Starting a double major in Economics/Accounting in a couple of months. Wondering if any comrades had any advice on how I can use skills like this to further my understanding of Marxism and/or help working-class movements in any way.

btw if anyone’s interested I had offers for history and fashion design too but I unashamedly picked this combo for employment (I still enjoy it anyway)

  • i_must_destroy@lemmygrad.ml
    4·
    2 years ago

    I became an accountant well before I knew anything about Marxism. To be honest, I mainly chose it because it would allow me to earn a decent wage.

    I did public accounting for a while, which was absolutely terrible and I do not recommend. It did honestly teach me a lot about capitalism, even if I didn’t realize it later.

    We were required to work 300 hours of overtime each year, most of it during the first 4 months of the year. Not exactly hard labor, but it’s a different kind of grind to sit in an office in front of a computer for 15 hours a day 6 days a week for 2 months straight.

    I don’t want to get to much into the details, but we could see what the firms were billing for our work. If you added the numbers up, you could see how much they were making off of you. We got paid like $50k starting off. Not bad at the time at least, but, if you actually ran the numbers you weren’t making much by the hour.

    Funny enough, one of the partners once specifically told us not to think too much about how much they bill because they had costs to cover that ‘weren’t considered sometimes’.

    Anyways, I now do accounting for a hospital. It’s not a bad job, it could be much worse anyways. I still feel like my skills could be out to better use somewhere else in society.

    Maybe one day.