Teaching Under Capitalism
Related article: The Fight Over Ethnic Studies Is a Fight Over Power, by By CJ Korpaczewski
Nearly every person in the United States has had their life shaped by teachers. We spend our childhoods in classrooms, learn to read from them, discover history through them, and often carry lessons from them long after graduation. Teachers occupy a unique place in society. They are entrusted with helping each new generation understand the world they are inheriting while preparing them to shape the one they will eventually create.
Yet despite the enormous importance of their work, teachers themselves occupy an increasingly precarious position. They spend years earning advanced degrees, often accumulating staggering amounts of student debt, only to enter a profession marked by declining real wages, expanding workloads, growing surveillance, and constant political interference. They are expected to function simultaneously as educators, counselors, social workers, nurses, security officers, data analysts, and public relations specialists. They are expected to answer emails late into the evening, grade papers on weekends, purchase classroom supplies with their own money, comfort students experiencing trauma, defend vulnerable students from discrimination, and somehow continue smiling through it all.
Capitalism has a remarkable ability to normalize exploitation.
Teaching has become one of the clearest examples of that process. Every new responsibility is described as simply part of being a dedicated educator. Every unpaid hour becomes a labor of love. Every sacrifice becomes evidence of professionalism rather than exploitation. Teachers are praised endlessly for their commitment while simultaneously being expected to accept conditions that workers in many other professions would rightly reject.
The contradiction is striking. Society tells teachers that they perform one of the most important jobs imaginable while compensating them as though that importance were little more than a sentimental slogan.
The Exploitation of Care Work
Historically, this contradiction has deep roots. Public education in the United States became feminized during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and with that feminization came the assumption that teaching was less a profession deserving fair compensation than a calling requiring self-sacrifice. The fact that teachers were overwhelmingly women justified lower wages and greater expectations of unpaid labor. Although the profession has become more diverse, many of those assumptions remain embedded in educational institutions today. The expectation that teachers will continually give more than they receive has survived long after the social conditions that produced it.
Capitalism has not discarded this logic; it has refined it. Throughout the public and nonprofit sectors, workers whose labor serves a broader social good are routinely told, either explicitly or implicitly, that part of their compensation comes from the moral satisfaction of the work itself. Teachers, nurses, social workers, librarians, and countless others are expected to accept lower wages, longer hours, and deteriorating working conditions because they are supposedly “making a difference.” The implication is that meaningful work is itself a form of payment. In reality, this is another mechanism through which employers and the state extract additional labor without paying for it. Workers end up subsidizing the institutions they serve with their own idealism.
This creates a vicious cycle. People enter education because they genuinely want to improve the lives of young people, but the very qualities that draw them to the profession—compassion, commitment, and a sense of social responsibility—are transformed into tools of exploitation. Every unpaid hour, every weekend spent grading papers, every classroom supply purchased with personal income, and every additional responsibility accepted “for the kids” becomes another subsidy flowing from workers to an educational system increasingly starved of public investment. Eventually, idealism collides with exhaustion. Burnout replaces optimism, frustration replaces solidarity, and many teachers who entered the profession hoping to change society instead become politically demoralized. Some leave education altogether. Others grow cynical and begin searching for individual solutions to problems that are fundamentally social. A profession sustained by collective commitment is gradually fragmented into isolated individuals simply trying to survive.
Recognizing this process is essential because it reveals that teacher burnout is not a personal failure or a consequence of insufficient resilience. It is a predictable outcome of a system that depends upon workers continually sacrificing their own well-being to compensate for chronic underinvestment. As long as educators understand those sacrifices as expressions of personal virtue rather than forms of exploitation, the cycle will continue. Breaking it requires more than better self-care or improved morale. It requires teachers to recognize that their idealism should be directed not toward subsidizing the system that exploits them, but toward joining with the broader working class to transform it.
The Political Attack on Teachers
Today those pressures have intensified. Teachers are expected to defend trans students against discriminatory legislation while simultaneously navigating hostile political environments. They are expected to teach honest history while avoiding controversy. They are expected to respond to increasing mental health crises among students while districts reduce support services. They are expected to absorb new administrative responsibilities without reductions elsewhere. Every year the workload expands while the resources available to meet those demands shrink.
The recent attacks on ethnic studies, discussions of Palestine, anti-colonial scholarship, and broader forms of critical pedagogy represent another stage in this process. Increasingly, teachers face records requests, public accusations, political campaigns, and legal challenges simply for teaching controversial subjects. Regardless of one’s position on individual disputes, the larger pattern is unmistakable. Classroom instruction has become another arena in which political power is exercised over workers.
The Myth of the Professional Class
Yet one of the greatest obstacles confronting educators does not originate with legislatures, school boards, or political organizations.
It originates within the profession itself.
One of capitalism’s greatest ideological victories has been convincing many teachers that they are something other than workers.
Teachers Belong to the Working Class
Teachers are encouraged to think of themselves primarily as professionals. We possess degrees. We perform intellectual labor. We develop specialized expertise. We attend conferences, publish curriculum, and accumulate credentials. From these realities many educators conclude that their interests somehow differ fundamentally from those of warehouse workers, transit operators, hotel workers, agricultural laborers, grocery clerks, and countless others who sell their labor in order to survive.
That conclusion is profoundly mistaken.
Teachers do not own the schools in which they work. They do not determine educational budgets. They do not control curriculum standards, district policy, or hiring decisions. They sell their labor power in exchange for wages. They work within institutions governed by administrators, school boards, legislatures, and courts. Their working conditions are determined largely by forces beyond their control.
In every meaningful economic sense, teachers belong to the working class.
