Surplus Education Part 2

Helen Rollins

07 July 2025

This essay is extracted and adapted from an extended article called Notes From the Private Tutoring Industry, to be published by GCAS later in 2025. It tackles the proletarianising process caused by the neo-liberalisaton of education, as opposed to its necessary socialisation, from the perspective of a tutor and the encounter with her clients over the course of ten years. The article looks particularly at the tendency of the rate of profit to decline in the wider capitalist economy and how education has been weaponised as a commodity to mitigate against this tendency. The effects that this has wrought have been extremely damaging: upon the university and in terms of value extraction from students and workers. The article analyses the condition of education relative to her clients’ class position across a broad spectrum: from students taken on pro bono, to the children of high-net-worth families. In this section, the article looks at this extremely wealthy group, a cohort that has replaced more middle-class families amongst her client base, as the value of education as a commodity was gradually undermined and the willingness of middle-class individuals to invest in the promise of the commodity waned. It concludes with the conditions of the ‘surplus graduate’ class and the effects of their sacrifice via education (appropriated by the market) upon their subjectivity and upon collective politics.

Wealth at the End of Days

Just as the clientele of the average UK-based private tutor has shifted in character from in-country parents to international ones, their economic position has also changed. As the economy has become increasingly unequal — accelerated again in recent years by the policies of the COVID pandemic — the clients of private tutors are often becoming increasingly ‘elite’. The middle classes are getting poorer and have had to cut back. Fewer are motivated to make sacrifices for the promise of a university education that is becoming more hollow as job prospects and salaries have contracted.

On the other hand, ultra-high-net-worth families often have so much wealth that they can buy their children out of the system education altogether, in terms of their attendance at both public and private schools. Still, however — though not for long, perhaps — they must abide by the law, which dictates that their children must be educated. In these instances, they employ private tutors on a full-time basis. These tutors live with their extremely wealthy employers and often travel with them around the globe.

Within some ultra-rich environments, the quality and direction of education differs substantially compared to the kind of teaching a tutor will do with other, more middle-class or working-class students. Billionaires are so rich that there is often now no motivation at all for them to send their children to even the most elite institutions for university; their position is so rarified that cultural recognition by the masses is worthless and their children, their children’s children and their children’s children’s children will never need to be qualified to earn a living. The extreme volumes of money the billionaire class has in its possession have become a protective barrier against a confrontation with the dialectical subjectivity of the masses, in a dynamic analogous to the building of emergency bunkers or the flight to Mars for the few. The extremely wealthy no longer need the cultural recognition of the many precisely because they are so rich.

The compounding processes that inequality is having on the economy (the more unequal the society, the more asset prices increase, the more poor and middle class people are impoverished because they need to sell off their assets to survive, which puts more money in the pockets of the rich, which leads them to buy more assets, pushing up assets prices further) has meant that a new elite class has solidified itself very quickly. Inequality seems to have reached a point of escape velocity since the rise of tech utopianism has ideologically mystified what has gone on and since the global rate of profit has neared zero (because of automation), leading to more extreme attempts to extract value from the masses. Fantasies that tech will magically resolve the intractable contradictions of capitalism (and all life on this planet) have led governments to permit previously illegal business practices that have been rebranded as liberatory. Capital mobility has permitted the avoidance of tax, which has had the second-order consequence that corporations and billionaires are in the ascendency over governments, who are themselves going bankrupt and, in a last ditch attempt at ‘job creation’, go to these wealthy entities cap in hand with offers of further tax breaks and grants, to their own further detriment, lest the corporations move their business interests elsewhere. Misguided policies of austerity have further impoverished citizens of increasingly impecunious states who can no longer raise sufficient money from the only sector of society that still pays tax: normal people.

