Tag Archives: activism

Educational technology and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting at the University of Lincoln’s Centre for Educational Research and Development conference on Thursday June 7. I’ll be speaking about Educational technology and the war on public education. My slides are on my slideshare. There is a fuller blog post on the war on public education is here and on militarisation is here. Part of the argument about alienation/commodification is made in this paper published in triple-C.

I will ask these questions.

  1. How do technologies contribute to the alienation of academics from their labour inside the university?
  2. What might be learned from occupations/work-ins in other geographies or at other times or in other sectors or under other capitals? How did techniques or technologies affect those actions?
  3. What forms of academic labour are legitimised and how does technology affect that legitimation?
  4. With a focus on technologies for militarisation and techniques for control, how is academic labour co-opted?
  5. How and where might academics push back, in order to abolish alienated labour?

For the University and against a neoliberal curriculum


Posted by hallymk1

In her keynote at Discourse, Power and Resistance ’12, Rosemary Deem highlighted the isomorphism that is occurring within and across universities in the United Kingdom as the ideology of marketisation is insinuated into the practices and policies that shape the higher education environment. This is not a new process, but the pace with which it is now being rolled-out is a dislocation or shock that enables change to be enforced through uncertainty. This is one of the ways in which capital uses systemic crises to renew itself. This quickened process is made visible in: the re-catagorisation of Universities as businesses in the HRMC regulations on taxation; the Coalition Government’s use of VAT regulations to open-up a space for marketisation through shared services; and by enabling for-profit providers to obtain the same VAT exemption on educational services as not for-profits. Andrew McGettigan has highlighted how this enables private providers, which are able to ‘leverage’ private equity, to steal a march on the rest of the sector, which as it is not for-profit cannot access such funds, and this leaves those institutions at the whims of private, philanthropic donations, or needing to chase increasingly limited and limiting (research) funding. These sources of money, often sought from those with a specific ideological position to further, then disciplines what the University is able to research or produce or critique. In Christopher Newfield‘s terms this process is yet another example of ‘state-subsidised privatisation’. It is a form of enclosure enacted as a discourse veiled inside the logic of democratic capitalism.

[NOTE: please see Andrew McGettigan’s comment below for an elucidation of his position.]

Deem also focused on the role of private equity companies and hedge funds in opening-up what is perceived of as being a public space for the market. This process is complex and related to the ways in which some educational functions prove profitable and can be privatised, like vocational training that can be provided at low cost using part-time or precariously employed (post-graduate) lecturers or courses that can be delivered via distance or work-based learning. These map onto leveraged or marginal or menial skills that are developed inside the knowledge economy. Those activities that require much higher infrastructural investment, and which are of marginal profitability in the market but which have a higher social utility, like medicine, can be left to the State to fund. Post-education, these proprietary skills can be harnessed for profit, for instance through the privatisation of healthcare. This whole process of marketisation forms a system of enclosure, or in David Harvey’s terms of accumulation by dispossession. It is a way in which rents can be extracted from individuals and institutions, in the form of services or fees that are contracted for and which might include technological services or actual courses of study. The latter are increasingly to be paid for from indentures/loans that inscribe education as an individualised good, rather than from general taxation that views educational spaces as a social good.

This process is exacerbated because the State, acting as regulator rather than funder, is regulating for the market and for enterprise, and not for the society of people. This is part of a neoliberal discourse in which the practices and activities of higher education are folded inside the subsumption of all of social life inside the dynamic of competition. Here the State is proactive in acting as midwife to the re-birth of public assets as market-oriented commodities. This idea of neoliberalism as a discourse is especially important in Stephen J. Ball’s work on Global Education Inc.. Ball traces the development of neoliberalism very deliberately as a discourse designed to promote shared libertarian, market-oriented entrepreneurialism that in-turn fosters a new nexus betweeen capital and the State, in order to re-shape all of society inside its hegemonic, totalising logic. In part, Ball sees this as facilitated by networks of power and affinity, that enable the re-production of ‘geographies of social relationships’ that are in the name of money, profit, choice and unregulated markets. These networks form shifting assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power. Moreover, they are transnational activist networks consisting of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers, philanthropists/hedge-funds interested in corporate social responsibility etc., which aim at regulating the state for enterprise and the market.

Importantly, this forms a neoliberal curriculum. The use of the word curriculum is hugely important in the roll-back of the State and the roll-out of the neoliberal agenda. Not only does it refer to a course of action that moulds individuals into persons, but it also anchors that discourse educationally. Thus, the focus is on creating uncertainties in the spaces in which the State operates, telling common-sense stories about the value of private enterprise in ‘leveraging’ both performance and cost reduction, and in connecting those stories to a meta-narrative of there is no alternative. In turn these meta-narratives reinforce World Bank and IMF orthodoxies related to structural readjustment, freedom and choice. Thus, the networks of interconnected actors and corporations, acting as transnational advocacy networks, then reinforce these dominant positions through their: activities; conferences; prizes; media attention; control of funding; research programmes and outcomes; evidence-based approaches to data-laundering; regulation etc.. Ball describes the reality of several networks that reinforce hegemonic power, and which connect academics to education providers and research groups, and interconnects them with technology firms, as well as to finance capital and think tanks, in particular in opening-up the Indian education system for marketisation. Ball highlights how academics based in the UK, like James Tooley and Sugatra Mitra (who has keynoted about his hole in the wall project recently, for example for the Association for Learning Technology) operate inside neoliberal networks that amplify the complex geographies of neoliberalism, which are made influential and powerful by money, policy advocacy, relationships, and action on the ground.

At issue then is how to create counter-hegemonic networks, policy and relationships, that might develop counter-hegemonic positions. What alternative actions might be taken to reinforce the idea that there is an alternative value position that can be take, both socially and in relation to higher education? In this, Deem argued for the role of academics acting as public intellectuals. Interestingly she also highlighted how ahead of the 2014 REF, the social sciences panel defined impact in wide-ranging terms, including public benefit. This is important because research impact is a crucial site of struggle in the commodification of the University and its subsumption under the logic of capitalist expansion. The ways in which academics might go into occupation of terms like impact, in order to redefine its use against that prescribed by the regulatory logic of the State or transnational advocacy networks, is important in moving beyond the use of the term simply as the impression of academic activity. Impact as impression objectifies activity and relationships and people’s subject positions through behavioural demands. What can be measured is part of a neoliberal discourse related to efficiency and consumption.

As the University becomes an overt site of capitalist accumulation, and as a result a site for entrepreneurial investment, the occupation of regulatory terms or regulations forms one concrete way in which resistance and refusal might be catalysed. There are two important points that flow from this kind of activity. The first is that the University remains a site of the production of mass intellectuality, where knowledge claims can be legitimised and critiqued. However, as a neoliberal discourse increasingly kettles the academic process and practices, it takes courage to act against the prevailing, hegemonic narrative. The cost of resistance is high and it is important therefore that academics act communally to shine a critical light on the activities of the state in regulating the University for the market. This requires that the increasing number of communal activities, like radical education projects/free universities outside the University and protests or refusals inside the University, are joined in solidarity.

The second point is about leadership. It is increasingly less certain that institutional leaders, Vice-Chancellors or Vice-Principals, will challenge the dominant narratives of the State, in terms of the marketisation of higher education. Acting as CEOs the logic is that they will attempt to compete rather than co-operate. Thus, in the UK, University leadership was quiet over the threats of violence made by the State against students who protest, and we witnessed banning orders being sought against protest on campus, PhD students being suspended for protesting via poetry, and elected student representatives being removed from University committees for protesting. This enactment of the University as an enclosed space for dissent is a logical outcome emerging from the rhetoric of competition. Earlier this year I wrote about the communal university, and noted that the marketisation of the sector reminded me of the establishment of the English Football Premier League in 1992, as a marketised space in which clubs were businesses and where the social health of the league as a whole was less important that that of the individual clubs acting as businesses. In this set of spaces, the public, or supporters, were of secondary, instrumentalist importance to the structural need to inscribe clubs as institutions inside the market.

