Category Archives: Political Economy

A note on technology and academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

Last week’s CERD conference on doing and undoing academic labour got me thinking about whether anything, once done, could be undone. Or whether, once our labour had transformed some thing or some place or some outlook or some one, there was no undoing. No going back. Shakespeare has Lady Macbeth tell Macbeth in Act 3, as he is consumed by guilt after the killing of King Duncan, “Things without all remedy Should be without regard: what’s done is done.” Later in Act 5, as she in-turn becomes haunted and has to regard those things have that have beeen done and for which there are deep and human consequences, Lady Macbeth laments that “What’s done cannot be undone.” Ambition, guilt, shame, humanity, each pivoting around action and reflection.

This had me wondering whether ravelling and unravelling was a better metaphor for academic work or labour than doing and undoing. And whether the ravelled or tangled or complicated nature of academic work inside and beyond the academy might be untangled or decomposed as a set of threads that might then be re-stiched into something else. Or whether by highlighting one of the tangles, in my case educational technology, we might be able to use that unravelled element for some other purpose. One of the ways in which those other purposes might be described is in understanding the neoliberal networks in which the threads are tangled, and as a result in situating educational technology in networks of power and resistance.

However, a series of increasingly complicated, contextual factors makes the process of unravelling a more tangled operation.

FIRSTLY: On political economy: Spain. The two visualisations noted by ZeroHedge in their Brussels… We Have A Problem posting, highlight that the risk-controlled, growth and employability-obsessed strategies that underpin the new normal in UK higher education take no account of the depth/accute-nature of the global crisis. ZeroHedge previously described this wider context in terms of European Bank solvency deficiency, which involves

very scary numbers that were noted in Zero Hedge yet which barely received any mention in the broader press. Because the numbers were all very, very large (think eyes glazing over 11-12 digits large), and because their existence meant that the long-term, chronic pain for Europe, which is and has been one of public (and selected private) sector deleveraging (which oddly enough is called “austerity” by everyone to no doubt habituate people to associate debt reduction with pain – where is “mean-reversionism” when you need it?), … were promptly buried.

Our political economic and sociological illiteracy makes me reflect more-and-more on the false consciousness endemic in our academic labour. Do we really reflect on the true nature/context of our work? This illiteracy does our students and our staff no favours, because if Spain goes, all bets are off. Our focus on participation, personal learning, employability, marketised skills development or whatever, is cast in the shadow of this crisis and our illiteracy.

SECONDLY: On political economy: the UK as a de-developing nation. Larry Elliot in the Guardian has amplified how our political economic illiteracy affects HE policy and practice, and what we are willing to discuss or fight for inside the academy. He notes that Britain is a de-developing nation, and this has huge ramifications for higher education policy and practice.

In the hundred years from 1914 to 2014, the century since the outbreak of the first world war, the UK will have declined from pre-eminent global superpower to developing country, or “emerging market”. The symptoms of this vertiginous plunge in the world’s rankings are already starkly apparent: a chronic balance of payments deficit, a looming shortage of energy and food, a dysfunctional labour market, volatility in economic growth and a painful vulnerability to external events.

Since the start of the crisis, the UK has borrowed more in seven years than in all its previous history. It has impoverished savers by pegging the bank rate well below the level of inflation, and indulged in the sort of money-creation policies normally associated with Germany in 1923, Latin American banana republics in the 1970s and, more latterly, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.

Then there is the large number of unproductive workers engaged in supervisory or “security” roles, on the streets, in public parks, on the railways and at airports. There are the wars fought without the proper resources to do so, and the awareness among military commanders that, in the absence of any military conflict, their forces will be shrunk further, there being no attempt objectively to assess the nation’s enduring defence needs. There is the ramshackle infrastructure existing in parallel with procurement contracts that run billions of pounds over budget and are then cancelled.

This is the actually existing world for which we claim we are preparing our graduates.

THIRDLY: on risk. Andrew Haldane of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee has argued that the modelling and risk—management systems that we have used in econometrics and financial services/financialisation has not respected the non-linearities, the self-organised criticality of systems nor the widespread risk of contagion across systems that exist in the real-world. He argues that the real-world displays non-normality that makes the highly-organised tolerances imposed by new public management a recipe for crisis. Our models are, in a word, unresilient. He notes that

It is not difficult to imagine the economic and financial system exhibiting some, perhaps all, of these features – non-linearity, criticality, contagion. This is particularly so during crises. Where interactions are present, non-normalities are never far behind. Indeed, to the extent that financial and economic integration is strengthening these bonds, we might anticipate systems becoming more chaotic, more non-linear and fatter-tailed in the period ahead.

Normality has been an accepted wisdom in economics and finance for a century or more. Yet in real-world systems, nothing could be less normal than normality. Tails should not be unexpected, for they are the rule. As the world becomes increasingly integrated – financially, economically, socially – interactions among the moving parts may make for potentially fatter tails. Catastrophe risk may be on the rise. If public policy treats economic and financial systems as though they behave like a lottery – random, normal – then public policy risks itself becoming a lottery. Preventing public policy catastrophe requires that we better understand and plot the contours of systemic risk, fat tails and all. It also means putting in place robust fail-safes to stop chaos emerging.

We do not stop to consider what this means for academic labour or for the practices of higher education. In our subject-silos, chasing our latest technology, and focused on marketised metrics and performance indicators, our academic labour-in-capitalism reinforces our intellectual enclosure.

FOURTHLY: on the political economy of UK Universities. Andrew McGettigan has developed work on HE financing, including some recent work on bonds. He argued:

Last year, the economist David Blanchflower, a former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, wrote in favour of universities issuing bonds.“In a recession, borrowing long term at low rates of interest is an eminently sensible thing to do— it is a classic Keynesian response,” he argued. “The public sector can utilise the savings of the nation. This is a time to invest at low, long-run rates of interest. Bonds could allow universities to borrow money for important projects cheaply.”

Universities have taken note. Many are now taking a closer look at bonds according to the British Universities Finance Directors Group, BUFDG… Banks say there is scope for universities to easily borrow another £4 billion whether through bonds or bank lending, much more even than the fabled cut in the Higher Education Funding Council for England’s teaching grant.

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.

McGettigan goes on to note how this then implicates Universities in the mechanics of the market through engagement with credit-ratings agencies or private finance initiatives/special purpose vehicles to leverage private investment. In this Universities are increasingly implicated inside neoliberal webs of practice, that include such special purpose vehicles, holding companies, joint venture companies, third party assurance companies and bondholders. These webs of complexity and risk are then formed inside the mess that is UK higher education policy where:

Some institutions may wish to avoid becoming trapped under what the University Alliance mission group has described as the £7,500 “cliff edge” defined by the level of tuition fees at which government quotas on student numbers start to bite. This could prompt them to start spending in a bid to justify higher fees to students… The common factor among all such strategies is that they are likely to require substantial up-front investment. Which is where bonds could come in.

Critical here is the extent to which University managers are willing to leverage institutions and the sector. McGettigan quotes Chris Hearn, head of education at Barclays Corporate, saying that “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”. So academic labour is enmeshed within a world that is increasingly framed by credit ratings, leverage, private finance, hedge funds and private equity, with little space to critique the processes and lived reality of what is being done to the university system and individual institutions. This is important given the experience of “the University of California [which] has $13bn of bond debt and has pledged the tuition fees of generations of future students to maintain its AAA rating.”

There are, of course, institutional and regional disparities, as this piece in the Times Higher demonstrates, and HEFCE’s announcement of recurrent grants and student number controls further highlights the disparities between Universities that will come to rely more on external sources of income, including philanthropy and business partnerships, that in-turn affect the purpose and practices of those Universities. At issue then are: what do we know of the political economy of universities? What can be fought for inside the academy? For what purpose is our academic labour? Inside our subject-driven, NSS/REF-enforced silos, do we have the literacies and the courage to unravel the reality of higher education and to fight for something different?

FIFTHLY: technology as a crack through which the University is corporatised. Both Andrew McGettigan and I drew attention to the formation of Pearson College, its technological underpinnings, and the partnerships that it has with established academic institutions. My point was to show how that corporation was leverage gains from the higher education market, through its College, its educational think-tank, partnerships with universities like Sunderland and Royal Holloway, the role of Edexcel and the development of accreditation for profit, and the role of military accreditation in the United States. Diane Ravitch writes eloquently about this in the USA on her blog [search for the Pearson tag].

As competition hots-up in the squeezed middle of universities, as the government uses secondary legislation to lever open the sector for privatization and the market, as other providers are encouraged into the sector often using the promises of study using technology as a catalyst, an architecture is opened-up that threatens any reality of higher education beyond the profit motive. Thus, Pearson can call upon proprietary technology/LMS, established and culturally-accepted systems thinking, access to content, and deep market capitalisation, in order to open-up the sector for wider marketisation.

Pearson College highlights how educational technology is a way-in both to the extraction of value from universities, and to the recalibration of the purpose of universities to catalyse such extraction further. The focus here is on efficiency and business process re-engineering, and of a view that as technology is neutral, and offers simple efficiencies, who could argue with public-private partnerships aimed at such developments? There is no alternative, and the inefficient, unproductive public sector is ripe for restructuring through the services of corporations. Partnerships and leverage are enforced, in-part, because academic labour is shackled inside the demands of performativity revealed in the REF or NSS scores.

Moreover, a surfeit of new providers cheapens the bulk of academic labour that is not developing proprietary knowledge or skills, and will drive down labour costs and increase precarious work. Flexibility, redundancy, productivity, privatisation, restructuring, value-for-money, all underpinned by technology, become the new normal. As the discipline of fear enters the market, the space to develop literacies for critiquing the take-over and recalibration of the University is enclosed and suffocating.

