Tag Archives: cooperative

Notes on the University and the association of capitals


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Elsewhere on this blog I recently wrote about the domination of merchants in higher education:

The links between commercial educational providers and universities, educators and students as producers and consumers of educational services, data and products, demonstrate power and dependency. This complex interdependency is not reducible to fetishized ideas of money via cost-savings or emancipation based on learning for a life of capitalist work. It links to ideas of the reproduction of capital within limits or barriers, and the current condition inside-and-against education demonstrates how crises re-establish the limits and conditions existing in the system as a totality and in the circuits of productive, money and commodity capital. Moreover, we are witnessing the attempt by finance and commercial capital to synchronise production with their own circuits. This is an uncomfortable symbiosis, as those of us engaged in a higher education that is being restructured by the dictates of finance capital and a new market can attest.

What is becoming more clear is the formation of associated capitals, in the form of public/private education providers, finance capital, brokers of educational services, technology firms, venture capitalists and so on, engaging in a public policy space designed to leverage accumulation and growth. These associated capitals might form transnational activist networks; they might be working in competition. The key is opening-up new markets.

TWO. The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education is hosting a conference Moocs: What we have learned, emerging themes and what next? The conference states that it “will take a critical look at how online and open access learning has evolved during the last year, with a particular consideration of the development of Moocs in both the US, India and Europe.” The speakers at the event are from MOOC providers or are champions of MOOCs as mechanisms for creating a market for educational services and commodities from the global North, for driving down academic labour costs, and for identifying and extracting surplus intellectual capital both inside and beyond the University. The conference is about problem-solving, rather than developing a critique of the idea of “open” or “open learning” or the MOOC phenomenon in light of critical pedagogic practice. Its aims and the biographies of those who are speaking reinforce both hegemonic educational power and the idea that “open” must be used to colonise and monetise higher education. Its aims are to:

  • Evaluate critically case studies in the rapidly unfolding landscape of Moocs and open access learning;
  • Participate in discussions with practitioners of Moocs and new models of open access learning;
  • Consider how these transformations are already affecting higher education provision in the US, UK, India and elsewhere, and to examine institutional and student;
  • Further evaluate the potential for integrating Moocs into university degrees;
  • Consider existing and new revenue models for Moocs.

Recent analyses of the impact of venture capital, higher education bubbles and return on investment, related to Coursera and Udacity do little to assuage the overarching momentum to use “open” or MOOC or whatever as a lever in the struggle between social forces. In any case, the role of new markets like the Chinese in those spaces is still unclear. Any educational technology failures are less to do with pedagogic failings and more closely tied to the political economic realities of a restructuring of higher education for the market. Organisational change and technology are key levers in this process, and their transformational appeal was highlighted by Gartner’s statement that Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $3.7 trillion in 2013. One might also reflect on Gartner’s note that we are witnessing increasing “innovation in personal and competitive business ecosystems” that impact “the labor content of services and products.”

Ecosystems; associated capital; entrepreneurialism; competition; growth; new markets; labour arbitrage; higher education.

THREE. Andrew McGettigan has recently argued that we are witnessing market creation out of control in UK higher education. He notes

The government exploited the existing ‘designation’ process to allow students at over one hundred private higher education providers to access student support on terms equivalent to those enjoyed by students at established universities, with the exception that since 2012/13 those students have been only able to borrow up to £6,000 per year towards tuition fees (up from £3,375 in 2011/12).

The cost to the Government “has been £80m over budget. With 30 000 students registered that year for the HNC and HND qualifications offered by Pearson-Edexcel through private colleges (the equivalent of one or two years of undergraduate study), that represents an 150 per cent increase in such students on the previous year.”

McGettigan asks “why does this matter” and argues:

Private providers can currently recruit how they like and, once designated, their Home and EU students have the right to access the publicly backed student loans (EU students can apply for tuition fee loans only).

The loan scheme is subsidised – only 65p in the pound is expected back. Public money is therefore involved.

Many private HE providers are commercial, for-profit operations – some like, Greenwich School of Management or University of Law are owned by private equity – so public money subsidises private fees and potentially profits.

As we saw in the USA, the private sector expands rapidly when backed by public money. Where will this money end up?

Further, we have no understanding of the performance of graduates from private institutions – they may end up paying back much less and so be subsidised to a greater degree

It also transpires that in order to introduce some control to the budget, the public teaching budget will have to be reduced by £20m – this is likely to come out of the budgets of widening participation initiatives. And £25m goes from the Access to Learning hardship fund. That is, students at established universities will suffer as a result.

In education, the public and the private dance out of time. The private is used to speed-up change, and acts as a disciplinary lever on public goods and issues of equality. In this, the State demonstrates its commitment to profit through competition above all else.

THREE. A recent Ernst & Young Global Limited report on China’s productivity imperative noted that there is increasing doubt that China will provide the sanctuary for long-term growth in higher education from the global North. It reports as follows.

A gloomy global macroeconomic outlook, particularly for Europe and the United States. That has already had considerable impact on the Chinese economy as export growth to key markets in Asia, Europe, and North America has slowed significantly since 2010. The worst is Europe, where exports have recently started falling, causing revenues flowing to China’s industrial sector to slow. China’s productivity growth has also fallen. Growth in total factor productivity has dropped from an annual average of 4.7 percent in 2001-07 to 2.8 percent in 2008-10. Earlier rounds of market liberalization and privatization have largely run their course, and the mass reallocation of labor from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing is coming to an end.