The possibility that the HE sector may come to resemble the English football league post-1992 following the deal made to form the Premiership, which lead to: the league being ruled by the power of money (witness the power of BSkyB, the influx of transnational capital in the form of hedge funds and corporates in club governance); the ossification of success/competitiveness (witness the limited number of clubs capable of sustaining challenges for the League or for Cups); the growth of indebtedness and administration (in particular where clubs chase access to the Premiership/TV deals); and the need for special pleading for/activism by supporters (in terms of fan ownership, supporter democracy and the rising costs of attending games).

In this process of enclosure, we might ask whether our academic leaders will be able to work communally or co-operatively to roll-back the neoliberal discourse that commodifies all of our social life inside the market, and which kettles free debate about what is legitimate. We might ask then what is the role of the academic as activist in developing alternative discourses that argue for a re-humanisation of educational life and activity.

One of those roles is to develop analyses of the transnational advocacy networks that influence the spaces in which we operate, and through those networks to reveal how the neoliberal discourse is played out in our society. So we might ask: how do the technologies we procure, and the procurement practices we use inside the University, and the people we ask to keynote our conferences, and the evidence-based research we enable to be used for advocacy, and the money that we take for research, and the learning/teaching and employability strategies that we agree and implement, and the definitions of impact/sustainability that we agree and use, re-inscribe both the power of a neoliberal discourse and transnational networks of power? Is it possible for scholarly communities of academics and students, working in society, to act in public against this discourse? Where do we identify communal spaces for solidarity and courage? Taking action that is against polyarchic, univeralised norms might enable a counter-hegemonic set of alternatives to be debated or created that support an alternative way of doing. The flip-side is that we do nothing as the whole of our lives and our sociability is subsumed under the abstracted rule of money.


Educational technology and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday I am presenting at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at their conference, ‘The Problem of “Dirty Hands” in UK Universities‘.

I’ll be developing some ideas around the theme of educational technology and the war on public education. My slides for the event are at: http://slidesha.re/GNqhFc. My argument will be as follows.

ONE. Educational technology is a site of struggle inside the University, through which the relationships between management and (immaterial) labour are reinforced and re-produced. More broadly the deployment of educational technology is a form of state-subsidised privatisation and is a space through which the marketisation of education can be rooted.

TWO. Through educational technology, labour inside the University is at risk of coercion, measurement and surveillance, in order to meet the marketised demands of competition and profit-maximisation. Educational technology is a way in which hegemonic positions can be protected and developed inside education

THREE. Academics and educational technologists/staff developers are complicit in the ways that educational technologies are deployed at the heart of the University through teaching and research. At issue is whether these same groups have a critical (ethical) lens through which to critique the nature of the technologies that they re-sell beyond a focus on the student experience? How might critical insight about the ways in which educational technologies enable the co-option of University teaching, research and development for value formation and accumulation be catalysed?

FOUR. Uncritical, technologically-mediated behaviours inside the University are conditioned through the politics of education, which reproduces polyarchic governance through a form of the shock doctrine.

  • Polyarchy is an elitist form of democratic engagement that describes what is manageable/appropriate in a modern society, and what is acceptable and what can be fought for in terms of organisation and governance. It rests on universal, transhistorical norms based on the tenets of liberal democracy and capitalism, and which make it unacceptable to argue for other forms of value or organisation. Thus, it is not possible to address the structural dominance of elites within capitalism, or the limited procedural definitions of democracy or participation or power. This political enclosure is reinforced technologically and inside systems of education.
  • The Shock Doctrine focuses upon exacting political control by imposing economic shock therapy. In terms of higher education this focuses upon:

i.    structural re-adjustment through enforced competition and coercion (fee structures and student indenture; internationalisation; distance learning);

 ii.    a tightening/quickening of the dominant, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology (student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity);

iii.    the transfer of state/public assets to the private sector (consultancy; outsourced services);

iv.    the privatisation of state enterprises/elements in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability (state-subsidised privatisation)

FIVE. In response to this ideological or political enclosure, the space for the implementation of educational technologies is legitimised by organisations that support/influence universities. Thus, the HEFCE focuses on technological deployments for cost-reductions, business-process re-engineering and efficiency gains, which themselves might underpin radical transformation of the university as a “business”. HEFCE states that it works with key partners like JISC and the HEA in supporting institutions in technological transformation. The JISC’s Transitions Group has reported the importance of the HE/FE sector for economic growth, and it connects and relates changes in these sectors that are political, financial, technological and competitive. These changes mean that JISC must operate within “stringent new financial realities”, in order that it is “better geared to achieving a large impact”. Thus, recent JISC-Announce emails clearly connect technological innovations to a discourse of “cost savings”, “value for money”, “value and impact”, and organisational efficiency and effectiveness. This legitimation of a discourse that connects educational innovation to fiscal “realities” is also revealed in the HEA’s values, which highlight the importance of value for money and place it alongside the HEA’s other organisational values of student learning and institutional innovation.

SIX. The recent Coalition Government budget for 2012 further tightens control of the technological policy and practice of universities through its focus on: universities working in the “business” of education; on VAT and shared services, and the need to treat “commercial universities” “fairly”; and by creating a research investment fund that “will attract additional co-investment from the private sector”. This reinforcement of the deep connections between commercial and financial leverage, technology, and education-for-employment are part of an on-going governmental discourse about the value/purpose of education, outlined for instance by Michael Gove at BETT.

SEVEN. It is from inside this space that educational technology is implemented by educational technologists, staff developers and technicians, and then adopted by practitioners and students. Thus, the following serve as examples of how technology is often implemented based on problems of performance, efficiency and scale, without a broader, political, contextual analysis or questioning.

  • Cloud Computing is argued for from perspectives of scale and organisational/labour efficiency, with a limited critique of: the geo-political and legal issues that arise, in particular related to national security legislation; the ways in which the cloud enables the separation and surveillance of proletarianised work, and the re-production and redistribution of commodity- and leveraged-skills to low-wage societies through outsourcing (and cutting labour costs for in-house work); the attempts that are being made to commodify and sell the idea of cloud computing in terms of green IT or sustainability, despite the lack of evidence that the cloud is ‘greener’, with industry wrapping itself around this concept as a space for further service-led innovation; and the privatization of public, academic services through outsourcing/consultancy/rent.
  • Blackboard is utilised as a Learning Management System in particular across the global North, and, as with other providers in the marketplace, the Company provides services that are rented by/licensed to Universities that are funded in some cases by the State. In 2011 it was reported that Blackboard had an “expanding footprint in the defense sector”, and that as a result “The Pentagon gets a manageable software program that helps instructors in subjects like military logistics and infantry tactics get a handle on the coursework flow of thousands of occasionally far-flung active duty military personnel. Blackboard, on the other hand, has a neat little honeypot that has, in many ways, saved the company.” Moreover, in 2011 Blackboard was acquired by Providence Equity Partners, a private-equity company. Providence was advised by, amongst others Goldman Sachs, on its acquisition of SRA International, a company that “is dedicated to solving complex problems of global significance for government organizations serving the national security, civil government, health, and intelligence and space markets.” Should those links between the investment banking/finance, defence and education sectors be discussed in the context of a University’s mission or in the sector’s aim to work for the public good?
  • Mobile learning is championed across the sector and by various funding bodies in supporting personalisation and anytime/anywhere learning, with limited critique of this in relation to the human/labour rights abuses that have been revealed in the factories where mobile technologies are manufactured or the mines from where raw materials are produced, and in spite of the threat of the enclosure of content on the open web due to the commercial, competitive imperative to create a market for mobile applications. How should revelations around human/labour rights, especially in the global South, affect institutional policy?
  • The implementation of communications-solutions like MS Lync often underpins an integrated systems architecture that connects communications and information-management capabilities across an institution. However, the development of such architectures also makes possible institutional surveillance of academic practices and labour, and the disciplining of marginalised practices, like the utilisation of open source solutions like Linux, or of practices that are defined outside technocratic norms. Framing discussions about the implementation of specific technologies as politically-neutral instances of problem-solving removes the imperative, for instance, to engage with trades unions about the management and monitoring capabilities of such tools as an aggregated whole. How often do academics or educational technologist discuss labour rights and safeguards when deploying a technology or designing an architecture?
  • The coming fetishisation of learning analytics and data-mining, linked to diagnostic and summative assessment, alongside progression and retention agendas, is in-part technologically-driven, and connects academics to the daily measurement of their practices and to impact measures for teaching. Do educational developers or technologists or academic staff consider the means by which their everyday existence is incorporated inside the means of re-production of capital? Do they consider how technologies further objectify our social relationships as commodities from which value can be extracted through, for instance, the monitoring and harvesting of personal data, the enclosure and control of spaces or applications of consumption, the use of venture capitalism to support specific social networks, and the technological augmentation and capture of affectivity?