SIXTHLY: the power of academic labour. All this emerges within the context of a global economic crisis that has no promise of resolution. The question is how academic labour can subvert, dissent from or push-back against the contexts and realities outlined above, either inside or beyond the University? Can academics find collective forms that enable the development of discretionary power? Can academics use their labour to overcome how that labour inside capitalism overcomes all of human sociability, to the point where all we can discuss is driven by growth? Can we develop new forms of labour in new spaces? Can the complexity of higher education be unravelled and re-stitched against this new public management?

The University is a new front in the attempt by capital to further accumulation and the extraction of value. In that space technology reveals the conjuncture of forces that seek to catalyse and co-opt this process, in the services, technologies and applications that blind us to the social and economic realities. In that same moment technology enables to us to shine a light on what our academic labour might be for. What it might help us to defend, against its use for labour management, business-process re-engineering or the real subsumption of our labour for the valorisation of capital. Our uses of technology might usefully then be developed tactically and in public, where we identify how, in spite of their notionally free affordances many technologies are a back-door route for surveillance and militarisation, albeit sometimes non-consciously.

We might then ask, to what uses of technology did we say no? Where such uses are immanent to the institution were we able to say no? Are we able to identify possibilities for the use of technology that are precluded by new public management, and to identify why that is the case? How might cracking, hacking or modding the university, and doing so in public, help us to forge a new form of sociability or new spaces for higher learning?


Higher Education, crisis and volatility


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. The marketisation of higher education is turning University life into a series of tactical engagements designed to extract value from public goods, rather than a set of spaces in which we might be able to confront the crisis. This crisis is enabling capitalism to overcome barriers to value production and extraction, and underpins an inevitable revolutionising of HE. This recalibration of HE is focused on the rate of profit, and a purported need to balance the sector’s contribution to the economy.

However, the extraction of value, or the focus on the rate of profit, is high-risk and catalyses volatility and it neglects the wider, systemic, socio-environmental issues that provide the context in which education-for-growth exists.

TWO. In his work on False Accounting: Why Higher education Reforms Don’t Add Up, Andrew McGettigan analyses volatility, instability and indenture in HE.

The income–‐contingent repayment loans offered to students are also future–‐policy–‐contingent, potentially creating an indentured class of graduates from whom higher repayments can be extracted. In sum, the Coalition has concocted a higher education funding regime which fails on its own criteria. It introduces fiscal instability into the sector and offers the nation minimal savings in return. While the deficit may be slightly reduced, large borrowings are required over the next two decades before the scheme is expected to pay for itself. These expectations may be pricked if adequate graduate repayments fail to materialise – leaving future governments to rectify the situation.

He goes on to state that the debate about HE reform is obscured by economic illiteracy.

the government’s deficit reduction strategy is aimed at slowing the growth of the debt. Reducing expenditure reduces the need for additional borrowing to meet any shortfall between annual income and expenditure. Loans have a lower impact on the deficit than grants – but they affect the debt separately to their contribution to the deficit. This is a very important matter and one that has been systematically obscured from the debate around higher education reform.

He then states that the overall effect is high-risk and based on modelling that makes serious assumptions about growth.

The large–‐scale move from grants to higher loans brings uncertainty into the heart of higher education as the viability of the loan scheme depends on making predictions about the general shape of the economy and graduates within it for the next three to four decades. Current indications about the graduate premium suggest it will be eroded further except in a small group of professions.

TWO. This connects to Christopher Newfield’s argument about the new proletarianisation. He argues that it is difficult to sustain a positivist argument for economic growth, especially where it is tied to the generalised, emancipatory potential of technological skills in a new economy. In part, this is because under neoliberal capitalism, technologies are used to promote consumption, production gains or to increase the rate of profit. The logic of their use and deployment is for productivity gains, or for workplace monitoring and surveillance and management and stratification, or to catalyse the creation of value by opening up/harnessing new markets, or by stimulating innovations that further valorise capital. Thus, Newfield highlights three different types of knowledge or skill:

  1. Type C is ‘commodity skills’, which are ‘readily obtained’ and whose possessors are interchangeable. This category includes most ‘pink collar’ work that involves skills like ‘typing and a cheerful phone manner’.
  2. Type B is ‘leveraged skills’, which require advanced education and which offer clear added value to the firm that hires such skill, and yet which are possessed by many firms. Computer programmers or network administrators are examples of essential employees who worked long and hard to acquire their knowledge, and yet who are relatively numerous. Ironically, they may have entered the field because it was large: its size may have signalled to them when they were picked a major in college–and to their stability-minded parents–something like ‘the high-tech economy will always need computer support specialists’. Yes, but not any particular computer support specialist, and not at a very high wage.
  3. Type A consists of ‘proprietary skills’, defined as ‘the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business’. The knowledge manager must nurture and cultivate only the skills that directly contribute to the firm’s propriety knowledge, and stamp out (or radically cheapen) the first kind of knowledge worker, whose skills are interchangeable commodities. Only the star producers–those who create proprietary knowledge–enable the firm to seek rents, and only they are to be retained, supported, cultivated, and lavishly paid.

In an indentured world focused on economic growth above all else, not everyone will enjoy the life-styles of those who produce proprietary knowledge.

THREE. Yet, economic growth is coupled to energy use. The Royal Society Science Policy Centre report People and the Planet argues that growth based on extant socio-economic models is extremely problematic.

in the most developed and the emerging economies unsustainable consumption must be urgently reduced. This will entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies, and is critical to ensuring a sustainable future for all. At present, consumption is closely linked to economic models based on growth. Improving the wellbeing of individuals so that humanity flourishes rather than survives requires moving from current economic measures to fully valuing natural capital. Decoupling economic activity from material and environmental throughputs is needed urgently for example by reusing equipment and recycling materials, reducing waste, obtaining energy from renewable sources, and by consumers paying for the wider costs of their consumption. Changes to the current socio- economic model and institutions are needed to allow both people and the planet to flourish by collaboration as well as competition during this and subsequent centuries. This requires farsighted political leadership concentrating on long term goals.

Furthermore, in their IMF working paper on The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology, Benes et. al. note that:

the problem of oil becoming harder and harder to produce in sufficient quantities was an important factor that would have significantly increased oil prices regardless of shocks.

it requires a large increase in the real price of oil, which would have to nearly double over the coming decade to maintain an output expansion that is modest in historical terms. Such prices would far exceed even the highest prices seen in 2008, which according to Hamilton (2009) may have played an important role in driving the world economy into a deep recession.

There is likely to be a critical range of oil prices where the GDP effects of any further increases become much larger than at lower levels, if only because they start to threaten the viability of entire industries such as airlines and long-distance tourism.

a point forecast that implies a near doubling of real oil prices over the coming decade, and an increase in prices over and above the very high recent levels even under a very optimistic scenario, at the lower 90 percent confidence interval. The world economy has never experienced oil prices this high for anything but short transitory periods, and we reiterate our previous statement that this might take us into uncharted territory, where a nonlinear, convex effect of oil prices on output might be a more prudent assumption.

And to add to the volatility Hamilton, in hi Oil Prices, Exhaustible Resources, and Economic Growth,  notes:

Coping with a final peak in world oil production could look pretty similar to what we observed as the economy adapted to the production plateau encountered over 2005-2009. That experience appeared to have much in common with previous historical episodes that resulted from temporary geopolitical conflict, being associated with significant declines in employment and output. If the future decades look like the last 5 years, we are in for a rough time. Most economists view the economic growth of the last century and a half as being fuelled by ongoing technological progress. Without question, that progress has been most impressive. But there may also have been an important component of luck in terms of finding and exploiting a resource that was extremely valuable and useful but ultimately finite and exhaustible. It is not clear how easy it will be to adapt to the end of that era of good fortune.

FOUR. Tom Murphy writes eloquently about energy, and how a growth-fuelled politics traps us.

Many of us have great hopes for our energy future that involve a transition to a gleaming renewable energy infrastructure, but we need to realize that we face a serious bottleneck in its implementation. The up-front energy investment in renewable energy infrastructures has not been visible as a hurdle thus far, as we have had surplus energy to invest (and smartly, at that; if only we had started in earnest earlier!). Against a backdrop of energy decline—which I feel will be the only motivator strong enough to make us serious about a replacement path—we may find ourselves paralyzed by the [energy] Trap.

In the parallel world of economics, an energy decline likely spells deep recession. The substantial financial investment needed to carry out an energy replacement crash program will be hard to scrape together in tough times, especially given that we are unlikely to converge on the “right” solution into which we sink our bucks.

Politically, the Energy Trap is a killer. In my lifetime, I have not witnessed in our political system the adult behavior that would be needed to buckle down for a long-term goal involving short-term sacrifice. Or at least any brief bouts of such maturity have not been politically rewarded.

FIVE. Higher Education is focused on a series of tactical manoeuvres: employability; internationalisation; public-private partnerships; value-added; outsourcing; the REF; student number controls; cash-flow and staffing costs; retention and progression; learning analytics; mobile learning; work-based learning; value-for-money; efficiency; economic growth.

Yet higher education does not exist in a vacuum.

What is to be done?


Against dispossession: a note on visitors, residents and proletarianised education


Posted by hallymk1

I

The threat of the increasing proletarianisation of our lives under austerity politics is increasingly invoked and folded into the debate over how we structure our social relations. Proletarianisation is an outcome of the materialist nature of our productive relations in an economy based on the commodity form, and where the drive to extract value from those relations is based on increased efficiency and productivity. Labour-power is the vital source of value creation, and one that is constantly being reinterpreted and threatened through its interplay with technique or technology. In its current form, the commodity economy, where labour-power is a commodity brought under the control of capital, all aspects of life are inside the imperative to extract value. In this social factory, our leisure time, our domestic life, our socialised goods held in common, our public/private spaces and places, are all bound by the realities of commodification.

