• 小莱卡
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    77 days ago

    What does elite overproduction mean? Surplus of educated people?

    • MizuTama [he/him, any]
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      96 days ago

      Yeah, the way it is phrased is a bit odd here but in essence, it seems he is referring to laborers whose labor power demands higher commodity costs due to the cost of production of them as a laborer being higher due to being better educated and trained. Quite literally appears to attempting to reinvent sections of Marxism with the spooky stuff cut out. Hell, even the criticisms levied against him are regurgitated.

    • Simon 𐕣he 🪨 Johnson
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      6 days ago

      In the modern era that’s basically it (because higher education represents the biggest generation of elites), but it’s more general.

      Elite in this case is simply the highest caste, class or social strata that enforces some form of power over the lower ones.

      Let’s say there’s X amount of elite “positions” (cuz being a King is not a job and this applies to history as well) every year, presidents, senators, bankers, CEO’s, all the way to some upper middle class jobs.

      Every year this set of jobs can expand or contract. These positions require (through culture or ability) social elites to fulfill their function, people of privilege, college educated, connected, skilled, etc. Let’s call the amount of elites Y

      Elite overproduction essentially is a phenomenon in a country where Y > X and grows Y at a greater rate than X year over year.

      In Tsarist Russia for example Y (represented by the nobility) grew at a rate of 2.5 over ~75 years. In that same time X had only grown through fake make work councils which could not subsume all of the elites being produced.

      However that’s not all the Y there was, Russia was also growing like the world was and petty bourgoisie were also growing adding to Y.

      Historically the conflict between the nobility and the bourgeoisie has been a conflict of the nobility refusing to make de jure space for the bourgeoisie and being de facto evicted from that space. That’s literally the French Revolution.

      This isn’t just Marxism rebranded because this applies to socialist countries in history such as the USSR, and currently such as China.