EIGHT. These examples serve to highlight the risks in any uncritical, techno-determinist deployment of technology. So we might ask, what is to be done? This is important in the face of governmental/funding policies that are in-turn constricted by transnational global capital, and in particular by the compression and enclosure of time and space wrought by technologically-transformed, finance capital. It is natural that those who work inside universities would escape into problem-solving tactics like ‘social inclusion’ or ‘equality of opportunity’, which are liberal themes so often connected to discourses that emerge around emergent, assistive or participative technologies.

NINE. However, everyday scholarly activities are becoming increasingly folded into the logic of capital through, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing. As a result, the internal logic of the University is increasingly prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships as against fetishised products and processes of valorisation.

TEN. Yet the University remains a symbol of those places where mass intellectuality can be consumed, produced and more importantly contributed to by all. Academics then have an important role in arguing against the conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and hence private property, catalysed through processes of virtualisation that are driven by the commodification of research and teaching and the emergence of commercially-viable, proprietary products that can be marketised. The capitalist processes of deskilling and automation, fetishisation of products, and proletarianisation of labour are at the core of this process.

ELEVEN. This struggle is given life in the range of radical academic projects and occupations in the UK, which are an attempt to re-inscribe higher education as higher learning dissolved into the fabric of society. 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 that shines a light on the University as one node in a global web of social relations. This also focuses upon rethinking in public the role of academics in society, facilitated through educational technologies but realised in concrete experiences on solid ground.

TWELVE. Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity 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. In the critique of knowledge production, revealed through the production/consumption of specific educational technologies, the University can grow in excess of its symbolic role. Thus, students and teachers might reconsider how they engage with these technologies, in order to contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction. How do students and teachers contribute to public dissent against marketisation, domination and foreclosure?


Presentations about the assault on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting two linked papers on higher education/the assault on public education in the UK.  I’ll blog what I plan to say here, and link to my slideshare.

The first presentation is at Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at their conference, ‘The Problem of “Dirty Hands” in UK Universities‘.

Title: Educational technology and the war on public education

Abstract: This paper will discuss the ways in which educational technologies reflect and amplify the commodification of the University as a set of spaces and practices, and how technological determinism and narratives of technology-as-progress reinforce academic complicity in the processes of marketisation and enclosure of higher education. Such complicity is determined by the uncritical manner in which educational technology is procured and deployed inside Universities, and the ways in which that deployment further commodifies our educational experiences.

Thus, state-subsidised capitalism, revealed through the engagement of private technology providers, outsourced solutions, the enclosure of the web through locked-down technologies, and consultancy in educational technology, will be related to critiques of the neoliberal assault on the idea of the University. In uncovering this relationship, the power that academics have in defining how they can operate in the University, and the place of technology in that struggle, is important. Thus, in suggesting strategies for academic agency or activism, the paper will highlight how using open technologies in public might help to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the University.

This might be viewed as a crack in the Coalition’s assault on education as a public good. At issue is whether students and teachers are able to recapture educational technologies in order to dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest and to develop alternatives. This might be seen as an attempt by capital to enter, control and enclose what has previously been seen as open source or as the terrain previously set-out and negotiated by hacktivists. However, it does open up a space for academic activists working with programmers and educationalists to challenge the dominant logic of how we construct and re-produce our educational worlds as commonly-defined, social goods, against state-subsidised capitalism and proletarianised work. We might then consider how to re-engage our actions and the technologies we deploy asymmetrically; to refuse and push-back against marketisation, to realise the possibilities of the hacker ethic, and to use technology to describe more social forms of value.

The second is at the Discourse, Power and Resistance: Impact conference, at the University of Plymouth. I will base my talk on this slideshare presentation.

Title: In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University

Abstract: This paper will briefly discuss the political possibilities for academic activism in the face of the shock doctrine, or neoliberal responses to socio-economic and environmental disruption, in the UK. The paper will argue that academic activism and occupation offer sanctuaries in which critiques of the idea of higher education can develop. It will be argued that they offer possibilities for academics and students, contributing as scholars to a shared process, to be against the foreclosure of the idea of higher education by the twin pedagogies of debt and the kettle. This process offers spaces in which such scholars can re-conceptualise and negate the alienation of their labour as capitalist work inside the academy. In the face of global disruptions in social access to both historic capitals and liquid energy resources, a radical critique of capitalist social relations inside the University holds the possibility of moving beyond this neoliberal foreclosure, towards revolutionary transformation enabled through processes of self-creation and praxis. It is intended that this brief paper will take 15 minutes and offer 20 minutes for discussion of possibilities for scholars to stand inside the neoliberal University, to be against its enclosure of the possibilities for higher learning, and to move beyond its foreclosure of resilient futures.


On Elsevier and the academic project


Posted by hallymk1

The Cambridge Mathematician, Tim Gower, has highlighted a campaign against the publisher Reed Elsevier for the tripartite crimes of: high pricing; bundling, which pushes what Gower hints are inappropriate or poor quality journals with those that are good; “ruthless” behaviour in cutting off access to all their journals where libraries attempt to negotiate better deals; and their support for SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act. Whilst Gower mentions earlier criticism of business practices, the main thrust of his argument is outrage over the pricing of and access to publically-funded research. In fact, Gower accepts the commercial logic of publishing’s current stranglehold over higher education as a business. He argues:

Returning to the subject of morality, I don’t think it is helpful to accuse Elsevier of immoral behaviour: they are a big business and they want to maximize their profits, as businesses do.

However, in an earlier set of criticisms about Elsevier, Tom Stafford reminds us of that Company’s involvement in arms fairs and the subsequent academic campaign against them. This was very much an ethical campaign of academic groups working in association with organisations like Campaign Against The Arms Trade. For Stafford, unlike Gower, the ethics of business were central:

I felt that Elsevier were making academics complicit in the arms trade and that this was something we, collectively, could take a stand on and where I, personally, could effect a difference.

In part the success of the campaign outlined by Stafford was based on de-legitimisation of Elsevier’s engagement in the arms trade through its involvement in arms shows, and linking this to pre-existing, global networks and associations, in order to hit the company’s economic value(s).

The pre-existing global networks that academics define offer more than a limited, horizon for their activism, beyond perceptions of academic freedom, or open access, or monetisation, or the alleged needs of developing countries. However, the case against Elsevier’s engagement in the arms trade for profit throws the limited and limiting scope of much academic argument for/against methods of production/distribution of content into sharp relief. Too often the only language that we have is money. Money as value is almost the only form of academic cohesion that we are able to articulate. Thus, David Wiley opines that “Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers” and calls for more(state?) funding “Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk.”

And yet the State and its institutions (at least in the global north) have demonstrated a willingness to enclose and discipline academic practice in multiple ways, from physically kettling students to psychologically kettling academics through the REF. Moreover, the landscape of higher education is riven with State-encouraged public/private partnerships, outsourced technologies/services, knowledge transfer/exchange partnerships, engagements with closed services for the production/distribution of content/learning. This historic enclosure of academic work, reinforced through governmental regulation, then enables rent to be extracted by corporations, in the form of subscriptions or licenses.

The key here is that the value of our work, or our labour, forms part of the productive/distributive relations of capitalism. This is not a debate that stops at the simple production of reified content or open educational practices. In short academic labour or immaterial labour or cognitive capitalism has value, in-part through its production of immaterial things in the form of content, and profit can be squeezed from it. In a time of austerity, rents provide a more sure form of income; so why should we see any respite for those who are forced to license or rent spaces that have been regulated away from open/enclosed? In fact, as the rate of production of surplus value from riskier, financialised, private ventures is reduced, a migration towards enclosing public spaces and extracting value from them is natural. As I have argued elsewhere

This amounts to a form of what Christopher Newfield calls “subsidy capitalism”, which “means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.”

