Category Archives: Activism

on the University as anxiety machine


Posted by hallymk1

I would be your king

But you want to be free

Confusion and art

I’m nothing but heart

(as we stumble to the shore… as we walk into the night …. this before can’t say it anymore…)

Low. 2011. Nothing but Heart.

We think we know what the narrative is. But over time it fractures and cracks and dies and is reborn. As we fracture and crack and die and are reborn.

Inside this world, inside our history, inside this capitalism we fracture and crack under the stress of it all. The toxic stress of being for economic growth. Of being for an entrepreneurial life. Of giving away our labour. Of alienating our labour. Of giving away ourselves. Of alienating ourselves. We willingly give it up. This is the new normal. We willingly give up our very selves so that they can accumulate value. We accede to their dominance so that we can survive and breathe and have hope. Hope in the face of the reality that our fracture and our cracking are driven by their hegemony and their economic growth.

The power of their narrative of economic growth, which subsumes our labour, and that is visited upon the University. Their common sense. Their intellectual rigour. The new normal.

As Jehu argues:

The sale of labor power has the effect of scrubbing all the concrete manifestations of labor from our consciousness.

We are scrubbed clean of our humanity, and this is done systemically:

It does this by validating the reduction of our capacities to just another commodity in the market.

This is all we are. A reduction. Scrubbed of the potential of what our lives might be. Marketised. Abstracted from reality. Made contingent on the production of value. And as we have witnessed in countless testimonies the University is increasingly a space inside which this scrubbing, this abstraction, this contingency, plays out psychologically. So that our desire to be something other than an entrepreneur is disciplined. So that we witness:

For many, like myself, like those closest to me, anxiety and depression are not technical terms but personal experiences.

And we witness:

Too many casual academics find themselves barely surviving as they are suspended in a state of near constant poverty.

And we witness:

The evidence of our anxiety is not exactly hidden – it’s scattered across social media and in discussions within session-by-session teacher networks, that universities mostly don’t see. More and more stories are emerging in these networks about the hardships of poverty, and families under immense stress.

And we witness:

Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide,

This is insidious. This latter-day higher education. This University as anxiety machine. This University as means for the production of anxiety. This University that forces us to internalise the creation of value and the extraction of value and the accumulation of value. This University that is recalibrated for value as we seek to resist in the name of teaching and learning and becoming and emancipation and us. The anxiety of the future collapsed onto the present; trumping the present; devaluing the present. The University not as a place where students can find themselves, but where they can create themselves. This is the University that demands we overcome our present imperfections; our present lack of impact; our present lack of student satisfaction; our present lack of staffing efficiency.

Future perfect trumps our present tense. Our present made tense.

As Giroux argues in Border Crossings, we might seek redress through the politicisation of our relationships inside the University, and by reflecting on the politics of pedagogic power.

Gramsci points to the complex ways [through hegemonic control] in which consent is organised as part of an active pedagogical process on the terrain of everyday life. In Gramsci’s view such a process must work and rework the cultural an ideological terrain of subordinate groups in order to legitimate the interests an authority of the ruling bloc. (p. 163)

What this maps onto is a project for

the construction of an educational practice that expands human capacities in order to enable people to intervene in the formation of their own subjectivities and to be able to exercise power in the interest of transforming the ideological and material conditions of domination into social practices that promote social empowerment and demonstrate possibilities. (p. 166)

What we might therefore do as educators is rethink how our pedagogic practices reveal and reinforce the hegemonic and objective material conditions of capitalist society. We might rethink how those practices enable teachers and students to define new relations of power that are against privilege. Such rethinking demands new relations of power inside the classroom that are against the taking and accumulation of power. Such rethinking demands democratic and participatory alternatives through which the curriculum and the relationships that shape it and the assessments that validate it are negotiated.

This is the dissolution of the University as a means for the domination/hegemony of a particular world view or a specific class. This is the dissolution of the University as a coercive space that is re-forged inside-and-against student-debt and impact and research excellence and analytics and employability and entrepreneurship. This is the dissolution of the University as the civil society of tenured professors versus casualised precariat. This is the dissolution of the consensus that reshapes the civil society of higher education in the interests of capital through the ideology of student-as-consumer. This is the dissolution of a higher education that is for materialism and value.

This is for the production of a University rooted in solidarity and co-operation. This is for the production of a University that is active and critical and popular.

The purpose of popular education is to enable those who are marginalized to become more fully human.  I see it as essential to facilitate not only action, but also critical refection on the consequences of action as an essential element of educational practice.  It contributes not only to learning, but to what Paulo Freire call the act of knowing. (Carlos Cortez Ruiz, p. 6.)

As Gramsci noted in 1916 this turns into “a problem of rights and of power”. This is the meaning of education as culture, and it is the relationship between political and civil society played out in the curriculum. In the prison notebooks (p. 330) Gramsci goes on to state that in whatever context, the problem of rights and power is a deeply conflicted, political process:

The average worker has a practical activity but has no clear theoretical consciousness of his activity in and understanding of the world; indeed, his theoretical consciousness can be “historically” in conflict with his activity. In other words, he will have two theoretical consciousnesses: one that is implicit in his activity and that really unites him with all his fellow workers in the practical transformation of the world and a superficial, “explicit” one that he has inherited from the past. The practical-theoretical position, in this case, cannot help becoming “political”—that is, a question of “hegemony.”

Inside the University, our confronting this as a political pedagogic process is, as Mike Neary argues, potentially revolutionary. At issue is the possibility that we might frame a curriculum that:

is driven by a lack of faith in the inevitability of progressive transformation, based on a negative rather than a positive critique of the social relations of capitalist society… the future is not the result of naturally upturning economic cycles, nor the structural contradictions of capitalism, but is made by the possibility and necessity of progressive social transformation through practical action, i.e., class struggle… the logic of revolution is not based on the call to some lofty liberal principle, e.g. social justice, or the empowerment of the powerless, but the more practical imperatives driven by the avoidance of disaster beyond human imagination.

Here it is worth highlighting Neary’s focus on Vygotsky’s belief in the revolutionary nature of teaching, where it emerges from inside the student as a social being. As Neary notes, teaching becomes radical where the social context of the curriculum is arranged by the teacher so that the student teaches themselves:

‘Education should be structured so that it is not the student that is educated, but that the student educates himself’ or, in other words, ‘…the real secret of education lies in not teaching’ (Vygotsky, 1926).

This is therefore beyond the impact of the teacher. This is beyond the student’s adaptation to the given teaching environment. This is for the creation of a person able to create and organise her own life as a pedagogic project. As Vygotsky notes in Shorter Logic this depends upon the ability to become concrete; to become for ourselves; to be.

… the man, in himself, is the child. And what the child has to do is to rise out of this abstract and undeveloped ‘in-himself’ and become ‘for himself’ what he is at first only ‘in-himself’ – a free and reasonable being.

And I am left wondering how to reconcile the University as an anxiety machine with the idea that the teacher might be revolutionary where s/he gives herself up to the process of arranging a practical, political pedagogy. This is revolutionary in the sense that bell hooks argued for an education that was more real, rooted in vivid, personal struggle against alienation and estrangement. This is the internalisation of the pedagogic process as a form of emancipation inside the student; and the restructuring of the student’s world based on the radical organisation of the classroom; and the student’s challenging of the prefigured world of the teacher in her everyday life and her every day actions; and the student’s on-going struggle to overcome the prefigured world of our political and civil society. This is the student’s struggle to be heard.

This is the same emancipatory process that Gramsci highlighted through his focus on critical awareness, the role of organic intellectuals who emerged through everyday life, and on the place of ‘common sense’ in maintaining hegemonic positions of power through civil society. However, it is also the same emancipatory process that underscores the therapeutic relationship. In therapy, Martha Crawford reminds us that the client/therapist relationship is potentially revolutionary in its identification and acceptance of limitations and past injuries as they are replicated and represented in present actions and thoughts and hopes, in order that these identifications and fractures might enable the self to be healed. For Crawford the deepest therapies change both client and therapist because they work from inside the client as social being.

We might also argue that the deepest pedagogic encounters change both student and teacher because they work from inside the client as social being. This is a relationship based upon identification and empathy, upon humane values of love, upon what we are willing to share and to bear co-operatively. This is the revolutionary, emancipatory space for teaching that is threatened inside the University as anxiety machine: what are we willing to share and to bear co-operatively? In the face of the iron law of competition and of value; in the face of the projection of the entrepreneurial self onto the curriculum and its relationships; in the face of the hegemony of efficiency and impact and satisfaction and growth; what are we willing to share and to bear co-operatively?

This is revolutionary teaching as a mirror that enables the student/teacher to overcome her being “trapped, lost, hypnotized by images of our own projected soul.” This is teaching as therapy inside the anxiety machine. This is teaching and learning as the ability to reflect; as the act of reflection; as the act of looking into one’s soul; this is our looking in the mirror inside the anxiety machine. The power of this is not to be understated. The threat of this is not to be understated because says Crawford:

Mirrors reveal to us what cannot be shown to anyone else, what we do not know, and perhaps don’t want to know about ourselves at all.

Perhaps the revolutionary teacher always asks what we are willing to share and to bear co-operatively?

Postscript

Henry Giroux writes that:

The transformation of higher education into a an adjunct of corporate control conjures up the image of a sorcerer’s apprentice, of an institution that has become delusional in its infatuation with neoliberal ideology, values and modes of instrumental pedagogy. Universities now claim that they are providing a service and in doing so not only demean any substantive notion of governance, research and teaching, but also abstract education from any sense of civic responsibility. 

And we are caught and made fraught as our labour is stripped bare and alienated from us. As the corporate control of the University restructures our pedagogic agency into student satisfaction and consumption; as the corporate control of the University restructures our public scholarship into impact metrics and knowledge transfer; as the corporate control of the University restructures our solidarity into performance management; as the corporate control of the University attempts to restructure our souls, which have to cope with the dissonance of it all; as the corporate control of the University attempts to restructure our selves as we introject their performance management against our critical identity.

And Josh Freedman writes that this stress, this anxiety, this dissonance, is amplified though excessive University borrowing:

in the long-term, public and private nonprofit schools alike will find it even more difficult to provide a quality education to a wide array of the population. And in a battle between students, faculty, and creditors, the creditors right now have the upper hand – which calls into question the core of the future of American higher education.