Because of the rapid ascent and solidification of the new rich, their cultural character differs greatly from the old feudal elite and the legacy aristocracy, which eventually dwindled through post-war social democracy. The values of these latter groups spoke to the historic nature of their wealth. The values of the new tech and oligarchical elite speaks to the novelty of theirs. ‘Noblesse oblige’, for example, was a strong ideological foil for the wealth of the aristocracy, which was not justified by a ‘meritocratic’ earning of money (as billionaires who have come to wealth via their own ‘entrepreneurial nous’ may claim is the source of theirs). Historically, social order was ‘god-given’, unearned and required some level of earthly penance, for example the participation in civic life, which often required an education. In some ways, the ideology of noblesse oblige contributed to the end of the aristocracy itself under capitalism (for example, the explosion of industrialisation in Britain confronted society with its inequality and many redistributive policies were driven not only by workers’ campaigns but also by the cultural unacceptability of capitalism’s horror in an era when the wealthy had an — albeit tenuous — ‘responsibility’ endowed upon them by 'god' for their flock).

There were further cultural reasons for legacy elites under earlier modes of capitalism to value education. At one time, having wealth meant that one was spared the necessity of participating in trade and making conscious shows of being in such a position was of cultural importance. Since education had yet to be incorporated into the auspices of capitalism, one was educated precisely because it revealed that one had time and resources to pursue activities less immediately tied to survival than labour. Since education has been commoditised, learning is labour: value is generated both by student debt and by rises in educational standards, appropriated via the capitalist class who exploit workers that are much more qualified than in past decades and who do not have to pay for on-the-job education. Education, in a contemporary sense, is ‘beneath’ those who can abstract themselves from the obligation to generate surplus value via studying and to compete for grades.

Today, the nouveau riche have often made their money in roles that do not require elite education (enterprise, investments, tax evasion and ‘influencing’, for example) and thus may not value it as a cultural artefact. Tutors are often employed solely to meet a legal requirement or to entertain their children. Whereas, in recent years, the credentials of a tutor could may have been valued by the rich as a show of wealth (‘my child’s tutor went to Harvard’; ‘mine has a PhD from Yale’), the rapid impoverishment of the tutor relative to billionaire parents means that the relation is becoming one no longer marked by the same levels of transference and respect that still marks that between the tutor and the international aspirant parent, or the historically middle-class British parents, who value (or valued) the ‘power’ the tutor may have to improve their child’s material condition, and it is often therefore difficult for the tutor to motivate the ultra-high-net-worth student to learn.

Overall, therefore, the nature of quantum wealth in the 21st century has devalued education. Analogously, education’s commodification via the promise that it could mitigate against the collapsing capitalist economy — already identifiable at the turn of the century — has undermined its value for those who are less wealthy, though in slightly different ways.

Educated Out of Thought and Reason

Particularised, divided, entrapped by market forces — the masses have no clear route to challenge the accumulative drive that abstracts the wealthy from communal life. In an economy where unemployment is high and job security is scarce, traditional strikes lose their effectiveness because fewer people are employed and thus cannot leverage their collective power to control supply chains and the means of production. Without jobs, workers lack the bargaining power to influence employers or to demand better conditions. Because of graduates’ indebtedness, their proliferation and their position in a ‘holding pen’ (waiting for a role that has been traditionally considered prestigious, that may still hold the promise of high earnings over the course of a career and that makes good on the sacrifice made and cultural capital aspired to), employers are able to offer graduates lower salaries; the capitalist class has the market advantage.

In this context, with little recourse to capital and to traditional mechanisms by which to lobby for their rights, we may look to Slavoj Žižek’s suggestion that one ‘[shouldn’t] act, just think’. Here, critical thinking (fostered, in an ideal sense, by education itself) becomes a vital political tool, one of the remaining means by which the subject can come to at least understand and clarify the economic calamity that surrounds them. By fostering awareness and solidarity, this approach can drive collective action and cause us to advocate for systemic change, addressing the root causes of economic inequality. One such change may be in terms of an understanding and lobbying for an alteration in states’ direction relative to the extractive forces of mobile capital that escapes tax. Without a bare acknowledgement of this situation, there can be no rectifying methods like international agreements and small nations will be continually driven to offer greater and greater incentives to house and facilitate capital extraction via tax avoidance, impoverishing themselves and the wider global community in favour of the quantum explosion of capitalists’ wealth. Without tarrying, intellectually and politically, with these factors in the first place, no change can be made.