And so there are two issues interconnected here, and they are linked to the value of academic work as labour. The first is the reality of academic work inside capitalism, which means a reduction of the debate about open education to the addition of value and the subsumption of open under dominant labour processes. As Joss Winn and Mike Neary point out hacking, hacktivism and open source cultures have had some impact here, but the discussion of open educational resources has tended to reduce to commodification and an inability to critique academic labour inside cognitive capitalism.

The second issue is the reality of academic practices compromised inside the logic of profit maximisation. In this reality we find, for instance, mathematician’s railing about Elsevier’s business model (whilst at the same time recognising the logic of these business practices) but we hear silence on the issue of Blackboard’ engagement with the Pentagon, our re-selling of Apple as an educational technology in spite of its human/labour rights’ record (although we might comment on its foreclosure on developers), or the enclosure issues I raised previously in this post on the war on public education.

Yet, as Tony Hirst reminds us here, we have a history of examining and re-examining our complicity or otherwise in State-sponsored narratives of privatisation/enclosure/injustice. Hirst argues this point for data, but it applies for the politics of any academic field:

1) there may be stories to be told about the way other people have sourced and used their data. Were one report quotes data from another, treat it with as much suspicion as you would hearsay… Check with the source [sic.].

2) when developing your own data stories, keep really good tabs on where the data’s come from and be suspicious about it. If you can be, be open with republishing the data, or links to it.

This view is amplified through connection to the “hopes” of World Bank insider, Michael Trucano, when speaking of mobile learning, that:

in 2012 practical insights into what this mobility might mean for both educators and learners based on real life experiences will emerge in greater volume and depth, so that policymakers and planners can make more informed decisions about how to direct increasingly scarce resources in ways that are cost-effective and impactful.

And the point may then be that in our re-examination of our academic labour practices we need to be explicitly political. It is not good enough to accept the polyarchal limits of our work, as they are defined by money, marketisation and impact, but to fight for some other form of value that defines our social relationships. Stafford argued

that the institutional rational that defines the modern corporation is pathological, creating them so that they fundamentally cannot take account of any humane values, being motivated solely by the pursuit of profit.

This moves us beyond the disempowerment of special pleading or cries for different funding models. It is the recognition of the responsibility of academics to extend the terrain for struggle, so that we might reassess the production and distribution of our work, our cultures and our academic society, for something more humane. This might be in fighting for open access, or in taking part in the struggle for alternatives, or in publically debating University governance and financialisation, or in critquing the spaces for occupation. But it has to be about more than the poverty of efficiency, subsidy and impact.


A note on academic activism, hyper-neoliberalism and the problem of power and consent


Posted by hallymk1

In her seminar on “Diagnosing the contemporary: prolific activism, hyper-neoliberalism and the problem of power and consent”, Janet Newman drew on her research into feminist critiques of the ideology and practices of neoliberalism, in order to challenge the realities of academic activism. I have blogged before about academic activism, in particular connected to the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity and the possibilities of exodus, and the types of radical spaces that the University might open up. However, Newman’s work demonstrated how, within the overarching re-formation of capital under neoliberal doctrine, it is the similarities across disparate positions that are in-and-against that re-formation, which offer spaces and possibilities to move beyond them.

In Holloway’s terms Newman’s work on critique and criticality from the perspective of gender politics is one of those cracks in the productive relations defined by capitalism, which itself needs to be connected to other stories or cracks that reveal the everyday and historical injustices of the politics of austerity and our polyarchic state apparatus. One of Newman’s key points was how to create spaces and places through which mappings between community activist and academic positions could emerge, and thereby lead to new analyses and actions. These spaces are crucial because they enable communities, or networks, or society to test what Stuart Price calls “truth claims in a story world”, like the idea that there is no alternative.

So, Newman highlighted a conceptual analysis of positions based on the experiences of women who have brought personal and political commitments into their working lives, in particular since the New Labour project. Her work highlighted the following themes/issues/possibilities that emerged on the boundaries between academic/activist positions.

  1. Mechanisms through which both academics and activists can confront power.
  2. Ways in which critical engagements, including knowledge work, could be developed.
  3. Spaces for close encounters with those who act as/for monitoring power (ostensibly based around financial power and efficiency).
  4. Revealing the mechanisms and strategies through which activist/minority/dissenting discourses are appropriated/incorporated by those in power, as a form of undoing. In this way radical or marginalised positions are neutralised in the process of co-option or are de-legitimised or even erased.
  5. The need for an on-going focus on relational positions or relationships, rather than transactions between groups or communities or individuals.

This final point seems to me critical in the approach of the occupy movement, or the flowering of oppositional, free education movements. It connects deeply to the edufactory collective’s tripartite strategy for opposing the restrictions and enclosure of academic practices imposed by neoliberal educational policy, namely: for a new educational politics based on the general assembly; for militant research strategies; and for activity in public. Newman also revealed a similar position in calling for a new constituency of activist academic positions that can hold politicians to account. She argued for: making our collective work visible; for engaging in public conversations; and for generative labour, or doing new things. This, for her, was a move to connect critique and criticality to our everyday practices.

I am left, therefore, with a deepening sense of the strands/cracks of continuity across stories. Moreover, there is the revelation that these strands/cracks are enabling us to recognise the ideological impact of austerity and neoliberal dogma on the possibility that we might become subjects in our own lives. There is the possibility that in the spaces opened up in occupation, we might form counter-narratives or counter-hegemonic positions. The stakes in this discussion are high: not only do we face socio-environmental crises, but the coercive state is being revealed on a daily basis, in the attacks on welfare, the militarisation of the police, in increasing authoritarianism around the Olympic Games etc..

However, we see in opposition to coercion more than simply hope; we see courage being revealed and the possibility that subject positions might be recuperated and that new spaces/places might be opened up across civil society. Richard Murphy reminds us of this in his work on the courageous state; and we are reminded of this courage in the worker/student actions of Tent City University, and the Space Project, and students at UC Berkeley, and Occupy Oakland, and student protests in Santiago, and Turin, and Dhaka, and at University College London, and Kent State University, and Manila, as well as in Venture Communes, and beyond. This mapping of political, scholarly, historical activism enables us to discuss what might be recuperated by us against the incorporation of dissent inside the dominant narrative. Moreover, this discussion enables us to keep each other’s narratives alive in the face of coercive power, and more importantly enables the legitimisation of our alternative narratives in the face of the de-politicisation imposed inside polyarchy.

So we might then ask how do we escalate dissent beyond the individual cracks shown by our own narratives? How do we join our dissenting narratives, our hopes for alternative possibilities, into something new? How do our local positions scale, so that the coercive power of the state can be critiqued and alternatives debated? And what is the role of academics as activists in that critique? In part, I think, this is a process of finding the courage to move beyond hope. To accept that there is no hope for/from a better capitalism, and that we need the courage to debate and try something new. This is what I take from a re-reading of the zero percent and the call to occupy everything, in the search for an alternative that is not simply in-and-against capital, but that wishes to move beyond it.


Educational technology, hacktivism and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I

In 2006, John Denham, Labour MP and former cabinet minister, argued in the Chartist that

All public services have to be based on a diversity of independent providers who compete for business in a market governed by Consumer choice. All across Whitehall, any policy option now has to be dressed up as “choice”, “diversity”, and “contestablity”. These are the hallmarks of the “new model public service”.

This morning Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, widened the space through which public or socialised goods could be enclosed, marketised and commodified within education as a new model public service, as he scoped a space for technology in education that was primarily economic, de-politicised and privatised.

Gove’s focus was laid bare from the very outset o his speech at BETT. He began not by championing teaching or teachers or the education sector, but “by congratulating all the companies in this Hall. British companies are world-leaders in the field of educational technology…” This is central for Gove as a member of the UK Coalition Government, precisely because that Government is closing down all public discourse that threatens or questions private profit maximisation or the extraction of value by corporations from our previously accrued social goods. Progress is to be realised by the privatisation and marketisation of public assets, and education is a pivotal terrain for making concrete and securing this neoliberal agenda. Thus, the only discourse that gains public space is framed by employment, labour (or capitalist work), commerce, industry and economics. This is now central to our educational culture. There is no place and no space for a critique of state subsidies for private gain or the politics of our education system, or how our education might enable other, dissenting or marginalised possibilities to be deliberated.

