Author Archives: hallymk1

Some notes on the associational and democratic organising principles of a co-operative University


Posted by hallymk1

ONE: outing capitalism

We need to talk about capitalism. We need to talk about this because of the systemic failure of capitalist counter-measures to enable the process of accumulation to be stabilised, and of growth to be renewed. The failure of these counter-measures, including the incorporation of new markets, the extraction of new forms of liquid energy, the printing of money, the redistribution of capital from production to services and financialiation, and the attack on labour rights/wages, is seen in the purely economic discourse that wraps around both everyday life and public policy.

What this ongoing failure tends to highlight is the opportunity to develop lasting critiques of the mechanics of capitalism, its social relations and organising principles. Across the range of ruptures that currently infect capitalism, from the failure to lever growth across the global North in spite of counter-measures to the ongoing social protests in Brazil, Chile, China, Egypt and elsewhere, we have a moment when the structuring realities of capitalism as an historically-situated system of domination can be revealed. For Postone (p. 70), this is central to a critique of our unfreedom. Thus,

history, grasped as the unfolding of an immanent necessity, should be understood as delineating a form of unfreedom. That form of unfreedom is the object of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism, which is centrally concerned with the imperatives and constraints that underlie the historical dynamics and structural changes of the modern world. That is, rather than deny the existence of such unfreedom by focusing on contingency, the Marxian critique seeks to uncover its basis and the possibility of its overcoming.’

What becomes more critical is our ability to demonstrate both the historical and the socially-constructed nature of the objective relations of capitalism. Understanding “the systemic constraints imposed by capital’s global dynamic on democratic self-determination” (Postone, p. 79) is then the object that underpins the deliberation of alternatives. However, these alternatives also need to be debated in the face if the lived realities of their emergence inside capitalism, so that it becomes possible to recognise how

human social production has been accomplished through ongoing historical injustice. The Industrial Revolution’s massive amplification of material wealth was founded on the exploitation of both individual and social labors, and also on the increasing ownership and concentration of the tools and other means of production in the hands of capital. Historically, human sociality in production has been brought about when the worker’s labor is expropriated by the conventions of private property and accumulated stock; that is, it has come about in an alienated form. The benefit of human sociality for the productive process as a whole has been founded on an alienated distribution wherein labor is not returned its due. (Wendling, p. 33)

Is it possible for the social relations that are reproduced transnationally for the valorisation of value and for the seizure of surplus value by an elite class, and which reduce labour through processes of arbitrage to a factor of production, to be resisted? Is it possible for resistance to liberate human subjectivity?

In determining answers to these questions, it is important to out the threats to the existence of capitalism: first, from a revelation of the mechanisms through which its internal contradictions and crises arise, based in-part on politicising issues of environmental catastrophe and social justice; second, from a revelation of the systemic failure to reassert stable accumulation on a global basis, based in-part on politicising issues of intergenerational justice and disenfranchisement; and third, from a revelation of the socio-historical nature of solidarity that emerges from global, social protest and resistance. As Cleaver writes about this secular crisis of capitalism, it is crucial that we crystallise the multitude of “antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings”, so that we are able to delineate “the study of the struggles for liberation from the constraints of capitalism as a social system.”

This is how I begin to respond to Joss Winn’s recent argument for the post-capitalist University that is inside-and-against the existing University, which exists as means for the valorisation of capital. He argues that:

agency should not be measured by the extent that we are able to resist or abolish the system of domination, but instead a dialectical approach would recognise that a post-capitalist university would be developed out of the conditions of possibility which the existing university has produced. In other words, an ‘anti-capitalist’ approach misses both the point of resistance and the target. What is required is the overcoming of the capitalist modes of valorisation.

Disruption of the University or higher education as a mechanism for reproducing the structuring inequalities of capitalism might include developing histories and practices rooted in the commons or community/gift-based economies, which are predicated on alternative forms of distribution and production. However, a more useful place to start is the organising principles of the University inside capitalism, and their relationship to competition and co-operation.

TWO: competition or co-operation?

As the work of Simon Clarke highlights, the realities of competition and co-operation need to be seen in light of the concept of value, which is characteristic of a society in which social relations emerge between independent producers regulated through market-mechanisms. For Marx, this has an economic, quantitative form that emerges from the processes of accumulation, and also a social, qualitative form that underpins class struggle. In-part this struggle takes the form of the ownership of labour and the mechanisms through which labour-power is reduced to a wage. However, it also enables a discussion of the specific character of labour that creates value; of capitalist work as specifically human labour.

Thus, revealing Capital as value-in-motion, as a system able to expand itself through the treadmill dynamics of competition, or as `self-valorising value’, enables a richer analysis of the mechanisms through which this expansion takes place. These mechanisms include competition and co-operation, and they apply as much to the University as any other competing Capital. In Chapter 13 of Volume I of Capital, Marx treats co-operation as the logical foundation and the historical starting point of capitalist production: the point of departure for manufacturing through the real subsumption of labour. Revealing the forms of co-operation inside the factory, demonstrates how capitalists used co-operative practices to even out the differences between individual workers and to give labour a “socially average character” (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 440-41). Moreover, co-operation in the manufacturing process is focused around capital intensity, delivering economies of scale, and reducing the costs of production, as well as driving efficiencies through changes to the labour process.

Co-operation rooted in capitalist production processes is thus predicated on competitive advantage, and this makes the subjection of labour to capital a “real condition of production” (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 448). Moreover, the productive power of collective labour appears to be a “productive power inherent in capital” (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 451). Thus, co-operation is the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production and within the factory this enables: new forms of the division of labour; the deskilling of labour; the domination of man by the machine and time; and, the separation of mental from manual labour (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, pp. 542-53). Thus co-operation, and especially machinic co-operation, forms a weapon in the struggle of capital against labour.

We might then ask whether it is possible to utilise forms of social co-operation to overcome the alienation inherent in capitalism and to liberate human subjectivity? Do the realities of labour as a function of the valorisation process mean that it is not possible to imagine alternatives, however co-operative in nature they may be? Can co-operation help overcome the realities of accumulation by dispossession, which separate “the workers and the ownership of the conditions for the realisation of their labour” (Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p. 874)?

A starting point, as Marx highlights in Volume I of Capital, is to reveal the structures inside which co-operation forms:

The capitalist process of production… seen as a total, connected process, i.e. a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capital-relation itself; on the one hand the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer. (p. 724)

One proposed mechanism for opposition is to reintroduce the idea of co-operation, perhaps as opposed to fetishising the structure/reality of co-operatives. Such a reintroduction would create politicised spaces for associational democracy. These might be worker- or producer-co-operatives, through which democracy is produced and reproduced as an organising principle. Moreover, their associational nature might enable solidarity between spaces that are formed co-operatively and democratically.

We might then ask how might co-operation reinforce or rupture the incessant reproduction and perpetuation of separation inside the system? Is it possible to reveal spaces or to liberate time that stand against expropriation, inequality, uncertainty, injustice and poverty? Can these spaces, times, or space-times be co-operative? If they might be co-operative then what do they imply for our understanding of labour or capitalist work, and for the organising principles of a society that is predicted on value (or self-valorising value)?

THREE: the co-operative university and associational democracy?

Recasting the idea of the co-operative university demands that we reveal the organising principles of the neoliberal university, which politicises the space-time of higher education as means for accumulation. This demands that we investigate the historical and material nature of the University and the extent to which co-operative practices or knowledges or space-times can be inscribed inside it or liberated from it. This is important for Joss Winn who writes:

Taking this view, the trajectory of higher education and its conceived role and purpose in public life over the last century can only be fully understood through a critique of capitalism as the historical mode of production which (re-)produces the university. This critical, intellectual effort must be combined with practical efforts to take control of the means of knowledge production so as to assume a democratic, co-operative form.

In some recent notes on the University, the state and democratic protest, I reflected on this in terms of liberation and association.

At issue is where we create/liberate spaces in which debates can take root. In an interesting set of tweets this month Jehu has argued the following:

“If you want to fight capital, your cannot fight it on its own terms; you must force it to fight on terrain it does not control.

