Huang Weijie: Talent Cultivation and the Development of New Quality Productive Forces
During the eleventh collective study session of the Political Bureau of the 20th CPC Central Committee, General Secretary Xi Jinping pointed out: "We must optimize the academic disciplines and talent cultivation models in universities according to new trends in scientific and technological development, so as to cultivate urgently needed talent for developing new quality productive forces and promoting high-quality development." Developing new quality productive forces requires the solid construction of a talent cultivation model adapted to its advancement. In contemporary Western discourse, the cultivation of talent is understood as "investing in one's self." Industries such as education and healthcare, which are related to "investing in one's self," have become key sectors for contemporary Western capital. In tandem with this, the concept and theory of "human capital" have gradually become part of the mainstream discourse of contemporary Western society and have spread globally, participating to a significant extent in the construction of subject-oriented thinking. Analyzing and critiquing the Western discourse of "human capital" from a Marxist philosophical perspective helps avoid the misleading nature of contemporary Western discourse in talent cultivation and allows for scientific reflection on talent cultivation models that promote the development of new quality productive forces.
The Discursive Characteristics of "Human Capital"
In the contemporary West, capital has extensively entered traditional fields of labor power [1] reproduction, such as education and healthcare. Accompanying this, the concept and theory of "human capital" have gradually entered the daily discourse of the masses since the 1960s. In this field, the theories of two Nobel Prize winners in economics, Gary Becker and Theodore Schultz, have exerted significant influence. Becker once provided a relatively clear definition of "investment in human capital": human activities that affect future monetary and psychic income by increasing human resources. According to the epistemology of "human capital" theory, to study laborers concretely rather than abstractly, one must proceed from the individual lived experience of the laboring subject to study the planning of their economic behavior. From this perspective, consumption is also production and investment, and the returns on such production and investment are the "psychic returns" of the consumer's lived experience.
Similarly, from the first-person perspective of the laborer, wages are also viewed as a "return" on an investment. In this context, what is the "capital" of this "investment"? "Capital" is seen as the skills of the laborer. Thus, wages are understood as the "return" on the "human capital" of the laborer's skills. Following the inference of "human capital" theory, if one wishes to increase wage "returns," the individual must increase "human capital" investment, which means increasing individual financial input in fields like education and healthcare. The discourse of "human capital" theory evades a crucial question: who should be responsible for the "investment" in "human capital"? This discourse presupposes that the individual laborer should naturally be responsible for "human capital" investment, while also presupposing the universal applicability of a mode of thinking based on the "investment-return" model. In fact, these presupposed "natural" conditions are products of specific historical conditions and possess historical boundaries.
"Human Capital" Discourse and Contemporary Capitalist Accumulation Modes
The construction of the "human capital" discourse is closely linked to contemporary capitalist modes of accumulation. Faced with the crisis of over-accumulation, contemporary capital tends to incorporate external spaces into the realm of capital accumulation. This process is manifested in the privatization, monetization, and capitalization of the social public sphere, which has become increasingly common in the West since the 1960s. Consequently, many undertakings in the social public sphere (such as education and healthcare) have become "industries" dominated by capital for "commodity production" and have been labeled the "tertiary industry." These "new industries" absorbed surplus capital and surplus labor populations displaced by the falling rate of profit, alleviating the crisis of capitalism to a certain extent. The consequence of this process is that public services in the social sphere have been transformed into a realm of commodity exchange where laborers must pay in currency, further increasing their burden of living. Yet, in contemporary Western discourse, this is given the false labels of "marketization" and "liberalization."
Meanwhile, laborers displaced from surplus capital become a relative surplus population, forming an industrial reserve army. This situation intensifies competition among laborers, forcing them to use their limited wages to upgrade their own skills in hopes of being employed by capital and obtaining higher wages. The "human capital" discourse narrates this process as laborers obtaining "returns" in the form of wages through "investment" in their own skills. Laborers do not gain actual choice over this "investment"; they are forced to increase investment in skill improvement under conditions of a relative surplus of laborers. What they obtain is less a "return" than a possibility of being exploited by capital and the satisfaction of means of subsistence [2] obtainable under that possibility.