Unfortunately, however, the kinds of education that have proliferated under its commodification may serve political insight ill. Not only has education been used — over recent decades — to mask the reality of a dwindling economy by promoting the promise that higher qualifications would lead to better job opportunities, by diverting attention from the underlying causes of the lack of available jobs (automation and the collapsing rate of profit) and by removing potential workers from the market place when there were in fact no paid roles on offer for them, it has also engendered a mode of thought that operates against our own best political interest. In our current context, where thinking may be one of the final avenues to change (before policemen and soldiers may be replaced by robots, for example, hampering any possibility of a dialectical conversion within their human subjectivity towards a siding with the people, rather than those in power, a hallmark of any revolution), it is important we exploit our logical faculties — our capacity for reason — to avoid oppositional approaches to our predicament and to develop rational solutions that include everyone, fostering mass political change.

As degrees became products to be bought and sold, not only was there an inevitable oversupply of graduates (a ‘reserve army’ in Marx’s terms) and a devaluation of academic credentials because of their proliferation, but also the ideas into which students have been educated have become more capitalistic: the oppositional logic of problem and solution. Simultaneously, there has been a confident mystification of the structure of this Capitalist Discourse, which Lacan named as the University Discourse in 1969.

Capitalist extraction requires a constant Bad Infinite of ‘problems’ that can never be solved in order to constantly offer ‘solutions’ in order to generate surplus profit — see the slogan of the dating app Hinge (‘designed to be deleted’), if it was successful at matching daters, there would be no market of daters to make profit from. This is in contrast to a logic of reason that tarries with the contradictory nature of real life, a logic of surprise aligned with Hegel’s notion of the Good Infinite and his insight that ‘the owl of Minerva flies at dusk’. We can reasonably learn from history, but we cannot predict the future. We can witness the way the universe unfolds towards us and act accordingly, but we cannot guarantee that an insight or commodity will offer a definitive solution. Hegel explicates this in relation to a linguistic analysis of the signifier ‘A’, the meaning of which can never be directly replicated in another context because it is never ‘at one’ with itself even in its first context. Every attempt at prediction and solution (perhaps even the modest attempt at a political one proffered at the end of this piece) can be taken by the market and sold as a theological entity that may guarantee a closure on the discomfort of the present (this is the logic of learning for profit against learning for learning’s sake).

Capitalism casts the inevitable anxiety we experience as humans (what psychoanalysts may term ‘a haunting by Lack’) as contingent, rather than ontological. But it is only through contradiction, through the fissure in reality, that we come to live and experience self-consciousness at all, self-consciousness being an experience ‘outside’ of ourselves, being beside ourselves and experiencing something more than just our material selves (what many philosophers term Becoming, rather than Being and Julia Kristeva the experience of ‘imminent transcendence’). The fact that capitalism denies reality’s ontological fissure disempowers us from confronting and understanding our reality as it is and tarrying with it.

As Hegel indicates, the given economic structure of a historical moment is a means by which society attempts to manage the contradictions of subjectivity and the world. Capitalism manages contradiction by repressing it, casting it as contingent and corrigible; past orders of history may have blamed contradiction on the whims of unjust gods. As Freud points out, what is repressed returns. The repressed contradictions of capitalism engender greater and greater social problems which favour an embedding of the urgency of a capitalist problem-solution logic within our mechanisms of critique. The more devastating capitalism renders the present, the more radical the change required, the more the urgency of the moment can be weaponised by the market to proffer solutions in a logic of the war of all against all, the more the solutions fail and the more we turn to scapegoats who sustain the image that there exists a perfect world beyond contradiction, just out of reach cast in our chosen scapegoat’s shadow. This is the logic of the fascist, one that rears its head consistently in capitalism when it fails, and when it blames its failures on the behaviours of individuals, rather that the system as such. Here, Žižek’s insight that one can still be a hypochondriac and have terminal cancer is extremely pertinent. It is possible for reality to be extremely bad and riven by problems and for humans to use those problems as a mechanism to mystify the ontological ‘problem’ of reality itself, rendering it contingent.

