fuck off, you little shitass whore

There’s a pamphlet by the influential social anarchist and theorist, Kropotkin, called Appeal to the Youth (or Appeal to the Young in some translations) that addresses this really well with regard to what in modern day we call the “professional class” - skilled labor through higher education essentially - these are the clinicians, the engineers, the teachers, etc.

The breakdown is this:

Educated professionals still must sell their labor and are protected from the worst of exploitation through the necessity of their roles and their education (making them harder to easily replace and exploit than say a factory or agricultural laborer - for Kropotkin, this was the peasant class in tsarist Russia), but are still subject to some degree of exploitation at the hands of capitalists.

So in a modern day example - doctors and nurses who are asked to work dangerous, long hours in understaffed hospitals who are punished for striking over patient safety and labor conditions. If they quit their job, they lose their health and dental insurance which incentivizes them to stick out poor working conditions. And there’s the ever present threat of being replaced by short term contract staff.

Additionally, Kropotkin argues that the educated youth often pursue these fields because they genuinely believe in their underlying philosophies and because they want to improve society. The doctor wants to heal sickness. The architect wants to improve infrastructure. The teacher wants to educate.

But by virtue of living under capitalism, when they leave the ivory tower of education and begin working, it becomes clear that their field’s values are fundamentally incompatible with the reality of capitalism. The doctor sees that people become sick because they live in poor conditions, don’t have healthy food, etc. The architect is asked to cut corners and sees that the people who work in construction of their buildings are mistreated and don’t actually have access to the infrastructure they helped build. The teacher realizes that poorer and disadvantaged students are systematically denied education and class mobility.