Recently, a piece in Times Higher Education caught my attention. Well, actually, it was the first couple of paragraphs that were of interest. There I read about a student who after exiting pre-med at University of California after just one semester started working at Techtonic, a software developing company providing her not only with a job but also all the specialized training needed to perform well. In fact, her friends suggest that the training provided by the private company was better than what they got at college. The rest of the piece then discussed whether on-the-job training is challenging the colleges for dominance in the education sector.

My first thought while reading the piece was that it could serve as a reminder for social scientists taking an interest in education that the construction of education as an object of research needs to break with the taken-for-granted notion of education in its dominating form – usually the educational system – and instead consider education as a field with multiple agents providing individuals and social groups with necessary symbolic capital. It was my second thought, however, that really excited me. Could the developments described in the article spur a comeback from the critique of the political economy of education? Isn’t this excactly the kind of empirical phenomena the central European Marxist discussion in the late sixties and early seventies was so concerned about?

Allow me to copy and paste way too much text from an old conference paper of mine, dating all the way back to October 2014:

During the decade following World War II, economists were puzzled by the fact that the economy seemed to grow at a faster rate than the increase of land, man-hours and other kinds of technical or physical capital. This residual between capital investments and economic growth turned the economists’ interest towards education, and at the 73rd annual meeting of the American Economic Association in 1960, Theodore W. Shultz delivered an address later published in The American Economic Review discussing the concept of human capital.1 By this concept, economists seemed to have found a way of analyzing investments in education as a factor of production, and as such, education could form part of more general theories of growth.

In other words, when Techtonic invests heavily in training their new recruits, who in turn receive income while not paying for this training, they are making human capital investments, right?

Marxist Bildungsökonomie was partially a critique of the vulgarization of economics of education. This criticism was aimed at the above mentioned human capital approach as well as subsequent manpower approaches for being a mere instrument of educational planning. “Vulgar” is of course in analogy with Marx distinction between classical bourgeois economics and its subsequent development into more instrumental and legitimizing theory (vulgarization). But some would argue that there never was such a thing as classical economics of education. On the contrary, economics of education was from its initial phase sprung from the need for planning the educational needs, and from the marginalistic theory. Employing the approach Marx used in his critique of the political economy would then be at fault since the established economics of education might reveal little of the real relations between education, labour market, and qualification requirements – one simply runs the risk of making “vulgar economics of education” the object of study, which would be a great deviation from the approach of Marx’ critique of the political economy.2

OK, 2014 me, I guess that makes sense, but could we please cut to the chase?

Marxist Bildungsökonomie assumes that there exist fundamental relationships between these two developments, an assumption that might seem obvious. As I mentioned previously, state finances are limiting the amount of expenditure available to public education. Marxists, on the other hand, suggests that the relationships are more fundamental, and education needs to be related to the basic conditions of capital accumulation. From such a perspective, the mere existence of education in a capitalistic society manifests itself as one of conflict and contradiction. On the one hand, investments in education results in less surplus-value for productive investments. On the other hand, these investments are necessary to the reproduction of the labour force. Individual capitals – those in competition with each other – therefore want to keep educational expenditures low, while it is in the interest of the collective capital to ensure the qualifications of the labour force. It is the task of the state, according to the ‘Prokla School’ , “to attend to the conditions for reproduction of collective capital” .3

Now, we are talking! Techtonic should not be investing in education, even though it would be serve their interest to reproduce their labour force.

This task is in need of elaboration, as there has been competing views as to how the relation state–capital may be conceived. One could easily arrive at the conclusion that if the main task of the state is to see to the reproduction of collective capital, the state is merely the lengthened arm of the ruling capitalist class. This view was one of the ‘state monopoly capitalism school’ (‘stamocap’) in the Marxist discussions, a position which followers of the Prokla school turned against, since they regarded it as a blurring of the distinction between society and state. This reduplication of society occurs in capitalist societies. “Society” is home to private interests, i.e. competing capitals, whereas “state” “appears as a neutral instance, raised above the class society, with the task of providing for general good”.4 It is the mechanism of reduplication which allows for the form of interventionist capitalism, characteristic of modern societies.

But that does not elucidate the capital–state relationship, does it?

It might be difficult to comprehend wherein the differences between the state conception of the ‘stamocap’ movement and the ‘Prokla school’ – critical of the stamocap conception – lies. There is no denying that state intervention exists, and that the increase of this intervention intertwines the interests of the state and capital. Hence, the capitalist interventionist state is a class state, like any other state in all known class societies. This notion of the interventionist state tells nothing about the functioning of this state though.5

Exactly! Does that mean that my initial hunch about a comeback from the critique of the political economy of education is misguided?

One could also point criticism towards a too un-mediated association between changing labour market demands and expansion of higher education from a qualification perspective. Martin Baethge highlighted contradictions in attempts at explaining general educational reforms with changing demands on the labour force, as the latter tend to initially regard only certain ‘top’ fractions of the labour force whereas general educational reforms elevates the average level of qualifications. This means that rising qualifications will raise the price on labour. Additionally, there can be structural changes at the workplace without requiring a more qualified labour force. In fact, as there is a tendency of the capitalist production process to continually breakdown the labour process into sub-steps, any initial demand for increasing qualifications due to e.g. technological innovation is gradually diminishing as the labour process over time. Baethge’s standing contribution, though, was a widening of the concept of qualification from exclusively production related to a more general reproduction of the labour force which could include, apart from production skills, communication skills, citizen skills, consumer skills, and the like.6 To make a simple example: Educational reforms as a way of tending to the reproduction of the labour force wouldn’t necessary have to be related to actual workplace changes in requirements, but could be a way of making sure that the labour force is well off in society. Baethge’s critical points on the qualification concept show why it might be risky to make premature assumptions on the correlation between shifts in labour market and transformations of the educational system.

Not at all! Like any productive scientific endeavour, the critique of the political economy of education evolved through internal criticism, gradually discovering that there might be relatively autonomous forces at play. Education is not simply about qualifications for carrying out certain tasks. What I do think is that the kind of developments described in the piece from THE might need elements of a critique of the political economy, since it bring to the fore the relations between the process of capital accumulation and education that sometimes fall into oblivion in times when the incredible reach of educational provision by the state is taken for granted. And, as I suggested in the beginning, the case of Techtonic definitely reminds the sociologists of education to consider a wider range of providers when trying to understand the struggles in the field of education.

1 Schultz, T. W. (1961), “Investment in Human Capital”.

2 Marx critique of the political economy had two objects in the real politcal economy and the idealistic political economy. The idealistic political economy was represented by classical economists like Ricardo, whose works Marx thought of as the purest form of self-comprehension of the bourgeois society. Broady, D. (1981), ”Critique of the Political Economy of Education”, pp. 146– 148.

3 Ibid., p. 148.

4 Ibid., p. 151.

5 Ibid., p. 153.

6 Ibid., pp. 160-161.

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