And Eric Grollman writes about radical battle fatigue and survival:

Yet another painful reminder of how marginalized scholars are, at best, conditionally accepted in academia. Everyday, I am faced with the decision: group survival vs. individual survival.  Since these are opposing decisions, I rarely, if ever, experience both. Ultimately, I chose silence about the dining hall display; I picked “safely” keeping my job over the safety of Black people on campus.  By creating this blog, I am “taking one for the team,” enduring known and unknown professional risks in order to improve the lives of marginalized scholars.  Everyday that I wear a man’s suit, I am choosing professional safety (as well as safety from violence) over greater visibility of genderqueer people on campus.  Every interaction with a student or colleague — do I choose authenticity and social justice or safety and job security — carries the decision between my survival or my survival.  And, major decisions like making my research more “mainstream” to increase my professional status comes at the expense of my own authenticity and perspective. The very things I should and should not do as a tenure-track professor seem at odds with the very things I should not and should do as a Black queer person.

no chance of escape
now self-employed
concerned (but powerless)
an empowered and informed member of society (pragmatism not idealism)
calm
fitter, healthier and more productive
like a pig
in a cage
on antibiotics.

Radiohead. 1997. Fitter Happier.


on academic labour and performance anxiety


Posted by hallymk1

 

ONE. The bleeding of our souls.

There is no escape from the living death of capitalist work (Dinerstein and Neary). This leads Cederström and Fleming to argue that our whole existence bleeds our souls in the name of value. The corporatisation of our lives bleeds our souls because:

The real fault-line today is not between capital and labor. It is between capital and life. Life itself is now something that is plundered by the corporation, rendering our very social being into something that makes money for business. We know them. The computer hackers dreaming code in their sleep. The airline stewards evoking their warm personality to deal with an irate customer…The aspiring NGO intern working for nothing. The university lecturer writing in the weekend. The call center worker improvising on the telephone to enhance the customer experience.

This is the world-for-acccumulation, against which Kate Bowles notes universities and academic labour are being restructured so that shame becomes a central tenet of everyday academic life.

We overwork because the current culture in universities is brutally and deliberately invested in shaming those who don’t compete effectively; as a correlative to this we are starting to value and promote to leadership roles people who really do believe in the dodgeball triumphalism of university rankings as a way of nurturing educational values and critical inquiry.

The cruelty of this shaming is that it passes itself off as supportive collegial celebration of the heroic few; it’s hard to call out precisely because it looks like a good thing.

Yesterday I argued that there is a broader set of questions for academics here, about how they approach organisational governance co-operatively, in order to generate solidarity that militates against the practices that devolve corporate leadership and responsibility for actions, and thereby enable performance management to become an internalised disciplinary activity. For Bowles, this is academic labour as labour that needs to stand against shame and being shamed through performance:

Being shamed isn’t the result of failing or refusing to participate in this system; it’s the result of being willing to supply your labour to enable competitiveness to work at all. Because there have to be losers, for there to be people who win.

TWO. Because there have to be losers, for there to be people who win.

The internalisation of performativity, alongside managerialism and marketization/the commodification of everyday practices, is as present inside the University as they are outside. Thus, academic labour is labour that needs to resist its reification and its alienation from its species. As Petrovic argued, as life, relationships, values, the soul, is recast for value or as value-laden, we witness:

[The] transformation of human beings into thing‑like beings which do not behave in a human way but according to the laws of the thing‑world. Reification is a ‘special’ case of ALIENATION, its most radical and widespread form characteristic of modem capitalist society

For Stephen Ball this is amplified by performativity that in-turn pivots around mechanisms for control and autonomy, and the deterritorialised nature of performance management so that it both appears and reappears inside-and-outside of the workplace. Thus, performativity is our lack of personal control over our labour, so that we seize on the enforcement of:

a technology, a culture and a mode of regulation that employs judgements, comparisons and displays as means of incentive, control, attrition and change – based on rewards and sanctions (both material and symbolic). The performances (of individual subjects or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or displays of ‘quality’, or ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. As such they stand for, encapsulate or represent the worth, quality or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement. The issue of who controls the field of judgement is crucial. (p. 216)

This is the entrepreneurial turn inside the University, as that working space mirrors the need to generate the creative-commodity economy outside. This turn recasts the academic as innovator whose formation inside-and-outside the University can be witnessed and judged as creative and valuable, not because it is useful but because it can be exchanged. This is not about the relationships that the academic has either with her peers, her students, or most importantly with herself. It is about the enclosure and commodification of that life under the organisation of the market.

THREE. Zero autonomy and performance anxiety.

Elsewhere I wrote that the impact of this need to perform and to be seen to perform is a function of a lack of autonomy. However, it is also formed of the systemic myth that is peddled about how if only we were more resilient then the world would be ours.

We are conditioned to rely on the rugged, resilient individual. To develop the rugged, resilient individual. And in the process we are all demeaned. In the process we are all alienated from our humanity.

In this, recognition of our alienation not as academics, but as labour and as labour-power, matters. This is an alienation from our very selves, as more is demanded of us: more extensive lists of projects to manage; the next EU bid to chase; your team’s development reviews to finalise faster; your own research to be done on your own time; your need to bring in external income to justify performing at that conference; more value to create; more capital to set in motion; more surpluses to be generated. This is the restructuring of the University as a business through your work and your alienated self.

This alienation is witnessed in Miya Tokumitsu’s connection of the relationship between academic practices and academic psychology:

Few other professions fuse the personal identity of their workers so intimately with the work output. This intense identification partly explains why so many proudly left-leaning faculty remain oddly silent about the working conditions of their peers. Because academic research should be done out of pure love, the actual conditions of and compensation for this labor become afterthoughts, if they are considered at all.

This underpins the increasing exploitation of the academic soul at work. It I why I was awake at 4am yesterday and today, worrying about those essays to be marked, about whether the three journal articles in review and the eight conference presentations accepted and the two book proposals and the proposed new Centre for Pedagogic Research are enough (enough already!) or made me a good enough academic (when I feel like a shameful fraud), and whether I am giving my team enough direction, and whether I need to find more time for trades union activities because solidarity is a weapon. Am I enough? Am I good enough? How am I judged, by you and by me? What is my value? Alienated from my self and my relationships through capitalist work.

And these fears and anxieties remind me that as I internalise a structural and structuring performance management, this is overlain on top of a hackneyed academic psychology that is prone to intense negativity, including: over-analysing my performance and my thinking until my mind bleeds; being convinced that everything has to be perfect for everyone forever, except for me; being unforgiving and overcritical of me; being unable to be in this world; being too deliberate in my use of language/discourse/action and search for hidden meanings where there may be none; making myself too responsible about stuff for which I am not responsible; and lacking faith in myself.

As Tokumitsu argues, this enables those in-power or with power-over the world to entreat educators to “do what you love”, and to give everything. This is hardly harmless. It reifies certain forms of work as loveable because they are intellectual or creative or social, rather than proletarianised, whilst its demands are made competitive and outcomes-focused and routine so that this very work underpins self-hatred. It is the sublimation and the very negation of the self; it is the identification of the ego with the performance; it is the bleeding of the soul. And the governor for this is the interplay between structural, organisational management, and crippling, personal, psychological self-doubt. Just work that bit harder, that bit faster, that bit better and we’ll tell you we are proud of you… And I read this into The Underbelly of Putting Yourself Last: Mental Illness, Stress, and Substance Abuse, and I read this into reports on mental health and Ph.D. study.

All this reminds me that a while back I wrote about courage and a friend’s cancer diagnosis that had been too long in arriving, and the realisation that “and now here we are.”

And now here we are. And for all sorts of reasons I read those five words with an intense scream against the pain that this life has become and the choices we are forced to make, in order to justify our lives as hard-working and worthy of justice. And I scream against the pain of the compromises that are contained in those five words. And I recognise that it is in the moment of a crisis that the things that we do, and the compromises that we make, to be a manager or a co-worker or for the clock or for impact or for efficiency or for whatever, resolve.

My alienated self; my soul at work; my mind bleeds; am I good enough? And I wrote to my friend over the weekend that this lack of autonomy was a form of structural domination, which wears us out socially and collectively, and which doesn’t matter to management because there is such a reserve army of labour to fill-in. The precariously employed, the casualised, the hourly-paid, the hopeful post-graduates, the lower-cost. So you have to perform, and this is their domination over us, reproduced through the logic of competition; competition between universities; competition between individuals; competition inside yourself.

FOUR. And it wears me out. It wears me out.

“You wear out, Ed Tom. All the time you spend trying to get back what’s been took from you, more is going out the door. After a while you just have to try to get a tourniquet on it… Anyway, you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from…”

“They sat quietly at the table. After a while the old man said: She mentioned there was a lot of old pictures and family stuff. What to do about that. Well. There ain’t nothing to do about it I don’t reckon. Is there?”

“No. I don’t reckon there is.”

Cormac McCarthy. 2005. No Country for Old Men.

The logic of academic competition that owns you as you ask “do I do enough?” “Prove it.” The future owned by fear. The future of “I do enough”, “I am good enough”, owned by the past of “do I do enough?”, “was I good enough?” Never thinking “I am” because the shadow of “am I?” is unforgiving. The logic of academic competition that uses the National Student Survey, Research Excellence, impact metrics, restricted promotions processes, and so on, as forms of academic cognitive behavioural therapy; as forms of restructuring what it means to be an academic; reifying what it means to labour in a University, so that performance is internalised. So that guilt and shame trump solidarity, unity and faith. So that in the battle to survive we forget that capitalist work is ‘a form of living death’ (Dinerstein and Neary (ht @josswinn)).

This means that, in Ball’s terms, we are subsumed under an imperative that makes:

management, ubiquitous, invisible, inescapable – part of and embedded in everything we do. Increasingly, we choose and judge our actions and they are judged by others on the basis of their contribution to organizational performance, rendered in terms of measurable outputs (p. 223).

This is the battle between an academic ego-identity that is increasingly status-driven and reified, a managerial cadre that seeks control through its own autonomy and performance management techniques, and the possibility of a socialised self that might refuse capital as the automatic subject. In this we need to recognise the duality that, first academic labour is labour and is locked in a struggle with capital over the production of value, and second that increasingly this form of labour is revealed as kettled inside a structure that exists for the autonomy of Capital.

This autonomy is a battle over productive and useful time. As Marx notes in Capital Volume 2:

It is plain that the more the production time and labour-time cover each other the greater is the productivity and self-expansion of a given productive capital in a given space of time. Hence the tendency of the capitalist production to reduce the excess of the production time over the labour-time as much as possible. But while the time of production of a certain capital may differ from its labour-time, it always comprises the latter, and this excess is itself a condition of the process of production. The time of production, then, is always that time in which a capital produces use-values and expands, hence functions as productive capital, although it includes time in which it is either latent or produces without expanding its value.

Inside a competitive market, all of life must become productive of value, and idle or working time, has to be annihilated. The self that produces things that cannot be exchanged has limited value and must be annihilated. The life that is consumed by working time rather than productive time is inefficient, and must be recalibrated by speed-up, always-on, the annilhilation of space by time. This is our internalisation of the capital’s necessity for perpetual time-space transformations, in order to generate and accumulate surplus-value and wealth. This is the time-space transformation through student debt, financialisation, the international university, the MOOC, and the University as an association of capitals.

