Glad to know that teachers still have zero respect from both the left and right.
it's less a case of zero respect then it is recognition of the role that teachers play in the social reproduction of capitalist society. Or at least that's the left crittque.
I just use it as short hand. Obviously not every job is "essential", the fact that some jobs have been kept going despite the risks of infection is proof of this. As much as we might pretend otherwise, there is a hierarchy of "essentialness" of jobs, with some jobs being more "essential" than others and times of crisis usually reveals the implicit hierarchy we take for granted in times of prosperity.
This is too "the market knows best" for me. I'm sure anyone can come up with an argument for the "worth" of this or that profession but times of great stress reveals fiction for what it is. I'm more interested in underlying reasoning than fictive surface level justifications. If your society is literally collapsing for want of, say, food stockers, then surely that's evidence enough that people who stock shelves with food are "worth" more than, say, marketing people.
This is akin to saying factory workers and coal miners reproduce capitalist society through the products they produce being used to support other capitalist ventures.
are you talking about the khmer rouge? like if you want to lump them in with jacobin then idk what to say.
Is this sarcasm?
you're now making fun of a position you've completely made up. this is such a huge misreading of their point about teachers that i'm not sure if you even care about having a discussion or if you just want to mock leftists.
no because it didn't stop coal, coal production went back up after the strike and declined mostly on the basis of a glut of cheap overseas oil and coal from emerging markers.
Why would you assume I was talking specifically about the Khmer Rouge? Shit happened elsewhere too.
It's a purely functional description if, you know, you ignore the context of every screed against the people under that description.
did you know that teachers can also be leftist and are in fact murdered for being so
I squared this circle like thus:
That's the thing. Public school teachers do not have significant agency in what they teach. Why is this somehow different from the factory worker printing the textbooks full of garbage or the driver bringing them to the shop for distribution?
Yes, it's why I said they get no respect from both the left and the right. I'm from a country that murdered them by the boatload under a rightwing dictatorship, jackass.
then I would politely suggest you stop being a jackass and respect teachers enough not to use their murders as a rhetorical cudgel against politics you don't like
This post is a whole bunch of huh. For example gyms and gym trainers are a luxury not a essentials bussiness America's . obesity problem has nothing to do with Americans access to weight equipments has to do with Americans overconsumption of food. And I could go on I mean like we're like even if we go to this mythical electric car system which were not anytime soon you'll still need mechanics.
Why would I do this?
Like, I don't get this at all. Its evident that the only person who cares about this "health theory of value" is you and I guess whoever else banging on that obesity epidemic drum. Not that I don't think its a problem, but if people want to kill themselves with obesity then they can feel free to kill themselves. I'm more interested in making sure people who want to stay alive can do so (say, diabetics, insulin, etc) rather than to police people to not kill themselves.
AirBNB landlords. I can probably think of a few others but these guys top the list for me. The more properties you're renting out the less essential I think you are.
Exercise solves basically none of it. Food is the main factor in obesity, and as you said the food supply is fucked.
I rely on public transportation to get around, so this is a weird take you won't see me agreeing with. I think they have lots of value and should form the bulk of traffic on the streets right now. What is your point here actually?
I'm a public transit guy, I take buses and the train everywhere, I don't even own a car, and I do agree with his point here: if right now you have a choice, and can afford to choose, between driving and taking the bus, you should drive. The idea that a pandemic exposes who's "really valuable" and who's "really not" is a nice and clean idea but I think the reality is messier then that: the pandemic exposes who is valuable and who is not in circumstances where people are limiting their exposure to other people, even family members, as much as possible, and parents have children stuck at home all day, and lots of other things that make this specific
but America's obesity problem has nothing to do with access to gym equipment that's not the reason why Americans are fat as fuck. So gym are not essential business they are a luxury.
Its a real idea in the sense that there are a lot of worthless jobs out there that only exist to give people something to do and they don't really add value to society. Notice the delineation between "essential workers" and other jobs in the wake of COVID-19. How important a job is to the function of society seems to bear no close relationship with its monetary recompense. "PMC" encapsulates this concept neatly to describe the vast universe of management jobs that only exist to soak up unemployment.
I think you're letting your distaste for that German commie color your view of the idea of the PMC.
That is not to say the only "real jobs" are rugged manual labor jobs where you lug girders and wear an overall and a massive mustache but the concept of "value" is central to a lot of socialist thought.
Buses are filled with essential low income workers where I'm from (nyc)
Sure but that's an artifact of current inequalities, if all of those service workers owned electric cars the objectively right thing to do now is not sit in a closed environment with twenty other people for half an hour during a respiratory pandemic.