In this commodification we experience a sense of loss because our labour is alienated from us, and is handed to capital, in return for the means of subsistence, or ways in which we can renew ourselves so that we can return to work/sell our labour in the market-place. Marx argues that under the logic of capitalism, labour:

Is then only the semblance of an activity, only a forced activity, imposed upon me only by an external and accidental necessity and not by an internal and determined necessity… My labour, therefore, is manifested as the objective, sensuous, perceptible, and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.

The argument is that under austerity politics, where access to socialised safety-nets or benefits is closed off, where there is an attack on common goods like pensions and education, and where policy discourse is limited to the Scylla and Charybdis of “there is no alternative” and of ”doing more with less”, we might ask how are we to obtain the means of subsistence? Whilst this is a world of precarity, both for labour and capital, and is one in which the politics of the production of our lives is central to our survival, it is also a world that Werner Bonefeld notes is reduced to an existence as labour-under-capitalism, so that our spaces, places, identities, and relationships are all means of extracting value or hoarding wealth. Bonefeld argues:

What does the fight against cuts entail? It is a struggle against the reduction of life time to labour time. The fight against cuts is in fact a fight for a life. For the dependent masses, wages and welfare benefits are the means with which to obtain the means of subsistence.

On Tsianos and Papadopoulos’ terms, austerity/precarity is the duality resulting from a crisis in our social systems when they are faced by the realities of what has been termed immaterial labour, or ”the power dynamics of living labour in post-Fordist societies”. In apolitical terms this is focused upon network governance, or cognitive capital, or the knowledge economy. However, once framed in terms ofpolitical economy we begin to address issues of a life-world “incorporated into non-labour time, [where] the exploitation of workforce happens beyond the boundaries of work, it is distributed across the whole time and space of life”.

Coercion is one central element by which this reduction of life time to labour time is maintained, and socio-technical solutions are a means by which order can be enforced through monitoring productivity or activity, alongside its use in developing the power of cultural norms and manipulation. However, Bonefeld argues that turning points are revealed as the crisis is renewed, in policy or in practice. Thus, it may be possible to move away from uncritical demands for the politics of jobs and wages, which in themselves merely reaffirm the alienating and corrosive relationships that catalysed austerity in the first place, towards questions of the production and distribution of value within global societies. So we might ask why the development of the productive forces at the disposal of society have become too powerful for this society, bringing financial disorder and requiring austerity to maintain it?

Žižek has further developed this articulation of the mechanics of precarity that underpin austerity, and the looming threat of proletarianisation that is etched into our social fabric. Thus, he re-states the classical, disciplining threat posed by surplus labour to those in work:

The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations and states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

It is against becoming part of this forgotten or vilified mass of humanity that we are coerced into accepting that “there is no alternative”; or that if we occupy then it is for some trans-historical alternative under capitalism. Pace Bonefeld, Žižek argues that much of the occupy movement and rebellions against austerity measures “are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians.” They are an attempt to maintain a lifestyle, or at least to sketch a space where the violation of that lifestyle by austerity politics might be minimised.

This is a central argument progressed by Schwartz in his deconstruction of the occupy movement and its 99 percent motif. Schwartz argues that our traditional identity politics, now morphed into the “them and us” narrative of the 99 percent, merely enables capital to reinscribe itself as the dominating reality of our lives. However, by acceding to the neoliberal ideology of austerity, we are culpable in describing and renewing its boundaries.

The 99%, acts as the loyal opposition within the capitalist society. It cannot even formulate a critique of the system let alone start a revolution. Incapable of understanding itself as a diverse collection of relations, it mistakes itself for a group of individuals bound together by a desire for reform. The least radical common denominator unites the 99%. Such a low level of consciousness is an immutable feature of mass movements within the contemporary biopolitical fabric, one perhaps more pronounced in mass movements inspired by marketing professionals with day jobs that rely on the demographic logic at the heart of biopoltical governance.

They behave as if the spectacle were determined by the production alternative images and narratives, rather than by sets of economic relations. Predictably, their tactics and goals reflect the assumption that groups of individuals rather than sets of relations determine economies. In short they live as if trapped in a reflection on the surface of death’s mirror.

Instead Schwartz calls for a negation of the space and place of capital as reinforced through the cries of the 99 percent for a fair capitalism, or for tax justice, or for more humane labour rights, or for an end to fracking, or for rights for aboriginal groups, inside a system that corrodes. Instead he calls for “0% movements” that in-turn disrupt the dominant logic of capital, and its imposition of precarious subsistence:

Their force increases along lines of affiance and separation based on concrete relations with others. Affiance and separation are anything but the growth associated with the 99%’s demographic counting. The constitutive disorganization and anarchistic fragmentation of 0% resistance has taught those involved that being too small to fail sometimes releases more power than being too big to fail. The lone warrior, the cell, the gang, the alliance that can shut down all the ports along a coast, the commune capable of occupying a whole city, collective sabotage, mass default: all of these 0% movements gain effectiveness from internal and external friendships and conflicts.

Schwartz locates transformation in these spaces inside the totality of capital, as a totalising negation of the real subsumption of our life time to labour time. The logic of zero percent is to move to the cracks that are formed in the circuits and cycles of capital, and away from a reproduction of its domination over our social lives, however humane the hopes for that reproduction may be. This logic of zero percent is for abolition rather than reinscription; it is for the negation of objectified identities as labour-in-capitalism, and for our ability to become subjects in our own life time.

II

One impact of this debate is on the politics of subject/object, and the possibility that subjectivities might emerge under capitalism. A second is on the place of technology or technique in defining oppositional spaces and connections, inside and across societies. For Žižek one place in which these two elements become entwined and are revealed is in the “privatisation of the general intellect”. He argues that the knowledge created, reproduced, reinforced and shared socially, and generalised at the level of society, which in-turn underpins our life experiences, is being privatised through the use of technology, so that we are witnessing “the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.”

This view connects the rent extracted from software licenses, to the extraction of value through patents generated from the opening of public data to private corporations, to the selling of personal data from adwords for profit-maximisation, to the clampdown on file-sharing and perceived piracy, to the enclosure of commonly-held goods or spaces through primary legislation. It incorporates our immaterial labour, created inside/outside work, within a commodity economy. Throughout these possibilities of en-closure and internet regulation, a rentier class is demarcating its power-over the productive forces of labour.

These foreclosures and enclosures are met, in part, by socially-constructed, ideological struggles over place, using technology to contest privatised control over what is/was held in common, or regarded as a commons. Much of this goes relatively unreported, but forms a vital set of skirmishes in the struggle for open digital space through which a politics of production, re-production and distribution can be affirmed. This affirmation is central to our ability to engage in a politics of zero percent, in order that we are able to imagine collectively a world beyond austerity and beyond the crisis of capital that it reveals.

These digital struggles for space are mirrored in, and map onto the real-world. Rachel Drummond eloquently highlights how austerity politics is being used to kettle, privatise and extract rent from previously socialised places, using tools/technologies of coercion. She states that the logic of public policy is based on long histories in which the accumulation of value and capital has been enabled through the dispossession of people from spaces. This has catalysed the subsequent enforced or coerced proletarianisation of a disposed population, by those in power. Thus, commodification, coercion and control are:

emblematic of a broad and diffuse logic of enclosure (privatizing and limiting access to space) that permeates the ongoing project of ‘regeneration’ in London and the UK. It is this that lies in the background of seemingly discrete issues such as long prison sentences for student protesters, evictions of ‘rioters’ and Traveller communities and the development of the London Olympic site. Just as the state seeks out new ways to criminalise and repress public protest, a new series of strategies and justifications to dispossess the people of any property and housing owned publicly or held in common continues apace. Yet what may be particularly novel in recent years is the specific ways these two strategies of enclosure have intersected with one another: repression and dispossession are increasingly employed together to produce a cleansed entrepreneurial city.

This bears repeating because it reinforces a new politics of place, facilitated by socio-technical tools: “repression and dispossession are increasingly employed together to produce a cleansed entrepreneurial city.” And so we witness techniques and technologies: for outsourcing our social relationships or abstracting them to control of private property and money, for increasing separation and individuation; for labelling individuals through ASBOs and the creation of dispersal zones; for criminalising squatting and occupation; for brutalising space through kettles; and for maintaining hierachies. All whilst we reinforce assertions as narratives of networked democracy.

What’s more, whether in concrete or digital spaces “Collective punishment (via eviction) opens the door to a new strategy of ‘dispossession by criminalisation’”. Whether you are subject to a dispersal order or are convicted of illegal file-sharing, our power to engage in activities using tools in a range of spaces is highly politicised and controlled. This is enforced both as those spaces are commodified and as our activity in them is reconstructed as labour time, in order to enable the extraction of value. For Drummond, this focus on dispossession of space connects to an idea of revolt in the face of the dispossession of a viable, social future, beyond the logic of austerity or the spectre of proletarianisation. She states:

It is perhaps within these twin fronts of dispossession on the one hand and repressive policing on the other, that we might view the recent explosion of occupations, despite all of their contradictions, as one appropriate form of resistance. For here we arrive at a tactic which seeks to transform the privately enclosed and the repressively policed space into something public and open to all.

III

One terrain in which the struggle against dispossession has played out is that of immaterial labour. This encompasses both intellectual labour, like the production of ideas, computer programs, mash-ups, visualisations, patents and so on, and affective labour, or work that is carried out inside the social factory and which commodifes affect or prepares intellectual labourers for productive labour. For Žižek, immaterial labour is seen by its proponents like Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato and Virno, as

hegemonic in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

This production of social life through the fusion or overlay of digital and concrete space is important because it reveals the ways in which the Commons, or digital communes are threatened with enclosure and commodification. One emergent field of contestation within this is then the possible subjectivity of the individual inside the network, the community or the society, and the reality of their objectivity in the face of the realities of power and hierarchy. In discussing the production of social life, the politics of place and space are central, and are amplified by the ways in which tools reveal and reinforce coercive practices. Networks and networked spaces are ideologically-framed and not trans-historical. They exist as spaces inside capitalism, framed by precarious or immaterial labour, and they reveal power.