This is the demand that academic labour fights against its fixity inside the walls of the University.

This is the demand that academic labour is always-on, always circulating, always looking for spaces to generate value.

This is the bind that academic labour now finds itself in: based in a belief system based on love or care or the student experience; courted and reified as special and high status and as commodity; kettled by performance anxiety and performance management; disciplined by academic cognitive behavioural therapy; forced to be responsive to the university as competing business in a landscape that is being reterritorialised on a global scale; forced to reinvent itself for expansion and accumulation; never allowed to be.

Never allowed to be.

Never allowed to be.

And it wears you out.


Friction, co-operation and technology in the neoliberal university


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting at “Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology and resistance“ in May. My abstract is noted below.
In the Grundrisse, Marx argued that the circulation of productive capital was “a process of transformation, a qualitative process of value”. As capitalists sought to overcome the barriers to this transformatory process, they worked to revolutionise both the means of production via organisational and technological change, and circulation time via transportation and communication changes. Reducing friction in the production and circulation of capital is critical to the extraction of surplus value, and Marx argued that in this transformation “Capital by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier [and]… the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it.”
 
Higher education is increasingly a space which is being recalibrated so as to reduce friction and thereby to increase the mobility or fluidity of intellectual production and circulation. Thus, technology, technical services and techniques are deployed to collapse the interfaces between geography, space and time. However, this collapse also reveals the stresses and strains of antagonisms, as the friction of neoliberal higher education reform deforms existing cultures and histories. It also points to alternatives like those emerging from analyses of the Chilean CyberSyn project or the Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living.
 
This paper argues that inside the University, the deployment of technologies, technical services and techniques enables education to be co-opted as an institutional means for production and control. As a result, academics and students are defined as entrepreneurial subjects. A question is the extent to which the friction that emerges from this neoliberal pedagogic project can be used to describe alternatives, and whether in the process it is possible to uncover ways in which education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, as a form of resistance.

on academic labour and plutonomy


Posted by hallymk1

In discussing academic labour, Chomsky made the interesting point that:

The university is probably the social institution in our society that comes closest to democratic worker control. Within a department, for example, it’s pretty normal for at least the tenured faculty to be able to determine a substantial amount of what their work is like: what they’re going to teach, when they’re going to teach, what the curriculum will be. And most of the decisions about the actual work that the faculty is doing are pretty much under tenured faculty control. Now of course there is a higher level of administrators that you can’t overrule or control.

This is a real tension. The perceived academic culture is deliberative yet the rollout of neoliberalism across increasing swathes of public space (utilities, healthcare, schools, universities) is increasingly kettling that academic project. As the Australian Actual Casuals note this disciplinary process emerges as a form of labour arbitrage, a set of organisational innovations designed to attack labour costs and control the capital produced by academics and students. We might view this as organised capital undermining the groundwork of organised labour by attacking the spaces and times, or space-times, available for solidarity and co-operative action.

In this Australian context, this includes the administrative drive for casualization, deprofessionalisation, disincentivising certain collective behaviours, and so on, and it affects not just adjunct academics and postgraduates who teach, but also:

casually hired workers on short contracts in universities contributing to research, administration, project work, IT and maintenance. Unlike salaried staff, casuals are in constant negotiation about their employment, and regularly deal with the insecurity of contract renewal and funding continuation. Casualisation offers flexibility to some, but to others is experienced as underemployment, just-in-time hiring, and a sense of marginalization from the permanent workforce. Casuals typically don’t have access to leave entitlements, often cannot apply for internally advertised positions, and if they can access onsite professional development at all, do so on their own time.

This then mirrors the experience of the 3Cosas movement at the University of London for whom the fight is:

to ensure equality of terms and conditions between the University of London’s direct employees, and its outsourced workers. There are three areas (‘tres cosas’) where the disparity between University and contract workers is greatest – SICK PAY, HOLIDAYS and PENSIONS. The campaign aims to persuade the University to ensure that all workers have the same rights in these three areas. It is eminently affordable, and it is the only right thing to do.

However, the right thing to do runs up against a set of competitive pressures that are defining and redefining (deterritorialising and reterritorialising) the University for the extraction of profit or wealth or value, and which is in the process deliberately dehumanising people. These competitive pressures are in part driven by what, in 2006, Citibank termed Plutonomy. This is the ‘binge on bling’ or the refocusing of growth on the ‘Uber-rich, the plutonomists, [who] are likely to see net worth-income ratios surge, driving luxury consumption.’ This is a socio-cultural war around the mobilisation and maintenance of corporate power: ‘The key challenge for corporates in this space is to maintain the mystique of prestige while trying to grow revenue and hit the mass-affluent market.’ Thus:

Globalization, productivity, a rising profit share and dis-inflation have helped  plutonomy. Beyond war, inflation, the end of the technology/productivity wave and/or financial collapse, which have killed previous plutonomies, we think the most potent and short-term threat would be societies demanding a more ‘equitable’ share of wealth.

The maintenance of economic power then forms a political terrain for the rollout of neoliberalism, which connects to Stephen Ball’s idea of transnational activist networks acting as a cadre to catalyse:

  • The economisation of everyday, social life, in order to realise new opportunities for profit;
  • Reconfiguring governance through an appeal to the entrepreneurial self, with the State as regulator and market-maker;
  • The State acting transnationally in concert with supranational bodies like the IMF, the European Central Bank and the World Bank, in order to impose the control that a free market desires, and removes impediments to the logic of the market;
  • Several active waves of neo-liberalism: proto (the intellectual project of Hayek and Friedman); roll-back (of Keynesianism); and roll-out (of new state forms, modes of governance and regulation);
  • The creation and extraction of value that is predicated upon mobility and connectivity;
  • The (networked) structures that enable neoliberalism are polymorphic and isomorphic.

Thus, life becomes an entrepreneurial activity, effectively a pedagogic project driven by those in the Plutonomy, designed to transfer the risk for the creation of value/management of risk from the public to the individual. This transfer is driven by instruments like student debt and financialisation, which see a transfer back in the opposite direction of wealth and power to those in the elite. Thus, Andrew McGettigan quotes Chris Hearn, head of education at Barclays, in discussing bond markets and HE:

the sector is ‘under-leveraged’ and could nearly double its borrowing. “Universities currently borrow about £5bn, largely through bank finance,” says Hearn. “But they probably have the capacity to generate close to an additional £4bn to £4.5bn.” “Time and time again we hear back from investors that they would desperately love to get their hands on anything to do with the university sector and it is surprising that no one has gone to that market yet.”

As McGettigan notes:

If the current upheaval in higher education does prompt a new wave of borrowing, then the consequences for universities could be equally huge. For borrowing on this scale comes with strings attached. Experience in the US, where bonds are more common, shows that those strings are capable eventually of transforming not only the daily life of a university but its very purpose.

If anything, the secular crisis of capitalism has quickened the pace of accumulation by the rick from the poor, including through the privatisation of previously public or socialised goods like education. In his Theory of Global Capitalism, William Robinson argues that the elite uses technology, entrepreneurialism and innovation both to globalise production and consumption and to catalyse the flows of capital accumulation, and because of the internal dynamics of the system of capitalism. These dynamics include competition, making the organic composition of capital as efficient as possible through squeezing labour, maintaining the increase in the rate of profit, and class struggle. Internalising performativity and entrepreneurial activity inside academics, precariously-employed post-graduates, outsourced IT workers, students and so on, enables the maintenance of power through Plutonomy. This entrepreneurial turn inside the University is used to lower costs, to drive productivity, to discipline labour and to gain competitive advantage over other capitals/businesses/universities. Innovation is the result of social forces in struggle and the need to overcome the temporal and spatial barriers to accumulation.

The secular control by those with power-over is based on the tenets of liberal democracy that are increasingly limited by the power of transnational capitalism over the objective material reality of life, and which is reinforced technologically and pedagogically. To argue for emancipation through technological innovation, least of all inside the University, is to fetishise technology and to misunderstand how technology is shaped by the clash of social forces and the desire of capital to escape the barriers imposed by labour.

Thus, inside the university, technological innovation goes hand-in-hand with strategies for capital accumulation and the explosion in proletarian work, unemployment and underemployment across the globe. Much of this immiseration remains hidden from those in the global North who perceive that capitalism and the market offers the only workable solution. This ignores the fact that, as an article on the Network of Global Corporate Control demonstrates, the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations

[identifies] a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy… a core of 1318 companies [representing] 20 per cent of global operating revenues and… the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms… representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues’… a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies … controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth … Most were financial institutions.

This is the world-for-acccumulation, against which Kate Bowles notes universities and academic labour are being restructured.

We overwork because the current culture in universities is brutally and deliberately invested in shaming those who don’t compete effectively; as a correlative to this we are starting to value and promote to leadership roles people who really do believe in the dodgeball triumphalism of university rankings as a way of nurturing educational values and critical inquiry.

The cruelty of this shaming is that it passes itself off as supportive collegial celebration of the heroic few; it’s hard to call out precisely because it looks like a good thing. It’s rampant in internal messaging (newsletters, all staff emails) that continuously reinforce the institution’s strategic mission by high-fiving those who win the prizes. It’s the self-justifying logic of casualisation, creating a vast second-tier of precarious and under supported university work for those who don’t get the real jobs. And it’s the immense project of research quantification, that crowds out practices of thinking, collaborating, listening and sharing in the name of picking winners and hothousing them because ultimately they pay off.

Thus in the UK, in the current round of strikes by academic labour, the potential pressures on national pay bargaining, and hence labour rights, are being talked-up. Inside a competitive environment where the core issue is the health of competing businesses rather than the sustainability of the sector, this is only natural. Moreover, it underpins an increasing corporate focus on outsourcing (or euphemistically-termed partnerships) in terms of: IT; HR functions; student services; and so on. It also drives a need to ensure that staff, as well as students, become increasingly entrepreneurial in taking responsibility/becoming accountable for organisational culture change through: increased flexibility of curriculum development and provision; agility in knowledge transfer; engagement with technological innovation; management of the impact of individual research; and in marketing and communicating about the self-as-commodity with an attached academic value (or profit/loss column). As universities are increasingly commercial entities, engaged with a range of commercial partners, working with students-as-consumers as carriers of debt, performativity and internalising a corporate ethos is central to the formal academic project.

The question now is how to resist such horizontalism and network governance, which itself reflects the needs of the University as corporate entity. In the face of the need to generate surpluses and to enhance market share, the only options appear to be to support the co-option of academic labour for this competitive project, to unionise and organise inside the institution and across the sector (and to join protests against austerity), or to seek exodus. Whichever action is taken, there is a broader set of questions for academics about how they approach organisational governance co-operatively, in order to generate solidarity that militates against the practices that devolve corporate leadership and responsibility for actions, and thereby enable performance management to become an internalised disciplinary activity. As Kate Bowles reminds us, this is academic labour as labour that needs to stand against shame and being shamed:

Being shamed isn’t the result of failing or refusing to participate in this system; it’s the result of being willing to supply your labour to enable competitiveness to work at all. Because there have to be losers, for there to be people who win.