Every atom in our universe, every symbol, every word is marked by a generative contradiction such that a precise ‘copy’ of our expectations can never be regenerated in another context, despite our need for the comfort that they can be. Magical thinking is a residue of the calamitous, but also generative, nature of our self-consciousness and of our universe: that we are generated by Lack. Capitalist logic is utopic in its promise to offer purity and demands quasi-religious sacrifice from us (that can never be made good on, on an ontological level) to consistently extract value — like, for example, taking on hundreds of thousands in debt for endless degrees and spending decades perfecting oneself in an ‘educational' environment. In this sense, education is the perfect capitalist commodity.

For Lacan, in his elucidation of the University Discourse, institutions come to teach students to think within capitalist logics, whilst cloaking them in the borrowed aesthetics of critical theories. This is a notion he develops in Seminar XX when he examines how confident, often ‘political’ critiques, become canonised and concretised and emptied of their radical capacity to undermine systems of power as they become absorbed by them. The prestige of being ‘lettered’ can come to mask a reactionary ideology, particularly for those trained to manage capital, where recognising contradiction would undermine their ability to act as functionaries of the market system. It is for this reason that many point out that some students emerge from degrees as if ‘educated out’ of the kinds of rational and common sense thinking that they may otherwise have engaged in — particularly relative to the real functionings of capitalism — if they were to have worked a normal job, in favour of ideological approaches and abstraction.

Whilst education (particularly of the bourgeois kind that students have imbibed at neoliberal institutions) itself may not offer the tools to see through capitalist toxicity, many years of engagement in the fantasy offered by these institutions (that education can lead us to be exceptions within capitalism), combined with a student’s near inevitable proletarianisation, may prove a potent mix. As many theoreticians have pointed out — from Bloch, to Tillich, to Weil, to Heidegger — ‘only a Christian can be an atheist’. Only in going to the end of the logic of the promise of oneness in alterity (offered by submission to the commodity or to a religious ideology), can one be confronted by the abject emptiness of that promise. This tutor, for example, submitting herself to the logic of the credential, abiding by the promise that earning certificates would empower her to be an exception to the capitalist imperative — rather than further being entrapped within it through debt — was only confronted by the abject failure of the commodity by going to its end, when it earned her the privilege of becoming a servant to the new elite: a confrontation with a contradiction of the promise of the commodity that can only make one more Marxist (let us not forget that Marx’s economic sagacity was not found in his promise — as taken up by reactionary political groups — that ‘communism’ would be enacted at a predetermined time (ironically, a very capitalist promise), but in his reading of capitalism’s contradictions and his insight that these untenable contradictions would have to lead to a reformulation of economic conditions lest civilisation collapse. In this sense, he is Hegel’s heir.).

Rather than university education directly making graduates more perspicacious as to the ravages of capitalism (especially in the context where the ‘critical theories’ learned at university themselves, conceived of to critique the economy and lead the collective to emancipation, have been de-radicalised by their inclusion in the neoliberal university and weaponised as a mystification mechanism for the functioning of capital), an ulterior residue may be emerging: that graduates are confronted by the failure of their degrees in the context of their impoverishment, a trauma that is intense because of the extreme sacrifice of their efforts.

Purity Spirals

Whilst this contradiction between the promise of the degree and the failure of the economic system to make good on that promise could be imagined as a locus of emancipatory potential, the trauma of confronting the truth of the system may be too powerful for the graduate — who has sacrificed their youth for accreditation — to bear and may, instead, draw them towards reactionary politics. To make good on the sacrifice of their education, graduates may become all the more driven to secure a position within the capitalist system, even at the cost of their wellbeing (for Freud, the subject would rather drive towards closure (or subjective death) than tarry with the Lack that marks reality, which itself is often made manifest — horrifyingly so — in the contradictions of the impossible promise to overcome Lack in the commodity). In recent years, we have seen a rise in purity politics and mutual cancellation amongst the surplus graduate class who are numerous and compete for jobs. Purity politics, where bereft subjects partly recognise the import of left-wing ideals upon material critique — especially those they have learned at university and that set them apart from those who haven’t attended — allow for the divided subject to simultaneously believe they are acting in their best interest against the capitalist system and reproduce conditions of competition and meritocracy at the level of subjectivity, a further means by which the capitalist market has come to extract value. The promise and false security of accreditation have been replaced by the promise and false security of recognition for ‘being good’ or for bearing the views that are compatible with reactionary institutions that require the projection of certain values as an ideological foil to their extractive position in the capitalist economy.

