valuable (like history) or even do a double major, taking an extra year to complete the higher level courses. But it’s not really going to make you better poised, materially, to support revolution. In fact, there is a toxic poverty fetishization among the Western left that pushes them into an academic track where there are 10X as many grad students as professors (9/10 won’t get what they want) or a nonprofit “mission-driven” track. We should resist that. It only makes revolutionaries more precarious. We need resources and organizing time to win this fight.

  • uniqueid198x@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Honestly, its pretty hard for an individual to move the needle on systemic issues regardless of skillset. Conversely, almost any skillset can contribute to building alternate power and challenging those systems. Study what you have a passion for, then get involved in the work.

    • peppersky [he/him, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Don’t ever hope for academic employment.

      This. You really cannot overstate how hard the state is trying to kill academia. Every branch of academia that can’t be immediately monetized on the market will be dead within like a decade and universities will be nothing more than corporate training sites, producing nothing but mindless morons ready for the labour market.

  • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    I’m coming to something of a personal Renaissance of what “greatest positive impact” means. There are things like environmental sustainability which are so clearly very positive. There’s also psychology that could help unwrench horrible brainworms that affect society. There’s law to stand up to oil companies in court. There’s medicine to help the sick. English to change the culture. Biochemical engineering to heal the lame. Neuroscience to learn about ourselves. Zoology to help animals. Plenty of majors get downplayed in importance. Plenty of the humanities are necessary when we’re stuck in the ugliest skyscrapers and argue with thought terminating cliches.

    Even if your goal is that you want to help, encouragingly, that doesn’t make you unique. Your Marxist perspective might, but not the desire for a better tomorrow. This is to say that it still matters what you find interesting. Not all majors are created equal. It might be harder to use IT for good, but with contributions to FOSS not impossible. If you went HAM in making sure Unity felt pain because they ditched their place in the market and Gadot had a free Unity conversion tool, that would send a shiver down a capitalist’s spine.

    As much as I’ve seen in the adrenochrome factory, seeing my friends progress in their careers, and my work at the CIA, it matters less what you study and more how you make use of it. A lot of degrees can get you a 9 to 5 at an office, but it’s possible™️ to think outside the box and use what you learned in school (and see it crumble and then learn how to repeatedly use bits and pieces of it).

      • WhatDoYouMeanPodcast [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know why you’d want to know. It’s all pretty boring and heady. You can already check out most of what we do at c/announcements and the modlog. I do a little bit behind the scenes checking for posters that are too based to inject them with lib takes and nanochips. Outside of that, I’ve been doing a passion project to check in on posters who get banned for reactionary/misogyny/racist posts to see whether they want to take free trips to South America to help build democracy.