“The capitalists control money; they control production; and they control the state — why would you choose to fight there?

“What the capitalists do not control is your free time. They have no way to convert this free time into capitalist profits.”

Jehu then reiterates Marx and Engels’ points around the need for association that:

“In labor theory the interest of a class, ‘achieves an independent existence over against the individuals’.

“Since the proletariat has no class interest, it can put an end to all classes.

“This argument is absolutely critical to Engels’ and Marx’s argument. because it means they have no choice but to enter into a voluntary …

… association to control their conditions of life together.”

You can read Jehu’s longer position on the difference between association and the State. However, he makes the important points that:

“The critical concept [is]the relation of the state to the class whose interest the state represents in an ideal form… The ideal expression of the interest of the bourgeois class, its general representative, is the bourgeois state… the proletariat have no choice but to enter into a voluntary association to control their conditions of life together. No state can give them this control, only their association… [the proletariat] is incapable of acting as a class and must act as individuals, these individuals must abolish class politics itself — they must overthrow the state.”

In a later post, Jehu quotes Zilbersheid reminder that “the abolition of labor [is] one of Marx’s most important ideas:

“At the core of the highest phase of communist society, as described in Marx’s early writings, is the abolition of labour. The more famous abolition of private property, the well-known abolition of the state, and the lesser-known abolition of the division of labour are all conditional upon the abolition of labour itself.

“At issue then are the mechanisms through which education is recalibrated to reduce free-time and to maintain the legitimacy and hegemony of the bourgeois state.”

Joss Winn develops this point when he writes that we need to out capitalism, and in particular “the domination of the logic of value, which mediates labour and therefore all social relations”. He notes that “it is not sufficient to control the specific means of production i.e. a ‘firm’. The problem must be tackled at all levels of society, locally, nationally and internationally, in order to overcome the overwhelming logic of this valorisation process located in both the production and the exchange of commodities”.

One way of beginning to address this problem might be to look again at the associational and democratic circuits not of the common but of the commune. When writing about the Paris Commune, Marx argued that the Commune stood in antithesis to the Napoleonic Empire, as the positive form of the Republic. Moreover, he argued that through education, the general intellect/science was freed from the fetters placed upon it by class and government, in order that the Commune could represent the idea of self-government for the producers. This form of self-government was anti-hierarchical and served:

as a lever for uprooting the economical foundation upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore class rule. With labour emancipated, every man becomes a working man, and productive labour ceases to be a class attribute (Marx, 2008, p. 50).

Moreover, this form of anti-economic, collective self-government was predicated upon co-operation and the abolition of labour or capitalist work through communism.

If co-operative production is not to remain a sham and a snare; if it is to supersede the capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodic convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production – what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, “possible” communism? (Marx, 2008, p. 50).

Inside the University as means for the production of value this requires what Gill (p. 19) has identified as resistance to “divisive, individualizing practices, [to] the silences around them, [to] the fact also that people are too exhausted to resist and furthermore do not know what to resist or how to do so.” These individualised practices are framed inside the creation of entrepreneurial, autonomous, self motivating, responsibilised subjects, and they underpin delegitimisation that is gendered, racialised and classed, and too-often based on competition.

Outing the dynamics of individuated competition and restating the possibilities of association, solidarity and alliance are key to the definition of a co-operative University that is inside-against-and-beyond the neoliberal, entrepreneurial University. As Cleaver notes:

Competition” has become a prominent slogan of domination in this period of international capitalist restructuring — one used to pit workers against workers. We need to defetishize its meaning by showing how it is merely a particular way of organizing the class struggle. Within the context of Marxist crisis theory we need to do the same and relocate competition within the class struggle rather than outside it… we should substitute the politics of alliance for the replacement of capitalism by a diversity of social projects. A politics of alliance against capital to be conducted not only to accelerate the circulation of struggle from sector to sector of the class, but to do so in such a manner as to build a post-capitalist politics of difference without antagonism.

Association, solidarity and alliance in the space-times that are revealed by the University resist the confinement of social reproduction within limits set by the value-form of labour. They resist the capitalisation of humanity, or our degrading reproduction as human capital (see Rikowski). Paraphrasing Marx, the purpose of the co-operative University based upon associational democracy is to create and liberate forms of space-time (Commons, co-operatives, clubs, social centres, communes, whatever) that enable human beings to distinguish between the techniques employed by capital for valorisation, and to direct their attacks, not against these material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used. Moreover, the associational and democratic organising principles of such a co-operative University need to be predicated on alliance and solidarity with other educational and non-educational forms of resistance. As Clarke argues (2002, p. 55) “The only force that could change the world was the self-organisation of the direct producers who would abolish the production of commodities based on capital and bring social production under conscious social control.”

Defining the associational and democratic organising principles of such a co-operative University forms the task of refusing and pushing-back against neoliberal enclosure of the reality of University life. This is not to recuperate an ideal of the University against the historical realities of capitalism. It is to recuperate the ideas of association, solidarity and alliance, in order to liberate spaces and times for social co-operation and co-operating. One outcome may be the mechanisms through which social production under democratic, social control, can reveal and crack the realities of valorisation.

FOUR: six sets of questions

1. What does this mean for the governance structures of universities? What does it mean for the hierarchical and alienating management and adminstration structures of universities?

2. What does this mean for the university as means for the production of value, as enclosed by: regulators like funding councils and quality agencies; financial regulatory networks, like credit ratings agencies; and transnational activist agencies like the World Bank and IMF?

3. What does this mean for the recalibration of universities against the discourses that are used to restructure them, like impact, entrepreneurship, and employability? What does this mean for academic labour?

4. What does this mean for the fetishisation of the student voice as opposed to participatory democratic engagement by students in the organisation of the University and the curriculum?

5. What does this mean for the organising principles of the curriculum, and the definition of a critical pedagogy that reveals the secular crisis and responses to it?

6. What does this mean for the idea of the University as a public good?


because solidarity is a weapon


Posted by hallymk1

To continue as we are feels difficult. To wait for redemption, or salvation. Inside this secular crisis. As Cleaver writes:

neither the cyclical business downturns nor the upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist counter-measures (local and international), have resolved the underlying problems of the system in such a way as to lay the basis for a renewal of stable accumulation. Thus, secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

The persistence of crisis. Revealed inside-and-against ever more desperate restructuring. As Phoenix Capital notes for China, with a nod to Brazil and the USA:

China is on the verge of a “Lehman” moment as its shadow banking system implodes. China had pumped roughly $1.6 trillion in new credit (that’s 21% of GDP) into its economy in the last two quarters… and China GDP growth is in fact slowing. This is what a credit bubble bursting looks like: the pumping becomes more and more frantic with less and less returns. Check out the collapse in China’s stock market.

The persistence of crisis. The contagion of crisis. Revealed inside-and-against a systemic assault on the future. As the Automaticearth notes of quantitative easing, money printing, and the looming deflationary spiral that will extract value from unborn generations:

What happens with pensions is the same as what happens with unemployment. And with the economy in general, for that matter: all the stimulus measures are mere lipstick for zombies, which are kept undead with trillions upon trillions of dollars borrowed from the future. We reap the undead profit and leave our children with the bill.

The promise of crisis. Revealed as entropy; more than as punctuated equilibrium. As Kunstler notes for the USA:

Everything in America except the Apple stores and a handful of big banks is falling apart — especially the human habitat and households. Suburbia will only lose value and utility. Big cities will have to get smaller (ouch!). Tar sands, shale oil and shale gas will not ride to the rescue (they cost too much to get out of the ground). The entire declension of government from federal to state to local will be too broke to fix the roads and make “transfer payments” to idle, indigent citizens. This populace will lose faith in their institutions… and disorder will eventually resolve in a new and very different disposition of things on-the-ground. If we’re lucky, this will not include cruel despotic leadership and war.

And young people are advised to “consider repudiating your college debt en masse, since the fantasy of repayment is but another mental shackle holding you back from your future.”