The report notes that “Raising productivity is critical for China’s economic future as the experience of other East Asian economies shows that capital-driven growth is not sustainable.” Thus, it argues that:

By harnessing the following sources of productivity, we believe that companies can maximize efficiency and drive a new round of profitable growth across the economy:

Take advantage of structural changes such as reforms to lower market barriers and the opening up of new industries to investment.

Maximize the benefits of information technology by making better use of data, improving communication, and enhancing speed and flexibility.

Exploit technological catch-up by combining different existing technologies and adapting them for China’s needs.

Increase the pace of talent development, deploy talent to the highest-value opportunities, and improve the way workers engage with each other.

Meanwhile, Phoenix Capital Research recently focused on The China Crisis You Haven’t Heard About, and stated

In the near-term, China will engage in capital investment (the substitution of capital, technology and information for labor) to drive economic growth. This means the Chinese Government throwing money at the manufacturing, information technology and healthcare sectors in its economy.

The global North’s increasing obsession with on-line learning as a lever for growth has to be seen in light of the use of organisational development and technology to drive labour efficiencies and to lower market barriers. Capital investment, the creation of a reserve army of labour with interchangeable and low-waged commodity and leverage skills, the extraction of rents, and the creation of an entrepreneurial class form a conjuncture with this need to create a global market for higher education goods and services.

FOUR. In Volume 2 (Chapter 16) of Capital, Marx discusses the turnover of variable capital including the impact of working class consumption on that process. He argues that capital advanced as wages ceases to be capital and instead forms the means of subsistence or social reproduction. The mass of commodities that is “annihilated” is consumed unproductively – it maintains labour power but does not produce surplus value. However, Marx argues that speculation both in the creation of a skilled labour force that is able to be thrown into the production process, and in the accumulation and valorisation of capital, tends to push consumption and wages up, and this in-turn tends to be followed by a crash. This restructuring of the flows of capital then reveal a deeper and more permanent problem or contradiction, namely how can capitalists sell their products when the mass of the population is impoverished?

In terms of higher education, we witness the mechanisms through which policy and practice becomes entangled with relationships to distant/new markets through on-line education, and to the idea of the student as an entrepreneur. Marx argues that credit markets, witnessed in the form of indebted study are critical in enabling the expansion of markets into social or public goods like education, and across new geographical terrains. In Chapter 16 of Volume 2 he points up the:

Contradiction in the capitalist mode of production. The workers are important for the market as buyers of commodities. But as sellers of their commodity – labour-power – capitalist society has the tendency to restrict them to their minimum price.

Further contradiction: the periods in which capitalist production exerts all its forces regularly show themselves to be periods of over-production; because the limit to the application of the productive powers is not simply the production of value, but also its realisation.

However, the sale of commodities, the realisation of commodity capital, and thus of surplus-value as well, is restricted not by the consumer needs of society in general, but by the consumer needs of a society in which the great majority are always poor and must always remain poor.

At issue is the relationship between credit markets and individuated debt, the student’s needs to prove she has the entrepreneurial skills to survive and reproduce herself in a global and stratified labour market, the collapse in real wages and graduate earnings, and the idea of the University as a competitive space scored through with a need to extract surplus value and generate profits. How is the indebted individual defined and conditioned socially through a marketised education? What might be our collective response?

In addressing this issue, just as Capital develops its productive power through association, co-operative forms mights also point towards labour’s self-actualisation. William Thompson’s, Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, (p. 453) argued that socially significant wealth is not that which is accumulated either as real assets or appropriated as claims on future labour, in the form of legal titles, interest rates. Thompson (p. 443) argued that:

In almost all other systems, the productive forces have been considered with reference and in subordination to accumulation and to the perpetuation of existing mode of distribution. Compared with the conservation of this existing mode of distribution, the ever recurring suffering or welfare of the entire human race is not considered worthy of a glance. To perpetuate the results of force, of fraud, and of accident, this has been called security, and for conservation of this lying security, all the forces of production of the human race have been mercilessly sacrificed.

He stated that it was “the forces of production and their free development in the future” that offered hope for co-operative forms of distribution and for co-operative labour. Thus, the recent piece by the Social Science Centre in Lincoln offers a different perspective on what is co-operatively possible at a different, local scale.

FIVE. Technological and organisation changes focus upon reducing the amount of capital needed to produce surplus value. Thus, capitalists adopt techniques that keep labour and capital fully employed, and as a result we witness a history of innovations related to reducing production time or working time. However, in Volume 2 of Capital, Marx also looks at the ways in which capitalists attempt to use innovations in spatial organisation, transport and communications, to reduce circulation time and to increase the geography of capital accumulation.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels argue that the need to create and enable capital flows, accumulation and spaces for further valorisation, results in “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products [which in turn] chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.” One result is that bourgeois, transnational and cosmopolitan consumption triumphs over local, national cultures, and industries that are defined by productivity and intensity dislodge indigenous cultures.

One example of this process is the subsumption and enclosure of intellectual property produced commonly and embedded in technologies and processes as what Marx called “mass intellect”. Thus, Wikileaks recently leaked a secret draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free trade agreement between twelve markets representing 40 per cent of the global economy. The leaked chapter on intellectual property rules demonstrates that the United States is pushing to make its Intellectual Property regime the standard for these markets. This focuses upon the adoption of existing US laws, to protect commodities like patents for pharmaceuticals or digital artefacts like movies or educational content. The Electronic Frontier Foundation fears that the IP section will limit on-line freedom.

In the Communist Manifesto it is argued that the Bourgeoisie, though its new powers of production and its commodities and its restructuring of laws, inscribes new, global markets into the circuits of production, and creates a world in its own image. This echoes Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse that the hegemony of the bourgeois mode of production rests on the expansion of a global system of valorisation, which in turn demands that commodities are not simply used but exchanged. This process of exchange demands the spatial transformation of productive forces, including transport and modes of communication. Thus, Capital drives beyond its spatial barriers and we see the “annihilation of space by time”, as circulation time and labour time are revolutionised to give quicker access to new markets.