Nonetheless, given that students have been traumatically confronted — and therefore libidinally and in terms of affect — with the lie of the promise of their education, there may well be an opening here. In this context, students may be able to reflect on their education in novel ways. The capacity for thought into which they may have been trained at university (through reading and the writing of essays, for example) — which may have been blunted if they were to adopt a bourgeois managerial position or if they were to have encountered to much University Discourse during their time in education — has been sharpened for many by the experience of their own proletarianisation since they have been confronted, in a material way, with the contradictions of the capitalist promise (here, Freud’s dictum that ’it is not enough to reason your way to the cure’ is relevant — learning facts about the structure of reality, subjectivity and the economy that emerges from them is not enough, but a direct, lived experience of those contradictions may be more powerful).

Students, therefore — through the combination of years of study and the real-world experience of their own proletarianisation — may be developing a capacity to think beyond the illogic of the market system and, because of their training in reading and writing at university, they may have become endowed with ability to communicate these ideas to broader audiences, including to the managers of capital who were once their peers.

Elsewhere, in certain cases, students who have either contingently encountered teachers within the neoliberal institution that valued ideas beyond the capitalist imperative or those who have been educated at institutions whose cultural values (or prestige) mitigate against the imperative of that institution’s marketisation, may have been educated into forms of logic that threaten the large part of contemporary, reactionary institutions. These reactionary institutions are those that — in today’s climate — must undermine themselves to sustain their place within the capitalist economy. Such graduates, who happen to have avoided the worst effects of education’s neo-liberalisation, may pose a threat to the centre and — in a mode that echoes the Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, which harkened Greco-Roman society’s demise — have had to be excluded since they threaten the institution (like the rational ‘fixer’ Archibald Tuttle, who is outlawed by the illogical bureaucracy in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil precisely because he is such a good handyman), often via ideological narratives that act as a foil against the egregious illogic of this capitalist imperative. For example, the success of a student may lead them to be considered ‘too privileged’ for inclusion in an institution, even if they have achieved their grades despite huge material disadvantages and their place may be granted to a materially advantaged candidate whose contingent identity status aligns with the market imperative to mystify real forms of privilege (class). As a result, what may be being generated here is a hyper-educated reserve army of the unemployed, one comprised of both of society’s most perspicacious and those most confronted by the illogic of capitalism’s favoured mystification mechanism: identity politics against a politics of class. If this group directs their consciousness towards universal emancipation, our toxic political economy may be under threat.

In the context of the dynamics touched upon above, surplus graduates of the world must unite and must do so in ways that foreground thinking through the contradictions of capitalism that has proletarianised them. Further, they must think with people of all kinds — those who went to university and those who did not — understanding our shared material position under capitalism and our shared capacity for logic and reason, as well as the possibility for our collective emancipation in the right material conditions. It is certainly the case that opportunities for mass democratic change have been missed in recent years. An example of this was Corbyn’s failure at election in 2019, where — it has been argued — normal people were put off voting for his government given the appearance that his followers favoured cultural, rather than material, politics. Young commentators, deemed to represent the values of the so-called ‘Labour’ Party at the time, were regularly put forward on television shows like Question Time and The Wright Stuff and spoke of issues that related to cultural ideas learned at university, rather than material politics. This was perhaps an example of downwardly mobile graduates who would prefer to identify with relatively cultural elite values, learned at huge cost during an ‘elite’ education, alienating working class people, rather than aligning with them and leading to a collective voting (here, through Corbyn) in the universal best interest on an economic plane.

