I don't know how people can learn Business Stuff and not become bomb-throwing communists. Every line of business law is the most blatantly rigged shit.
corollary: people who are already bomb-throwing communists should learn business stuff, because you need to know your enemy
It's like a cult. No wait, sorry. It's not like a cult. It IS a cult.
Source: I was indoctrinated in it previously, then got out.
I do know a guy who DID get more radicalized than he started by having to take shitty business and economics courses in college.
One of my friends loves to tell the story of the time she went to college to learn business
Everyone in her 101 class was talking about their plans to grow giant businesses and own the world and then she goes "I want to run one business and survive :)"
And everyone looked at her like she grew another head cause why WOULDNT you want infinite growth???
A lot of it is the basic assumptions. Growth is one, for sure. Ownership is another. There's a lot of mysticism around ownership. It's used to justify everything, and create chains of command. Ownership gives control, of the money and the things that money can buy. The law is built on this same mysticism of private ownership. And it very much has spiritual, mystical properties - arbitrary values of who did what in what order, and then what later actions count and what don't, in terms of conferring this magical ownership status.
The guy who inherited a number in a bank account and signed a piece of paper and is never around owns the store. The person willing to enforce the rules and extract maximum work for minimum pay on the owner's behalf is the manager, and gets an extra bribe of pay, though not quite enough to threaten the owner's share. Every other worker, though everything that makes it a store happens only because of them as a team? Nothing, nothing but the pay they're offered. Even though no income would exist in the store. That's the whole exploitation thing, right? But the point here is to illuminate how the business school magic puts it: they're not owners. They were never offered ownership, only wages; the theory is they agreed to that and so it's fair, they'll take their wages and make their own deals. Obscuring the usual fact that no, their wages can't possibly allow them to make deals and everyone become owners - and that's the point.
The mysticism is a system of obscuring the truth from everyone, especially the owners. They get to think they're righteous. That's part of the reason it sticks, it's a comfortable lie. And until the deal gets as bad as it does in severe depressions like now and back in the 1930s, it fools the comfortable middle class too, workers whose wages were high enough to let them own a little bit, like their own houses, partly, through mortgages at least. And by obscuring whose hands do what, it allows a moral logic that isn't connected to that material reality. So it doesn't acknowledge things like hunger or homelessness either. They disappear through the magic of selective moral blindness.