Academic complicity in plutonomy; in the accumulation of wealth; in the mechanics of proletarianisation and dehumanisation. Because there have to be losers, for there to be people who win.


Call for contributions to a book on ‘Mass Intellectuality: The democratisation of higher education’


Posted by hallymk1

Through our work on the Social Science Centre, Joss Winn and I have been approached to produce a book which documents and critically analyses ‘alternative higher education’ projects in terms of their being critical responses to ‘intellectual leadership’ in mainstream higher education. The book is intended to be part of a series already agreed with Bloomsbury Academic Publishing that focuses on ‘intellectual leadership’. The series editors have encouraged us to develop a proposal for a book to be included in this new series. A brief statement about the series is:

‘Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education’ is a research-level series comprising monographs and edited collections with an emphasis on authored books. The prime purpose of the series is to provide a forum for different and sometimes divergent perspectives on what intellectual leadership means within the context of higher education as it develops in the 21st century.

This is an invitation to attend a workshop where we aim to collectively design a book proposal that is submitted to Bloomsbury. As you can see below, we have drafted a proposal, which the series editors and their peer-reviewers have responded very positively to, but it has always been our intention to ultimately produce the book in a collaborative way with all its authors.

We hope that from the workshop, a revised proposal is produced with confirmed authors and chapter summaries, which we will then submit to Bloomsbury for final approval.

We are very optimistic that it will be accepted, but of course we are at liberty to submit the proposal elsewhere if Bloomsbury decide not to go ahead with it. Either way, we are confident of getting the book published.

Hopefully, the draft proposal below is largely self-explanatory. The chapters headings are only indicative in order to get us this far. We expect a fully revised proposal to come out of the workshop with input from all authors.

If you are interested in writing a chapter for the book, you are strongly encouraged to attend the workshop. We will be seeking international contributions to the book, but would like as many authors as possible to help design the book through attendance at this workshop.

We welcome anyone who is involved with and/or working on alternative higher education projects such as free universities, transnational collectives, occupied spaces, and co-operatives for higher education. We hope that this book will provide a lasting critical analysis of recent and existing efforts to develop alternatives to mainstream higher education in the UK and elsewhere. We expect it to encompass chapters which focus on all aspects of these initiatives including, for example, governance, pedagogy, institutional form, theory, disciplinary boundaries, subjectivities: ‘academic’, ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘researcher’, and the role and nature of research outside of mainstream universities.

The workshop will be held on Thursday 5th June in Leicester, UK. Exact details of time and place will be sent to participants nearer the date. If you would like to attend, please email Joss Winn prior to 10th May, with a brief abstract of your anticipated contribution. This will help us get a sense of direction prior to the workshop and organise it more effectively. If you are unable to attend the workshop but would like to contribute to the book, please tell us.

1. Book Title and Subtitle.

‘Mass Intellectuality: The democratisation of higher education’

2. Summary

Drawing on the activism of academics and students working in, against and beyond the neo-liberal university, this book brings together for the first time, both an analysis of the crisis of higher education and the alternative forms that are emerging from its ruins.

3. Description (marketing)

Higher education in the UK is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What and who have led us to this crisis? What are the alternatives? To whom do we look for leadership in revealing those alternatives?

This book brings together critical analyses of the failures of ‘intellectual leadership’ in the University, and documents on-going efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organising higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect critically on efforts to create really existing alternatives.

The authors argue that mass higher education in the UK is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-term interests of society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

4. Key features

1. The book critiques the role of higher education and the University in developing solutions to global crises that are economic and socio-environmental. In this way it grounds an analysis of the idea that there is no alternative for higher education but to contribute to neoliberal agendas for economic growth and the marketisation of everyday life. The restrictions on the socio-cultural leadership inside the University are revealed.

2. The book describes and analyses several real, alternative forms of higher education that have emerged around the world since the ‘Great Recession’ in 2008. These alternatives emerged from worker-student occupations, from engagements in civil society, and from the co-operatives movement. These projects highlight a set of co-operative possibilities for demonstrating and negotiating new forms of political leadership related to higher learning that are against the neo-liberal university.

3. The book argues that the emergence of alternative forms of higher education, based on co-operative organising principles, points both to the failure of intellectual leadership inside the University and to the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge. The place of ‘Mass Intellectuality’ as a form of distributed leadership that is beyond the limitations of intellectual leadership in the University will be critiqued, in order to frame social responses to the crisis.

5. Table of Contents

Chapters to be negotiated in a dedicated workshop for the book. However, examples indicative of actual content are as follows.

1. Introduction: Leadership and academic labour: the failure of intellectual leadership in Higher Education [Joss Winn and Richard Hall]

This chapter will introduce the book by offering a perspective on the different types of ‘intellectual leadership’ that exist within higher education i.e. the state, university management, and academic. It will establish a critical framework for understanding the role of each, focused upon their interrelationships, and the tensions and barriers that arise. The chapter aims to introduce and provide a review of the term ‘intellectual leadership’, and then offer a different way of conceiving it as a form of social relationship. In doing so, the authors will briefly question the role, purpose and idea of the university and ask what is it for, or rather, why is it being led? For what purpose? If there has been a failure of leadership, whom has it failed? The authors will then draw on other chapters in the book to offer further responses to these questions, which are themselves developed through the structure of the book: in; against; and beyond the university. We will review the aim of each section, how they are connected and why they point to the need for alternatives. We will address whether it is possible to define alternatives for higher education as a coherent project, and if so how can they be developed and what is the role of leadership in that process?

First section: inside the University

This section sets up the problems of intellectual leadership, historically, philosophically and politically. The co-editors suggest the following indicative areas, which will be defined at the workshop.

  • The failures of intellectual leadership: historical critique (including militarisation and financialisation)

  • The failures of intellectual leadership: philosophical critique

  • Intellectual leadership and limits of institutional structures: managerialism and corporatisation against academic freedom

  • Technology: enabling democracy or cybernetic control?

  • The recursive ‘logic’ of openness in higher education: Levelling the ivory tower?

Second section: against the University

This section documents responses to the first section, in the form of recent critical case studies from those working and studying within and outside the academy. The co-editors suggest the following indicative areas, which will be defined at the workshop.

  • Leaderless networks, education and power

  • Student intellectual leadership: models of student-academic and student-worker collaboration

  • Forms of co-operation: case studies of organisational democracy in education

  • Historical examples of leaderless organisation

  • Historical examples of resistance to intellectual leadership

  • Regional examples of alternatives: Latin America, etc. [unless UK-based]

  • A review of recent initiatives: Student as Producer, SSC, FUN, Free University Brighton, Liverpool, Ragged, P2PU, Brisbane, Edufactory, etc.

Third section: beyond the University

This section provides a critical analysis of the responses described in section two and draws out generalisable themes related to the purpose, organisation and production of higher education, in terms of the idea of Mass Intellectuality, relating it to leadership. The co-editors suggest the following indicative areas, which will be defined at the workshop.

  • Co-operative higher education. Conversion or new institution building?

  • Other models: Open Source ‘benevolent dictator’; heroic leader; radical collegiality, co-operatives

  • Critiques of horizontalism, P2P production, forms of co-operation, radical democracy, etc.

  • Beyond/problems with/critique of ‘Student as Producer’ (Lincoln)

  • General intellect, mass intellectuality: New forms of intellectuality

  • Higher and higher education: Utopian forms of higher education

  • Intellectual leadership and local communities

  • Public intellectuals and public education

Conclusion. The role of free universities: in, against and beyond [Joss Winn and Richard Hall].

The concluding chapter will aim to synthesis key points from the book into an over-arching critical, theoretical argument based upon evidence from the preceding chapters. We will question whether the examples of alternatives to intellectual leadership inside and beyond the university are effective and whether they are prefigurative of a fundamental change in the meaning, purpose and form of higher education. We will reflect on the concept of ‘mass intellectuality’, and attempt to develop this idea in light of our critique and preceding evidence. We will attempt to identify a coherent vision for alternatives to mainstream higher education and assess the role and form of ‘intellectual leadership’.

6. Chapter by chapter synopsis

This needs to be determined at our workshop, but the text below is indicative.

Section one collects chapters which discuss the historical, political-economic and technological trajectory of the modern university, with a particular critical focus on the ‘imaginary futures’ of post-war higher education in the UK and elsewhere. In the context of the current social and economic crises, the chapters lay out the failures of universities and their leaders to provide an on-going and effective challenge to neo-liberalism and question why.

Section two collects chapters which focus on recent and historical attempts by students and academics to resist, reinvent and revolutionise the university from within. Looking at UK and international examples, they examine the characteristics of these efforts and assess the effectiveness of critical forms of praxis aimed against what the university has become.

Section three collects chapters which reflect critically on recent student and academic activism that goes beyond the institutional form of the university to understand higher education as a form of social relations independent of mainstream disciplines and structures. They examine several inter-related and complementary forms of practice as well as reflecting critically on their own practice.

7. Indicative Submission date

  • Workshop to define content and structure in 5th June 2014

  • First draft of all chapters by October/November 2014.

  • Peer-review of chapters completed by February/March 2015.

  • Final draft chapters to co-editors by May/June 2015.

  • Manuscript delivered by September 2015.


Presentations on academic alienation, academic labour and academic activism


Posted by hallymk1

I have a number of presentations coming up that focus upon academic alienation, academic labour and academic activism. The connection between alienation and work, revealed in normative responses to the triple crunch of climate change, peak oil and austerity, leads me to question the ways in which academics enable the hegemonic reproduction of the University for value. I’ll be speaking about academic work/activism and the triple crunch here. However, the following abstract has been accepted for the Academic Identities conference 2014. I will be co-presenting with Joss Winn(from the University of Lincoln and the Social Science Centre).

A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Academic Labour.

In this paper we analyse ‘academic labour’ using categories developed by Marx in his critique of political economy. In doing so, we return to Marx’s mature writing to help understand the work of academics as productive living labour subsumed by the capitalist mode of production. In elaborating our own position, we are critical of two common approaches to the study of academic labour, especially as they emerge from inside analyses of virtual labour or digital work.

First, we are critical of efforts to define the nature of our work as ‘immaterial labour’ and argue that this category is an unhelpful and unnecessary diversion from the analytical power of Marx’s social theory and method. The discourse around ‘immaterial labour’ raised by the Autonomist or Operaismo tradition is thought-provoking, but ultimately adds little to a critical theory of commodity production as the basis of capitalist social relations. In fact they tend to overstate network-centrism and its concomitant disconnection from the hierarchical, globalised forces of production that shape our objective social reality.