The future repatriated to obviate the crisis of the present. The secular crisis inside which all life is subordinated to value. All education is subordinated to value. All knowing is subordinated to value. The crisis of the domination of:

Capitalist rules [that] impose the generalized subordination of human life to work. Whereas all previous class societies have involved the extraction of surplus labor, only in capitalism have all human activities been reshaped as work, as commodity producing labor processes.

The crisis revealed as there is no alternative. The crisis revealed as PRISM; as mastering the internet; inside Brazil as a crisis of representation; as global social domination; as the State’s securitisation of capitalist social relations. Because in the secular crisis:

the problem that capital faces in managing the antagonism of the working class is that of managing not only a shared (though not necessarily allied or even complementary) resistance but also diverse processes of self-constitution repeatedly escaping its rules and precipitating crisis. Capital accumulation requires that capitalist command (thesis) internalize the hostile self-activities of the working class (antithesis) and convert them into contradictions (synthesis) capable of providing dynamism to what is basically a lifeless set of rules/constraints.

The crisis revealed politically, beyond economic determinism, through refusal. The crisis revealed as solidarity; because solidarity is a weapon. The crisis revealed as the courage to discuss capitalism, and the domination of dead over living labour. The crisis revealed through technology as

the problem of imposing work — and thus of maintaining control — [which] becomes more and more acute [just as] the amount of at least potentially free or “disposable” time rises with unemployment, i.e., wagelessness.

And we see this in the recalibration of higher education around global labour arbitrage, the prestige economy and internships, financialisation and debt, and the extraction of socialised value. And what becomes more clear as we wait for the State and its institutions to reimpose a method of accumulation, and to reimpose the logic and domination of work, is the need to find a means by which it is possible to

substitute the politics of alliance for the replacement of capitalism by a diversity of social projects. A politics of alliance against capital to be conducted not only to accelerate the circulation of struggle from sector to sector of the class, but to do so in such a manner as to build a post-capitalist politics of difference without antagonism. It has been the circulation of struggle which has thrown capitalist command into crisis; it is only through the circulation of struggle that the divisions which continue to weaken us can be overcome. Such circulation, however, is not a matter of propagating anti-capitalist ideology but involves the fabrication and utilization of material connections and communications that destroy isolation and permit people to struggle in complementary ways — both against the constraints which limit them and for the alternatives they construct, separately and together.

And to argue for a co-operative moment for higher education, in this secular crisis. Because solidarity is a weapon.


Some notes on the University, the State and democratic protest


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Is this (consumer) capitalism?

The Royal Society’s People and Planet reportfrom 2012 argued that there is an urgent need to address issues of climate change and resource availability across the globe. The report argued:

in the most developed and the emerging economies unsustainable consumption must be urgently reduced. This will entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies. At present, consumption is closely linked to economic models based on growth. Decoupling economic activity from material and environmental throughputs is needed urgently. Changes to the current socio-economic model and institutions are needed to allow both people and the planet to flourish by collaboration as well as competition during this and subsequent centuries. This requires farsighted political leadership concentrating on long term goals.

The relationships between growth and profitability, work and technology have to be addressed unless we are simply aiming to become more efficiently unsustainable. This has ramifications for individuals, institutions, the State, and transnational corporations.

This is more critical given a recent UK Ministry of Defence Strategic Trends Programme report, which highlighted a series of tensions that are likely to emerge around cyber-terrorism, access to resources and the economic impact of increased demand for fossil fuels, climate change, and a normalisation of global GDP. The report argues:

The western ‘way of life’ is often associated with ready access to a wide variety of consumer choice and relatively cheap energy. This is likely to be increasingly challenged as lifestyles follow GDP levels and ‘normalise’ across the globe. This trend will have significant impact within the US and the UK, where the way of life for the bulk of their populations may be challenged by rising energy and resource. prices, and the declining availability of finance to sustain discretionary spending.

Moreover, the report’s authors make a case for rebalancing the economy and using the relationship between education and technology as a driver in that process.

Across the West, it is possible that enrolment on science, technology, engineering and mathematics educational courses will remain low relative to South Asia … Graduates from India and China, will become more visible and lead trans-national companies, particularly in technical and engineering fields. The implementation of long-term strategies to educate the UK population and revive these technical disciplines may be of increasing importance to maintain an innovation base and a competitive national economy. Key-skilled workers, scientists and researchers who develop the complex technologies which underpin cyber security, space, nuclear, stealth and bio-medical technologies will be increasingly prized.

This ties into the recent Institute for Public Policy Research report, A critical path: Securing the future of higher education in England, which highlighted the importance of specific technologically-driven strategies that are designed to rebalance the economy as productive and resilient. In terms of higher education, a much more diverse experience is signalled, for instance through universities embracing “the potential of new technologies by recognising credit from low-­cost online courses so that these may count, in part, towards degree programmes.”

Rebalancing the economy. Rebalancing the State. Rebalancing business-as-usual.

TWO. The tensions between capitalism, education and the State.

What is increasingly clear is that the rush to embrace innovation in services, technologies and cultures has ramifications beyond the maintenance of the rate of profit. For sure, there are important issues of data security and privacy, cyber-terrorism and snooping, alongside matters of outsourcing and raising the digital literacy of citizens. However, these cannot be divorced from the tensions that surround the real-world realities of: sustainability and climate change; the scarcity of resource availability, including rare earth metals, liquid fuel, and water; and maintaining current standards of living in a world of energy scarcity and increased energy costs.

How individuals, institutions and corporations react to these tensions and seek co-operative solutions is of crucial importance moving forward. Increasingly we need to politicise our use of technology inside and beyond education, and to involve students and teachers in discovering or remembering alternative ways of living and creating the world. At issue is where we create/liberate spaces in which debates can take root. In an interesting set of tweets this month Jehu has argued the following:

If you want to fight capital, your cannot fight it on its own terms; you must force it to fight on terrain it does not control.

The capitalists control money; they control production; and they control the state — why would you choose to fight there?

What the capitalists do not control is your free time. They have no way to convert this free time into capitalist profits.

Jehu then reiterates Marx and Engels’ points around the need for association that:

In labor theory the interest of a class, “achieves an independent existence over against the individuals”.

Since the proletariat has no class interest, it can put an end to all classes.

This argument is absolutely critical to Engels’ and Marx’s argument. because it means they have no choice but to enter into a voluntary …

… association to control their conditions of life together.

You can read Jehu’s longer position on the difference between association and the State. However, he makes the important points that:

The critical concept [is]the relation of the state to the class whose interest the state represents in an ideal form… The ideal expression of the interest of the bourgeois class, its general representative, is the bourgeois state… the proletariat have no choice but to enter into a voluntary association to control their conditions of life together. No state can give them this control, only their association… [the proletariat] is incapable of acting as a class and must act as individuals, these individuals must abolish class politics itself — they must overthrow the state.

In a later post, Jehu quotes Zilbersheid reminder that “the abolition of labor [is] one of Marx’s most important ideas:

At the core of the highest phase of communist society, as described in Marx’s early writings, is the abolition of labour. The more famous abolition of private property, the well-known abolition of the state, and the lesser-known abolition of the division of labour are all conditional upon the abolition of labour itself.

At issue then are the mechanisms through which education is recalibrated to reduce free-time and to maintain the legitimacy and hegemony of the bourgeois state. Joss Winn’s points about the University as a means of production feel important here in addressing what might be done.

THREE. Protest against the State and its institutions.

We might then reflect on Dan McQuillan’s point about the anti-austerity protests that have dominated Turkish life for weeks:

this is what austerity governments should fear; the spark… MT @fxmatt4 Cities that have experienced protests: pic.twitter.com/RpLXYuwaV9

We might also reflect on the role of the State in monitoring both free and working-time through surveillance and data infringements, and the mechanisms through which Domestic Networks [are used] to Spy on the World.

We might also acknowledge that academics and universities are complicit both in the enclosure of higher education as a free or public space, and in the research that underpins the State’s hegemony. Moreover in the UK that hegemony threatens to be restructured through at least two further “austerity elections”.