Evidently, so-called "investment in one's self" is actually the shifting of the responsibility and costs of the reproduction of labor power to the outside of capital. When laborers are forced to bear a greater burden for the reproduction of labor power in areas like education and healthcare, their standard of living further deteriorates. Furthermore, laborers lacking means of production and means of subsistence are forced to bear debts for education and healthcare—before even attaining the possibility of labor—just to achieve the possibility of earning a wage under capitalist conditions, thereby becoming further dominated by money capital.
Promoting Talent Cultivation Models to Serve the Development of New Quality Productive Forces
When the "human capital" discourse claims its fulcrum is an active economic subject, it is actually seeing a pseudo-subject constructed by the economic structure. The subject engaging in "self-planning" within the so-called "investment" of "human capital" is precisely an abstract presupposition. What the "human capital" discourse misses is the profound insight of Marx's historical materialism regarding the determinacy of the socially objective forms [3] generated by history.
In practice, the theoretical discourse of "human capital" casts aside the historical determinancy of laborers and brackets the socially objective forms in which contemporary laborers find themselves; hence it often understands laborers as bourgeois individuals. This presupposition of an individual subject of "self-planning" and "self-investment" ignores the dimension of ownership of the means of production and means of subsistence, failing to address a key question: without ownership of the means of production, means of subsistence, and factors of production, how is the subject to plan? Contemporary capitalist practice has expanded privatization and monetization into the natural and even social spheres; the subject is forced to "plan" and "invest" in themselves using money as an objective form. For laborers, the primary form through which they obtain money is wages, which is determined by the capital-labor relationship in which they are situated. When "human capital" theory views wages from a first-person perspective, this perspective precisely masks the exploitative relationship between capital and labor. Thus, "human capital" theory treats the monetary relationship—existing under the condition that capital owns the means of production and subsistence—as an eternally existing "natural" form.
Based on a Marxist perspective, we can see that "human capital" theory analyzes economic growth in isolation from the production dimension of the means of subsistence. Consequently, under the mindset of fetishism [4], it equates the appreciation of capital and the increase in the degree of rent-seeking with economic development, ignoring that this so-called "economic development" comes at the cost of the interests of the broad masses of laborers, thus standing on the opposite side of history. Conversely, to promote economic development and ensure its fruits benefit all laborers, it is necessary to emphasize and advance public investment in and social sharing of social public undertakings such as education and healthcare. This will alleviate the burden on laborers in the process of becoming talents, promote the leap in laborers, instruments of labor, and subjects of labor [5] (and their optimal combination), and drive the development of new quality productive forces.
Developing new quality productive forces requires prioritizing public undertakings related to human development, such as education and healthcare: "We must strive to cultivate and create strategic scientists, first-class technological leaders, and innovation teams; strive to cultivate and create extraordinary engineers and great country artisans; strengthen skill training for laborers; and continuously improve the quality of all types of talent." To this end, we must guard against the intrusion of "human capital" discourse generated by contemporary capitalist accumulation modes, prevent the excessive privatization of public undertakings related to human development like education and healthcare, alleviate the burden on laborers in their quest for excellence, and provide a fair and effective service platform for cultivating outstanding talent that serves the development of new quality productive forces. Simultaneously, we must deeply implement the strategy of strengthening the country through talent in the New Era, "following the requirements for developing new quality productive forces, unblocking the virtuous cycle of education, technology, and talent, perfecting the working mechanisms for talent cultivation, introduction, utilization, and rational flow," and continuously guiding the allocation of social resources toward undertakings related to the cultivation, introduction, and utilization of talent. This will prevent the dividend of labor power reproduction from being seized and occupied by developed capitalist countries and effectively promote talent cultivation models to serve the development of new quality productive forces.
(The author is an Associate Professor at the School of Philosophy, Nanjing University)
Source: Chinese Social Sciences Today Online Editor: Huihui