Second, we are cautious of an approach which focuses on the digital content of academic labour to the neglect of both its form and the organising principles under which it is subsumed. Understandably, academics have a tendency to reify their own labour such that it becomes something that they struggle for, rather than against. However, repeatedly adopting this approach can only lead to a sense of helplessness. If, rather, we focus our critique on the form and organising principles of labour, we find that it shares the same general qualities whether it is academic or not. Thus, it is revealed as commodity-producing, with both concrete and abstract forms. By remaining focused on the form of labour, rather than its content, we can only critique it rather than reify it.

This then has implications for our understanding of the relationships between academics and virtual work, the ways in which technologies are used to organise academic labour digitally, and struggles to overcome such labour. It is our approach to conceive of ‘academic labour’ in both its concrete and abstract forms and in relation to a range of techniques and technologies. The purpose of this is to unite all workers in solidarity against labour, rather than against each other in a competitive labour market.


On the domination of time and the liberation of a pedagogical alliance


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Academics and socially necessary labour time.

In the University, abstract time dominates: the 50-minute hour; the four-week turnaround for feedback on work; being always-on through tethered technologies; the production of journal articles and books; the production and circulation of learning materials; the production and circulation of assessments and feedback; the exchange of ideas as commodities; the governance of production and circulation by intellectual property, patent and copyright law. A value-chain that is real and virtual, and governed by abstract time whilst its temporalities are regulated by the cultural space/time of student-as-consumer.

Abstract time dominates the life of the University as academic labour is really subsumed and recalibrated by capital. As the products of academic labour are re-constituted as commodities, academic labour is disciplined by impact, performance management and internalising league tables and satisfaction scores. The focus becomes less the concrete labour that produces a journal article or a podcast or a report, but the value that can be extracted from those products as they are exchanged through research funding or knowledge transfer or the fees that accompany student retention, and then realised through the accumulation of wealth.

Thus, we see the embodiment of the abstract labour of the academic in the new commodities that form the backbone of a new process of exchange and value creation/extraction. Time is central in this process. The concrete labour which is employed in the process of making a book or an on-line course does not create value, but the time it takes to write the book or course is alienated from the academic as s/he faces the demands of producing them in a competitive environment. This concrete academic labour may have a use for someone, as peer-review or piece of research or whatever, but as the University is subsumed under the dynamics of the market and as its products are required for exchange, that labour becomes an abstracted measure of value. This is an environment where value emerges based on the average time actually required across society, given generally available technological and organisational development, to produce the specific commodity. This average, this socially-necessary labour time, is abstract labour dominated by exchange in the market. Through exchange and competition, any differences in the concrete labour embodied in the book or the online course are averaged out.

As Postone (1993) writes in Time Labour and Social Domination:

As a category of the totality, socially necessary labor time expresses a quasi-objective social necessity with which the producers are confronted. It is the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structures of alienated social relations in capitalism. The social totality constituted by labor as an objective general mediation has a temporal character, wherein time becomes necessity (p. 191).

Thus, the University enmeshed in the market becomes a source of value and also seeks out value from new markets. The attrition on the average time it takes academic labour to produce, circulate or exchange commodities damages the sociability and solidarity of the academic’s wider communities with whom s/he is now in competition. Thus, the socially necessary labour time of academic production increasingly dominates the life of the academic and the student. This domination is made worse for the academic as the University is subsumed under value accumulation, because the academic means of production are necessarily revolutionised through technological and organisational change. This leads to speed-up, impact, always-on, performance management, in order that the productivity of the academic in one day or one month or one year can be measured against her peers through the socially-necessary labour time that determines what her productivity should be. In a competitive market, if that four-week turnaround time is three weeks elsewhere the academic labour rights will be threatened. This measure intensifies and dominates her work.

TWO. Academic subordination to abstract time.

As the University is marketised and academic labour is made productive of value, as Wendling notes (p. 196), abstract time permeates and mediates social relations. Quantifying the time taken to produce, circulate and exchange becomes a form of domination because humanity is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between teacher and student is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between author and peer-reviewer is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between administrator and teaching team is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between Vice-Chancellor and outsourcing partners is subordinate to capitalist time. The social relationships of the University are alienated through their subordination to capitalist time. Productivity; time not task; efficiency not humanity.

Here, the individual academic’s work is made social, and lives or dies through profit and loss. The space/time of academic life is recalibrated through exchange and profit and loss. The space/time of academic life is recalibrated through the production, circulation and consumption of the commodity form. The space/time of academic life is recalibrated through the specific historical dynamic of capitalism.

E.P. Thompson recognised this in terms of work-discipline and labour, and the ways in which the systemic domination of the measured time to produce, circulate and exchange products ‘influence[d] the inward apprehension of time of working people?’ (p. 57) As time became increasingly alienated, Thompson argued that our humanity also became alienated from us because our ‘task-orientation’ was subsumed under the clock. Here the production of human necessities and the costs of social reproduction became subordinate to the production of value, and clearly demarcated as something separate from capitalist work. Moreover, “work” and “life” become increasingly demarcated, so that “passing the time of day” becomes objectionable and a waste of the capitalist’s time. As Thompson argues, ‘In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to “pass the time”.’ (pp. 90-1)

THREE. Time is our everything.

Marx argued this at length in the Grundrisse, and began to develop an analysis of the interrelationships between time in the circuit of production and time in the circulation of commodities, and capital’s drive to control time by reducing socially necessary labour time through technology and organisational developments, by maximising the time available for surplus labour, and by reducing circulation time, in order to turn capital over more quickly.

in addition to the labour time realized in production, the circulation time of capital enters in as a moment of value creation — of productive labour time itself. While labour time appears as value-positing activity, this circulation time of capital appears as the time of devaluation. The difference shows itself simply in this: if the totality of the labour time commanded by capital is set at its maximum, say infinity, so that necessary labour time forms an infinitely small part and surplus labour time an infinitely large part of this [infinity], then this would be the maximum realization of capital, and this is the tendency towards which it strives. On the other side, if the circulation time of capital were = 0, if the various stages of its transformation proceeded as rapidly in reality as in the mind, then that would likewise be the maximum of the factor by which the production process could be repeated, i.e. the number of capital realization processes in a given period of time. The repetition of the production process would be restricted only by the amount of time which it lasts, the amount of time which elapses during the transformation of raw material into product. Circulation time is therefore not a positive value-creating element; if it were = to 0, then value-creation would be at its maximum. But if either surplus labour time or necessary labour time = 0, i.e. if necessary labour time absorbed all time, or if production could proceed altogether without labour, then neither value, nor capital, nor value-creation would exist. Circulation time therefore determines value only in so far as it appears as a natural barrier to the realization of labour time. It is therefore in fact a deduction from surplus labour time, i.e. an increase of necessary labour time. It is clear that necessary labour time has to be paid for, whether the circulation process proceeds slowly or quickly. E.g. in trades where specific workers are required, who can, however, only be employed for a part of the year because the products are, say, saleable only in a given season, [in those trades] the workers would have to be paid for the entire year, i.e. surplus labour time is decreased in exact proportion to the reduction in their possibilities of employment during a given period of time, but still they must be paid in one way or another. (For example in the form that their wages for 4 months suffice to maintain them for a year.) If capital could utilize them for 12 months, it would pay them no higher, and would have gained that much surplus labour. Circulation time thus appears as a barrier to the productivity of labour = an increase in necessary labour time = a decrease in surplus labour time = a decrease in surplus value = an obstruction, a barrier to the self-realization process [Selbstverwertungsprozess] of capital. Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time… There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production

These contradictions, of the need for labour from which to extract a surplus and to add value to the production process, and the need to destroy the costs of labour, and to conquer geography and temporality for exchange, in order to open-up geography and temporality for the market, are also seen in Capital’s need for control. For Harvey, “time–space compression” to refer to the way the acceleration of economic activities leads to the destruction of spatial barriers and distances. In particular, Harvey argues that new technologies and organisational forms, like high frequency trading, containerisation and so on, underpin expansion. Here, either the time or the distance that separates production from exchange and profit is destroyed. Universities driving the expansion of global markets through outsourcing, internationalisation strategies, on-line delivery and so on, reinforce the subsumption of academic labour inside the disciplinary dictates of control. This is the time-space compression of the lifeworld of the academic and the student, rationalised through a technologised curriculum, and governed by value-for-money, the limits of time-bound pedagogies, and the costs of the production and consumption of academic commodities.

This focus on the control of space/time, in order to maximise the instantaneous accumulation of wealth connects to the cybernetic hypothesis. It was the search for control and minimising the risks to accumulation that led Tiqqun to argue:

A system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect: there is a degradation of its energy to the extent that it undergoes exchanges, in the same way as information degrades as it is circulated around. This is what Clausius called entropy. Entropy, considered as a natural law, is the cybernetician’s Hell. It explains the decomposition of life, disequilibrium in economy, the dissolution of social bonds, decadence… Initially, speculatively, cybernetics claimed that it had thus opened up a common ground on which it would be possible to carry out the unification of the natural and human sciences (p. 14).

This entropy was a function of crisis inside a global system of value creation, extraction and accumulation that suffered from disequilibrium and uneven growth, as well as bubbles, booms and busts.

The crises of capitalism, as Marx saw them, always came from a de-articulation between the time of conquest and the time of reproduction. The function of cybernetics is to avoid crises by ensuring the coordination between Capital’s “front side” and “rear side.” Its development is an endogenous response to the problem posed to capitalism — how to develop without fatal disequilibrium arising (p. 21).

Thus, the technologies for control were defined “to maximize the volume of commodity flows by minimizing the events, obstacles, and accidents that would slow them down.” (p. 22) This is increasingly true of the University where flows of management information like psychometric test outcomes and workload data, performance metrics like retention and progression data, and enriched use of technologies to manage research and teaching, attempt to reduce all academic activities to flows that take place in real-time, through structures that are always-on, with feedback and inputs that are “just in time”. As a result the University, like any other capitalist business, attempts to abolish time. Technologies and techniques are designed to accelerate production, to remove labour-related barriers, and to destroy the friction of circulation time.

FOUR. Academic proletarianisation and free time.

One result of this is the dissonance for the academic between the cognitive skills, practices and knowledge that are high value, and the increasing routinisation of academic labour.  In particular, Marx argued in Capital, Volume One that machinery and techniques were used to dominate the labourer through proletarianisation.

The shortening of the hours of labour creates, to begin with, the subjective conditions for the condensation of labour, by enabling the workman to exert more strength in a given time. So soon as that shortening becomes compulsory, machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective means, systematically employed for squeezing out more labour in a given time. This is effected in two ways: by increasing the speed of the machinery, and by giving the workman more machinery to tend. Improved construction of the machinery is necessary, partly because without it greater pressure cannot be put on the workman, and partly because the shortened hours of labour force the capitalist to exercise the strictest watch over the cost of production.

