Today’s world celebrates the idea of the entrepreneur. People applaud hustling and “grinding” as steps to success and the good things in life. This is because we live in a world of precarious job opportunities, even for graduates. Lack of job security and accompanying poor income from these for most of those who manage to get jobs has become the norm. In this climate, entrepreneurship education has served as a way to either get out of the rat race or at least get by, by doing “side hustles” to survive. This education subtly promotes an image of the hardworking and innovative entrepreneur. They take the form of alternative education for graduates and undergraduates to avoid being unemployed. Examples abound which include catering, makeup, shoemaking and photography courses.
Now, on the face of it, there is nothing wrong with skills acquisition or having multiple sources of income. There is nothing wrong with just developing the financial literacy abilities needed to run a small business. So, if there appears to be nothing wrong with it why then is it a problem?
We need to put things in a historical perspective, to have the needed clarity and understanding of the issues at stake. The capitalist mode of production flourished at its beginning with the privatisation of land and the commodification of labour. This period featured classical capitalism, evolving through various forms until the end of World War II, when western countries established welfare states and former colonies developed developmental states. This Post-WWII welfarist order of capitalism was not given out of the benevolence of capitalism, because it has none. They concessions from the capitalists to workers due to the working-class struggle to overthrow capitalism.
Today’s world of neoliberalism has a lot of similarities to the earlier world order of capitalism, in terms of commodification of labour, poor wages, inhumane living conditions and widening social inequality. Even the labour rights of that period resemble the labour rights of a lot of less developed countries where extractivism is the order of the day, and also in several newly industrialised countries where most of commodity production takes place currently. But that classical period, running from the nineteenth century to the 1930s, saw profound theorisation of both Utopian and Scientific Socialism(Marxism), massive labour organising and revolutionary socialist organisations built. That period was when the Russian Revolution triumphed and several revolutions were also lost in places like Germany, Italy, and Finland. But in the current period when we have one of the highest wealth inequality, we do not appear to have as massified revolutionary class-based political organisation as was the case in that earlier period.
Alongside repression, the ruling class maintains its power and the current state of affairs for capital expansion through ideological conditioning, which serves as the basis of the hegemony of their class. Entrepreneurship education is one of such ways of making the ideas of the dominant class the dominant ideas of the day. It is meant to condition what we see as possible, shutting out every other possibility. It is not a coincidence that entrepreneurship education has shadowed the rise and consolidation of neoliberalism.
While governments are selling off state-owned enterprises to the richest people for nothing close to what they were worth, with the baseless argument that this will make the assets more efficient we are also being sold the idea that entrepreneurs are hardworking people that deserve all that they have.
The idea of moving from being a hustler today to becoming a billionaire in the future has been planted in the minds of many young people, helping to deaden their commitment to building strong working-class movements. They do not see any need to unionise when they want to be their own boss someday. Entrepreneurship education has made many an ordinary people to sympathise in some sense with the rich and blame themselves when they fail. Now people do not slave away for a meager wage. They want to hustle and grind in a bid to get rich or die trying. It also shifts blame away from the government’s inability to make the economy work for the poor people or at least ensure stable employments and benefits for the worker.
But there are limits to the extent that the capitalists can get away with the mastery of using the illusion of entrepreneurship to lure young working-class people away from radical ideas. We see this with outbreaks of mass struggle, sometimes like during the EndSARS rebellion. The challenge for revolutionary youths in the working class movement is to counter the dominance of ideas that sow illusions like those with hustler mentality within the ranks of our class, challenging these illusions with revolutionary ideas of solidarity, struggle and revolutionary transformation of society.
by Emmanuel IRO-OKORO