In this process, the deployment of open, on-line tools are critical and pedagogical. They enable capital to reduce the friction of distance and speed that exists across educational and social spaces They also reduce the costs of educational service and commodity production by collapsing the relative locations of places and infrastructures. For instance, MOOCs enable concentrations of both cognitive labour and associated capital that then lead to efficiencies. Thus, universities working with private educational providers and technology companies form an example of agglomeration economies that enable the relocation of higher education in the global North to new markets. Public policy, in creating a local and global higher education market, draws in further educational functions. Moreover, flattened costs and precarious employment underwrite a more competitive landscape for all higher education providers, reinforced by the agencies like the World Bank and World Trade Organisation.

SIX. Thus, we might analyse the idea of the University, inside-and-against the organisational and technological innovations that drive the speed-up or acceleration of turnover time of educational services and commodities in a global market. These innovations include the subsumption of the University inside associations of public/private capitals, in order to secure their competitive place. These innovations also tend to reduce the friction caused by distance and localised working practices. We might then ask what is the popular response to this process? Does the Social Science Centre offer one such popular response? It states that:

while there are fewer existing networks of solidarity than might exist in larger cities, there is also an intimacy and a proximity that provide possibilities for associational networks that might be diffused in larger cities. Most of us work full-time and cannot give the time to the SSC that we would like to. Without the material basis on which to work and study full-time at the SSC, we have to think creatively about the form and nature of education practised within the SSC.

As a response, educators might question how we work through association or co-operation with the geographical and spatial-temporal implications of a critique of higher education policy and practice. We might highlight the dynamics of accumulation and the need to expand markets in established economies and to create new markets as a new form of imperialism (with privileged rights to sell goods via intellectual property laws). We might ask, how does higher education policy and practice demonstrate the flows of capital between the global North and “emerging markets”, in an attempt to allow production in the former to grow, whilst supporting the creation of competitor-economies? We might ask, where is it possible to find the courage to push-back?


For a co-operative university


Posted by hallymk1

With Joss Winn from the University of Lincoln, I’m running a workshop at the Discourse, Power and Resistance conference next Easter. Our abstract is as follows. [Note that Mike Neary from Lincoln is also running a session on The University and the City: the Social Science Centre, Lincoln – forming the urban revolution.]

Our discussion takes as its premises the following:

1. The University is being restructured through a neoliberal politics as part of a global pedagogical project.

2. This project is aimed at the dispossession of free space/time so that all of life becomes productive and available for the extraction of surplus value.

3. This pedagogic project is recalibrating and enclosing the roles of teachers and students as entrepreneurial subjects. In part it is also creating a surplus academic population, consisting of the academic unemployed, the precariat, the outsourced, and so on.

4. If this project is to be resisted then the premises that underpin the economic utility of higher education as a positional good need to be revealed.

5. If this project is to be resisted then the idea of academic labour that underpins employment in the increasingly digitised and stratified universities of the global North needs to be critiqued.

6. If this project is to be resisted then the marketised organising principles that underpin the idea of the University need to be challenged.

7. If this project is to be resisted then educators need to define structures and practices that reinforce the sociability of everyday life, in order to realise new opportunities for pedagogic co-operation.

8. If this project is to be resisted then histories and cultures of co-operative education need to be revealed and critiqued.

The session will briefly position these headline statements about the idea of the University, and of academic labour, in the UK. The session will then ask participants to uncover stories of how and where pedagogy/educational institutions might be used for co-operation rather than competition. The session will ask participants to discuss what a co-operative University might look like.


Some notes on the creation of a higher education market


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Staking out and enclosing y/our education: they have to create a market

They want to marketise our pedagogy. They want to marketise our interactions with students and staff. They want to create a market by quantifying y/our interactions with students and re-defining y/our work as data inputs and learning outcomes and impact and quality. They want to create a market because enclosing education (as a public good) for private gain depends upon the circulation of educational services as commodities. Without a market there can be no circulation. They need to create commodities and they need to create a market. Because without them money (M) cannot circulate, and without t hem money and its increment (M’) cannot be had. And as a by-product they will discipline the circuit of educational production, including y/our pedagogy.

So David Willetts’ recent pamphlet for the Social Market Foundation, Robbins Revisited tells us the following about the drive to marketise y/our pedagogy.

The clear breakdown of work commitments for each course now provided to all students and parents – including the percentage of time spent on independent study – gives them a realistic idea of what to expect, as well as an important basis for judging institutions (p. 37)

Institutions can lay on extra lectures – but this is unlikely to result in more satisfied students with a better grasp of their subject. This brings us back to Robbins, and his analysis not just of teaching time, but of the time spent in discussion periods (p. 40)

This is a very useful pointer for us as we review how we might extend the Key Information Set data in the future. Asking institutions to provide a breakdown of the average number of discussion classes for each course – broken down as Robbins suggests into tutorials, small seminars and large seminars – would allow students and parents to judge courses by the sort of teaching they value (p. 44)

One option would be for the Key Information Set data to mirror what was available to Robbins fifty years ago, with a requirement for institutions to specify how many essays or how much work students can expect to have marked on each course – and whether feedback will be written or discussed (p. 46)

Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching (p. 47)

And as McKinsey Consulting will tell you, we can only unlock innovation and performance with liquid information and open data: “we see a clear potential to unlock significant economic value by applying advanced analytics to both open and proprietary knowledge.” Your pedagogy has to be converted to liquid information. Your relationships as data and as liquidity.