Where labour rights and the reduction in the hours of working are enforced this leads to increased capital intensity as the capitalist seeks to “convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means of exhausting the workman”. As Jehu argues this intensification and exhaustion form a process of domination of the body of the labourer and the time for the production of value. Value emerges from more time that is productive through the overcoming of entropy, and yet capital needs the destruction of time. Thus

in labor theory, reduction of hours of labor not only accelerates the development of the productive forces, with this development of the productive forces successive reductions of labor becomes becomes necessary: it “must soon lead to a state of things in which a reduction of the hours of labour will again be inevitable.”

Which is to say, reducing hours of labor first and foremost accelerates the demise of capitalism and wage slavery — freeing up disposable time for the great majority of society.

Therefore in any resistance to Capital’s domination, the recovery of time is pivotal. This is the case because value is measured through social time, which Capital tries to destroy through the co-option of science, co-operation and social commerce, in order to reduce necessary labour time and to attempt to liberate the creation of wealth from labour. Yet Capital measures all value by labour time and the extraction of surplus labour. This is the critical antagonism: “Capitalism is doomed, in sum, because it demands — at the same time — more labor and less labor.” (Tiqqun, p. 37) Thus, for Tiqqun

the new revolutionary subject would reappropriate its “creativity,” or its “imagination,” which had been confiscated by labor relations, and would make non-labor time into a new source of self and collective emancipation. (pp. 37-8)

Wendling also highlights that Marx saw the possibility for liberation in a reclaiming of wealth as ‘disposable time’ (Grundrisse, p. 708). Disposable time, rather than time that is owned by the capitalist and alienated from the worker, is the key to social emancipation. Around free-time, available for social reproduction, education and liberating the general intellect, forms a political battleground. Moreover, it becomes a battleground for social use and wealth, rather than the production for exchange and value. As Wendling notes:

in the communist future, which is not subject to the calculus of value, time must diminish in importance. When we extrapolate Marx’s visions of free time, therefore, we must not only envision the lengthening of the disposable hours the worker marks between short stints of productive labor. We must instead imagine a modern life freed from time, or at least modern life freed from time’s abstract and alienating dominations. (p. 199)

FIVE. Free time and the academic/student relationship

Giroux argues that

Civic engagement seems irrelevant and public values are rendered invisible, if not overtly disparaged, in light of the growing power of multinational corporations to privatize public space and time as it disconnects power from issues of equity, social justice and civic responsibility. Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs.

This is as true for the two critical relationships of academic and student and academic and public. These relationships offer the possibility of intimacy, care, acceptance and liberation, but inside an increasingly commodified academic process they risk being destroyed by an abstraction. For many academics this is what the duality of student-as-consumer and student-as-producer collapses into: the reality of a concrete relationship, or the abstraction of a process of learning. This process is increasingly enclosed by time-bound teaching sessions or impact/satisfaction metrics and money, which is a form of structural domination over people. This then threatens the idea that epistemological liberation might be underpinned by dialogue and struggle that emerge from a concrete pedagogical alliance rather than an abstract process.

Such an alliance pushes back against the idea that academic/student/public might be locked inside a commodified, abstract, time-bound process that is based on the exchange of money, time, expertise, skills, feedback, peer-review, rather than being rooted in a humane relationship  that has a use and that is based on solidarity and sharing. As Giroux continues this is about liberating time from its structural domination over us:

The formative cultures, institutions and modes of critical agency necessary for a vibrant democracy do not exist in a culture in which knowledge is fragmented, power concentrated in few hands and time is reduced to a deprivation for large segments of the public – one consequence of which is the endless struggle by many Americans simply to try to survive at the level of everyday life. The colonizing of time, space and power suggests taking back people’s time in an era when the majority must work more than ever to make ends meet. There is no democracy in a country in which for most people time is a deprivation rather than a luxury. Time is crippled when it is trapped within an endless need to fight to merely survive in order to have enough to eat, have access to decent health care, day care and a social wage. The struggle over time is inextricably linked to a struggle over space, institutions, public spheres, the public good, power, the future and the nature of politics itself.

In Marx’s terms, this struggle demands the analysis of the position of the labour of the academic inside the market, as it is subsumed for the creation and accumulation of value, rather than for its public use/good. Such labour is useful but it is increasingly incorporated inside a social universe whose gravity is value. The increasing value of academic labour enabled through its marketisation and enabling its further exchange begins to dominate the processes of academic production. It dominates working practices, academic relationships, the technologies and intensity of academic labour on a social scale. Thus, as the academic labour of the teacher and the student is restructured by strategies for value creation and accumulation, it has to behave like any other form of labour. It has to satisfy a specific social need and be measured in terms of the totality of academic labour. It is measured and disciplined by socially necessary labour time.

This process of liberation of time for use rather than exchange is the solidarity that might be developed, not be fetishising academic labour, but from seeing it in terms of public and social labour, dominated by time-space compression. Marx noted in Capital, Volume One that:

From this moment on, the labour of the individual producer acquires a twofold social character. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold needs of the individual producer himself only in so far as every particular kind of useful private labour can be exchanged with, i.e. counts as the equal of, every other kind of useful private labour. Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract. (p. 166)

This argument of commonality and of the solidarity that emerges from global exploitation points towards the potential that labour has to be socially useful and thereby liberated as a common treasury. This is about liberation from the domination of abstract time and the recovery of Thompson’s task-oriented life. This is about refusing, inPostone’s (1993, p. 202) terms, the conception of time that is “uniform, continuous, homogenous… [and] empty of events”. In this view, useful labour emerges through tasks and events that reproduce society against-and-beyond value production. They are a form of sociability that do not occur within time, but instead structure and determine that time (Postone, p. 201).

Potentially then, this is bell hooks’ self-actualisation: a capacity to live more fully and deeply. This is a capacity to integrate intellectual and emotional life through a society that is against value and for humane values. This is a humane capacity that is also the capability to liberate time for use and solidarity, rather than exchange. Here, academic life is not driven by a commodity-valuation based on the domination of abstract time. Academic life is governed by time that is useful for social reproduction. It is not about impact metrics or performance management or turnaround times or workload management. It is based on personal and social relations that dissolve the barriers between work and life, and which enable the teacher and the student to form a pedagogical alliance for the collective, socially-negotiated overcoming of capital’s power-over learning, teaching and the curriculum. This concrete alliance, revealed inside-and-against abstract time, is the beginning and end of our pedagogical fight for free time; a concrete struggle against abstract processes for value creation and accumulation; our concrete potential to be and to become.


some notes on academic co-option and exodus


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. This is an age of enclosure; of mine and not yours; of indentured study; of an entrepreneurial life beholden to capitalist work; of a subservience to exchange value; of alienation in the face of money. In the face of the rule of money.

‘An age of crisis, such as the present, is an age of rage. It is an age of frustrated expectations, frustrated hopes, frustrated life. We want to study at the university, but it is too expensive and there are no grants. We need good health care, but we do not have the money to pay for it. We need homes, we can see homes standing empty, but they are not for us. Or quite simply, for the millions and millions of people in the world who are starving: we want to eat: we can see that the food is there, that there is plenty of food for everyone in the world, but something stands between us and the food – money, or rather the fact that we don’t have enough of it.’

‘That does not mean that we do not want money, necessarily. Money is the form that wealth takes in this society, and as the producers of that wealth, we all want to participate in it. In the present society, no matter how austerely we may (or may not) like to live, we need money to live and to realise our projects. So yes, we want more money, for ourselves, for the universities, for schools and hospitals, for gardens and parks, for projects that point towards a different world, and so on. But we do not want a world that is ruled by money, we do not want a world in which the richness that we produce takes the form of money, we do not want a world in which money is the dominant form of social cohesion, the medium through which our social relations are established.’

John Holloway, Rage Against the Rule of Money.

TWO. The University is succumbing to violence. It is a space for the reproduction of systemic violence. From “you have no voice”, to “your voice is delegitimized”. The University is militarised through its research, and the money that conditions it. Students want cops off campus, but University managers conditioned by debt and money need the discipline of the kettle and the courtroom. This is the normalised violence of coercion or control or marginalisation of students; or the militarisation of the physical spaces of our campuses; or the direct co-option of our own/our students’ immaterial labour in making stuff for the military. For the public good.

‘More than 50 universities have received funding from the UK’s national laboratory for nuclear weapons since 2010’

‘In a statement the EPSRC said: “AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment) has unique research capabilities and assets and is a highly valued partner to EPSRC, contributing significantly to the UK’s overall research endeavour.”

‘It added: “EPSRC is party to both the concordat to support research integrity published by Universities UK in 2012 and to the Research Council UK policy and guidelines on the governance of good research conduct. We, of course, expect all the research we fund to be conducted in line with these policies and know that our partners share our commitment to such standards.”’

‘Cranfield said it had supported the UK defence community through its research since its formation as the College of Aeronautics in 1946. “We are proud that this work has helped protect the men and women of the Armed Services who put their lives at risk daily on behalf of our nation and to have contributed, in part, to the post-conflict reconstruction of nations around the world,” a spokesman said.’

Holly Else, University links to nuclear weapons maker ‘worth £8 million a year’.

THREE. Academics are increasingly co-opted for the maintenance of dominant positions. Co-opted for value. Alienated through the subsumption of their labour-power, and the products of their labour, from any notion of the public good. Reinforcing normative, deterministic myths of inefficiency; myths of the failing of the public; myths of the efficiency of the private; the reality that all of life must be for exchange rather than for use-value. A working life stratified in league tables, and project grants, and impact statements, and the internalised monitoring of work. A working life of performativity; of private knows best; of speed over thought; of consumerism; of the market. A meaningful, critical academic life annihilated by speed and time.

‘It may have been three years coming but the Government now fully accepts the importance of ICT for learning and that it’s not enough to simply leave it all to schools. That was the message from education secretary Michael Gove MP and skills minister Matthew Hancock MP at the first meeting of the Educational Technology Action Group yesterday (February 4).

‘Group chair Professor Stephen Heppell said: “We were given an unequivocal steer by our ministers to be bold and ambitious; to clear away impediments and to be world leading. They reminded us that technology could and should help make learning fun. It was a wonderful brief to be given, from the heart, and we will be open and inclusive in achieving what was asked of us – an action group, not a faffing around group!”

‘Michael Gove’s message to the new group was that he and his team had reflected on their former position of getting out of the way of the education front line. The public sector was not as tech-savvy as consumers and they felt that government had a convening and leadership role to play so that the right conditions were cultivated for education. They recognised the disruptive potential of technology and were committed to supporting teachers in leveraging the best out out [sic.] of technology to improve their effectiveness and professionalism.’