II

For Gove, the imperative behind linking markets and technology is key because “with each new gadget, each huge leap forward, technology has expanded into new intellectual and commercial fields.” More importantly and ominously, Gove re-framed the Coalition’s attack on education as a social good, originally signalled in HE through the Browne Review and in primary/secondary education through its White Paper, by folding into it the progressive, reductionist logic of technology. He argued:

Almost every field of employment now depends on technology. From radio, to television, computers and the internet, each new technological advance has changed our world and changed us too. But there is one notable exception. Education has barely changed. Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. Millions have left school over the past decade without even the basics they need for a decent job. And the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of technological change.

So there we are. Technology is revolutionary. Technology enables progress. Technology enables growth. But our schools and our teachers have failed our children as workers. And as a result millions of students lack basic skills. And we risk economic stagnation as a result.

And yet as Christopher Newfield argues in his work the new proletarianisation, it is difficult to sustain this positivist view argument for the generalised, emancipatory potential of technological skills, because under 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.

Yet Gove’s speech re-enforces one of the entrenched myths of educational technology discourses in that it alleges the democratic-yet-neutral tendencies of technology, where all have the opportunity to profit from becoming the Type A workers that Newfield analyses. In Gove’s view, technology, coupled to re-skilling teachers and defining a new ICT curriculum for business, will enable economic equality of opportunity. However, in discussing Education and Inequality, Sean Reardon, argues for the United States that:

It is well known that economic inequality has been growing in the U.S. since the 1970s. Less well known, however, is the fact that inequality in educational success has also been growing. The difference in average academic skills between high and low-income students is now 30–40 percent larger than it was 30 years ago.

So family background has become increasingly determinative of educational success, and educational success, in turn, has become increasingly determinative of economic success. The American dream has moved farther out of reach for lower-income children.

What has caused this rise in educational inequality? Contrary to popular rhetoric, our schools are not worse than they used to be. The average nine-year-old today has math skills equivalent to those of the average eleven-year-old 30 years ago. Nor have test scores or college completion rates for students from low-income families declined; they simply haven’t risen nearly as fast as those of high-income students. Although there are striking inequalities in the quality of schools available to children from low- and high-income families, these inequalities do not appear larger than in the past. Furthermore, if schools were responsible for widening educational inequality, we would expect that test-score gap to widen as students progress through school. But this does not happen. The test-score gap between eighth-grade students from high- and low-income families is no larger than the school-readiness gap among kindergarteners. The roots of widening educational inequality appear to lie in early childhood, not in schools.

Reardon argues that “Stagnant incomes have left the poor and working-class without the resources to give their children the improved educational opportunities and supports that the children of the rich enjoy.” Marx saw this when he wrote 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.” Moreover, this disengagement with the politics and reality of poverty and class, means that we prioritise “the [perceived] affordances of educational technology” (participation, horizontal organisational structures, opportunity etc.) over-and-above the implications of increasing proletarianisation in the service-sector and the routinisation of work that is based on outcomes and technologically-mediated prefomance, and which is reinforced by the reduction of social mobility under capitalism. As Paul Mason highlights, this is amplified through the idea of the disenfranchised graduate loaded with debt and with no future.

III

Pace Gove, some commentators have tried to re-shape the discussion about digital skills or literacy or computer science, to which his speech contributed. Josie Fraser, in her post Computer Science is not Digital Literacy argues “for ways in which young people can become active in creating and critically engaging with technology [as citizens]”. Pat Parslow’s post on Digital Literacies, schools and the Guardian argues prosaically for users as “confident explorers of the ‘digital space’, able to learn new systems without attending courses (or at least, without having to attend too many).” However, the dominant space for a discussion of digital literacy or an ICT curriculum is economic and not social. The recent Guardian article Pupils need to understand computers, not just how to use them, notes that

Michael Gove, has “sat up and listened”, says Ian Livingstone, one of the founders of the gaming company Games Workshop. He co-authored an influential report for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on the future of the UK gaming industry, which concluded that it was losing its edge on the rest of the world.

In this drive for “edge”, education is subsumed under the dictates of profitability, competitiveness and the commodity form. There can be no other way. And this logic is further revealed in the Coding for kids campaign, which has no politics in its statement of intent. The campaign was catalysed by an e-petition to the UK Government, which was justified in Emma Mulqueeny’s, Teach our kids to code e-petition, through the assertion that digital technology, the reproduction of our social world and economic growth are connected:

It is not yet awesomely cool to be able to build digital tools that shape the way the rest of us operate in our worlds, both social and work-based. Not in the UK anyway. And I could see this having a profound effect on our worldwide digital economy and reputation in the very near future

Mulqueeny goes on to celebrate Rushkoff’s assertion that “the difference between being able to code and not being able to code, is like being the driver or the passenger”, further demonstrating how technology is used to define what is contested within the positivist and progressive claims about its affordances for economic agency. In this case, coding skills, rather than their subsumption under the deeper structures of capitalist society that disenfranchise the many, are at issue. Thus, we never get to a deliberation of whether coding and hacking and open source might be used as a means of re-imagining our world.

The polyarchic parameters of this discourse are re-produced by Gove at BETT, as he attempts to constrict what we can discuss in terms of technology-in-education, reinterpreted by some as “digital literacies”. What we can discuss legitimately is kettled and cordoned and enclosed by economics and not politics. This notion of what it is legitimate to discuss is critical, and Gove uses it to further the mythology of a neutral, positivist technological paradigm being fused under education. He argued that

technology will bring more autonomy to each of us here in this room. This is a huge opportunity. But it’s also a responsibility. [So] We want to focus on training teachers. Universities, businesses and others will have the opportunity to devise new courses and exams. In particular, we want to see universities and businesses create new high quality Computer Science GCSEs, and develop curricula encouraging schools to make use of the brilliant Computer Science content available on the web.

This amounts to a form of what Christopher Newfield (in a separate blog-post) call “subsidy capitalism”, which “means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.” Gove’s focus on business defining the curriculum/teacher training mirrors Newfield’s point that:

There is a profound cultural limitation at work here: American leaders see the agencies responsible for social benefits as categorically less insightful than the financially self-interested private sector, even though the latter are focused entirely on their own advantage. As it is now, the future emerges in erratic bursts from the secret development operations at companies like Google (e.g. this radio report on the sudden appearance over Silicon Valley of The Cloud). We are having an increasingly difficult time imagining a collective future that emerges from common activity.

Thus, for Gove there is a lack of a meaningful commentary about poverty or equality and their relationship to educational attainment and wealth, and no focus on the educational research that highlights the links between class and educational outcomes. This sets a direction of travel for public policy that disables our ability to imagine a collective future, and is further reduced by Gove’s eulogising of a few, self-made men like Zuckerberg and Schmidt, without a meaningful discussion of these cultural leaders’ approach to the production of our common wealth or social goods.

IV

The risks of this approach and the domination of corporate power over our digital lives, and our digitalised spaces and time, has been analysed by Cory Doctorow, in Lockdown, The coming war on general-purpose computing. Doctorow highlights how the information economy is realised through the subsumption of our everyday engagement with technology and digitised content under private property and copyright law. Thus, our activity is reduced to “a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.” The result of this commodification of our virtual lives is a need to “control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them.”

This is the world onto which Gove’s speech about educational technology, teacher training, the ICT curriculum and the value of student’s as workers, needs to be mapped. In this world, states Doctorow, the following practices occur and are contested.

  1. Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it only runs “signed” operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from operating systems unless they allow for covert surveillance operations.
  2. Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit’s existence by causing the computer operating system’s kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive.
  3. Nintendo’s 3DS opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven’t altered the old firmware in any way. If it detects signs of tampering, it turns itself into a brick.
  4. On the network side SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans innocuous tools such as DNSSec—a security suite that authenticates domain name information— because they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures.
  5. The Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too!