It is in relation to this debate on immaterial labour, proletarianisation and dispossession that I wish to view models of action or identity inside/alongside digital networks. This is important because debates over educational models like White and Le Cornu’s Visitors and Residents reveal the deep, social interconnections of people, place and purpose inside capitalism, and the risks of transhistorical analysis. They also reinforce the importance of Marx’s note that:

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.

For White and Le Cornu, making some sense of a digital life is framed by the individual in place, and her/his ability subsequently to transform their existence. Thus, they argue:

social media platforms facilitate the construction, by the individual, of complex social networks not constrained by physical geography. These are critical shifts in the use of the internet which we suggest are transforming the nature of relationships, citizenship and learning.

It is this notion of transformation that demands a political critique precisely because the emergent duality of visitor/resident is socially constructed within capitalism, and reveals the logic of immaterial labour, framed by precarity and dispossession. Witness the description of Residents.

Residents: Residents see the Web primarily as a network of individuals or clusters of individuals who in turn generate content. Value online is assessed in terms of relationships as well as knowledge. Residents do not make a clear distinction between concepts of content and of persona. A blog post is as much an expression of identity as it is a discussion of particular ideas. The fact that Wikipedia has been authored collectively is not a concern, what is important is how relevant the information they find is to their particular needs.

The creation and extraction of value from relationships, networks and affects is central to the creation of productive relations and productive [value producing] labour. Inside a commodity economy people enter into direct production relations [capital/labour/rentier] as owners of things [commodities, property, cognitive capital, social capital, labour-power], and these things acquire specific social characteristics [they define our social relationships]. In Marx’s terms we see the emergence of “material relations between persons and social relations between things”, and so the commodification of our life time comes to define our existence. Moreover, this existence appears as the result of long socio-historical repetition/activity, which becomes enculturated and re-inscribed in the range of spaces/networks/communities where capitalist social relations dominate.

Thus, in the life time of identities that emerge from the fusion of concrete and digital spaces and networks, it is the ways in which the logic of labour time can be refused or negated that matters if we are to talk of transformation. In worlds where the emergence of modelled identities can be farmed or where affects can be accumulated, educators might work against transhistorical narratives that claim emancipatory possibilities beyond the daily realities of political economy. As a result, educational models like visitor/resident become important where they are historically-grounded, and where they offer the possibility that temporal critiques related to the life time of individuals, described on a continuum of forms, developed inside places/networks/hierarchies, and using tools that are shaped by digital media and education, might be socialised.

And yet, as Drummond notes, our socialised identities forged in collective places/spaces are under attack. This attack frames White and Le Cornu’s argument that the “social dimension of computing has brought about a paradigm shift in many individuals’ experience of computer use as well as influenced their attitude and motivation towards the use and purpose of connected digital technologies”, and that in this connectivity, place is a pivotal field. In making sense of these possibilities we need a critique of place, related to issues of power and dispossession, and the social relationships that flow from our labour time, or our work-inside-capital. As the authors note, contextualisation is key if the metaphor of place is “to occupy centre stage in any discussion about how people interact with each other and with content when both are electronically mediated, and be linked to the metaphor of tool.” It might be argued that this context is historically-defined as labour-in-capital, for place anchors commodification, dispossession and coercion.

IV

Without such a contextualisation of the place of education inside the sets of exploitative and corrosive relationships and spaces articulated as capitalism, our models of digital practices and our discussions of digital literacy, will merely reinscribe new forms of proletarianisation, through monitoring, control, efficiency, productivity and mundane work. This, as Bonefeld acknowledged, is the subsumption of our life time to labour time. It is about the extraction of surplus value from the range of places in which we exist, and that are increasingly privatised and commodified, or copyrighted and licensed/rented back to us, or enclosed and kettled, or monitored and taken-down, and in which we are expected to use tools/technologies that we are forced to rent. Whether we visit these spaces or are resident in them, the precarity of immaterial labour, revealed through the dispossessions, privations and privatisations of austerity, frames our existence. How is a transformatory existence possible without such a recognition?

We might usefully reframe our engagements with our digitised life time, through what Dmytri Kleiner calls venture communism, in which we

create our own institutions, our own alternative structures that move beyond the meagre choices offered by bourgeois society and prefigure the future society we are fighting for.

And that is right, that is also the main form of political struggle that Venture Communism proposes and explores mechanisms of realizing. Thus, the most important direct loss is not political influence, but rather mutual capital. Our capacity for investing in alternative structures comes from a single source: The amount of wealth that we, as workers, can consistently divert from consumption.

We transform our society as we build the means satisfy our needs outside the financial cycles of capitalism. When we take demand away from forms of consumption that reproduce capital and further concentrate wealth, and instead satisfy the needs and desires of our communities by other means. When we produce and share according to our mutual needs and desires, and not according to the logic of profit capture.

The desire then is to frame models/spaces/activities that exist for different value forms beyond money/capital, and that act against the coercive practices that enforce spatial dispossession in the name of austerity. This is a connection beyond the dichotemy of 99%/1% , for a politics of zero percent or the collective commons. It is for an exodus from the daily realities of venture capital. Here then educators and technicians might reframe their work politically, and recognise the ideologies that underpin their engagement with place and identity. Educators might then ask how digital literacies or models like visitor/resident are meaningful in the face of the on-going privatisation of our digital spaces/places? How do these digital practices recognise and reinforce the realities of commodity capitalism that in-turn reinscribe an objective existence? How might those practices/models be re-shaped mutually or co-operatively for alternative structures or value forms? How might they lead to a subjectivity beyond proletarianised work or a prescribed readiness for efficiency or productivity or the control/monitoring of others? How might they be co-opted to build the means to satisfy our needs outside the financial cycles of capitalism?


Mobility Shifts and Student-as-Producer


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 14 October 2011

Some matters arising from Mobility Shifts and from yesterday’s student-as-producer seminar at CUNY.

  1. How do we critique formalised education as an ideological apparatus of the state-for-capital?
  2. Are we interested in transition or transformation? If the latter then what is the purpose of norms of justice, equality, democracy, participation that are developed within alienating, capitalist social relations? In the face of free market logic how might we overcome the anxieties that plague our existing models of education?
  3. Does education subtracted from the operation of learning leave accreditation, monitoring, control? Does this connect to institutional/tutor accreditation anxiety, realised through plagiarism?
  4. Capital needs disruptors, which/who can re-inscribe new spaces for control and accumulation, and develop new forms of commodities from which value can be extracted. What is the place of educational innovation inside capital in this process? How do we overcome this devastating reality?
  5. How conservative should schooling be, in order to promote mass intellectuality? How conservative are our allegedly radical methods? Can we be against explanation and for emancipation inside this historical moment?
  6. Where social inequality is at stake, in the face of the market and education as private property, how can we work for its negation? How can we refuse agendas of equality that are culturally revealed as opportunistic or hierarchical or based on structural/legalistic frameworks? How do we work for the negation of inequality as revealed under labour-in-capitalism?
  7. Can we reinvent the University against its prescribed role in the reproduction of education-for-capital? How do we reengage with and critique its history?
  8. How can student-as-producer reveal and oppose the ways in which the student is reified through, for example, the NSS?
  9. How can student-as-producer reveal the possibilities for academic activism and the academic/worker engagement in mass intellectuality?
  10. How do open technologies and the processes and lived realities of hacking help in this engagement with/development of mass intellectuality? How do open bases and frameworks enable distributed models of engagement that propose/describe alternatives?
  11. How do we stand against the rhetoric of technology that reveals and then reinscribes institutional power structures?
  12. How do we become courageous in the face of business-as-usual? How does student-as-producer reinforce academic activism?

In, Against and Beyond the Edufactory


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 15 October 2011

These are my notes from yesterday’s sessions on cognitive capitalism, the University as knowledge factory and alternatives to higher education, from Mobility Shifts. I’ve also posted my tweets from a student discussion of occupy wall street and the response of the University to the crisis.

  1. The University has been subsumed within the circuit of capital, so that it has become emblematic of capitalist social relations, driven by the abstracted power of money.
  2. The University is now a flagship public-private partnership, whose primary purpose is the generation of surplus value through cognitive capital. The exploitation of labour and new sites of struggle are results of the increasing sophistication of the social factory, through which all of social life reveals sites of profit accumulation and the reproduction of capital.
  3. Biopiracy, proletarianisation, routinisation, precarity and globalised culture are all outcomes of this process.
  4. Disciplines become sites of the production of cognitive capital, separated out from each other denying forms of critique that might underpin alternatives. Moreover, a hidden curriculum, focused upon separation, competition and debt, anchors study to capital. As a result we see the wasted potential of co-operation and association.
  5. The idea of the University, as a site of all of living knowledge, is undermined in the face of the endless and hopeless austerity. An exodus from the control systems of capital exhibited through formal education is seen in the autonomy of the internet and sites where general assemblies are developed.
  6. Defensive battles are being waged in generative hubs of radical activity, that sit against the neoliberal enclosure of extant structures and forms, like the University.
  7. Edufactory proposes three spaces for alternatives to emerge: firstly in new forms of general assembly based upon a new politics [see the Zagreb occupation of 2009; student-worker solidarity]; secondly in militant research strategies, which see research as a tool for political action and for widening the field of struggle; thirdly in wresting publication away from corporations-as-rentiers, which turn the cognitive labour of academics and students into private property. This act of violence attempts to remove the academic from revolutionary activity in public.
  8. In spite of this, the University remains a site of resistance in the circulation of capital, In the circulation of money into commodity into surplus value/profit/accumulation, then into money’, commodity” and so on, there are spaces for opposition to develop alternatives, notably at the points of transformation. Although capital will tend to use its biopower in order to maintain control over labour at these points. This also includes the use of technology for control in a transnational field of practices, where academic activity is increasingly measured. This has political consequences.
  9. Within higher education the social relations that lie outside of the University offer hope/spaces for developing webs of resistance – in a politics of community engagement and cross-disciplinary activity and in radical education collectives. These form cycle of struggle.
  10. The precarity of capital is problematised by the power of labour in forcing a reconception of the politics of production, rather than a politics of distribution [of resources, abundance, scarcity].
  11. Universities are becoming warehouses of young people, ensnared by hidden curricula, where activities are used to depoliticise and promote allegedly utilitarian outcomes.
  12. The idea of the University in the production of knowledge at the level of society, in co-producing the general intellect or the social brain, needs to be re-politicised in order to reappropriate knowledge and its means of production for society.
  13. In, against and beyond needs to be understood in terms of real subsumption, through which capital overcomes human sociability to appear naturalistic and pre-determined. It might be critiqued in terms of the social factory or biopower, but it also offers a vantage point for critique from within the social relationships that emerge from/reproduce it, namely the historical moment of labour-in-capitalism.
  14. In, against and beyond is a critique of the power of things or commodities over human sociability and producers. However, capital depends upon the power of labour in order to generate surplus-value and therefore needs principles of domination. A negation might be offered through practices of emancipation, where capital is seen to be in crisis and therefore as precarious. Thus, teh Californian communique offers us the hope that “we [labour] are the crisis [of capital]”.
  15. How is it possible to reconcile our institutional roles and revolutionary intent? What do examples like the School for Designing a Society offer us? What about this list of radical projects? What about upping the anti? What about human geography? Or Noel Castree’s work on academic activism? Or John Holloway’s work on the state as the legal form of capitalism?
  16. some student quotes:

For a network of commons


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 November 2011

I kept the faith and I kept voting/Not for the iron fist but for the helping hand/For theirs is a land with a wall around it/ And mine is a faith in my fellow man/Theirs is a land of hope and glory/Mine is the green field and the factory floor/Theirs are the skies all dark with bombers/And mine is the peace we knew/Between the wars

Billy Bragg, Between the Wars.

Yesterday the Education Activist Network emailed though a series of YouTube videos about student protests and occupations at UC-Berkeley. These highlighted the increased politicisation of young people, the increased militarisation of our campuses, and the increased bravery of people as co-operative social forces in the face of State authoritarianism. More appropriately, this might be viewed as bravery in the face of the brutality of the transnational global elites that now dominate the control mechanisms of the State. Those control mechanisms include universal access to healthcare, access to employment and education, access to homes, and/or paramilitary-style policing. In each of these areas the political/economic compact of recent years is in crisis, and this crisis is being played out in education.

The nature of transnational elites has been raised in documentaries like Inside Job, in popular texts like Paul Mason’s Meltdown, in academic spaces looking at corporate networks, and in work analysing trans-national corporate power. This revelation of how these elites now dominate our political landscape was clarified at Tent City University last weekend by David Harvey. Harvey argued that it is only people massing together in the streets and in the squares, whose relationships are shared and nurtured and encouraged in-part on-line and in-part through radical educational forums, who can oppose the foreclosure of our (educational) futures and our (educational) spaces. Harvey argued that people acting deliberately and politically in public spaces that were previously enclosed and policed by Capital enables us to recreate and re-produce those spaces as a Commons. In part this is an outcome of the process of occupation. It is only on this network of Commons, something Nick Dyer Witheford has written about for a networked world in terms of the Circulation of the Common, and that Joss Winn and Mike Neary have critiqued in pedagogic terms, where questions of the inequality of wealth and power can be meaningfully debated beyond the trite inadequacies of ‘a better capitalism’.

Education is central to this project of building the Network or Commons of Commons. In education, as Harvey argues, we are witnessing the enclosure of debate about the idea of the school or the university, so that all we are left with are plaintive cries against students-as-consumers. At the same time, through the enforcement of external, marketised agendas of outsourcing, internationalisation (globalisation), employability, attacks on employment rights, and the proletarianisation of working practices, the grip of transnational capital over education (as the life-blood of our social relationships) is tightened. In response, in a range of Universities, for example in Chile and Columbia, in California, and in Bangladesh, students are resisting neoliberal managerial techniques that are solely designed to extract value from those who have least power. In part this is a form of defence. In part though, as the Edufactory Collective amongst others, have argued, this is a way to redefine political engagement through general assemblies, militant research and open education.

This collective, educational response, framed within a connected set of Commons, and operating globally, is central to a critique of the power of transnational global elites, as they turn in on extracting value from our historically-accumulated capitals. The argument here is that states are running to the end of the possibility for printing money (quantitative easing) as a mechanism for recovering from this systemic crisis. Moreover, there are no spaces left outside the system of capitalist accumulation into which capital can flee or from which it can extract value easily. Therefore, in order to increase the rate of profit, or the compound growth at three per cent that is required both to maintain the Global North’s standards of living and to pay-off its debts, the system has to turn back in on itself, in order to self-valorise. So our socially-prescribed, historically-produced goods [or capitals], like access to universal healthcare and state education, which were accumulated in the post-war Keynesian settlement, are now the source of private profit through market mechanisms.

This forms a new, systemic crisis of capitalism based on value-extraction from societies, with huge consequences for the middle classes. It underpins austerity measures and the privatisation of state assets, each of which is driven by transnational flows of capital. As a result, a world of nationally-defined political economic analyses is outdated, in part because the socio-environmental problems we face are global (as the brilliant Tom Murphy shows for energy), but also because of the porosity of borders to capital. In this current moment of the crisis, we see nations inside and outside the Eurozone that are unable to control the damage being wrought by speculative capital, and that are unable to re-construct their economies beyond the organisation of global, capitalist production chains. Thus, we see the mobility of capital, in flowing to tax havens and in drawing on very low labour rates and profits from sale of goods that are produced in countries with poor labour conditions in high income, strong currency economies. Critically, the key players in these speculative relationships and in making the case for and delivering austerity are global elites, who wish to impose deregulated unprotected labour relations.

This focus on the power of what is termed the markets is in reality the power of oligopolistic, transnational banks, corporations and subservient politicians/media. Thus, any focus on national solutions to the defence of national capitals, of an attempt to recapture, for example, the pre-eminence of Great Britain, visited in-part through its education system, becomes meaningless. Or leads us down the route to fascism. This then infects our education systems. It may remain hidden from view, but it shapes our engagement with internationalisation, employability, innovation, research and development, community engagement, personalisation, outsourcing and technologies. It also shapes our open education agendas, our MOOCs, our work on badges, our engagement with work-based learning, our radical alternatives. There is no outside.

However, as Mieksins-Wood noted fifteen years ago:

the universalization of capitalism not just as a measure of success but as a source of weakness… It can only universalize its contradictions, its polarizations between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Its successes are also its failures… Now capitalism has no more escape routes, no more safety valves or corrective mechanisms outside its own internal logic… the more it maximizes profit and so-called growth – the more it devours its own human and natural substance.

Thus, the real social and political value of our reaction to austerity, revealed in free schools, in tent city universities, in teach-ins and teach-outs, in student-worker occupations, and a million other forms, is their deliberative, educational, open agendas. This is not to dream of them as utopian ideals or fetishise them as anti-capital, but it is to reflect on them as a network of educational commons. They serve as mirrors through which we can look for ways to run down pointless levels of consumption, and to scream against pointless technocratic experiences, and to create more scalable, resilient production and distribution systems that are socially-defined. The idea that under globalisation, in which capital, production, the state, classes and media and culture are ‘without borders’, can be made better and more responsive to our existence in localised spaces is untenable. We require a process of deliberation that is against those who would carry out the logic of a system of global feudalism, where an increasingly powerful minority control/trade/commodify both the scarcity and abundance of resources.

What the process of creating a Commons or Network of Commons through dissent, occupation, protest and refusal has shown us is the courage we share to imagine and re-produce something different. In the face of the increasing extraction of value from our lives, and in the face of the meaningless of a life lived for compound economic growth, and in the face of our powerlessness within the system defined for us by transnational elites, and in face of the use of collectivised force by our elected politicians against us, the educational solidarity of our occupations has shown, as Harvey described, that only people acting and educating as co-operative, social forces can save us now.


A teach-in at Tent City University and the struggle for alternatives


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 7 November 2011

I spoke at a session for Tent City University yesterday, with Polly Toynbee, George Monbiot, Alex Callinicos, Dave Hill, Guy Mitchell of the Really Open University, and a student activist from the Education Activist Network. My intention was to connect to the details of the cuts that Toynbee and Monbiot raised, to connect these to the ideological points that were raised about the crisis of capitalism by Callinicos and Hill, and to create a space to talk about the Social Science Centre in Lincoln as a radical response to the crisis. This point was then picked-up by Mitchell and the EAN representative who made clear statements about connecting alternatives to existing sites of protest, as a web of resistance, and about the courage that we could take from the protests against the imposed quickening of neoliberal shock doctrines across the globe this year.

The points that I emphasised are noted below. However, it is worth revisiting them in light of an email exchange I had with my comrade and Cuban expert George Lambie about the crisis. George wrote that:

As you know there are also many things happening around the crisis at the moment and we are getting close to the limits of money printing, which is being replaced by value extraction from societies. In my view this represents a systemic change in the organisation of capitalism with huge consequences, especially for the Keynesian-nurtured middle classes which the first wave of neo-liberalism undermined, but did not destroy.

Enclosed within this space, and now under the cosh of neoliberalism, is the University. My statement on that institution and the crisis follows.

I briefly wish to address the idea of the University. And in particular what is the University for in the face of the discipline of debt and the kettle?

ONE. On the question of alternatives. At Zuccotti Park on Sunday 9 October, Slavoj Žižek argued that “the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, [and so] we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism?” This is a process of overcoming the elite’s interpretive myths – of being-in-excess of their hegemony over us. Of living beyond their enclosure of our lives.