They want to use information and data to quantify academic labour, and to drive funding, and to enclose and commodify pedagogy, and to extract value. A real cultural change. The new normal.

TWO. A new higher education market of commodity producers

In Volume 2 of Capital, Marx demonstrated that Capital is the unity of three circuits: it is formed of moments of the circulation of money, of production, and of commodities. Money and commodities are mobile, and intellectual or cognitive services or commodities are especially so, and are productive of value. Production, situated in reality, is less mobile, and needs to be corralled or kettled or coerced. Hence the drive for internationalisation or the MOOC, or their need to find spaces from where value can be extracted or invested. And they are no longer just Vice-Chancellors. They are private equity and hedge funds and private providers and policy-makers and transnational activist networks. But mostly they are money.

As David Harvey shows, the money form is more visible and is prioritised because it is how surplus value is realised. Accumulated money and the power that accompanies it means that other forms of human or humane value in the production of commodities are marginalised. Money is hegemonic. The creation of money recalibrates the world.

One form of recalibration is taking place inside higher education, where the discourse of mission-group leaders, Vice-Chancellors and Ministers of State, is around finance, the consumption of education, and business needs. In order to restructure higher education for the market, universities need to be formally subsumed in their current (public/private) forms within capitalist production and circulation, and then restructured inside the circuits of productive and commodity Capital. So we see the transformation of educational services into products, and the use of data, and technological and organisational change to drive further the processes of consumerisation and commodification of academic labour. And this includes the curriculum.

Critically, the subsumption of universities inside the mechanics of capitalist reproduction demands a market. This applies to Vice-Chancellors acting as CEOs or nascent business leaders, and to private providers of educational services, both of whom need specific use-values (course content, data, knowledge exchange partnerships, research outcomes as products, technical infrastructure and so on) in specific amounts that can be purchased and put to work. Crucially, this work has to be productive of surplus value, and profit. Hence it needs a market, and if one doesn’t already exist it must be created. This need for a market is also extended to potential students who carry debt, and who are encouraged to purchase commodities or services-as-commodities, as positional goods. Thus, the material circumstances of the production, purchase and circulation of educational commodities are critical, and they catalyse policy as a means of restructuring. Because policy and secondary legislation (there has been not HE Bill under the UK Coalition Government) are being used to create a market.

However, one of the central issues for academics is that as they labour under commodity capitalists, they have to vie for a place on market, and this makes them vulnerable to crises related to futures-trading, or access to means of production, or to overproduction, or to market-saturation, or to an inability to access credit markets, or to more general, societal access to debt. Hence the very real impact of finance capital in creating a higher education market based on catalysing new systems of production or organisational development or technological innovation leaves universities at risk. It leaves academics at risk. The University’s much-vaunted institutional autonomy abstracts it from a notion of public good and distances it from any socialised purpose or meaning. Autonomy prefigures marketisation and competitive restructuring. It is thus impossible to separate out Governmental policy based on funding, or Governmental support for MOOCs, or venture capital investment in educational technology start-ups or MOOCs, or University restructuring and reorganisation, from this need to create a market. One outcome is the need to commodify and marketise y/our pedagogy, and to commodify and marketise y/our relationships.

And pace Marx in Volume 2 of Capital, education as a commodity is critical to this because the commodity is the social form against which every educational capital can be considered. The circuit of educational commodities is the form of motion common to all educational capitals. It is social only in that it forms the total social capital of the capitalist class, as it is restructuring education. Moreover, the movement of individual educational capitals is conditioned by its relationship to other educational capitals, or universities. This is a material relation underscored by competition, surplus value, risk, hedges, and the rate of profit.

THREE. Catalysing a new higher education market

Read my lips: there is no alternative. Or at least that is my interpretation of Christopher Snowden’s address to members as incoming President at the Universities UK Annual Conference, in September 2013. My emphasis is emboldened, as I am trying to become emboldened.

It’s about a university education as an entrepreneurial good

In an ever shrinking world, where businesses and trade are becoming increasingly global, a university education is a passport to a life that opens up wonderful new opportunities. Universities provide life skills – much more than simply scholarship and subject expertise.

It’s about connecting the University explicitly to the creation of value

Public support for investment in the sector could be damaged because society does not fully appreciate the value of higher education.

Without better insight into how universities generate value, we miss an important opportunity to achieve more with limited resources, and will struggle to engage in purposeful debate with wider society about the future direction of the sector.

This is a debate the sector must take hold of and lead on.

It’s about positioning “business” as the critical form of governance in the University

We need to pull together and communicate the value of higher education using real examples that mean something to the public, business and politicians. We need to demonstrate that universities are a major asset to the UK with economic, social, cultural and scientific benefits that go well beyond the superficial treatment and short-termism that is often reflected in the media.

We enjoy tremendous public goodwill but higher fees mean we’re seen increasingly as businesses by our stakeholders. Indeed only recently John Cridland, Director-General of the CBI, made it clear that he saw universities as businesses. We may or may not agree but we are all in very different positions financially

It’s about failing to make the case for anything other than economic value

We know that senior politicians acknowledge the case for universities in terms of their economic benefit, but it is less clear that the fundamental and diverse contributions universities make to the fabric of the nation is understood when so many references focus only on the flow of students from secondary to tertiary education and then into employment.

But then we immediately make the economic case

One of our great strengths is our capacity to make our argument on the basis of evidence. So let us look at the facts.

The higher education sector generated £59 billion in 2009 in output for the UK economy and provided employment for 1.2% of the UK workforce. Updated figures will be available early next year but we can be confident that they will be substantially higher.

