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)
Accountancy is a very rare and valuable skill set in communist circles. Revolutions aren’t cheap and the resources of the workers’ vanguard need to be properly managed and protected. What good is it building an organisation for years just to see its assets get frozen and confiscated by state authorities the moment it steps out of line? People with expertise in financial management are necessary to formulate methods for hiding the movements’ assets while at the same time ensuring that they remain accessible to the org when necessary, such as storing away money in off-shore trusts beyond the reach of national authorities for example. Such activities are essential for both legal and illegal organisations.
Better yet, just use your commerce for Marxism. You don’t literally have to have your Marxism beholden to your accounting/economics expertise but the other way around.
In the old days, small businesses and co-ops were at the behest of the Communist Party during its height in the 1930s.
Read Capital and the Grundrisse. They will give you a mega edge over everyone else as those books talk about the actual real world lol
professor gonna be shocked when i start talking about LTV
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.
yeah I’m really unsure if I want to throw away my 20s working obscene hours at one of the Big 4, just doesn’t seem worth it
I can tell you it is not. Just look for another accounting job at normal company.
I have an accountancy degree as well. I think your best bet to help others is to start working at a place that is helping others. Leftist organisations, marxist parties, social orgs whatever. They all need accountants. The party I am a member of, for example, offered me an accountant job a while ago.
I actually abandoned being an accountant because I want to be a social worker (I have been one for a while now) but there’s a lot of possibilities to combine marxism and accountancy.