A question then becomes what is the role of the University in the process of legitimising protest or in carving-out the terrain that Capital does not control, including widening unproductive time or creating non-value driven social relationships? Inside the secular crisis, what is the relationship between the University, the State and democratic protest? Is it possible to rethink the idea that the University might be other than means of production? That it might contribute liberated knowledge and alternative, counter-hegemonic histories, or curricula infused with praxis, to the co-operative art of protest and dissent?


Talk: The challenges of resilient learning and the production of a university experience


Posted by hallymk1

On Thursday 20th June, I’m keynoting the University of the West of Scotland Learning and Teaching Conference. My talk is entitled:

The challenges of resilient learning and the production of a university experience

My slides are here.

The Spotify playlist that accompanies the talk is here.

The talk is a triptych: hope; despair; and courage (#solidarity).

The talk may follow this path:

  1. We are told that business-as-usual has been disrupted but that there is no alternative to finding new mechanisms for growth. We hide from the narrative that it is easier to imagine the end-of-the-world than it is to imagine the end-of-capitalism. Yet this state of grace is all we are taught, and even worse it feels like it is all that we imbibe with our mother’s milk.
  2. Hope: if only we can find the superhero inside, who is able to mange debt and disruption, and in the process become resilient, there would be no need for alternatives. Maybe resilience gives us hope?
  3. Despair: look behind the curtain and you see: the crash in real wages; a student debt bubble; rising youth unemployment; the State and its institutions disciplining and delegitimizing its students’ voices; energy and environmental crises; and an outpouring of anger. Is this what business-as-usual looks like? Is there really no alternative? Will becoming resilient make a difference?
  4. Courage (#solidarity): how do we work to make hope possible? What can we learn from critical pedagogy? What can we learn from historical and current alternatives? How do we look beyond the market and the knowledge economy, to manage our historical materialism in association and democratically? How do we liberate knowledge from the University for global knowing? How does hope rest on courage?

And what, exactly, is the role of the University in this process of disruption and in making alternatives?

I am indebted to Joss Winn, Mike Neary, Sarah Amsler and Andrew McGettigan for helping me to find some slides/images, some words and some courage.


Some notes on austerity, higher education and the crisis of *human capital*


Posted by hallymk1

NOTE: Joss Winn reminds me that “Human capital is a flagrantly despicable term to reduce people to”. He is, of course, correct. Joss adds: “people = abstract labour = value = capital, the automatic Subject.” See for example Bowles and Gintis, and Marx on The Emancipation Question.

In a post on the University and the secular crisis I noted that:

It is the secular crisis outlined by Elliott and Atkinson, the IFS and the IMF, and revealed inside-and-against the political economy of austerity, that is reshaping the very idea of the University. If we are to develop a meaningful, socially-constructed and democratic set of alternatives, they need to be placed against-and-beyond the secular crisis that is restricting and re-inscribing the very idea of the University.

This morning I read this from Andy Westwood on Austerity, the Spending Review and a crisis in human capital:

We thought the last Spending Review in 2010 was bad enough. But this one – covering 2015-16 and then 2016-2018 is beginning to look a whole lot worse. Departments across Whitehall are now deep into negotiations with the Treasury. And it’s looked pretty bloody for some time. The Budget confirmed the worst – it showed that it was highly likely that BIS as a non ring-fenced department would be looking at a cut of approximately £1bn (possibly as high as £1.6b) in 2015-16 and more in the years that immediately follow. Science and research may just get a reprieve but that will only magnify the cuts elsewhere in BIS spending.

The potential cuts to come are eye watering. As the FT showed in their data [], the total reductions between 2010 and 2018 are staggering. Local Government, Culture, Defence – even Health and Education are going to have to make really tough decisions and looking at each in turn it is also easy to see why they might look at universities and see them ‘awash with cash’…

If we think adult and part time demand is in crisis now, just wait until these changes start to take effect.

All in all we might describe this as a major human capital crisis – and so much for winning the global race. But perhaps as worrying in the short and longer term is a different aspect of this crisis that is gathering pace amongst academics, media and voters – the belief that investment in human capital, skills, FE and HE may not be worth it after all.

Little wonder that Willetts among others is pressing the technology agenda, stating that:

“The UK must be at the forefront of developments in education technology. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCS) present an opportunity for us to widen access to, and meet the global demand for, higher education. This is growing rapidly in emerging economies like Brazil, India and China.

“Futurelearn has the potential to put the UK at the heart of the technology for learning agenda by revolutionising conventional models of formal education. New online delivery tools will also create incredible opportunities for UK entrepreneurs to reach world markets by harnessing technology and innovation in the field of education.”

However, we might also wish to bear in-mind this report on youth unemployment in Europe from Zerohedge:

Overall, Europe’s youth unemployment rate continues to march higher (to 24.4%) having not fallen for 24 months, but it is Spain that is the ‘winner’ with 41 consecutive months without a drop in youth unemployment. With welfare benefits running dry, and Sweden and Switzerland already running hot, we fear this summer may bring the much-feared unrest so many have been concerned about.

Check out the charts in the original link and then consider what value or price your higher education, in particular in light of statements from across Europe like this one from Italian Labour Minister Enrico Giovannini that:

We have to rescue an entire generation of young people who are scared. We have the best-educated generation and we are putting them on hold. This is not acceptable.

We already have protests across the Eurozone including bloccupy Frankfurt.

Then we have to consider the role that credit and the financialisation of a University experience plays in that mix:

what most analysts either miss or dare not mention because it threatens their own privileged spot at the feeding trough is financialization, the process of financially commoditizing every asset to the benefit of the financial sector and the state (government), which also benefits from skyrocketing financial profits, bubbles and rising asset values.

Then we have the attrition in real wages, the increasing tendency towards stock market bubbles fuelled by QE and a rentier economy, increasing worries about the Chinese economy as the motor of growth, and weak demand in the US economy.

So I am left wondering about the range of increasingly disenfranchised social forces and the impact of an increasingly commodified higher education on the hopes and expectations of our young people. Andy Westwood notes:

If we are going to emerge from this current spending round and future spending reviews in the shape we’d all like, then we need to confront both the difficult spending numbers of 2015-16 and also the rather more difficult crisis in human capital that sits uneasily and rather threateningly, alongside it.

Perhaps the key is in refusing to see those social forces as human capital or means of production. Perhaps what is needed is a critique of the forms of political economy/political debate/politics of austerity that force us to view human lives and society as restricted by the idea of economic value. What is certainly needed is a recognition that the forces of production across capitalist society, which are increasingly restructuring higher education as means of production, are also increasingly ranged asymmetrically against the everyday experiences of young people. The question for academics is how to support both critique and the development/nurturing of alternative forms of society that in-turn push-back against the neoliberal agenda that commodifies humanity.


On the University and revolution from within


Posted by hallymk1

On Sunday Kate Bowles tweeted that:

The tiny problem for the idea that Coursera will “revolutionize” all of our education systems is that revolution usually comes from within.

This made me think about the inside/outside of education, and the idea that certain spaces might be (falsely) considered to be open/closed irrespective of the dynamics of Capital. For Marx in Volume 1 of Capital, there was increasingly no outside, merely the silent compulsion of competition that drives the constant revolutionising of the forces of production across the system. This latter point is critical to any meaningful analysis of the current crisis – this is a systemic process and not one that is neatly contained inside different tentacles of capitalist production. Marx wrote that:

Modern industry never treats views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions (Capital, Volume 1, p. 617).

This also impacts the ways in which resistance might be formulated. As Cleaver notes in his theses on the secular crisis the constant revolutionising of different spheres of production is met by a multiplicity of responses. Here, forms of recognition and solidarity across spheres are critical.

When looked at positively, in terms of their struggles for their own interests (beyond mere resistance to the imposition of work), the interests of this complex “working class” are multiple in the sense of not being universally shared. The interests of one group are not exactly the same as those of another even if the realization of those of the one would facilitate the realization of those of the others. Thus there is a problematic relationship between the notion of a working class for-itself and the multiplicity of interests for which different groups of people struggle. “The” working class which struggles against capital, and whose antagonism threatens capital’s survival, is actually a multiplicity moving in a variety of directions made up of equally diverse processes of self-valorization or self-constitution.