As an export industry the sector is worth £10 billion, with the potential to reach £12 billion by 2020 for fees and living expenses alone if unencumbered, according to BIS. This figure rises to £17 billion in by 2025 when research income is included.

For teaching and research, the sector is ranked second in the world. A quick look at the latest THE world university rankings reveals that the UK had three universities in the top 10. The rest were in the USA.

It is not surprising therefore that we are the second most popular destination for international students.

For research productivity the UK is more efficient than the USA – in fact more than three-and-a-half times the world average – but the UK spends only 1.4% of its GDP on higher education compared to 2.8% in the USA.

Whilst we could also cite why universities were created in the first place – to satisfy a thirst for knowledge and the belief that society would benefit from the scholarly expertise generated from these institutions – I believe we need to find new stories that reflect the world of today and universities’ future potential, describing who we are and what we do, and they need to be intellectually convincing as well as economically sound.

“As well as economically sound”, because that is fundamental. The rule of money is fundamental. The circulation of money. Money.

To do this we need to address four main current issues which lie at the heart of higher education in the UK: Student funding; Research and capital funding; Regulation; and international positioning.

And how can it be any different when the President of UUK believes that industry validates education

My own experience in industry in the UK and USA as a former CEO of a globally-based technology manufacturing company and as a professional engineer has convinced me that transforming a bright school leaver within a few short years into a work-ready, savvy employee who can hit the ground running requires much more than the acquisition of a few workplace skills that meets the needs of today. 

And when his point-of-reference is the CBI and growth, then what is to be done to push-back against the economisation of higher educational life?

A recent report by the CBI entitled Tomorrow’s growth aims to advance the debate about how the UK can meet the higher skills requirements of our future economy.

We all know that the research in our universities contributes not only to the knowledge base, culture and economy of the UK, but also makes an extremely important impact in supporting innovation in business and industry.

And in case you missed it, that much-vaunted institutional autonomy bears further financial risk and further restructuring of what it means to be an academic because

Of course we have further financial icebergs ahead, including the deficits in the sector’s private pension schemes. The introduction of the new financial reporting standard FR 102 will mean a reduction in institutions’ net assets as they account differently for pension liabilities and other expenditure.

As we heard in yesterday’s sessions, the 2014 triennial valuation of USS, the second largest pension fund in the UK, is likely to be challenging, but the employers have taken early action to develop proposals for addressing the deficit. We will be working with USS and entering into discussions with the Pensions Regulator about our plans to ensure that the scheme is sustainable in the longer term.

And so the market is the only way

If universities become over-regulated, we run the risk of extinguishing the enterprising and entrepreneurial culture of our institutions

Our education system is a huge export sector with considerable potential to grow, and the government has recently estimated that growth could be in the region of 15 to 20% over the next five years. There were already 4.3 million students enrolled outside their home country in 2011 and forecasts suggest this could grow to 7 million by 2020.

And in spite of the environmental crisis I wrote about yesterday, there is no alternative

Without high educational attainment, the UK will not maintain its wealth, quality of life and status in the world. A highly educated population is essential to Britain’s success in the global knowledge economy.

And the idea of the academic and of academic labour is subsumed and restructured by this, and for this market.

Universities UK’s ability to make a positive contribution to addressing these issues depends on the extent of engagement by members. We depend on you giving up your time for our policy networks and task groups, and encouraging your staff to contribute to evidence gathering and campaigning work. We have shown that when we act together we can have a significant impact.

FOUR. Is there any space for critical pedagogy in this brave new world?

It strikes me that it is impossible to discuss the History and Future of Higher Education, without an appreciation of political economy, and of the realities of the ways in which the relationships between educators and students, inside-and-against institutions, are being restructured by the market. A political critique is needed that is against students and teachers as entrepreneurs, or better users and producers of value (as data, content, assessments, research, whatever). As Henry Giroux notes, we require open spaces for dissent and disobedience and remembering difference. We need an explicit academic activism that recaptures the idea of the public intellectual.

They embraced ideas critically and engaged them as a fundamental element of individual agency and social action. Such intellectuals addressed the totality of problems faced in the periods in which they lived, made their publications accessible, and spoke to multiple publics while never compromising the rigorous nature of their work. They worked hard to make knowledge, and what Foucault called, dangerous memories available to the public because they believed that the moral and cultural sensibilities that shaped society should be open to interrogation

[we need pedagogies for] educating students as informed and critical citizens by providing them with a language that will extend their sense of individual and social agency, deepen and enlarge their intellectual perspectives, and broaden their ability to think critically and engage with wider audiences. Instead, we educate them to be either low-paid workers who despise the social wage or to become a potential workforce for the Walmart-prison-industrial complex.

Public intellectuals must use whatever resources are available to question the vocabularies, institutions, ideologies and values of neoliberalism and other authoritarian forces of war, violence and privatization that are now threatening the planet. The new media offer a space and opportunity for intellectuals to engage in a new utopian discourse, one in which progressive social change becomes imaginable just as a future is viewed in terms that refuse to imitate the present. Public intellectuals must refuse all vestiges of sectarianism, political purity and moral absolutism. They must engage in modes of self-critique, tempered with an ability to listen to others and a willingness to display what Orwell called the rare moral and political beauty of the “offensiveness” of truth telling and the willingness to make power and authority accountable. Surely, this has to be the foundation for not just imagining a better world, but also collectively struggling for it. We live at a time when those who have the courage to hold authority accountable are treated like criminals and those who, under the authority of the state and mega corporations, commit horrendous crimes are treated as patriots and models of leadership.