What is clear here is the contested and deeply politicised terrain on which the use and development of educational technology is played out. Yet, it is missing from the Coalition Government’s education agenda. In fact, their explicit attempt to reduce this discourse to economic utility, and to ignore the impact of poverty and economic inequality, and to forget or marginalise the political structures and organisation that is impacted by and revealed through technology, demonstrates further that this educational space is now open for enclosure under private property, and for further subsidy capitalism.

V

The crack in this revealed assault on education as a public good is Gove’s final statements connecting “an open-source curriculum” and “Disapplying [sic.] the ICT programme of study”. Gove talks here about freedom, and enabling teachers “to cover truly innovative, specialist and challenging topics.” This might be seen as an attempt by capital or corporations to enter, control and enclose what has previously been seen as open source or as the terrain previously set-out and negotiated by hacktivists. However, it does open up a space for educational technologists working with programmers and educationalists to challenge the dominant logic of how we construct and re-produce our educational worlds as commonly-defined, social goods. This does not disavow coding for kids, or digital literacies, or the reproduction of teacher training. It just doesn’t do it simply for corporations or for profit maximisation. And where it is for those ends, that realisation must be critiqued and deliberated both inside and beyond the formal curriculum.

For we exist in a world that faces socio-environmental crises, and which is in the midst of a global crisis of capitalism. It is simply not good enough that our discourse as educators is focused upon employability or economic growth. The agenda for our development of digital literacies, or for an ICT curriculum, or for redesigning our teacher training, lies beyond the demands of transnational finance capital or of commerce or of industry, as realised by the state-under-capitalism, for marketised skills. Testing and deliberating global solutions demands an engagement with politics, and with politics as they are revealed through technology. Overcoming global problems demands that we do not simply outsource solutions, but that we use and engage with technology co-operatively and socially, in order to consider whether the society we have built and re-produce is indeed the one we need.

In this those engaged in the operationalisation of technology-in-education might consider their activist stance. Is Gove’s industrialised, economically-driven and enclosed world really the best we can hope for or create? Given those advances in bio-engineering, in microcomputing, in shared services etc. that he advances, is it really all we can do to hope for the further commodification of our existence, and the production of an educational experience that is shackled to that end? If the answer is yes then we are all impoverished. The crisis demands that we consider how the actions we take and the technologies we deploy contribute to poverty and the stratification of society; how they contribute to state subsidized capitalism and proletarianised work; how they re-produce inequality; and how they disable us from acting co-operatively in society. But we might also consider how to re-engage our actions and the technologies we deploy asymmetrically; to refuse and push-back against marketisation, to realise the possibilities of the hacker ethic, and to use technology to describe more social forms of value.

If Gove wants “an open-source curriculum”, then we should give him “activism 101”, “protest 101” and “hacktivism 101”.


Some notes on resistance to the crisis and hegemony


Posted by hallymk1

In the last month I have attended some pretty amazing events. This was capped this week with a presentation at the Home Affairs Select Committee and seeing Jesse Jackson get his honorary doctorate. However, it began with my attending two of John Holloway’s three lectures in Leeds on the rule of money, and then attending a seminar given by DMU’s Jonathan Davies that critiqued network governance. (The introduction to Jonathan’s new book is available free.)

Each of these events has made me question the crisis, my place in it, and our response to it both within and beyond the University. Along this same front, I note two recent posts by @thirduniversity on lessons learned from facing the crisis and on radical alternatives, a piece by Aaron Peters on oppositional networks and the State, and a powerful cri de coeur by Vinay Gupta on our complicity in the end of days.

However, what I want to capture below is what I take from a series of engagements by academic activists who have faced and continue to face the symptoms of a systemic crisis of capitalism. This is a systemic crisis that sees those in power attempting to recapitalise the value embedded in our social goods and our shared social wealth, like free education. The systemic nature of the crisis forces us to consider alternatives, counter-hegemonies and the power we need to refuse or negate or push against or break. It then forces us to consider whether networks and decentralisation are possible; whether we might be able to define and implement a new form of value; and what the actions we take in occupation might enable us to do, in the face of power.

What follows is deliberately presented as a set of notes. What they will add up to will take some time.

  1. These are days of rage. This rage is ours and it looks two ways: firstly to dignified hope; secondly to undignified destruction. There is a question of how we can intervene for hope.
  2. We rage, and we are outraged, and we need courage, because globally we are under attack. The attack is on what it takes for us to have a means to live. Or it is on our very means of existence. The attack is revolutionary. We must not forget the revolutionary strength of conservatism.
  3. At our core must be the act of saying “no!” But this takes courage. It takes courage to say I do not accept your imposition and enclosure of my world.
  4. This is a systemic attack, and in this it looks more clearly than ever that the system is against us. However, in the act of raging we must not end up with destructive personalisation, or fetishisation of the individual or of neoliberalism, or of a label, as evil personified. It is not enough to be personal. We must be beyond that; to attack the systemic social domination/determination of our lives.
  5. There is power in our non-violence. We must not reproduce their symmetries of hate and demonization and vilification. Engaging their logic leaves us hopeless. We must work to dismantle the system of oppression, to be active in participating in its destruction.
  6. Real democracy now! We must refuse to trust our leaders. We must reclaim the world as ours. We must assume our responsibilities through assemblies not parliaments, and for a better society. In the communes and assemblies that are a part of the struggle for a world turned upside down, and against an institutionalised world. We need a breaking of this reality.
  7. Economic democracy is meaningless in the face of private property and money. We must unmask the real enemy, money.
  8. Money is the attack. It is the system’s assault. The dynamic of money is on the tip of the tongue of the movement; is on the tip of the tongue of the occupation. Pushing beyond this, and giving voice to it demands theoretical reflection.
  9. Money is the commodity that stands abstracted in the face of democracy. It flows away from democracy in Greece, and exists in a state of antagonism to the idea and reality of real democracy now.

10. Money is the gateway; it is our cognitive dissonance; it is our (un)reality; it is our process of exclusion that denies our access to the products of our own creativity. Money seems identical to reality, but it is an assault on our humanity. Austerity is an assault on our possibility.

11. Money is a historic form of aggression; of relationships; of social bonds; of cohesion. The fact of money and the dynamic of money are terrible.

12. It takes courage to say “no!” To bring this to the tips of our tongues. To highlight how we are shackled.

13. We are shackled by money as a social bond against human activity. It is the imposition of faster, of exclusion, of alienation, of constricted social labour. Money is designed to constrict and constrain and control aberrant behaviour. And so, our existence is monetised, and the rule of money is increasingly, aggressively policed.

14. We are proud to be the crisis of capital. Of money. To be against their credo of bombing or killing those who do not submit, or of accumulating by their dispossession.

15. It is possible therefore to see in the movements of anger of 2011, how dignity is starting to unite against money. Against this historical nightmare. Against the imposition of alienated or abstracted labour. And for the emancipation of our activity and of our creativity against capital.

16. We use money and not capital for the freshness and obviousness of its language; and because it is on the tip of the tongue as we regard our banks; and because it leads us down well-worn paths of bonds and bondage. And because it offers us new ways of relating in the theme of anti-capitalism.

17. We must recognise how issues of state and society and religion and gender are critical. But that they take us only so far and no further. The crisis unfurls in a way that has a resonance beyond the state, to a point where money is god.

18. What is to be done in moving the discussion beyond the tip of the tongue? We must look for cracks and challenge as we can and where we can, and to see this as a historical process.

19. We must struggle against labour. But we must struggle against labour-in-capitalism. And we must struggle against the rhythm of capitalist domination. And this takes courage. And it is not progressive. For progress is a symptom of capitalist history. The most exciting left is not progressive, It is Luddite and indigenous and conservative and it is able to voice “no!” It is humanising and dignified.

20. We might remember that collective or social debt has a power that individual debt does not. That in acting together we might act for something better.

21. Thus, we might think of our spaces and protests as social, and integrated, and creative. And through them we might reveal the brutalising infrastructure of the State, through its apparatus of debt, surveillance, exception, baton rounds etc.. Revealing this in public is powerful; what is observed and shared is vital. We must reveal the process of ideology; the legitimation of exception; the idea and reality of a radical alternative or free university that is against the walls of money and its mechanisms of control.