In higher education this is important where we identify the spaces through which the sector is being opened up for-profit and for value extraction. Previously I have written about Stephen Ball’s idea of philanthrocapitalism, which drives ‘a move from palliative to developmental giving’, which restructures charity or giving in the name of capitalism. Here benefactors are consumers of social investment and philanthropy for educational ends is geared around entrepreneurialism. There is a clear need to see a business return on cultural or educational giving. Thus, there is an increasing use of commercial or enterprise models of practice as a new generic form underpinning what Ball calls ‘venture philanthropy, philanthropic portfolios, due diligence, entrepreneurial solutions and so on.’ Ball argues that philanthrocapitalists often seek silver bullet solutions to grand challenges, which in turn utilise business partnerships, to develop technical, generic or universally-applicable, and scalable solutions. The idea is that strategic giving that is problem-focused, interdisciplinary, time-limited and high impact will ‘extend leverage’ between the private and public sectors. The Gates’ Foundation and its sponsorship of educational programmes and MOOCs is one such mechanism through which the private cracks open and revolutionises the public space.

Such leverage is also created through policy, as witnessed in the recent Amendments to California State Senate Bill 520 on MOOCs, which promise public funding for the public elements of public/on-line private partnerships. In order to force each segment of California’s public education system (community colleges, state universities and the University) Christopher Newfield argues that Senate President Darrell Steinberg has created a system of “grant programs” for intensifying reliance on online programs and providers, in order “to avoid a serious discussion about [the public/State’s] reinvesting in California’s educational system”:

Steinberg is proposing to impose upon the three segments millions of dollars of new costs. Even if the State does provide funding for these costs that money could be spent in other less speculative ways. Far more likely is that the Segments will be driven into partnerships with online providers so as to share the upfront costs of meeting Steinberg’s timetable.

Nor is there any means set up to assure that no public funds are spent on private interests. Should the segments enter into partnerships with the online providers, they will likely contract out services and use public funds to pay for them. Despite the rhetoric of social justice, venture capital will demand a profitable return on its investments. Moreover, as the for-profit MOOC providers have demonstrated, their business is information and they claim that the information they gather on students is their property. I see no way around the notion that public funds will indeed be diverted to “private aspects” of the partnerships.

This is another mechanism through which the system revolutionises the means of production and division of labour across increasingly intertwined branches of production. The MIT Technology Review makes this point for personal data and the kinds of big data that California wishes to make open and accessible through its educational “grant programs”:

What’s more, the economic importance of products fueled with personal data is growing rapidly. According to the Boston Consulting Group, as methods for basing transactions on a person’s digital records have spread from banks to retailers and other sectors, the financial value that companies derived from personal data in Europe was $72 billion in 2011. The consultants concluded that “personal data has become a new form of currency.”

Access to and control over data and the means by which it can be commodified and marketised therefore becomes one more revolutionary productive force. This is also seen in the recent statements about the Georgia Tech/Udacity/AT&T on-line Master’s Degree partnership about which Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Georgia Tech this month announced its plans to offer a $6,630 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors. Georgia Tech and Udacity, a Silicon Valley-based startup, will work with AT&T, which is putting up $2 million to heavily subsidize the program’s first year. The effort, if it succeeds, will allow one of the country’s top computer science programs to enroll 20 times as many students as it does now in its online master’s degree program, and to offer the degree to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its existing program

Placed alongside policy that proscribes public/private partnerships and the public availability of retention, progression and outcomes-related data that emerges from state-funded programmes, this creates a set of spaces inside which the forces of production are restructured for-profit. These types of partnerships show the deep penetration of the private, for-profit sector of the economy into the public sphere: there is no outside of the systemic need to overcome crises of accumulation and the need to maintain the increase of the rate of profit through a control of the organic composition of capital and the rate of surplus value that can be extracted.

In the UK there is an equal avoidance of a serious discussion about the public/State’s funding of education, in spite of the attempts of groups like Million+, for example in its report Do the Alternatives Add-Up? Elsewhere, Professor David Eastwood, the incoming Chair of the Russell Group of Universities, has argued that the Coalition’s refusal to increase the cap on fees for “public” higher education will lead to “a 16 per cent real cut in the tuition income of institutions.” Eastwood argues that with no increase likely before 2017 “That should put a stop to glib discussions about enhancement and improvement. We are managing pretty massive efficiency gains in the delivery of educational programmes over the next five years.” This underscores a point I made on the University and a revitalised public about how specific policy activities that are located in secondary legislation like the Budget, or in technical consultations over white papers and funding, signal “a cultural shift that sets a direction for marketization through tactical engagement. It is less about fighting the battle for ideas in public than it is about laying markers for marketization. One might argue that it is not about creating a deliberative space to discuss the realities of public or socialised education and what the University is for, but it is about cracking or fracturing what exists, in order to extract value from that system.”Thus, the introduction of fees and the subsequent fee-cap, alongside pressure for outsourcing and public-private partnerships, are being used to constrain and then restructure the work of universities as competing capitals, including with for-profit and on-line providers.

As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to look at the restructuring of higher education as anything other than a revolutionising of the forces of production aimed at overcoming the limits of accumulation in the systemic production process. As Marx notes in the Collected Works (Vol. 5, pp. 431-2), throughout history

some persons satisfied their needs at the expense of others, and therefore some – the minority – obtained the monopoly of development, while others – the majority, owing to the constant struggle to satisfy their most essential needs, were for the time being (i.e., until the creation of new revolutionary productive forces) excluded from any development.

Moreover, Marx argued that it is the mechanisms through which human society could recapture human nature against the profit-motive, which we should seek to reproduce. This is not the human nature of the MOOC-defined, self-made, neo-liberal superman; it is “species life”.

Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth… The community of men, or the manifestation of the nature of men, their mutual complementing the result of which is species-life…” [Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 217.]

At issue is how to promote such a species-life through education in ways that recapture production as a social activity. This is more pressing as the policy and practice of austerity threaten to unleash revolutionary social forces. As Reuters reports: “German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned on Tuesday that failure to win the battle against youth unemployment could tear Europe apart, and dropping the continent’s welfare model in favor of tougher U.S. standards would spark a revolution.” In-part this is more pressing because, as Jehu argues:

we have achieved a five-fold increase in total material wealth produced annually between 1964 and 2012 in the United States. Yet, for all this increase in material wealth, poverty still exists… real material [agricultural] output rises to 500% overall and labor needed in agriculture falls 88%; yet, despite this improvement in material wealth, 43 million workers still live in poverty… Despite these facts, Washington tells us we cannot afford our current material standard of living. Politicians say either retirement has to be delayed and medical coverage cut, or Washington must go still deeper in debt… Now ask yourself: If you are working twice as long as your parents, producing five times as much material wealth, should you be better or worse off than they were? So where did all that increased wealth go? Since you are, in fact, poorer than your parents, it is obvious none of that increased wealth made its way into your pockets.

Inside this systemic process of revolutionising the forces of production and increasing global output, real wages have collapsed in the face of strategies for accumulation. The issue is whether a “direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – [that] are therefore an expression and confirmation of that social life” (Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 299) might be realised that incorporates increasingly alienated social forces in the global North, as well as those largely ignored in the global South. This requires that we have a more mature discussion of the possibilities for production that lie beyond for-profit. In higher education this includes recognition that the sector is being restructured (revolutionised?) from within, by outsourcing, philanthrocapitalism, MOOCs etc., and that spaces for resistance and refusal need to be created and supported in solidarity actions so that we recapture our existence and our production as a social activity, for-society  rather than for-profit. It is here, and in celebrating existence for-society, that a revolution from within might begin.


On the secular crisis and a qualitative idea of the University


Posted by hallymk1

I was struck over the weekend by a friend’s statement that “I struggle to translate your critiques into the various education/technology contexts of the global South”. This is an issue that generally plagues those of us who work in higher education in the global North, and for whom the wider, global context is increasingly viewed through the prism of competition. Earlier this year, at the Alpine Rendez-Vous, a specific workshop tried to pull out some key questions for those working in the interstices between higher education and technology, in order to address some of these issues of private/public, quantitative/qualitative, development/global sustainability etc.. The workshop focused some thinking in the following areas.