Unfortunately, as psychoanalytic writer Vakhtang Gomelauri has pointed out, subjects are willing to exhaust every effort to maintain a fantasy image of themselves, or subjective stability, ‘even at the cost of their lives’. When graduates have sacrificed so much and been so traumatised by their loss of footing, for which a ‘meritocratic’ capitalist ideology — instilled through education — has led them to cast blame, even unconsciously, upon themselves, many would rather die than accept their proletarianised position. Indeed, it has been common in the UK for young graduates to label those whose cultural values they don’t agree with — but those with whom they may share a financial position — as ‘mouth breathers’ or ‘Gammons’, in a mode of political snobbery delineated (critically) by Marx in Chapter 3 of the Communist Manifesto when he evokes the pitfalls of bourgeois socialism. This tendency is particularly true in countries like the UK where education has long been wrought on along classist lines. Phrases like, ‘you should study hard or you will end up stacking shelves at Tesco’ was frequent refrain in schools in the 90s and 00s, an ironic turn of the screw of history given the average UK graduate’s debt in 2025 is £45,000 and their salary £28,000, 14 months after graduation. This is against a £25,000 full-time salary at Tesco. There is no argument here in favour of low workers’ salaries; it is, in fact, the poverty of workers’ wages that has inspired the willingness of students to continue to buy the lottery ticket of education as an alternative to a low wage. A recognition, however — and symbolic ‘digestion’ of the fact (to borrow a Bionian metaphor) that the average graduate is in a similar, and sometimes worse, position to an average worker may inspire collectivist action and the vouching for collective rights, as well as a fight for better pay for all workers under the regime of mobile, global capital. Sympathy for the graduate is vital here, just as it is for the worker. Many theorists have been capable of reasoning out a subjectively destitute individual’s choice to vote for Trump or Brexit in 2016, but few have recognised how traumatic and unfair the lot of the proletarianised graduate has also been.

A Politics for All

Since capitalism is an economic system that aims to totalise (but must always exclude a novel, contingent object or orientalised Other for the promise of future value extraction), the only means by which to defeat it is through a logic of true universalism, which logically includes Lack and Contradiction. Whilst within contemporary University Discourse, universalism has been equated with liberalism and capitalism, this critique is unfounded. Capitalism relies on a particularist ideology disguised as universalism. It uses ‘universalism’ as a positivist Master Signifier that denies its own contradictions. Particularist, progressive narratives often critique this misguided universalism, but are readily appropriated by capitalism to justify and disguise worsening material conditions and to offer new sites of exploitation via an Orientalist logic or the claim that singular groups possess essential or transcendent qualities. Here, the wrongly categorised ‘universal’ western subject must learn from the Other, appropriating a ‘novel’ logic which can be commoditised (Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility is an example of this). In reality, all commoditisation is based on a false promise. All reality and all subjectivity is marked by a Lack (or Contradiction) that can never be absolved. The capitalist exploiter is, in reality — despite what capitalism claims — as subjectively destitute as the reserve army of underemployed graduates that he has created. The money he has appropriated is excessive, dangerously so. But its excess points to its impotence at assuaging the Lack it aims to absolve.

It is only when All is included in our collective logical framework — Lack and Contradiction, included — that there can no longer be a novel site of extraction offered for profit. If there is no exception, no outside to our collective logic (a universalist logic that embraces a Lack that cannot be assuaged), no new thing can be commoditised. When applied to the university, this would be a site of socialised education.

It is also only through mass movements that embrace All that we can change our political economy since it is so broadly embedded in our world. Movements must include people of all positions and all beliefs, for the material benefit of everyone. (This is particularly true under our global regime of seemingly un-taxable mobile capital: states must work together to navigate the possible capturing of tax together, universally, lest we all descend into total impoverishment and total capture by the billionaire class.)

Those who went to university must forgo the promise that a neo-liberalised education could ever offer them the status of exception; it was always a capitalist fantasy. Within the R/real world, we all share something that cannot be changed: nothing itself. To embrace this nothing (or subjective Lack) — which cannot be purified by the appropriation of value, cannot be absolved by the buying of a commodity or the achievement of a degree — is to undermine the logic of the market. And it is particularly important today within a privatised 'public' realm where subjectivity itself has been commoditised, rendering collective politics — rather than competitive chimeras of the same, often spurred on by capitalist logics imbibed at university — nearly impossible.

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Helen Rollins is a writer and filmmaker interested in the intersection between art and philosophy. She has written, directed and produced several short films that have played in festivals throughout the world. She is the author of Psychocinema.

Helen's Everyday Analysis pamphlet, Babyface, is available here. 

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