And this reminds me that Sarah Amsler wrote for the fearless university. She noted the following.

When we look a little wider, we begin to see that many ways of organising academic labour, non-academic university labour, teaching, learning, research, student life and campus culture are standardising and globalising. Institutional discourses on scholarship, teaching, learning, research and education itself have been so honed and intellectually impoverished over decades, increasingly by people who have no primary interest in any of these things, that it can be difficult to imagine them as anything other than technical activities.

if we are to shape universities to be places in which we can actually teach and study and learn and be – and where we and our students and others who find their way in are excited to be doing so – we need to educate ourselves about the politics of higher education, advanced research, labour, intellectual culture, space and time. And we need to do this in a context in which thinking and speaking about the politics of any of these things is regarded as either a waste of time or a threat to economic productivity and institutional ‘reputation’, as it has become defined in neoliberal terms. And we need to do this in an environment where perhaps many academics, by dint of profession or proclivity, have either no experience of political participation or activism, or no interest in social and economic politics at all. And we need to do all of this in an environment where many academics and some students are exhausted and insecure and are therefore in need of considerable self and collective care. It is at least a fourfold project. This should not be daunting; life is complex.

And Sarah called for “a little more of a politicised relation to truth in affairs of education, knowledge and academic practice”. In the face of the creation of a higher education market, and in the face of the marketisation of our pedagogies, and the refusal of hope and of courage inside the University, we should be fucking incandescent perhaps this is the place to start. Even if we buy the rule of money; even if we buy the restructuring; even if we buy the data; we should be pushing-back against the subsumption of teaching to marketised outcomes and its reduction to liquid information.

As Modest Mouse would have it: “Hold on to what you need; We’ve got a knack for fucked up history.”


On money, labour and academic co-operation


Posted by hallymk1

As David Kernohan has argued over at Followers of the Apocalypse, the Coalition is busy re-writing history in the name of its cultural revolution. This is usefully applied to David Willetts’ recent pamphlet for the Social Market Foundation, Robbins Revisited. The pamphlet made me think of three things.

ONE. This is a clear manifestation of the subsumption of academic research, in particular about progression into higher education and about pedagogic practice, for policy that is based on re-engineering society for market principles. Whilst networks exist (here from policy maker to think-tank) to promote those privatised principles in spaces that were/are publically-regulated, funded and governed, a critical question is whether it is possible to nurture networks that push-back against this hegemonic position? Whether this will happen in think-tanks whose policy advisory boards represent the structural hegemonic power of the media, politicians and academia is questionable. Are we able to create activist literacies through co-operation that connect academics and disaffection in society?

TWO. Willetts’ pamphlet pivots around money, productivity and data-informed choice. Notably, he writes the following.

The expansion in higher education has had little impact on the considerable positive graduate earnings premium, which today stands at comfortably over £100,000 (p. 18)

a one per cent increase in the share of the workforce with a university degree raises long-run productivity by between 0.2 per cent and 0.5 per cent, which implies that at least one-third of the increase in UK labour productivity between 1994 and 2005 was due to the growing number of people with a university degree (p. 19)

One reason for this exceptional performance [in research] is that over the past twenty years the academic community and governments have created very strong competitive funding… However there was no matching incentive to focus on teaching. Universities had a fixed allocation of student places which most could fill almost regardless of the offer they made to students. The student experience suffered… The introduction of higher fees covered by income-contingent loans has stopped this decline (p. 36)

Students aren’t merely buying a degree, as they might a holiday. They are engaging in something inherently worthwhile and also investing in their future. The paradox is that unleashing the forces of consumerism with more information for prospective students and funding following their choices is the best way of bringing back traditional academic focus on high-quality teaching (p. 36)

The clear breakdown of work commitments for each course now provided to all students and parents – including the percentage of time spent on independent study – gives them a realistic idea of what to expect, as well as an important basis for judging institutions (p. 37)

Institutions can lay on extra lectures – but this is unlikely to result in more satisfied students with a better grasp of their subject. This brings us back to Robbins, and his analysis not just of teaching time, but of the time spent in discussion periods (p. 40)

This is a very useful pointer for us as we review how we might extend the Key Information Set data in the future. Asking institutions to provide a breakdown of the average number of discussion classes for each course – broken down as Robbins suggests into tutorials, small seminars and large seminars – would allow students and parents to judge courses by the sort of teaching they value (p. 44)

One option would be for the Key Information Set data to mirror what was available to Robbins fifty years ago, with a requirement for institutions to specify how many essays or how much work students can expect to have marked on each course – and whether feedback will be written or discussed (p. 46)

Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching (p. 47)

It is not for ministers to dictate what subjects universities offer – nor the subjects that students choose to study. Yet given that going to university can change your life, it is quite right that students and parents should think hard about which institution and course is right for them. That is why we are requiring universities to provide more information than ever. Students now have easy access to comparable information on everything from employment outcomes for particular courses to how satisfied students are with course assessment or feedback (p. 55)

Yet a report from 8th October by technology consultancy Gartner made some startling predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2014 and Beyond, which materially affect Willetts’ assumptions and assertions. These include:

  • The organising principles that underpin how academic/student data is regulated and used;
  • The labour relations that underpin employment in the increasingly digitised and stratified economies of the global North;
  • Predictions about the economic utility of higher education as a positional good that is based solely on income.

In particular Gartner focused upon the impact on labour and labour-relations of technological changes linked to the digital economy, smart machines and consumerisation. It noted the need to engage with “disruptive shifts [] coming at an accelerated pace and at a global level of impact.” This impact is predicted to be deeply political and based on economic disenfranchisement. The report goes on as follows.