  • Have we implicitly assumed that the western/European model of universities is necessarily the sole or best expression of a culture’s or a community’s higher learning and intellectual enquiry?
  • As western/European pedagogy, or rather the corporatised, globalised versions of it, now deploys powerful and universal digital technologies in the interests of profit-driven business models, should we look at empowering more local and culturally appropriate forms of understanding, knowing, learning and enquiring?
  • Is encapsulating the world’s higher learning in institutions increasingly modelled on one format and driven by the same narrow global drivers resilient and robust enough, diverse and flexible enough to enable different communities, cultures and individuals to flourish amongst the dislocation and disruption we portray as characterising the crises?
  • Our responses, for example personal learning environments or the digital literacies agenda, seem implicitly but unnecessarily framed within this western/European higher education discourse – can these be widened to empowered other communities and cultures entitled to the critical skills and participation necessary to flourish in a world of powerful digital technologies in the hands of alien governments, corporations and institutions?

Our increasing inability to view globalised higher education from any perspective other than that of competing nation states in a transnational system, and of universities as competing capitals inside that world-view, is highlighted by Matt Lingard’s report on the Universities UK event, Open and online learning: Making the most of Moocs and other models. Critically, Lingard highlights how MOOCs are being utilised to catalyse further marketisation of education in the global North with the on-line space being used less as a socially transformative experience, and more as a space for public/private partnership, in order to lever global labour arbitrage and strengthen the transnational power of specific corporations:

The world of MOOCs is full of partners. Universities are partnering with delivery & marketing platforms such as Coursera & Udacity. Companies such as Pearson are partnering with them to proctor in-person exams (eg find a test centre for your edX MOOC). The sponsors of the UUK event were Academic Partnerships & 2U. Slightly different services, but both working with universities to develop & deliver online courses. David Willetts hopes that MOOC & industry partnerships will develop & potentially help with the UK skills gap (such as computer science).

This increasingly competitive, efficiency-driven discourse focuses all activity on entrepreneurial activity with risk transferred from the State to the institution and the individual. The technology debate inside higher education, including MOOCs, falls within this paradigm and acts as a disciplinary brake on universities, just as the State’s marshaling against opposition to austerity acts as a disciplinary brake on individual or social protest. What is witnessed is increasingly a denial of socialised activity beyond that which is enclosed and commodified, be it the University’s attempt to escape its predefined role as competing capital, or the individual’s role as competing, indentured entrepreneur. As these roles prescribe an increasingly competitive identity for the student and the University, what chance is there for describing global alternatives that are not those of neoliberal institutions like the World Bank, the Education Sector Strategy 2020 of which declares:

Education is fundamental to development and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is also a strategic development investment. The human mind makes possible all other development achievements, from health advances and agricultural innovation to infrastructure construction and private sector growth. For developing countries to reap these benefits fully—both by learning from the stock of global ideas and through innovation—they need to unleash the potential of the human mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than education.

The rights of the child are tied to strategic development investment, which is likely to come from transnational corporations and States in the North, with an outcome a strengthening of those labour pools for privatised knowledge, innovation and enterprise. In part, this reflects Marx’s development in the Grundrisse of a theory of crisis related to overproduction in one arm of the system:

in a general crisis of overproduction the contradiction is not between the different kinds of productive capital, but between industrial and loan capital; between capital as it is directly involved in the production process and capital as it appears as money independently (relativement) outside that process.

As a crisis of overproduction emerges in educational commodities in the global North, technology becomes a fundamental strand of a strategy for commodity-dumping and value extraction from other arms of the globalised system. Thus, the World Bank notes:

Another set of changes is technological: incredible advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and other technologies are changing job profiles and skills demanded by labor markets, while also offering possibilities for accelerated learning and improved management of education systems.

Technology ties the interface between development and education to labour markets and capitalist work, rather than to solving issues of social production, sustainability or global leadership in a world that faces: economic stagnation, including the threats to national and corporate debt and liquidity of an end to the bull market in bonds, a dislocation between the real and shadow economies, and falling corporate revenues that impact the rate of profit; climate tipping points through increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the oceans and atmosphere; problems of access to liquid resources like oil with a potentially catastrophic focus on shale oil and gas; and problematic access to food staples through commodities trading.

The issue of social production leads me back to the idea of the secular crisis, and Harry Cleaver’s work on reading capital politically. Cleaver’s first thesis on the secular crisis states that:

secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

This systemic threat to the system is a function of the crisis inherent in capitalism’s need to maintain an increase in the rate of profit catalysed through revenues that can be levered from new markets, lower labour costs, or technological innovation. This tends however, to Cleaver’s second thesis, that of the crisis of the class relation:

The basic antagonistic forces which are inherent in the social structure of capitalism, which endure through the ups and downs of fluctuations and restructurings, which have been repeatedly internalized without ever losing their power of resurgence, are the negativity and creativity of the working class. The working class persistently threatens the survival of capitalism both because of its struggles against various aspects of the capitalist form of society and because it tends to drive beyond that social form through its own inventiveness. As opposed to all bourgeois ideologies of social contract, pluralism and democracy, Marxism has shown that working class anatagonism derives from capitalism being a social order based on domination, i.e., on the imposition of set of social rules through which, tendentially, all of life is organized. Class antagonism is thus insurpassable by capitalism within its own order because that antagonism is inseparable from the domination which defines the system.

In reflecting on the experiences of a competitive higher education in the global North and its role in the marketisation of everyday life in the global South, we might reflect on Cleaver’s use of the idea of systemic domination in the name of value, and his idea in Reading Capital Politically that we need to think about power and the use of a life constructed qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

The intensity of the struggle is dictated by the degree of power. When workers can organize sufficiently to directly appropriate wealth, they do so. At the same time, they struggle to obtain the kind of wealth they want — the work conditions, the leisure time activities, and the use-values. In this sense, too, the struggle is qualitative as well as quantitative.

In a globalised life that is restructured around the metrics of efficiency, value, enterprise, and where all life is enclosed and measured for-profit, are there alternative, qualitative descriptions of life that might enable alternatives to be developed? Are there alternative spaces that might be described qualitatively? One possibility lies in the idea of the commons and the praxis that emerges from commoning; a global idea of socialised solidarity that is exemplified in recent work on the wealth of the commons. This is a set of interconnected spaces that are social and negotiated, focused on a social dialogue between abundance and scarcity that enables democratic governance to shape life. As the epilogue to the wealth of the commons states:

To us, the evidence seems clear: people everywhere have a strong desire to escape the helplessness that institutions impose on them, overcome the cynicism that blots out optimism, and transcend the stalemates that stifle practical action. Another world is possible beyond market and state. This book chronicles some new ways forward – and the beginnings of an international commons movement.

It is inside this statement, and through a rediscovery of our global narratives of the commons and commoning that I might begin to reframe my work against the various education/technology contexts of the global South. Merely reframing it around solutions to the secular crisis of capitalism emerging in the global North does nothing for the development of a qualitatively different, resilient education. It is educational ideas and stories that are beyond the market and the state, which are social and co-operative that need to be described and nurtured. We might then begin to describe an alternative, qualitative future for the idea of the University in the face of the secular crisis.


On the University and a ‘revitalised public’


Posted by hallymk1

In his thin review of Andrew McGettigan’s ‘The Great University Gamble’, Nick Hillman argues that

As well as lacking historical awareness, the book has an odd take on current policymaking. McGettigan repeatedly asserts that the Coalition’s motives are concealed from view. The Government are proceeding ‘without presenting its plans or reasoning to the public.’ Opponents of the higher education reforms have been outmanoeuvred by politicians who call ‘snap votes’, ‘sneak passages’ into legislation and use ‘existing powers quietly’ (his italics).