Merlin John, Etag ICT policy group told ‘be bold and ambitious’

FOUR. The University is broken. It is conditioned by neoliberal politics through the tenets of growth, financialisation and securitisation. Its twin contributions to society take the form of debt and privatisation. At issue is which knowledges and practices can be liberated from the University before it is too late. And the role of academics in that liberation.

‘The activist academic seeks a balance between the pursuit of individual rights and broader social justice. Not exactly an original idea. Many have pointed out that we live in a world defined by a proliferation of individual human rights and the neoliberal revival of early savage capitalism, which everywhere seeks to destroy the gains in social justice achieved in the 20th century. The expansion of “individual” human rights in the U.S. is accompanied by the decrease in social justice, i.e. increase in inequality, within the US, within other nations, and between nations, as well as the destruction of public education and health. Social justice succumbs while individual rights are increasingly enshrined in law. It seems that the larger the scope of legally-adopted human rights, the more the decrease in social justice worldwide. The struggles against both individual and collective wellbeing should be inseparable in theory and practice.’

Raúl Fernández, Nine Reflections for Academic Activists

FIVE. Against the rule of money; a rule of normalised violence; a rule underscored by the co-option of academic labour; a rule that is breaking the University; what is to be done?

‘The notion of exodus is important here, as a form of dissent , revolt or rebellion against capital’s exploitation of the entirety of social life… this connected web of social relations also offers a crack through which we might oppose the domination of capital over our existence. In Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that an association of the multitude, of interconnected oppositional groups that are able to share stories of oppression or austerity or hope or history using a variety of events and spaces, offers the opportunity for multiple protagonists to push for more democratic deployment of global resources. Virno goes further to argue that the very automation that capital develops in order to discipline and control labour makes possible an exodus from the society of capitalist work through the radical redisposal of the surplus time that arises as an outcome of that automation, alongside the ways in which different groups can interconnect in that surplus time. Academics then have an important role in critiquing the potentialities for an exodus away from the society of capitalist work.’

Richard Hall, on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus


On students, teachers and the pedagogical alliance


Posted by hallymk1

We look for an idea that is beyond student-as-consumer, and we witness a reinforcement of a deterministic, manifest destiny of the student who bears the risk for her higher education. We witness statements that divide student and teacher: “we continue to use technology to reinforce 19th century teaching practice to meet out-dated assessment models.” We witness statements that tie information and employability to metrics and risk, through choice and accountability. We witness statements made about the rule of money in the creation of a market that will lever teaching excellence: “Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching.” We witness statements made that reduce education to value: “Without high educational attainment, the UK will not maintain its wealth, quality of life and status in the world. A highly educated population is essential to Britain’s success in the global knowledge economy.”

Education defined by price; defined as value; defined for value. Relationships framed by price; defined as value; defined for value. Educational relationships framed by the ability of the student to manage her own risk: in finding £9,000 per annum to pay for access to her education; in managing her transition into higher education; in accessing and corralling sufficient resources to ensure progression across years; in enclosing and commodifying sufficient emotional and cultural and social capital to be employable. To become an entrepreneur in the face of the growth delusion of the UK economy, and the global assault on labour and the sociology of moderation that some would have us believe is opportunity, or skills for jobs as yet not invented, or the natural order.

Capitalist work as the natural order. The only alternative being there is no alternative.

And in this what is lost is the critical relationship between the student and the teacher. What is the complicity of the teacher in the entrepreneurial reinvention of the student? What is the definition of the pedagogy and of the curriculum worth in the face of the entrepreneurial reinvention of the student? What is the purpose of the teacher in the face of the risk- and compliance-based culture of higher education? What is the value of the teacher’s academic labour inside a marketised higher education? Where the social relationship between student and teacher is commodified around outcomes, performance, managerialism and risk, is there an alternative to a culture of performativity?

Where is the space to debate the alternative? We don’t witness this in the current UCU industrial action based on pay. We rarely witness this in the campaigns that claim to defend the British University. We are left, as Andrew McGettigan notes, with financialisation as the key determinant of the student-teacher relation.

Consumerism produces a new ‘teaching’ vector: customer-manager-ombudsman-regulator. It displaces traditional academic relations: it is essentially deprofessionalising. It cannot be emphasised enough that, no matter how many regulatory bodies, quangos and paper-trail hounds clog up the sector, the bottom line is that universities have degree awarding powers because they demonstrate (or are meant to) a ‘self-critical community’ of academics and scholars who safeguard standards.

As the pressures of the rule of money are exerted we wonder, what is to be done? Do we buy the idea that the University, governed by vice-chancellors as chief executives, and students as carriers of units of debt, and credit ratings agencies, and private providers operating with impunity inside its walls, and the realities of insurers of risk and bond markets, is lost? Do we cave to the idea that as a globally-competing business, the relationship between student and teacher is lost to the market, or as Neary and Hagyard argued to we re-radicalise the curriculum, and our relationships inside it?

In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of student as consumer, the links between teaching and research need to be radicalised to include an alternative political economy of the student experience. This radicalisation can be achieved by connecting academics and students to their own radical political history, and by pointing out ways in which this radical political history can be brought back to life by developing progressive relationship between academics and students inside and outside of the curriculum.

And this echoes and amplifies the radical, critical, pedagogical work of bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, that

to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin (p. 13).

This is spiritual, because it is about the person, in the form of the teacher and in the form of the student. It is about having soul and spirit and connecting to the soul and the spirit. It is not about connecting through the base abstraction of money. Thus, she continues:

that means that teachers must be actively involved committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. (p. 15)

This is the testing of reality through the organising principles and values of the curriculum, in a way that Freire acknowledged in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. (p. 39)

Transformation is liberation because it is deeply and politically personal and rooted in solidarity. It is not about the entrepreneurial internalisation of the risk of failure, it is framed by spaces inside-and-through which it is possible to challenge one’s perception of one’s place in the world with others. Thus, Freire maintains that this is about education and the politics of place, linked to identity, without which “there can be no real struggle.” In turn this is rooted in questioning and praxis: “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (p. 72)

Here the role of the teacher is not as liberator, but as member of a solidarity economy through which pedagogy is not done to the unfortunate student as a form of emulation, but is defined and produced by the student. For Freire, “The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption”. (p. 54) Elsewhere Freire noted that “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” (p. 181)

This connects deeply to the idea that the teacher might hold the same liberation role, born out of solidarity, as the therapist who is able to effectively support the emancipation of her client as a human being. As Wampold has argued for psychotherapy, relationships that emerge from trust, care and love rooted in empathy tend to have an impact on recovery/liberation.

Putting aside the debate about whether some treatments are more effective than others, it is clear that if there are differences among treatments, the differences are quite small (Wampold, 2001, 2007, 2010). Thus, we are left with the question: If the differences among treatments are nonexistent or are very small, are there other factors that do have an influence on the effects of psychotherapy? The answer is yes—the therapist who is providing the psychotherapy is critically important. In clinical trials as well as in practice, some therapists consistently achieve better outcomes than others, regardless of the treatment approach used (Wampold, 2006).

Whilst Wampold highlights 14 qualities of effective therapists, the following seem especially pertinent in reflecting on Freire, hooks and Neary and Hagyard’s pedagogic radicalisation of the student/teacher relationship:

Clients [students] of effective therapists [teachers] feel understood, trust the therapist [teacher], and believe the therapist [teacher] can help him or her. The therapist [teacher] creates these conditions in the first moments of the interaction through verbal and importantly non-verbal behavior. In the initial contacts, clients [students] are very sensitive to cues of acceptance, understanding, and expertise. Although these conditions are necessary throughout therapy [the curriculum], they are most critical in the initial interaction to ensure engagement in the therapeutic [pedagogic] process.

Effective therapists [teachers] are able to form a working alliance with a broad range of clients [students]. The working alliance involves the therapeutic [pedagogic] bond, but also importantly agreement about the task of goals of therapy [learning]. The working alliance is described as collaborative, purposeful work on the part of the client [student] and the therapist [teacher]. The effective therapist [teacher] builds on the client’s [student’s] initial trust and belief to form this alliance and the alliance becomes solidly established early in therapy [teaching].

Moreover, this approach is reinforced in some analyses of the interrelationships between the client’s theory of change and therapist variables in psychoanalysis. Here what emerges is the critical “interplay between therapist variables (the person of the therapist) and the client’s theory of change. When these two vital factors meet, something new is created. It is crucial that the therapist becomes aware of, and manages, the effect of therapist variables on the alliance.” Just as the client’s theory of change in therapy co-evolves with the therapist through dialogue, meaningful pedagogic engagements are deeply political in that they involve the co-evolution of the spaces inside-and-against which the student and the teacher negotiate the liberation of the former from the latter’s power over her, alongside the understanding that the student has over the structural domination that de-limits her power to create her world.

Critically, this does not involve a uniform creation of the client/therapist or student/teacher model. That model might be revealed as advocacy or directive or designing or co-operative. They are individually framed and defined, and are grounded in phenomenological difference. As Robinson notes:

Research further suggests the most important aspect of therapy that involves the therapist is the therapeutic alliance. According to Assay and Lambert (1999), the therapeutic alliance accounts for 30 per cent of outcome variance. For Wampold (2001), the alliance accounts for more than half of the 13 per cent attributed to therapeutic factors, rather than client and extra-therapeutic factors. Put another way, the alliance accounts for seven times as much outcome variation as the model or technique being used by the therapist.

Thus, what is clear in the therapeutic situation, is understanding how the specific therapist meets the client’s theory of change, as it is revealed in the therapeutic alliance, precisely because: “each therapeutic encounter is a one-off encounter between a unique client with their unique theory of change, and a unique therapist with their unique response.” Here, for Robinson, two types of questions emerge in the therapeutic alliance: “They will ask ‘what part does my client’s theory expect me to play?’ They will then ask ‘Is this a part I have the skills to play and am capable of playing, and is it a part that ethically I am willing to play?’” In critical pedagogic terms teachers might also ask: “what part does student’s epistemological theory expect me to play in her learning? Is this a part that I have the skills to play and am capable of playing, and is it a part that ethically I am willing to play?

From a willingness to ask these questions emerges a social dialogue around: power and roles in organising a curriculum for liberation; the expertise, skills and knowledge to be shared; the practices to be uncovered, trialled and tested. This feels like the solidarity of connection that is beyond the rule of money. Pace Robinson, we might continue thus: “The client [student] comes to therapy [learn] with their presenting [pedagogical] problem(s), their solutions, their internal and external resources and, arising out of all of this, their own unique theory of change. The many variables that contribute to ‘me’ as a therapist [teacher] then come into play as I endeavour to meet the challenge to connect with this person and their theory.” At issue is then finding a dialogic solution that is constantly negotiated by student and teacher, which accommodates the student’s epistemological and ontological view of the world inside a pedagogical alliance. Such an alliance addresses what the student considers important and relevant, and helps the student frame a pedagogy that can support her action in the world. This needs to take place both inside and outside the classroom, in order to reflect what the student needs from the curriculum.