TWO. On hegemony. And yet in education we are told to focus upon finding mechanisms to maintain business-as-usual. As Jeffrey Williams notes of the USA

“Universities are now being conscripted as a latter kind of franchise, directly as training grounds for the corporate workforce; this is most obvious in the growth of business departments but impacts English, too, in the proliferation of more ‘practical’ degrees in technical writing and the like. In fact, not only has university work been redirected to serve corporate-profit agendas via its grant-supplicant status, but universities have become franchises in their own right, reconfigured according to corporate management, labor, and consumer models and delivering a name brand product.”

And in the UK the Coalition Government, in its undemocratic implementation of policy enacted through post-election horse-trading rather than agreed manifesto, is very clear that “The White Paper [Students at the heart of the system] comes as part of the wider government agenda to put more power in the hands of the consumer”, and that HE “should evolve in response to demand from students and employers, reflecting particularly the wider needs of the economy.” Higher education is explicitly a commodity now, to be consumed in depoliticised warehouses and bent on utilitarian ends. It is explicitly open to market forces and for-profiteering. This exposes it to risk, hedging, venture capitalism, and the treadmill of competition. As the militant accountant Richard Murphy argues “the proposed increases in fees, with increased debt obligations to match is not an education policy: it is, I suggest, a policy designed to provide the financial markets with a new form of collateralised debt obligation that they can trade now that mortgages are not available to meet the demand for such products.”

This means that all of the social relationships we develop and nurture within higher education are subject to the rule of money. To the discipline of debt. Such that debt becomes a pedagogy. Our disciplines are sites for the production of cognitive capital, and are overlain by a hidden curriculum of separation, individuation, competition and debt. This is the violence of our ongoing crisis, through which the idea and the reality of the University is attacked. As the eminent Marxist Simon Clarke notes ““The sense of a world beyond human control, of a world driven to destruction by alien forces, is stronger today than it has ever been”.

THREE. On symbolic power. Yet the University remains a symbol of places where mass intellectuality, or knowledge as our main socially-productive force, can be consumed/produced and contributed to by all. The University remains a symbol of the possibility that we can create sites of opposition and critique, or where we can renew histories of denial and revolt, and where new stories can be told, against what the student-activist Aaron John Peters calls states of exception that enclose how and where and why we assemble, associate and organise. This symbolic power-to critique and negate what is denied to us, to overcome the alienation of our knowledge from our lives, is reflected by the spaces that academics take up within and against the neoliberal university. This symbolic power connects to what the Edufactory Collective have termed “Transforming mobilizations around the public into the organization of institutions of the common”. They argue that enhancing the politics of the common is “the political task today.” That discussing in association our common wealth is a central political project, with a critical role for academics and students, acting as scholars.

FOUR. On our histories of resistance. In sets of occupations and teach-ins and free exchange, some of which are incubated inside the University, the symbolic possibilities of higher education might connect into this “organization of institutions of the common”. Here, then we might reconnect to the historical traditions of higher learning beyond the University. We might look to more radical experiments in higher learning, not institutionalised higher education. Our re-reading of historical experiments offer a rich tapestry of what is possible in the face of institutionalised discipline: and so we have William Lovett’s Public Halls or Schools for the People, which are deeply connected to the History of the National Union of Working Classes, the London Working Men’s Association and the Chartists; and we have the worker-student Popular Education projects that connected to 1968 and the Indiani Metropolitani of the Italian Autonomia movement; and we have the anti-Apartheid Teachers’ League of South Africa. And in each of these spaces and the hundreds of other refusals, we have representations of how higher education might be dissolved, in the form of mass intellectuality or higher learning or excess, into the very fabric of society. It is in this borderless or boundary-less activity, which is overtly political in seeking an exodus from the logic of capital, where academics and students as scholars might contribute to our overcoming of the domineering and alienating historical processes of capitalism.

FIVE. On scholarly work in public. Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity, academics might consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to workerist and public dissent against domination and foreclosure? Where do we discuss alternative value-structures, and an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. As the radical Geographer, David Harvey notes, at issue is “to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image.” Again Edufactory hints at the ways in which scholars can work in public to reveal the crisis and produce alternatives, through: critique of the mechanisms of the general assembly, as a political process; militant research strategies; open publishing and engagement. This is a call for action in public.

SIX. On alternatives. Not only do we have rich histories of popular education within-and-against capitalism to reflect upon and nurture us, but we also have current examples of radical alternatives from where to take courage. And so we can engage with alternatives that seek to demythologise higher education and the processes of teaching-and-learning from a standpoint of critical pedagogy. And this is important because critical pedagogy helps us to critique higher education as it is subsumed under the historical logic of capitalism. It helps challenge the ways in which the elite uses the power of ideas to complement its material and political power, and its cultural hegemony. We see this in the work of the Really Open University and its Space Project in Leeds; and in the work of the outlawed Copenhagen Free University; and in the work of the Really Free School; and in the Peer-to-Peer University; and in the School for Designing a Society; and in the Journals, “Upping the Anti” and “Human Geography”; and in countless other spaces that are trying to describe a world that is in, against and beyond the treadmill dynamic of capital. These webs of resistance form cycles of struggle and refusal, and reveal spaces for alternatives.

SEVEN. On The Social Science Centre. I wish to end by briefly describing one specific space where the production of intellectuality in common is a critical, pedagogic act of resistance, namely the Social Science Centre in Lincoln. The Centre is an unincorporated co-operative, managed by consensus. It exists as a community of scholars and activists, with peer-review, democratic engagement and negotiated, dialogic, social science curricula at its heart. The focus on the social sciences is a deliberate response to the Coalition’s funding agenda. The curriculum is not pre-determined, although it is shaped by the interests and needs of its members; the curriculum is predicated on the idea of student-as-producer. In this process, the hope is that students as scholars become revolutionary social beings within open, socially-driven spaces, rather than becoming institutionalised agents. We hope that by forcing reconceptions of the politics of production, we can demonstrate the precarity of capital. The hope is that this open approach breeds mass, social intellectuality, which is geared to communal problem-solving and transformation. This connectivity is a critique of closed, institutionalised systems of education, which are reinforced through locked institutional technologies and systems. The SSC aims to understand how critical judgments about scholarship – including those that fall outside the present imagination of what constitutes ‘high-quality’ work in academic orthodoxies – can be made and deliberated collectively, and how we can create meaningful criteria for learning and teaching that are not alienating or symbolically violent, but that work to open spaces of possibility for everyone involved. This is not a question of structure or structurelessness, but rather what sort of structuring practices and conditions may be effective for learning authentic, critical, questioning autonomy. In the social sciences. As a model for others to critique and question and re-model. As an act of political refusal.

EIGHT. On courage. The challenge in the Social Science Centre and beyond is for students and academics as scholars to develop a critique in the face of everything. We might, then, consider how students and teachers might dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to engage with this process of transformation. We might then return to Zizek’s focus not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want, in order to consider the courage it takes to reclaim and re-produce our politics and our social relationships, in the face of their enclosure.

After the teach-out I joined our young people as they marched to the Occupation at St Pauls. And I witnessed how the fear of discussion and protest drives the State to brutalise and intimidate. And I witnessed adult men in body armour, riot shields, truncheons and plastic bullets, herd then kettle young people armed with dub-step and percussion instruments. And I heard a deafening silence from our education leaders in the face of this brutalisation. And I witnessed how the courage we demonstrate in our struggle for alternatives is their precarity.

My photos are here.


Triple crunch and the politics of educational technology


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 November 2011

I want to make a brief return to one implication of the ideas fleshed out by Joss Winn earlier this year in a post on the Triple Crunch, which focused on peak oil, climate change and the economic realities of business-as-usual, and then in my response on Triple Crunch and the Politics of Educational Technology. This implication is the role of academics and scholars; it is academic activism.

In his post Joss wrote: “It’s time that a co-ordinated effort was made by the sector to examine these issues in detail, involving academics from across disciplines as well as business continuity managers and VCs”. I concluded that academics and scholars might usefully contribute to story-telling that enables us “to critique in common the ahistorical truisms of liberal democracy, that technology and education can only meaningfully serve capitalist expansion, through discourses of finance capital that are related to value-for-money, efficiency, private/public, and the market.” We used the detail of climate change and liquid fuel availability inside our reality of capitalist social relations, to question the idea of the University.

This morning I read three things that stimulated a return to this question.

1.   The weekly Oil Depletion Analysis Centre’s Newsletter (for 4 November 2011). In developing an analysis of the week’s events that impact on liquid fuel availability, the newsletter highlighted the Euro bailout and Greek politics, persistent Brent crude oil costs of$100/barrel, the UK Coalition Government’s decision to halve the feed-in tariff for solar energy, and a report from Cuadrilla Resources that it was “highly probable” that earthquakes in Blackpool were caused by their fracking activities. ODAC highlighted that:

“The UK today represents a microcosm of the current energy dilemma. Oil and gas production are in decline, energy costs are rising, and the race to avoid the worst impacts of climate change requires drastic cuts in emissions. Shale gas, along with tar sands and shale oil, offer an illusion that business might be able to continue as usual, but these are lower quality resources in terms of the energy they require to produce, pollution, and emissions. They are not the cheap energy sources on which our economy depends, and betting on them risks slowing the transition to a more resilient energy future.”

We might then ask, how are Universities addressing this dilemma in their forms, practices and research engagement?

2.   In a note on #OccupyLSX, Pierce Penniless argues for political engagement and action that is deeply connected to everyday realities. He argues that:

“We are living in an extraordinarily hot political moment, in which people’s politics are changing rapidly – and in which systemic popular dissent is more visible than it has been for a long time. That it is systemic is most interesting: for all the reductive slogans about bankers and their bonuses, the political conversation that emerges in the camp is far more about systemic change than some peculiar bad bankers.”