This doesn’t stack up. The students who poured into central London in 2010 were not protesting at being kept in the dark about the Government’s intentions. The £9,000 tuition fee cap was announced in Parliament and later debated and voted on in both the Commons and the Lords. Other important elements of the student finance package, like the real interest rate, were in primary legislation that went through all the regular parliamentary stages. There has been a higher education white paper and an accompanying technical document as well as numerous public consultations on contentious issues, such as the regulation of alternative providers.

Two issues come to mind and both are rooted in the use of history by policymakers. First, the central point made by Hillman is that “important elements” were “in primary legislation” (my emphasis). They were in primary legislation; they were not in and of themselves primary legislation. This way of doing political business, by signalling a cultural shift through white papers, changes to VAT on shared services, technical consultations, changes to student number controls and core/margin allocations, sets a direction for marketization through tactical engagement. It is less about fighting the battle for ideas in public than it is about laying markers for marketization. One might argue that it is not about creating a deliberative space to discuss the realities of public or socialised education and what the University is for, but it is about cracking or fracturing what exists, in order to extract value from that system.

Maybe this is a function of there is no alternative, and the realpolitik of Coalition Government. However, it also reminds me of the policy-making of that disenfranchised wing of the Tory party, under both the Whig Junto Administration of the reign of William III and then Harley’s Administrations under Queen Anne, which sought to ‘Tack’ controversial legislation to finance bills so that they would not receive the scrutiny they deserved in Parliament. A second outcome was that the risk in removing the tacked legislation was that the finance bill, required for the functioning of the State, and especially the State at war for Empire, would fail. The key example was in 1704-05 when High Church (Tory) zealots in the Commons tried to force the third Occasional Conformity bill past the (Whig-controlled and more tolerant) Lords by tacking it to the Land Tax bill. This was seen to be factious and constitutionally dubious and followed a similar attempt in 1702, a bluff which the Lords threatened to call. (See Geoffrey Holmes’ magisterial British Politics in the Age of Anne.)

At issue here is the way in which policy, strategy and realpolitik stack-up in the face of a public space that is being cracked open and increasingly commodified. As McGettigan highlights elsewhere, the financial and governing complexities of that space, the meanings of public and private, and what we wish to be publically-funded, regulated and governed each need critique. This is where history comes in for the second time, and we might do well to reflect on Martin Daunton’s analysis of how the current financial crisis fixes on historical power and the humanity of History within policymaking:

What does history teach us? We need to understand the circumstances in which institutions were created, so that we are aware of their problems adapting to new circumstances. We need to understand the assumptions of different countries that are rooted in national histories. We also need to recognise how politicians and commentators are using and abusing history for their own purposes. And we need to understand that policymaking… cannot be reduced to neat theories and mathematical formulae.

Such a critical appraisal of the present, made in terms of the past, anchors the view that actual academic practices are socio-historically-situated, and operate at a range of scales within society. This socio-historical perception of the academic sits asymmetrically in relationship to what Stephen Ball defines as neoliberal transnational activist networks. These networks emerge as assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power through shared ideologies and resource interdependencies. They consist of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers, and so on, which aim at regulating the state for enterprise and the market. One such mechanism is private think-tanks, which utilise academically-funded research outputs or practices, and which support the incorporation of “important elements” “in primary legislation”, based upon: their belief in market economics as the key mechanism for overcoming scarcity, distributing abundance and overcoming disruption; their focus on policy and high politics; and their focus on the University as the point of departure for the privatisation of knowledge creation.

Critically, this then becomes a space inside-and-against which consent for the politics of marketization and restructuring can be manufactured. Witness the Future of the Higher Education Curriculum conference, which argues that:

As funding structures for higher education change, with universities now funded by student loans, it is imperative that universities deliver optimum teaching and learning and design their curricula to ensure student attraction and retention

In this process, the UK Coalition Government’s HE strategy threatens both to silence academics as independent, critical actors and to enclose such practices through: the removal of state subsidies; the individuation of educational experiences and risk in the name of entrepreneurialism; and the commodification of learning. We might then consider in this process of restructuring the role of our history, both in policymaking and in the idea of the public. As John Tosh argues for the historian so is true for academics more generally in the face of our current modus operandi for policymaking:

For historians themselves, good citizenship consists in contributing their expertise to the national conversation: exposing politically slanted myth, placing our concerns in more extended narratives, testing the limits of analogy, and above all showing how familiarity with the past can open the door to a broader sense of the possibilities in the present. That should be our contribution to a ‘revitalised public’.


The University and the secular crisis


Posted by hallymk1

In retrospect Steve Smith’s article linked in a previous posting on the University and the rule of money is important in highlighting that the UK Government’s austerity agenda will tighten considerably in the aftermath of the next General Election in 2015. He is clear that the squeeze on incomes for universities will give little room for manoeuvre, and one outcome is that the sector as a whole risks further stratification and restructuring, as institutions operating as competing capitals look for securitisation or financialisation coupled to attacks on labour rights and efficiency drives.

It is salutary to remember that the idea of the University and issues of funding are situated within the politics of austerity and the fiscal realities of an ideological attack on the sector. It should be noted that this is a deeply political attack that has seen resistance from groups of students and public sector workers and trades unions, but limited critique from the sector’s leaders. It is only Million+ that has developed an on-going critique based on the Government’s economic projections. Thus, in March 2013, the CEO of Million+ wrote:

Once the loss to the Treasury of reduced participation (which in turn leads to reduced tax receipts) and the inflationary impact of higher tuition fees are taken into account, the short-term savings will be outweighed almost six and a half times by the long-term costs of the new system.

In developing a meaningful critique, it is important to place the context of University funding, and the concomitant restructuring of the idea of the University for entrepreneurship and employability, in the context of the UK as a de-developing economy. Speaking at the LSE in September 2012, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson stated their thesis that that the historical trend for the UK economy in the last century has been managed decline arrested by quick fixes like access to North Sea oil revenues and the stimulus of the deregulated City. Elliott and Atkinson argue that the UK is in a long decline, signalled now by an economy that is 4% smaller than it was when the financial crisis hit, and which is emerging from recession slower than it had during the Great Depression. They note that: the cost of the economic downturn is in excess of £200bn; real incomes are down, with the IFS stating that it will be 2016/17 before incomes reach 2004 levels and with an increase in levels of poverty; banking is “big, bust and corrupt”; successive rounds of Quantitative Easing and purchasing of gilts has underpinned much higher real inflation than that reported in the CPI, with no respite for savers; and the Treasury has had to borrow in excess of 550bn thereby doubling the debt.

For Elliott and Atkinson, the macro-economic context, inside which higher education is framed, is one of blunder, fudge and self-delusion. Revenues from the UK economy’s strong suits in some services and consultancy areas, aerospace and IT, as well as some universities, are not enough to overcome the lack of strength elsewhere, notably in manufacturing and the bubble sectors (student debt, financial services and banking). On top of this they point to the lack of oil and gold assets, contracting asset prices, and the lack of equity, alongside historic weak growth, in order to argue that any focus on rebalancing the economy is nonsense. They argue that this is the result of decades of macro-economic policy that has framed the UK as a giant hedge fund. Moreover, a series of roll-backs of labour rights through attacks on Trades Unions, plus privatisation related to market efficiencies, has focused minds on productivity, but has led to an overreliance on debt as incomes are squeezed. In driving forward productivity manufacturing has been seen as secondary to services, including finance, consultancy, and increasingly education. Regulation and forms of credit control have been secondary to enterprise and innovation.

Crucially for Elliott and Atkinson, the crash in 2008 enabled the economy’s defects, which had been covered by three decades of financialisation, to be revealed. These defects include: chronic debt; a long-term attrition on real wages; illiteracy amongst large numbers of the public; a pension time-bomb; no plan for replacing oil/gas/nuclear energy; a deficit in tax receipts, which make socialised payment for the welfare state problematic; dysfunctional banking services; an overreliance on exports to Europe at a time of contraction; and an overreliance on the imports of assets including skilled labour. Moreover, there has been a balance of payments deficit since 1983, and in spite of talk about global markets, the UK’s international net asset position is negative to the tune of £325.6bn. There is: a deficit on trading goods; no rebalancing of the economy towards exports and away from consumption, so that engines of growth are consumer debt and mortgage lending, and not science and education; a private sector that has not invested but hoarded, with cash balances worth £754bn but levels of business investment at less than 2% per annum. For Elliott and Atkinson this is a bet on deleveraging and disinvestment. Moreover, Government-borrowing and rescue packages, plus loan guarantees and outsourcing, which are hidden from the balance sheet, total another £612bn of debt.