The possession of advanced degrees does not change this reality. Neither does intellectual labor. A software engineer earning six figures remains a worker if they survive by selling their labor to an employer. A research scientist remains a worker. A university professor remains a worker. The defining feature of class is not education, culture, or prestige. It is one’s relationship to the means of production and whether one must sell labor power in order to live.
Why, then, do so many teachers hesitate to embrace that identity?
Part of the answer lies in the ideology of professionalism. Teachers are constantly encouraged to distinguish themselves from “ordinary workers.” They are urged to see themselves as neutral experts whose authority derives from credentials rather than collective power. This professional identity creates pride in one’s craft, but it can also create political isolation. Teachers begin viewing labor struggles as something that belongs to factory workers or warehouse employees rather than to themselves.
The consequences are profound.
Professionalism Without Power
Educators who see themselves primarily as professionals tend to search for professional solutions to political problems. When public education comes under attack, they respond with research studies, expert testimony, carefully written policy papers, and appeals to evidence. These are valuable tools, but they cannot substitute for organized power.
Unfortunately, this outlook is often reinforced by the union bureaucracy itself. Because teachers’ unions exist primarily to negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions within the existing system, their leadership frequently frames political struggles as technical policy disputes rather than expressions of broader class conflict. Members are encouraged to lobby legislators, cultivate relationships with elected officials, commission research, and issue carefully worded public statements. While these tactics may occasionally produce limited reforms, they also encourage teachers to view themselves primarily as a profession seeking recognition from those in power rather than as workers building independent power against them.
This orientation is not simply the result of individual leaders making poor strategic choices. It reflects the social function of bureaucratic union leadership under capitalism. The bureaucracy’s role is to manage conflict, negotiate compromises, and preserve institutional stability. It therefore has a material interest in channeling teachers’ anger into procedures that remain compatible with the existing political order. The development of independent working-class consciousness, by contrast, inevitably pushes beyond those limits. It asks educators to see their struggle not as a dispute between experts over educational policy but as one front in a broader conflict between labor and capital.
The consequence is that many teachers become politically disarmed. They come to believe that better evidence, stronger curriculum, more persuasive arguments, or another legislative campaign will eventually convince those in power to leave public education alone. Yet while educators produce research, opponents organize. While teachers write reports, opponents file lawsuits. While academics debate, political organizations build networks capable of exerting pressure on school boards, districts, legislatures, and the courts. One side understands that political power determines outcomes. The other too often behaves as though evidence alone can overcome organized power. History has repeatedly demonstrated that it cannot.
The recent battles over ethnic studies illustrate this clearly. While educators have produced extensive research demonstrating the educational benefits of ethnic studies, opponents have organized politically. While teachers have appealed to evidence, others have built networks capable of influencing school boards, legislatures, courts, and public opinion. One side has often approached the conflict as an academic debate. The other has approached it as a political struggle.
Politics is not won by evidence alone.
It is won through organization.
The Limits of Union Bureaucracy
This misunderstanding also shapes how many educators view their unions. Teachers need unions, and every gain won over the past century has depended upon collective organization. But unions alone cannot substitute for a politically conscious working class. A union can negotiate wages, benefits, and working conditions. It can defend members from arbitrary discipline. It can organize strikes under certain conditions. These are indispensable functions.
At the same time, unions operating within capitalism face structural limits. Their daily responsibility is to negotiate the terms under which workers labor within the existing system. They are not, by themselves, organizations designed to transform that system. As Leon Trotsky argued, trade unions arise to defend workers’ immediate interests under capitalism, but because of that role they tend to develop bureaucracies oriented toward negotiation and stability. Their limitations are not simply the product of poor leadership but of their social function.
This does not mean unions should be abandoned. It means they cannot carry the entire burden of social transformation.
Class Consciousness Beyond the Union
The task before educators is therefore larger than electing better union officers or passing stronger resolutions. It requires developing working-class consciousness. It requires recognizing that the struggle over curriculum, wages, surveillance, privatization, housing costs, healthcare, racism, sexism, and imperialism are not isolated battles. They are different expressions of the same social order.
Teachers will not defeat these attacks alone.
Nor should they try.
One Working Class, One Struggle
The strength of the working class has never resided in isolated professions acting independently. Its strength emerges when workers recognize their common interests across industries and occupations. Teachers have more in common with nurses fighting hospital closures than with the consultants hired to evaluate their classrooms. They have more in common with longshore workers defending their unions than with the investment firms profiting from privatized education. They have more in common with warehouse workers monitored by algorithms than with politicians demanding ever more surveillance inside schools.
Capitalism depends upon fragmentation. It encourages each profession to understand its problems as unique. Teachers worry about curriculum. Nurses worry about staffing. Transit workers worry about privatization. Warehouse workers worry about automation. Each struggle appears separate.
But they are not separate.
They are different fronts in the same conflict between those who own and those who work.
Recognizing that reality is not merely an intellectual exercise. It is the foundation of solidarity. Teachers who understand themselves as workers stop asking only what is best for education and begin asking what is necessary for the emancipation of the entire working class. They recognize that the future of public education cannot be separated from the future of healthcare, housing, labor rights, and democratic freedoms. They understand that an injury to one section of workers ultimately weakens them all.
Choosing Sides
The question, then, is not whether teachers are professionals.
Of course they are.
The real question is whether professionalism obscures their more fundamental identity as workers.
If it does, then professionalism becomes not a source of strength but a barrier to liberation.
Teachers deserve respect for their expertise. They deserve compensation that reflects the importance of their work. They deserve the autonomy necessary to educate honestly. But none of those goals will be secured by appealing to the goodwill of those who benefit from the existing order.
They will be secured only when educators recognize themselves for what they have always been: members of the working class whose liberation depends upon the liberation of the working class as a whole.