PP grounds an issue I made around the time of the occupation of the Michael Sadler building in Leeds last November, in arguing for a process of deliberation focused upon re-production of our everyday realities. PP argues that his main point is to encourage experienced political activists to engage. However it might also be written about academics and scholars in grounding, theorising and supporting the development of alternatives. He writes:

“you need to engage this movement, and it won’t be comfortable doing so. I was down there almost continually, and one thing that’s striking is that its representation online bears little resemblance to what’s actually happening in reality. What’s happening is happening there, not on the computer screen.”

We might then ask how are academic and scholars addressing this dilemma in their practices and research engagements? How are we becoming activist? What are we working for?

3.   Etienne Dubuis in Le Temps (in French, but translated at WorldCrunch), picks up on a point that has been increasingly made in Africa, about corporate land-grabs in what the global North terms “developing nations”. In this capitalist accumulation by dispossession universities in the global North are implicated in a process that reveals real-world examples of the impact of the triple crunch:

“The increasing production of biofuels also explains why international buyers are becoming so interested in purchasing agricultural lands, while the 2008 economic crisis also heralded land ownership as a relatively safe investment alternative.”

Whilst Dubois questions “how the benefits should be divided among investors, host states and local communities?” We might also ask how the risks are divided, and aligned with this what is the role of the universities in the global North and their internationalisation agendas?

In trying to open some of these debates up to a trans-disciplinary audience, and to one which is also focused on technology, Joss and I have a paper being published in e-Learning and Digital Media later this month, in which we consider:

the impact that peak oil and climate change may have on the future of higher education. In particular, it questions the role of technology in supporting the provision of a higher education which is resilient to a scenario both of energy depletion and the need to adapt to the effects of global warming. One emerging area of interest from this future scenario might be the role of technology in addressing more complex learning futures, and more especially in facilitating individual and social resilience, or the ability to manage and overcome disruption. However, the extent to which higher education practitioners can utilise technology to this end is framed by their approaches to the curriculum, and the sociocultural practices within which they are located. The authors discuss how open education might enable learners to engage with uncertainty through social action within a form of higher education that is more resilient to economic, environmental and energy-related disruptions.It asks whether more open higher education can be (re)claimed by users and communities within specific contexts and curricula, in order to engage with an increasingly uncertain world.

In the paper we hint at a re-focusing on deliberation; and a need to find spaces for such deliberation. This includes active engagement with the politics of events that is unfolding around us, at Occupy Wall Street, or Occupy Oakland, or in critiquing communiqués, or in delivering sessions at Tent City University as Mike Neary has recently, or at more established community events. This is part of the struggle for alternative ways of producing our realities and distributing our abundance and overcoming scarcity. Thus Joss and I argue for

social relationships that are redefined by educators and students, and [a] focus on people and values that is in turn assembled through open education. In overcoming alienation and disruption, a resilient education underpinned by open technologies and architectures enables us to critique and overcome unsustainable, commodified, institutionalised forms of education. The challenge is to develop such a critique in the face of everything.

This last statement is refracted by the key point that I take from PP’s cry for experienced activists to work within and for what might be at #occupylsx and at the aligned Tent City University. Only I look at it in terms of experienced academics working in similar spaces to help shine a light on what is denied in our world. To shine a light on the denial of a meaningful conversation about alternatives, in the face of the crisis that is revealed in austerity, in climate change, in resource depletion and in peak oil. And which is revealed at first in the Global South, but as ODAC highlights, which is also so much closer to home than we are allowed to imagine in our desperation for sustainability or business-as-usual.

And we might then reflect on the scholarly role given in A Message to Wisconsin’s Insatiable Workers and Students earlier this year:

Teachers, elaborate your teach-ins. Tell your story, encourage everyone you touch to say why collective struggle (not just bargaining) is a necessary part of our position in this world. Talk about your dying grandmother. Talk about your difficult addictions. Talk about history. This law is an attempt to conceal the realities of our daily lives and to liquidate those stories from the future. Reveal this, and make possible the education that was never allowed in school.

NOTE: Third University will be leading sessions as part of Leicester’s Community Media Week this Sunday and Monday, on social media for protesters. The focus will be on safety and story-telling. I will also be helping at a teach-out as part of Tent City University next Wednesday, on the implication of these issues on academic activism. In solidarity.


In, Against, and Beyond The University: for the courage of boundary-less toil


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 11 November 2011

“It isn’t for the moment that you are struck that you need courage, but for the long uphill climb back to sanity and faith and security.”

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

ONE. At Liberty Plaza on Sunday, Žižek argued that “the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, [and so] we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions – questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organisation can replace the existing capitalism?

TWO. This re-framing of alternatives demands that we move against historically positivist thinking, which maintains business-as-usual as our only option. It demands that we move against simple problem-solving arguments that see us making puncture-repairs to reason, justice, and universality, or in plaintively arguing for “a better capitalism”. The more courageous step is to re-imagine and re-produce an overcoming of this historically-specific, alienating capitalist system. We need an ontological critique of what is, on the basis of what could be. This is a process of overcoming the elite’s interpretive myths – of being-in-excess of their hegemony over us. Of living beyond their enclosure of our lives.

THREE. And this forms a process of re-inscribing our place in the crisis beyond what those with power-to chose to reveal. On Tuesday 11 October, the European Systemic Risk Board stated that:

  • There is a global crisis of sovereign risk;
  • The transnational financial crisis has reached a systemic dimension;
  • There is an upwardly rising risk of contagion; and
  • After a period of leveraging, we are experiencing a period of correction.

And yet in education we are told to focus upon finding mechanisms to maintain business-as-usual. And in the background our technologies-in-education are underpinned by corporate imperialism, war and human rights atrocities. Our technologies-in-education are a mechanism for profit and enclosure and the re-production of power, based upon a history of labour-in-capitalism. We are increasingly separated from the reality of our being. This is the violence of our ongoing crisis, through which the idea and the reality of the University is attacked.

FIVE. Dowrick argues that it becomes possible to gain courage and unearth resilience when giving up the wish that things are other than they are; when surrendering to the painful truth of what is. In this space it is possible to recast our lives through sharing, exchange, openness, and against hoarding, privatisation, enclosure. Against the risk of cynicism or passivity that tells us there is no alternative, to fight for that alternative takes courage.

SIX. And what of courage and alternatives and the University? We might argue, pace Holloway, that by fetishising the University as a site of the production of alternatives, we isolate it from its social environment: that we attribute to the University an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the University does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the University does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any University that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the University’s territory.

SEVEN. Yet the University remains a symbol of places where mass intellectuality, or knowledge as our main socially-productive force, can be consumed/produced and contributed to by all. The University remains a symbol of the possibility that we can create sites of opposition and ontological critique, or where we can renew histories of denial and revolt, and where new stories can be told, against states of exception that enclose how and where and why we assemble, associate and organise. This symbolic power-to critique and negate what is denied to us, to overcome the alienation of our knowledge from our lives, is reflected by the spaces that academics take up within and against the neoliberal university, and might be revealed in boundary-less toil beyond the borders of higher education.

EIGHT. The Edufactory Collective have highlighted the political, activist importance of such boundary-less toil in this historical moment. They argue: “The political question which, from Tunisia to the UK, India to Latin America, revolutionary movements and revolts pose is the alliance or the common composition of different subjects and struggles. Transforming mobilizations around the public into the organization of institutions of the common: this is the political task today.”

NINE. In sets of occupations and teach-ins and free exchange, incubated inside the University, the symbolic possibilities of higher education might connect into this “organization of institutions of the common”. Here, higher education might be dissolved, in the form of mass intellectuality or higher learning or excess, into the fabric of society. It is in this borderless or boundary-less activity, which is overtly political in seeking an exodus from the logic of capital, where academics might contribute to our overcoming of the historical processes of capitalism.

TEN. Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity, academics might consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction? How do students and teachers contribute to workerist and public dissent against domination and foreclosure? Where do we discuss alternative value-structures, and an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. As Harvey notes, at issue is “to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image.”

ELEVEN. We might, then, consider how students and teachers might dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to engage with this process of transformation. We might then consider the courage it takes to reclaim our politics and our social relationships.


on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 28 September 2011

I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.

Nelson Mandela.

If we don’t take action now/We settle for nothing later/We’ll settle for nothing now/And we’ll settle for nothing later

Rage Against the Machine, Settle for Nothing.

A note on institutions and power

In How to Change the World Without Taking Power, John Holloway argues that we deceive ourselves if we believe that the structures that have developed and which exist in order to reproduce capitalist social relations can be used as a means to overcome its alienating organisation of work. Holloway makes this point for the structure of the democratic state as a symbol of failed revolutionary hope.

At first sight it would appear obvious that winning control of the state is the key to bringing about social change. The state claims to be sovereign, to exercise power within its frontiers. This is central to the common notion of democracy: a government is elected in order to carry out the will of the people by exerting power in the territory of the state. This notion is the basis of the social democratic claim that radical change can be achieved through constitutional means.

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the state from its social environment: it attributes to the state an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the state does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the state does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any government that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the state territory.

Holloway is not alone in arguing that the state’s room for manoeuvre is constricted by transnational global capital, and in particular by the compression and enclosure of time and space wrought by technologically-transformed, finance capital. In this view, working to take control of the state crushes the transformatory intent of those who would fight against capitalism, because this transformation is always about manoeuvring for power. This instrumentalism always risks descending into a hierarchy of struggle for democracy or as nationalism or for a Tobin Tax or for whatever. In Paulo Virno’s terms this is not a courageous ideology, it is based on “weak thought”, or a political philosophy that “was developed by philosophers with theories that offer an ideology of the defeat [of labour movement by neoliberalism] after the end of the ‘70s”.It is a way of seeking compromise with capital, and escaping into a ‘fight’ for exclusionary or problem-solving tactics, like ‘equality of opportunity’.