22. We must communise. The beginning is near. But we must be determined.

23. The force of our determination is revealed in the force of our “no!” Our “no!” to their logic of death. This turns the world upside down, and reclaims it. It repudiates the history of a process without a subject. This reclaiming is a dignified process of asserting our subjectivity.

24. But we must move from refusal, and “no!” to push back the rule of money. We must restrict its area of sovereignty, and socialise against profit as the primary criterion of our world. For our lives are too important to monetise.

25. The State complements the rule of money. The State is not an alternative form of social cohesion. It is the revelation of a particular form of the capitalist social relation. Soviet Russia was oppressive and inefficient and exclusionary. It was not against the rule of money. We cannot rely on the State to deliver us [c.f. The Co-ordinating Committee for Water and Life, in Bolivia].

26. Our labour is shaped by money as a social bond; our labour is abstracted; it has no meaning beyond money; its central thrust is labour, harder, faster, for money. The State cannot push back the rule of money.

27. We must break the rule of money. We must communise. We need an alternative form of value; and of social cohesion. We need social self-determination as a verb, as an act of doing, as a process.

28. Movements of indigenous people give us hope, as they rise to support a communal way of living (c.f. Rossport in Ireland). They show new paths that might open up; that might be co-operative and mutual. That show different relationships between nature and people.

29. We must look for the interstices as ways of repudiating the system. In this moment of experimentation our uncertainty requires courage. As people are pushed into communities of mutual support we can begin to break the rule of money.

30. As we see how they monetise our relationships we see the crisis in our ways of living. We see that our lives do not work. They are not resilient. We need alternative networks. Perhaps Greece, and Detroit and Argentina in 2001 offer alternatives. Of neighbourhood councils and barter and recovering factories and movements of unemployed workers and in community spaces and gardens [c.f. “no house without electricity”].

31. Fighting for the right to work is a disaster. We need to say good riddance to capital and labour-in-capital. We need to construct other ways of living, doing and solidarity.

32. But we must do this whilst understanding the dynamic of the movement of the world as labour-in-capital. As money. As the indentured servitude of students; as the wholesale destruction of a peasantry. No-one controls this social dynamic. Not banks. Not states. Who can say “stop!”? But we must be courageous for we have to passively confront trained force. It is no good confronting trained force with untrained force. We must not reproduce their world; their power-over others. The logic of the symmetrical struggle is a history of power and parties. We must integrate into neighbourhoods and find place. We must help people to affirm: “we are ordinary people and we are rebels”.

33. We must highlight how we share similarities and connections. We must legitimise our struggle where we can and reveal truth claims in a story world that teeters on the brink of fascism, and through which there is an aggressive transfer of assets. We must associate.

34. But what does this mean for networks and governance? Whither alternatives in network democracy? Networks are instruments of power. We hear claims that networks are better; that they are trust based and multiple; that we live in an age when networks are qualitatively hegemonic (after Hardt and Negri). This is the transformation thesis of network governance.

35. And so Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 138) deconstruct the metaphor of the network (the network governance milieu) as: decentring states, capitals and classes; against zombie categories (c.f. Beck); underpinning the risk society and individuation; part of a logic of flows rather than structures; the age of the combinard (Lash on reflexive modernisation); and a migration from homophily to heterophily (c.f. Graham Thompson, 2005 on ethical virtues, trust and networks).

36. However, the structural issues have not gone away in an allegedly post-scarcity world (Janet Newman, 2004 on emergent orthodoxy struggles). The policy landscape moves from counter-hegemonic populism to a post-hegemony third-way, and from network resistance to network participation, and to fetishised informational capitalism. Thus the network becomes a liberal feel good concept, through which ideology is sedimented and concretised and reinscribed. At issue then is the issue of network co-governance, as an ambiguous, complex, turbulent set of tropes.

37. The issues with networks are historical; they are based on hierarchy; on closed or captured power; of institutionalised, discursive inequalities; of distrust. There is no evidence for the rise of governance networks, or that governance networks are transformational. Hard-power, coercion and strong incentives overcome limited soft-power (c.f. Gerry Stoker, 2011).

38. Immanent materiality and the coercive function of the state (either soft or hard) overcome consensus. And so we see, in Gramscian terms, “hegemony armoured by coercion”. Governance is immanent domination and material coercion/discipline.

39. Despite globalisation, states are coercive and competitive; structure and contradiction still underpin our materiality; class as a social relation is very real; network governance confuses conjuncture with epoch. The argument that there has somehow been a change is undermined by the continuity apparent in the totality and its crises.

40. The State therefore exists as a political society. Its hegemony is still based on deep social leadership exercised by a governing bloc that has clear political/economic goals, and a clear intellectual/moral unity. The State delivers a passive revolution. It keeps the structures of our lives the same by changing them – this is the logic of the dialectic of rupture/restoration. The Integral State delivers hegemony armoured by coercion.

41. Governance through the integral state frames a precarious hegemony, based on the State as social reproduction, on a trajectory of domination and material coercion that is an immanent condition of social stability within iniquitous and unstable political economies.

42. The Governance genome consists of command, conflict, trust, contract. Contracts are enforceable. The fallacy of liberalism is that it is not underpinned by force. Even in networks.

43. Thus neoliberalism reinscribes capitalism beyond the market, in the language of networks and connectivity and rhizomes. And network governance becomes a neoliberal strategy for remaking civil society. This visionary, regulative, risk-managing, trust-based ideal of neoliberalism celebrates connectivity and the passive revolution as a hegemonic, strategic project.

44. A system of heterophilus, network governance is incompatible with this stage of capitalism. It is a vague premonition of a possible post-capitalism. It is a future possibility that is mistaken for reality. Our reality is one of the commodity form protected by the immanent threat of violence. In this hostile environment, which attacks trust, how can resistance thrive in networks? How can network governance be benchmarked historically?

45. Heterophily is rare in governance networks, which implies that distrust will trump trust. When connectionist dispositions fail because they are inauthentic, there follows an incremental reconfiguration of the integral state, so that hegemony maintains domination. Distrust is a healthy fact of our human condition, and underpins resistance. Trust does not make a complex society productive (Cook, Hardin and Levey) and under neoliberalism and austerity we see a decline in trust-based relationships in our revealed social attitudes to those in need.

46. We do not live in conditions favourable to an emergent world of heterogeneous networks. Crises stress them and demonstrate their lack of ontological purpose. Although they can offer configurational critique, networks are not able to dissolve the integral state. We need to consider concentrated resistance to match their concentrated power. These are the realities of market dynamics.

47. Is network governance a normative project or an explanatory tool?

48. This is not to say that we refuse an engagement with networks. They form spaces for resistance, exodus, autonomy, everyday making, outsider resistance etc., but they are also sites of coercive counter-power and concentrated, counter-hegemonic resistance.


The University as deliberative space


Posted by hallymk1

These are my notes from today’s Home Affairs Select Committee conference on the Roots to Violent Radicalisation, held at De Montfort University. The highlight of the day was attending the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s award of an honorary doctorate. Along with receiving my National Teaching Fellowship, this was the highlight of my academic career to-date.

  1. The University is a crucial site for discussion, in which the balance of civil liberties and security issues might be deliberated as it is formed inside austerity politics.
  2. In response to the spread of the state of exception into the space of the University, occupations remind us of the courage that we share in debating what is legitimate, who is marginalised, and why power is wielded.
  3. The University is reproduced inside a broader, global set of relationships and political contexts, and this set both enables/disables the use of labels and interpretations about people and practices. This labelling comes in the wake of power, and affects who is scrutinised and which technologies are used to coerce and prevent, and for whom do we impose exceptional circumstances. Through critique we might work to push back against the University’s role in this reproduction of states of exception, and to re-politicise the forms of our University life, against meaningless, enclosed and universal narratives of justice and democracy.
  4. The University develops meaning as it enables working and living in public. The work of the University must be public, knowable and fair, and it must be care full. How we demonstrate our care is a crucial question. As we answer it, we might consider how we enable our students’ dreams to outlive our fears, and how we collectively develop the courage to keep trying.
  5. We might usefully consider the Realpolitik of University life. Inside capital and in the face of the rule of law what is the role of the University? How does the University help us to critique whose word is law? How does the University help us to understand what we are willing to bear in the name of freedom?
  6. The University becomes more resilient through the politicisation of its form as well as in the production of its content. This resilience emerges both from the University’s relationships with the range of communities in which it is embedded and that themselves broaden its engagement, and by its deliberate refusal to outsource its duty of care (for instance to the police).
  7. The University helps us to be against force and enclosure. It is a space that offers a critique of systemic, structural disenfranchisement. It is a space for deliberating rather than judging. It is a space for developing an avowedly political response to the collective punishment meted out as austerity and marketisation.
  8. The University is a space to recognise, critique and engage with the radical rejection of the processes of financialisation, precarity, poverty, war and demonisation of the other, which dominate our mainstream discourse. Where this work is done in public we are able to develop alternatives to the question of “who sets the climate for our world?”
  9. Those of us who work in Universities might usefully ask, “in the face of radical repression, what did you do?” The University is a site for the shelter and encouragement of active, non-violent resistance to radical injustice, which gives us hope that we might become free from the expansion of fear in our society.