Gartner’s digital business predictions focus on the effect digital business will have on labor reductions, on consumer goods revenue, and on use of personal data [emphasis added]… Engineers, scientists, IT professionals and marketers at consumer goods companies are engaging crowds much more aggressively and with increasing frequency using digital channels to reach a larger and more anonymous pool of intellect and opinion. Gartner sees a massive shift toward applications of crowdsourcing, enabled by technology, such as: advertising, online communities, scientific problem solving, internal new product ideas, and consumer-created products.

By 2020, the labor reduction effect of digitization will cause social unrest and a quest for new economic models in several mature economies. Near Term Flag: A larger scale version of an “Occupy Wall Street”-type movement will begin by the end of 2014, indicating that social unrest will start to foster political debate.

Digitization is reducing labor content of services and products in an unprecedented way, thus fundamentally changing the way remuneration is allocated across labor and capital [emphasis added]. Long term, this makes it impossible for increasingly large groups to participate in the traditional economic system — even at lower prices — leading them to look for alternatives such as a bartering-based (sub)society, urging a return to protectionism or resurrecting initiatives like Occupy Wall Street, but on a much larger scale. Mature economies will suffer most as they don’t have the population growth to increase autonomous demand nor powerful enough labor unions or political parties to (re-)allocate gains in what continues to be a global economy.

The escalation of consumer awareness of data collection practices has set the stage for offering consumers more control over the disposition of personal data — collected both online and offline. As increasing demand and scarcity drives up the value of such data, incentives grow to entice consumers to share it voluntarily.

Smart Machines — The emergence of smart machines adds opportunity and fear as “cognizant and cognitive systems” and can enhance processes and decision making, but could also remove the need for humans in the process and decision effort. CIOs will see this as a means of delivering greater efficiency, but will have to balance between the active human workforce and the cold efficiency of machines that can learn [emphasis added].

Gartner forecasts that smart machines will upend a majority of knowledge workers’ career paths by 2020 [emphasis added]. Smart machines exploit machine learning and deep-learning algorithms. They behave autonomously, adapting to their environment.

In her outstanding Ph.D. thesis on “The State Machine : politics, ideology, and computation in Chile, 1964-1973”, Jessica Miller Medina highlighted how the Allende Government in Chile attempted to utilize technology and data (through cybernetics) to create a new representation of society beyond the market, using different, co-operative organizing principles. The key for Miller Medina was to describe

not just a technological history but a history of the changing social networks that connected these technologies to the function of the state and its management (p. 17).

Moreover, her work reminds us to see the technological and technocratic ideas of Gartner and Willetts as means to “solidify a particular articulation of the state that was supported by new claims to legitimate power” (p. 96). Thus, she quotes Allende (p. 252) arguing for democratic renewal:

We set out courageously to build our own [cybernetic] system in our own spirit. What you will hear about today is revolutionary – not simply because this is the first time it has been done anywhere in the world. It is revolutionary because we are making a deliberate effort to hand to the people the power that science commands, in a form in which the people can themselves use it.

This is increasingly critical in the world described by Gartner, where large proportions of society are subsumed under a system in which they cannot participate, and against which they demand to push-back. It also makes it critical that the academic world described by Willetts, which is reduced to money and data, is refused. Clearly this refusal needs to reflect the fact that Willetts’ argument for debt-driven study and choice risks the creation of indentured lives. Debt-driven study is in-part based on the demand for entrepreneurial education that delivers economic impact inside a society organised around the market. But what is the value of that inside economies in the global North that are de-developing, or in the face of risks to the US economy of attacks on the dollar as the global reserve currency (especially from China and Russia), or where capital intensity and reduced productivity/wages become the norm, or where jobs are leveraged or outsourced, or where commodity skills are in short supply?

One response might be to open-up a discussion about the link between the production of a higher education that is against-and-beyond indenture, and that is described by alternative, co-operative organising principles. In this way, Willetts (p. 47) might do well to understand the ramifications of the University of Lincoln’s curriculum that driven by the idea of student-as-producer, not just through banal connections between teaching-and-research for new inventions or productivity or entrepreneurialism, but in its democratic intentions and organising principles.

THREE. We need to discuss Ecuador and the environment, not just because of the IPCC’s recent report on climate change or the Royal Society’s People and Planet Report, but because addressing global problems demands more than the poverty of the market. Willetts cannot see beyond this space:

Many developing countries have extraordinary ambitions to expand the number of people entering higher education, and at a great pace. British institutions are well-placed to help, and it is fortuitous that we now have MOOCs to help achieve these ambitions. The jury is still out on whether there will be one or two dominant platforms or whether there will be several diverse names (p. 68).

In The Republic of Ecuador’s National Plan for Good Living 2009-2013: Building a Plurinational and Intercultural State, the Government argues for five interconnected revolutions: democratic; ethical; economic; social; and Latin American dignity; in order to build a fraternal and co-operative coexistence. In part, this is based on “The transformation of higher education and the transfer of knowledge in science, technology and innovation.” The plan explicitly critiques neoliberal market-driven solutions to problems, and attempts to tie education to co-operative, democratic renewal that will in turn overcome inequalities. The aim is:

The combination of ancestral forms of knowledge with state-of-the-art technology can reverse the current development model and contribute to the transition towards a model of accumulation based on bio-knowledge.

This aim of linking environmental to historical and cultural knowledge through a democratic agenda based on equality not the liberal sop of equality of opportunity, is further realised in Ecuador’s recent announcement that Michael Bauwens of the Peer-to -Peer Foundation will join “a major strategic research project to “fundamentally re-imagine Ecuador” based on the principles of open networks, peer production and commoning… The project seeks to “remake the roots of Ecuador’s economy, setting off a transition into a society of free and open knowledge.”