Thus, Holloway argues that “The hierarchisation of struggle is a hierarchisation of our lives and thus a hierarchisation of ourselves.” What drives an alternative is the negation of hierarchical power within

a society in which power relations are dissolved. You cannot build a society of non-power relations by conquering power. Once the logic of power is adopted, the struggle against power is already lost.

Thus what is needed is our co-operative conquest of power as a step towards the abolition of power relations. At this point we are able to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the world. At this point we are able to move beyond protest about economic power and occupations of enclosed spaces, to critique how our global webs of social relations contribute to the dehumanisation of people, where other humans are treated as means in a production/consumption-process rather than ends in themselves able to contribute to a common wealth. For Tsianos and Papadopoulos this emerges in the radicalisation of everyday life that threatens to connect a politics of events beyond the traditional forms of the party and the trades unions. As the everyday is folded into the logic of capital, and the everyday is subsumed within the discipline of debt and the apparent foreclosure of the possibilities for an enhanced standard of living for us all, then the everyday becomes a space in which revolt can emerge.

But how is this critique to be developed inside the very heart of the struggle against capitalist social relations and power? Holloway notes:

For what is at issue in the revolutionary transformation of the world is not whose power but the very existence of power. What is at issue is not who exercises power, but how to create a world based on the mutual recognition of human dignity, on the formation of social relations which are not power relations.

Holloways argues that we cannot live in ignorance of the power relations that dominate our lives. He argues for the positive creativity that emerges from the negativity of critique and from our “refusal of capital”. In this we must recuperate doing, as opposed to capitalist labour, and to develop our shared power-to create the world, rather than simply to maximise profit. Holloway argues that we must fight capital’s negation of our power-to create the world through its alienation of ourselves from our work, by its commodification and expropriation of our labour (in de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford’ term “boundary-less toil”), or by its denial of our sociality through enforced or enclosed individuation. We see this in our awakening to the precarious nature of labour in the face of capital’s need to reproduce increases in the rate of profit. This can be achieved for instance by the discipline of the threat of dead labour embodied in machines, or by the capture of our everyday existence in immaterial labour or cognitive work, or by increased financialisation. (Paul Mason’s blog tracks how politicians are now desperately embroiled in keeping the neoliberal show on the road.)

Thus, pace Marx, we argue for association and assembly in describing new, co-operative patch-works of social doing/creating that are not in the name of capitalist work; which challenge capitalist work and its boundary-less exploitation as the main organising principle of our lives. Following Marx, it is through association that Holloway argues for the creation and sharing of social forms that articulate our doing and making of the world, and which dissolve our current power relations into the fabric of new assemblies, and thereby work to negate our reification or fetishising of established forms and practices.

Being against established forms is central in Holloway’s argument for revolutionary activity that centres on the denial or negation of identities forged and fetishised inside capital’s structures, including Universities. The idea is to promote “creative uncertainty against-in-and-beyond a closed, pre-determined world [my emphasis].” In this we move towards a world of disjuncture, disunity, discontinuity, where doing inside capitalism becomes riskier as the repetitive, precarious nature of its alienation and dehumanisation is revealed. This revelation is a recognition that denying capital’s power-over our lives is a possibility, and that revolt against its subsumption of our lives to the profit motive and the rule of money is a possibility. At issue is a move towards “an anti-politics of events rather than a politics of organisation” based on an individual’s or a class’s subjective power-over others. As Marx argued in the Collected Works (Volume 3):

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

A note on higher education, higher learning and an exodus from capital

I would like to make a point about the role of higher education and those who exist within or connected to higher education in this process of creating a species-life. We might open this out by taking Holloway’s starting point about the state [quoted above], and thinking about the University.

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

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

It might then be argued that within the University there is little space to contest the logic of capitalist work and its denial of possibilities; that there is little opportunity for the world turned upside down, where we can create a world that is, in Christopher Hill’s words, populated by “masterless men”. Yet the University remains a symbol of places where mass intellectuality, or knowledge as our main socially-productive force, can be consumed/produced and contributed to by all. The University remains a symbol of the possibility that we can create sites of opposition and ontological critique, or where we can renew histories of denial and revolt, and where new stories can be told, against states of exception that enclose how and where and why we assemble, associate and organise.

This symbolic power-to critique and negate what is denied to us, when we are sold pedagogies of student-as-consumer, is reflected by the spaces that academics take up within and against the neoliberal university. These are often incubated within the symbolic space of the University and revealed in boundary-less toil beyond the borders of higher education. In these sets of actions, incubated inside the University, the symbolic possibilities of higher education might be dissolved in the form of mass intellectuality or higher learning or excess within the fabric of society. It is in this borderless or boundary-less activity, which is overtly political in seeking an exodus from the logic of capital, where academics might contribute to a transfomatory praxis.

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 (witness working from home, playbor in games-based industries, Facebook and Google’s subsumption of our identities for further accumulation, or the enclosure of the open web for profit). Within this subsumption, immaterial labour forms “the labor that produces the informational, cultural, or affective element of the commodity.” Thus, the fetishisation of personalisation, of self-branding, of the technologies we connect through, risks the commodification of each and every action we take in the world. However, 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. In his work on Digital Diploma Mills, Noble argued against the conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and hence private property. In this he saw virtualisation driven by the commodification of teaching and the creation of commercially-viable, proprietary products that could be marketised. The usual capitalist processes of deskilling and automation, and proletarianisation of labour are at the core of this process. Noble argues against the surrender of pedagogic control, and for what Neary has highlighted to be a pedagogy of excess, through which academics and students might engage “in various forms of theoretical and practical activity that [take] them beyond the normal limits of what is meant by higher education. It is the notion of students becoming more than students through a radical process of revelation”. This is an attempt to fight against the compression of academic space by automated time, to widen that space for communal activity that is not driven by money and proletarianisation.

This activist engagement beyond the borders of higher education is a reminder of the history of the struggle of Italian workerism in the 1960s and 1970s. It also connects to current calls for people to stand on solid ground collectively in protest against the excesses of transnational financial capital, and the austerity measures that are catalysing protest beyond the normative structures of trades unions and labour parties. It is in this set of spaces that academics and students might have a borderless role to play, as evidenced as follows.

  1. In the people and networks participating in the 15s hub, against austerity policies that are an attack on the working class and the common wealth. Academics have taken a leading role in these networks, in inscribing and defining new possibilities.
  2. In the range of radical academic projects in the UK that are an attempt to re-inscribe the perception of higher education as higher learning within the fabric of society, so as to imagine something new. In some cases these projects are working politically to re-define issues of power. In most cases they see the institution of the school or the university as symbolically vital to a societal transformation. They form a process of re-imagination that risks fetishisation or reification of radical education, but which offers a glimpse of a different process. This glimpse shines a light on the University as one node in a global web of social relations, and one which enables borderless doing.
  3. Rethinking in public the role of academics in society, or the direct engagement of nerds, geeks, experts, mentors, whatever, in the wider fabric of society, facilitated through social media but realised in concrete experiences on solid ground. Thus:
    • Ben Goldacre argues that *we* “should be showing kids how to extract meaning from the noise of large datasets, by showing them how to do simple stuff”;
    • Tony Hirst argues for “the ‘production in presentation’ delivery of an informal open ‘uncourse’” where production-in-public is the central organising theme, and where “By embedding resources in the target community, we aim to enhance the practical utility of the resources within that community as well as providing an academic consideration of the issues involved”;
    • Dave Cormier scopes an ontological crisis in the educational system, and revisits a rhizomatic approach to learning in order to engage with “the kinds of societal questions i would like to think our education system could prepare us for”;
    • Doug Belshaw raises the possibility for badges to be potentially revolutionary through their “peer-to-peer element”;
    • Change MOOCs offer the possibility of co-operative teaching and study in public;
    • Princeton University actively promotes open access, in order to stop staff handing all copyright to journals, thus opening-up access to its research and practices, whilst Martin Weller argues for an open digital scholarship that will “allow for greater impact than traditional scholarly practices.”

This is not to state that these practices are overtly political or boundary-less, but that they offer a way of re-framing the relationships between academics and the public in an age of crisis. For example, it may be that it is the formation of social relationships, and the concomitant re-formation of value, in the process of creating and sharing badges that is transformatory. It is the critique of commodified accreditation within higher education catalysed by badges as a form o open, higher learning, which makes them important. This stands against the potential reification, privatisation and commodification of badges and their owners as things. It may be that teaching-in-public, or digital scholarship, is re-politicized as a form of active engagement between students, teachers and people in spaces of dissent or protest, in order to underpin new workerist revolts. It may be that these strands form a pedagogy of academic activism, connected to a philosophy of exodus from the daily re-enclosure of capital.

These reflections on the interstices between academic and public, and between accreditation and informal learning, and between the private and the co-operative are surrounded by political tensions, and culturally replicated structures of power. Any process of academic activism demands academic reflexivity in understanding how academic power impacts the processes of assembly and association and historical critique. One of the criticisms levelled at our understandings of the “Arab Spring”, for instance, was against academic tourists presenting as “Western ‘experts’ who jet in and jet out”, and base their work on their identity under capitalist work. The Autonomous Geographies Collective raised this challenge in engaging co-operatively with meaningful participation in social change, rather than parasitically exploiting the protest of peoples against the expropriation of their lives.

Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity, as the neoliberal response to the latest crisis of capitalism, academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction? How do students and teachers contribute to workerist and public dissent against domination and foreclosure? David Harvey notes in his Companion to Capital, Volume 1, that Marx is interested in processes of transformation, and more importantly in the revolutionary transformation of society. This transformation overthrows the capitalist value-form in the construction of an alternative value-structure, and an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. At issue is “to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image.” We might, then, consider how do students and teachers dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to engage with this process of transformation?