For the University as radicalised space


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday 13 December De Montfort University will be hosting the Roots of Violent Radicalisation Conference, which has been organised by the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee. I will be speaking in the workshop on how Universities can best counter violent radicalisation. I will make the following four points.

  1. The University has a radical, historical tradition that is politicised, and which enables both deliberation about and the legitimisation of alternative positions. Importantly, these positions might be realised inside the University.
  2. Most radicalism is not violent, but seeks to refuse, negate and push back against marginalisation and de-legitimisation, through tactics of deliberation, denial or disobedience.
  3. Current University tactics against protest mirror the state of exception imposed by the State, and that this reinforces marginalisation and de-legitimisation. Thus, strategies for coercion are being imposed and are kettling scholarly debate.
  4. The University should fight to recover itself as a space for general assembly and deliberation, and that this work should be done in public, in order to engage with the roots to violent radicalisation.

Point one: the radical University tradition. There is a distinct and vibrant strand of radicalism, as opposed to violent radicalisation, that infuses the historic idea of the University. This strand connects Newman’s declaration that the University was a site for the “collision of mind with mind”; to Humboldt’s view that “Education of the individual must everywhere be as free as possible, taking the least possible account of civic circumstances. Man educated in that way must then join the State and, as it were, test the Constitution of the State against his individuality”; and to the student activism of the 1960s and 1970s that led the historian EP Thompson to declare a hypothesis that was against:

“a university [that] had become so intimately enmeshed with the upper reaches of consumer capitalist society that [its administration] are actively twisting the purposes and procedures of the university away from those normally accepted in British universities, and thus threatening its integrity as a self-governing academic institution; and that the students, feeling neglected and manipulated in this context, and feeling also – although at first less clearly – that intellectual values are at stake, should be impelled to action.”

And this strand of radicalism connects many other examples of political, scholarly, historical activism: in Oakland; and Santiago; and Turin; and Dhaka; and University College London; and Kent State University; and Manila; and beyond.

Point two: marginalisation and radicalisation on campus. This radicalism is fed, in-part, by marginalisation; by an existence that is de-legitimised beyond the abstraction of money, and where putting students at the heart of the system reveals only the intellectual poverty of a life lived as a consumer, wrapped in the ideological rhetoric of choice, private property, debt and marketisation. This rhetoric then forms the background to the enclosure and removal of historically-accrued, socially-defined goods like free education and healthcare. Thus austerity is exposed as the State’s action against our shared future.

And in response to this marginalisation we see students in a range of contexts taking non-violent direct action that questions the State’s actions and reveals the coercive machinery of its power. Much of this work of protest is done in public spaces through marches and occupations, and Judith Butler has argued the importance of these radicalised, public movements:

“When bodies gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands. They are demanding to be recognized and to be valued; they are exercising a right to appear and to exercise freedom; they are calling for a livable life [sic.]. These values are presupposed by particular demands, but they also demand a more fundamental restructuring of our socio-economic and political order.”

This point reflects the politicisation of both the form and the content of our institutions, and a process of indignation or radicalisation. As the activist Pierce Penniless argues:

“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.”

Point three: the coercive University in a state of exception. In a reprise of historic activism, we see students marching and subsequently being kettled or maced or receiving official letters from the Police ahead of future demo’s or being threatened with baton rounds; we see students using the historically-situated tactic of occupation, in order to protest their opposition through general assemblies and teach-ins, and being classed as terrorists or extremists, and having services denied to them. Or we witness our educational leaders as supine or quiescent in the face of the brutalisation of our young people by the State. Their silence is deafening.

And now we see the Universities of Sheffield and Birmingham and Royal Holloway (University of London) in the UK seeking or obtaining High Court injunctions banning any form of protest on their property. Against this criminalisation and de-legitimisation of dissent and the creation of a state of exception on campus, Liberty have argued that “The right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy and this aggressive move hardly sits well with our best British traditions of academic dissent… Universities should be places where ideas and opinions can be explored [my emphasis].” And the written evidence submitted by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies to the Parliamentary Inquiry on the Roots of Violent Radicalisation echoes this point:

“Universities play a key role in challenging prevalent ‘wisdom’ as well as debating and researching controversial topics. The ‘values-led’ approach to the revised strategy risks harming legitimate grievances being aired on campuses and could have a significant damage on intellectual debate and research as well as the international reputation of British universities.”

Thus, these English Universities’ attempt to criminalise the politicisation of the form of the University. They attempt to de-politicise its form whilst its content is being politicised through its marketisation. The inscription of a hidden curriculum of debt and consumption within campus-life is coupled to the de-legitimation of any counter-argument that confronts or refuses or pushes back against their power over where scholars might assemble and what they might discuss. We surely have better strategies than marginalisation and overt coercion with which to accommodate difference?

Point four: reclaiming or re-legitimising Universities as radical spaces. Against the neoliberal constraint on what can legitimately be fought for, University communities might consider how they share stories that reclaim the breadth of their common histories and social relationships. This process might usefully be developed using open technological systems. This is important because universities have much to contribute to a public discussion of how cultures protect the richness of their ecosystems, which in turn helps us to describe alternative worlds, and to accept that much of our present is shaped by historical struggles that are valuable precisely because they are political. Thus, we learn not to accept dominant narratives as given, or neutral, or beyond our collective wisdom to re-define in a legitimate manner. And our non-acceptance is not seen as radicalisation.

Which brings us to an engagement with and understanding of violent radicalisation. Universities, in terms of both their management and the communities of scholars that management is meant to facilitate, need to engage with issues of marginalisation, legitimacy and power, and to do this democratically and in public. It is not enough to de-legitimise all protest as extreme unless it conforms to proscribed norms, in prescribed spaces that are too often private. As the historian John Tosh has argued, differences need to be deliberated:

“Few things would make for a more mature understanding of current affairs than an awareness that the relevant historical perspectives are themselves the subject of debate – particularly if those controversies bear on the present. It then becomes possible to think outside the box – to challenge the spurious authority of single-track thinking.”

In this process we uncover what is legitimate, and we reveal what we collectively are willing to bear in the name of freedom. What we are willing to bear has to be negotiated communally, through a process that re-legitimises the politics of both the form and the content of the University. This demands trust and consent rather than coercion, a discussion that is more vital to the idea of the University in a world that faces not just economic austerity but socio-environmental crisis. For it may be that we risk enduring a semi-permanent state of exception if we do not find the courage to deliberate the reality of our world. EP Thompson recognised this courage emanating from a radicalised student collective, and saw in it a glimpse of redemption beyond economic growth:

 “We have been luckier than any of us had the right to deserve in the quality of our students. They took the initiative. They asked the right questions. They began to understand the answers. They stood firm against rhetoric, against threats, against the special pleading of those with large interests to lose. They have – by now in scores – put their academic careers at risk. It is they who have reasserted the idea of a university. They may well need help.”

This was echoed forty years later by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies when they argued that we need to open-up the debate against and beyond the permanence of exceptional circumstances, in order that “The autonomy of universities as places of free speech and expression should be preserved.” It is in this struggle that the University as a community of scholars should fight to recover both its history and its self-realisation as a public space for the discussion of legitimacy, marginalisation and power.