Work and education: compared analysis of elements in Adam Smith and Karl Marx

Abstract

This article identifies and analyzes elements related to work and education in Adam Smith and Karl Marx. Through comparative analysis, basic texts were studied in which these classics debate, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the following elements: labor and its different types; causes and consequences of the division of work; increased productivity; work tools; social wealth; wage formation process; man and worker; society and State; history; and education. Among the results, work stands out, for Smith, as the basis that provides what is necessary for men, whose technical division would make it possible to extend well-being. For Marx, work is the form of production of human life and its social and technical division, in a certain way, creates capitalism. Theorists agree that social wealth results from work, however, they contrast between “naturally” distributed versus the result of exploitation and privately appropriated. In Smith, education is linked to the knowledge needed to work, to increase production and the development of the nation. Marx situates it as a class instrument, a necessity resulting from advances in the means of production, linked to social division, which confers a unilateral character to human development. Therefore, divergences, specificities, as well as diametrically opposed conceptions are pointed out, which continue to support human formation, under the bourgeois view or the fabric of its criticism and overcoming, which remains necessary and current as long as the capitalist mode of production exists.