The question is whether educators have the will to struggle for a pedagogical alliance that is based upon the collective, socially-negotiated overcoming of power-over learning, teaching and the curriculum. Do they have the will to struggle for the humanistic connections between students and teachers, or will the abstracted power of money dominate and de-legitimise? How might a critical pedagogy enable self-actualisation and the genesis of the soul of the student through a pedagogical alliance?


Notes on hegemony and counter-narratives


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Transnational activist networks for privatisation

Stephen J. Ball and Deborah Youdell, Hidden Privatisation in Public Education.

Global privatisation tendencies reflect both an orchestrated escalation on the part of dominant governments, international organisations and private companies and an unintended international policy drift towards greater levels and more diverse forms of privatisation in and of public services – privatisation as policy commonsense. Certainly however, highly influential western governments and international organisations actively promote privatisation as desirable and necessary for the economic development of the world’s poorer nations and as part of their own economic strategies.

Privatisation in its multiple forms is being taken up globally. Forms of privatisation, such as choice and per-capita funding, pave the way for further reform moves such as devolved budgets, competition between schools and the use of published performance indicators. For-profit organisations are playing a greater part in education design and delivery. However, most of the privatisations in and of education remains hidden within more general education reforms and there is an almost complete absence of public debate around these issues.

(Saltman 2000) argues that the hegemony of the market – its acceptance as self-evident common sense — and the profit incentive are displacing the struggle over values, which is an essential condition of democracy. What we are seeing here is a kind of collapse of the boundaries between moral spheres, which follows the breakdown of the demarcations between public and private provision and between social and opportunity goods.

The various approaches to education outlined above work together to make education more like a ‘commodity’ owned by and benefiting the individual and her/his employer within which ‘…everything is viewed in terms of quantities; everything is simply a sum of value realised or hoped for’ (Slater and Tonkiss 2001) rather than a public good that benefits the society as a whole. This is the displacement of use values by exchange values. While policy accounts of education matched to the needs of employment and the economy – a human capital approach — argues that this benefits society as a whole by creating a strong economy as well as individual wealth, it is difficult to see this in practice. Furthermore, there is a conceptual shift from education as an intrinsically valuable shared resource which the state owes to its citizens to a consumer product for which the individual must take first responsibility, as it is this individual who reaps the rewards of being educated. This conceptual shift changes fundamentally what it means for a society to educate its citizens.

The market in education is no longer simply a matter of choice and competition between educational institutions but rather is a diffuse, expanding, and sophisticated system of goods, services, experiences and routes – publicly and privately provided.

Endogenous privatisation, that is, privatisation in education, provides the possibilities for further policy moves towards forms of exogenous privatisation, or privatisation of education.

Education services are now ‘big business’ and an increasing number of national and international firms are looking to make profits from selling services to schools and goverments and from the delivery of state services on contract. Some countries now earn a considerable proportion of their export revenue from educational services sales. Business is also increasingly involved with local and national governments and educational institutions as ‘partners’ (PPPs). These partnerships vary widely in their form and in their effects.

One increasingly common form of ‘partnership’ are PFI schemes. Privatisation works as a policy tool in a number of ways, with a variety of ends and purposes. It is not just the state giving up its capacity to manage social problems and respond to social needs. It is a new modality of state action. The privatisation of education and social welfare involves a shift in the role of the state from that of delivering education services directly, to that of contractor, monitor and evaluator of services delivered by a range of providers.

Privatisation tendencies, both endogenous and exogenous, have profound implications for the future of teachers’ careers, pay and status, and the nature of their work and their degree of control over the educational process. The ‘flexibilisation’ of teachers work is a key component of most versions of

privatisation and this threatens to alter both the perception of teachers within society and the quality of students’ experience in schools.

TWO. Networks of transnational hegemonic power.

Vitali, Glattfelder, Battiston.The network of global corporate control.

In the first such analysis ever conducted, Swiss economic researchers have conducted a global network analysis of the most powerful transnational corporations (TNCs). Their results have revealed a core of 737 firms with control of 80% of this network, and a “super entity” comprised of 147 corporations that have a controlling interest in 40% of the network’s TNCs.

We present the first investigation of the architecture of the international ownership network, along with the computation of the control held by each global player. We find that transnational corporations form a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic “super-entity” that raises new important issues both for researchers and policy makers.”

As a result, about 3/4 of the ownership of firms in the core remains in the hands of firms of the core itself. In other words, this is a tightly-knit group of corporations that cumulatively hold the majority share of each other.

…despite its small size, the core holds collectively a large fraction of the total network control. In detail, nearly 4/10 of the control over the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself. The top holders within the core can thus be thought of as an economic “super-entity” in the global network of corporations.”

top holders are at least in the position to exert considerable control, either formally (e.g., voting in shareholder and board meetings) or via informal negotiations.

Andrew Gavin Marshall. Global power project, part 5: banking on influence with Goldman Sachs.

There are several individuals holding leadership positions with Goldman Sachs who represent what we refer to as the global ruling class – or global plutocracy – by virtue of their multiple positions on numerous boards and advisory groups, think tanks, educational institutions, and other important institutions of influence, giving them unparalleled access to policy-makers around the world.

THREE. Hegemonic power needs hegemonic narratives

Raúl Ilargi Meijer.Debt Rattle Feb 6 2014: Remember “Uncharted Territory”?

And you might say: those guys are always pessimistic, look at how great we’re doing, and many people say exactly that, but if that were the real story, then how does one explain away the notion that the entire global QE family has lifted those markets to where they stand today, knowing QE can’t go on forever? At the end of the day, it’s still simply shoveling more debt upon a mountain of debt already easily unprecedented in history (and history’s seen a few).

The British government has grown fond of using the term “escape velocity”, which supposedly means that if they just frack the entire nation to bits, squeeze the poor till they’re all so dry no clean unfracked drinking water is needed, and sell every single home in London to Asian dieselgarchs who’ve gotten rich off of China shadow banking virtual fantasy yuan printing, the UK economy will set off for the stratosphere selling its exports to all the countries who were neither so smart nor so lucky, and don’t have a penny left to buy those exports with. Escape velocity is empty political rhetoric. And there’s plenty of that. Spin doctors must be busier and more in demand than ever before. There’s such a load of nonsense being sold on a daily basis.

You can of course wait for the markets to fall. And whether it’s 20% or 40% is immaterial. It’ll lead to absolute panic. And when the smoke clears your wealth, your pensions, everything you don’t have hidden away, will be used to once again prop up the financial system that can’t be allowed to fail “or else”. Well, you’ll already be squarely inside the “else”. How to prevent the worst of this? Open the banks, their books, their vaults. Burn everything that smells too much like it’s died. Secure people’s deposits up to a maximum. Go through the hundreds of trillions in derivatives, and clear them. At the same time, set up new banks, real small, get rid of the glass monstrosities and design some nice parks where they stood in lower Manhattan. Preferably with edible crops and lowers.

But as I said, you can also wait for things to happen, markets to plunge, and see how uncharted the territory can become.

FOUR. Transnational organisational principles to confront transnational capital

Latin America, State Power, and the Challenge to Global Capital. An Interview with William Robinson. UPPING THE ANTI, NUMBER THREE, pp. 59-75.

the key question remains how popular forces and classes can utilize  state power to transform social relations, production relations, and so forth. And once you raise that question, you have to talk about what type of political vehicle will interface between popular forces and state structures. That’s the big question raised by the current round of social and political struggle in Latin America: what’s the relation between the social movements of the left, the state, and political organizations? Previously there was a vertical model. In the last 15 or 20 years, the emphasis has been on horizontal relations, networking among different social groups, and cultivating much more democratic relations from the ground up. These shifts in emphasis have all been spearheaded by the indigenous organizations in Latin America. While I support that politically, at some point you need to talk about how vertical and horizontal intersect. This is precisely one of the problems with the autonomous movements in Argentina, among others. In attempting to overcome the old vertical model of vanguardism and bureaucratism, they’ve gone to the other extreme. But without a political vehicle you can’t actually bid for state power or synchronize the forces necessary for radical transformation.

Every time there has been a new integration or reintegration into world capitalism there has been a corresponding change in the social and class structures of Latin America, as well as a change in the leading economic activities around which social classes and groups have mobilized. [This is based on transnational accumulation and the integration of national industrial activities as component phases of global production; internationalisation of migration/service; global agribusiness; and the export of labour to the global economy and global labour arbitrage.]

What we are seeing is a total transformation of the Latin American political economy. The new dominant sectors of accumulation in Latin America are intimately integrated into global accumulation circuits. All of this represents an intensified penetration of global capital around major resources. If all national economies have been reorganized and functionally integrated as component elements of a new global capitalist economy and if all peoples experience heightened dependency on the larger global system for their very social reproduction, then I do not believe that it is viable to propose individual delinking or suggest that you can simply break off from global capitalism and create a post-capitalist alternative. Global capital has local representation everywhere and it translates into local pressure within each state in favor of global capital.

[Thus,] a permanent mobilization from below that forces the state to deepen its transformative project “at home” and its counterhegemonic transnational project “abroad” is so crucial.

Increasingly, organizing the working class means organizing informal sector workers. It means shifting from an exclusive focus on the point of production to a focus on both the point of production and reproduction. That’s what the piqueteros do. They say that if you’re unemployed you can’t organize into trade unions and withhold your labour. If you’re structurally unemployed you have to disrupt the daily functioning of the system. Similarly, if you’re an informal sector worker you can’t make demands on capital in the same way as a formal sector worker. So increasingly, the type of working class organization we need must address both production and reproduction – social movement unionism, for instance, linking neighborhood struggles to formal worker centers and so forth. We have to recognise this and work to deepen the transnational character of these struggles across the world.

FIVE. On the organisation of counter-narratives

Antonio Gramsci. Workers’ Democracy.

The labour movement is today directed by the Socialist Party and by Confederation of Labour; but the exercise of the social power of the Socialist Party and of the Confederation takes place, for the major mass of workers, indirectly, by force of prestige and of enthusiasm, by authoritarian pressure, thus by inertia. The sphere of prestige of the party expands daily, reaches working classes hitherto untouched, implants the consensus and desire to work vigorously for the coming of communism in groups and individuals up to now absent from the political struggle. It is necessary to give a political form and a permanent discipline to these disordered and chaotic energies, to absorb, assemble and empower them, to make of the proletarian and semiproletarian class an organized society which educates itself, which makes its own experience, which acquires a responsible consciousness of the duties which fall to the classes come to state power.

But the social life of the working class is rich with institutions, it articulates itself in multiple activities. Precisely these institutions and these activities need to be developed, organized together, connected in a vast and flexibly articulated system which absorbs and disciplines the whole working class.