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
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.