They argue that this highlights that the UK is experiencing a qualitative change in its economic status, and in how it views and structures itself, as it de-develops. It is locked into a world of increasing competition and rivalry over energy and resources, including labour. Thus, we face a reality checkpoint, as large segments of the UK population are threatened with increasing impoverishment and unreliable access to power, fuel, food, education, health and shelter. For these authors what is needed is an economic plan, which focuses on the roles of the market and the State, and that we will make better choices if we regard the UK as a submerging market economy.

The Elliott and Atkinson thesis connects to: the views of those in the financial press that fiscal austerity has not worked and needs to be geared around both public and private investment and recapitalisation; the recent article byHerndon, Ash and Pollin that critiques the original research on the relationship between public debt and GDP growth that underpinned austerity; and the calls of the IMF for the Government to rethink its austerity agenda in the face of weak growth. In each of these analyses the outcomes of a 2012 Europaeum report on the impact of fiscal policy on higher education is amplified:

the economic downturn has, on the whole, had a negative short-term impact upon public higher education programmes.European universities are being affected in many different ways during the current economic crisis – with winners and losers already emerging, and the differences set to be multiplied over the coming years depending on how the winners use their comparative advantage, and how the losers can best mitigate the effects of cuts through so-called efficiency savings or by raising new sources of income.

The University then, is being restructured as part of a response to a secular crisis, and academic work, productivity, the rate of profit and labour arbitrage are central to this issue. As Harry Cleaver’s first thesis on the secular crisis noted:

We are writing and talking about secular crisis because neither the cyclical business downturns nor the upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist counter-measures (local and international), have resolved the underlying problems of the system in such a way as to lay the basis for a renewal of stable accumulation. Thus, secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

This is a point that Aaron Peters makes in his article on workfare as one of capital’s responses to the crisis. As Peters notes:

A discussion of surplus population is central to any enquiry as to the relationship between workfare and the secular crisis. The hypothesis runs that within the contemporary global economy there is a large and growing ‘surplus population’ that is incapable of accessing the labour market. Alongside this group is another yet larger one which frequently includes the ‘working poor’; temporary workers, part-time workers, agency workers, those on zero hours contracts and increasingly since 2008 the precarious self-employed. We know that this second group has grown throughout not only the course of the last several decades but particularly so since the Global Financial Crisis.

Yet employability and individual entrepreneurship developed through an appetite for debt and securitisation underpin the very restructuring of higher education in the global North. They are part-and-parcel of the changing organic composition of- capital and the restructuring required to deliver productivity and growth. What is clear is that there is no such analysis emerging from the leaders of universities, even whilst the austerity agenda that drives the restructuring of the sector is under attack from financial journalists, academic activists and even the IMF. The risk here is that even if a counter-narrative is developed through an analysis of the secular crisis, it is too late to recover the University in any form beyond that of competing capital subsumed under the dictates of money. Securitisation, indentured study, labour arbitrage, internationalisation, commodity-dumping in the global South, the enclosure and privatisation of previously socialised goods are all locked-in.

At issue then is Cleaver’s third thesis on the secular crisis, that of the struggle against capitalist work:

Capitalist rules impose the generalized subordination of human life to work. Whereas all previous class societies have involved the extraction of surplus labor, only in capitalism have all human activities been reshaped as work, as commodity producing labor processes. Those processes produce either use-values which can be sold and on which a profit can be realized or they produce and reproduce human life itself as labor power. Antagonism, resistance and opposition accompany this imposition because this way of organizing human life dramatically restricts and confines its development. People struggle both against their reduction to “mere worker” and for the elaboration of new ways of being that escape capitalist limits.

How might we develop educational spaces into which knowing and subjectivity might be developed, based in-part on socialised knowledge that is liberated from formal educational spaces? As Cleaver notes in his final two theses, at issue is the creation of a revolutionary subjectivity that is based upon

the liberation of alternative, self-determined social “logics” outside and beyond that of capital.

Such a revolutionary subjectivity is entwined with the need to develop

[a] politics of alliance against capital… not only to accelerate the circulation of struggle from sector to sector of the class, but to do so in such a manner as to build a post-capitalist politics of difference without antagonism.

It is the secular crisis outlined by Elliott and Atkinson, the IFS and the IMF, and revealed inside-and-against the political economy of austerity, that is reshaping the very idea of the University. If we are to develop a meaningful, socially-constructed and democratic set of alternatives, they need to be placed against-and-beyond the secular crisis that is restricting and re-inscribing the very idea of the University.


The University and the rule of money


Posted by hallymk1

In a post from September 2011 on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus, I amend a quote from John Holloway to argue that “academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production”. The amended Holloway quote is as follows.

In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

I then go on to argue that:

Whether or not we agree with Holloway’s point about the state’s implications in the maintenance of a capitalist order, we have seen capital’s increasing control over higher education in the United Kingdom through the Coalition Government’s shock doctrine. The ideological, political drive towards, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing means that the University has little room for manoeuvre in resisting the enclosing logic of competition and in arguing for a socialised role for higher education. This means that the internal logic of the University is prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships.

I have been reminded of this by Steve Smith’s acceptance of the politics of austerity and his focus on the rule of money in defining a UK higher education that is predicated on competition and marketisation. This reminds me that the leadership we might crave for an alternative form of higher education that is against student-as-consumer and the extraction of value from previously socialised goods like education, is highly unlikely to come from University Vice-Chancellors. GurminderBhambra provides a salutary reminder of that fact in her comment piece on the Sussex privatisation protests, and the disciplinary reaction of University leaders to peaceful campus protest. It is worth re-visiting the demands and calls for dialogue of those involved in that protest, in order to reflect on the courage it takes to stand-up for collective forms of higher education in a set of spaces that are being increasingly enclosed and commodified, and against the cultural space that is increasingly described by business leaders like Smith.

So the question of how to address the realpolitik of neoliberalism, becomes what is to be done in the face of the politics of austerity? What alternatives are possible in the face of the insistent mantras of the rule of money, other than, as Andrew McGettigan does so ably, to follow the money and to show what we risk losing as we enclose and commodify the historic value of a higher education that was constructed socially? In light of the leadership revealed in Smith’s comment piece I return to my posting from earlier this week on memory, profitability, disruption and socialised alternatives:

At issue are the ways in which knowledge and forms of knowing that are created inside the University, MOOC, disruptive-wherever can be liberated or repatriated for global knowing, and against enclosure and commodification. What forms of knowledge, what skills and practices, what ways of knowing, what mechanisms for analysing global problems, can be emancipated and used to define alternative, socialised value forms? To where can they be liberated or repatriated so that they can be used against-and-beyond their private accumulation for profit? How and where do we ignite critical, political pedagogic practices that enable the democratic production and consumption of knowledge and knowing? These are the questions that ought to frame the idea of (disruptions to) higher education, and its contributions to our collective responses to global crises.

In contesting the enclosure and commodification of the university and higher education there is a need to connect the work of protests like those at Sussex, to the work of trades unions, and to alternative spaces like the Campaign for the Public University and to live projects like the Social Science Centre. Possibilities for refusal and for pushing back on issues of both institutional governance and operation are critical. As McGettigan argues, we need to think about the public funding, regulation and governance of institutions and the sector, and to make connections to other educational spaces like the Workers Educational Association and the Co-operatives movement. However, we also need to consider whether a more activist, public and social role for academics is necessary in the face of the restructuring of universities as competing capitals. We might, then, consider how and where students and teachers can dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to structure a process of meaningful social transformation? At issue is the autonomy of the University in helping to define such an alternative when its world is increasingly shaped by the polyarchic constraints of money/commodity and market-based consumption.