What remains for academics in the global North is to resist and push-back against the tyranny of the rule of money and the marketisation of everyday life, in order to explore whether another, co-operative way is possible. This means an activist stance in-and-beyond capitalist work that strives for the common. Refusing the Coalition’s agenda for higher education, through alternative projects like the Social Science Centre or critiques/negation/occupation of the REF or of open pedagogy or whatever, is a start. However, the realisation that technology consultants like Gartner are focused on the political and economic marginalisation of large swaths of the global population, and concomitant social unrest, ought to sharpen our thinking about the lived, transnational realities of capitalism and the need to describe and reveal alternatives. We have access to alternatives based on different organising principles, and these historically and geographically distinct examples need to be rehabilitated and discussed. The question is whether collectively we have the courage.


Moving the goalposts: some realities of democratic football governance


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday 29 October I’ll be running a seminar at the Social Science Centre in Lincoln entitled “Moving the goalposts: some realities of democratic football governance”. I intend to open up a discussion about my time from 1999-2009 as Chair of the Walsall Supporters’ Trust. The Trust was set-up with help from the national body Supporters’ Direct, in order:

to be the vehicle through which a healthy, balanced and constructive relationship between the Club and its supporters and the communities it serves is encouraged and developed. The business of the Society is to be conducted for the benefit of the community served by the Club and not for the profit of its members.

The seminar will raise the following issues.

•      Some realities of being a football fan in England

•      Some realities of being a football fan in Walsall

•      Some realities of democratic football governance

In it I will discuss how my involvement in the politics of Walsall FC almost destroyed my love of the game (detailed on YouTube as Disillusioned Saddler). I intend that we will also be able to focus on the realities and limits of co-operative practices in social change.

My slides are here.

NOTE: there are connections from football governance, regulation and funding for education, as I noted in a post on The Communal University. Andrew McGettigan has also highlighted this analogy between education and football.


Critical perspectives on educational technology: some notes


Posted by hallymk1

Yesterday’s symposium on critical perspectives on educational technology made me think about the following issues.

FIRST. How do we understand the structuring effects of the educational and pedagogic structures in which we work? How do we understand the ways in which those structures prefigure the impact or effects of any intervention? How do we understand how the very structures in which we are hoping to promote or provoke transformation, in themselves work to restrict, discipline or kettle transformation. How do we move beyond the problem-solving perspective of educational innovation, in order to situate the use of educational technology inside transnational systems of domination?

SECOND. How do we understand how such transformation is itself kettled by the circuits of capital? In particular how do we understand the mechanisms through which our lived educational work falls under the treadmill logic of accumulation and the rate of profit? How do we work to understand how Capital as the automatic subject structures our struggle for emancipation or transformation? How do we work to describe and then to critique that struggle?

THIRD. If we are defining something, some intervention, or some innovation as valuable, then we need to describe and discuss what valuable/value means. Inside capitalism value has a specific description and sets of precepts that flow from it. Moreover it is dynamic and fluid. Capital is value in motion. So can we describe something else that is a different type of value? Can we do this based on co-operation or co-operative or social practice(s)?

FOURTH. Keith Turvey made me think about the ways in which commodities like a book of logarithm tables might be inscribed with historical meaning and social value, and how those shared commodities might be used as points of solidarity in describing the world. Through a process of participatory narrative design (of practices, knowledges and skills) we might define something that is spatially or socially or historically different. More importantly we might use specific commodities to explode the relationships and conceptions and organising principles that are congealed in them. So how might we disassemble a tablet or piece of software or network, to look at the labour and human rights revealed inside it/them? How might we look at how their production and consumption processes place us in-and-against nature? We need to analyse specific technologies in light of David Harvey’s re-reading of footnote 4 of Chapter 15 of Volume 1 of Capital. He argues that they reveal the following.

  1. Technological and organisational forms of production, exchange and consumption.
  2. Relations to nature and the environment.
  3. Social relations between people.
  4. Mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs.
  5. Labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects.
  6. Institutional, legal and governmental arrangements.
  7. The conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

FIFTH. I needed to be clearer in my argument. It was this: it is impossible to critique educational technology without addressing its place inside a global system of capitalism; this system is struggling to re-establish stable forms of accumulation and rates of profit, and this struggle is usefully analysed as a secular crisis; one systemic response to this crisis, catalysed by a transnational activist network that includes academics, has been to use technologies and techniques to open-up public education for the market because there is no alternative; detailing the use of specific technologies like Blackboard as a LMS, or Pearson as a publisher, or the use of tablet technologies, enables critical questions to be asked about the relationships between education, technology and the market in the reproduction of Capital as a social relationship;  asking these questions also enables us to ask whether there are alternative organising principles beyond the market, namely through co-operation, that might enable us to describe alternative forms of value and alternative societies; there are stories from South America and Latin America that are not to be fetishized, but which offer an alternative perspective; in light of the dehumanising effects of neoliberalism, the recent IPCC report on climate change, and the Royal Society’s People and Planet report, we need to ask whether there is another way.

SIXTH. I needed to make it clear that this is not just abstract, and that I try to enact critique in my work at the Social Science Centre or in alternative projects, and in my work on the Digilit Leicester Project, and in catalysing the DMU Academic Commons. These are political, they are about reflexivity and self-awareness,  and they are about the struggle/courage for different organising principles.

SEVENTH. These resources are useful ways forward.

Affinities on The New Cooperativism: http://bit.ly/187iT8R

De Peuter and Dyer Witheford on Commoning: http://bit.ly/Ve2cE9

Draft report on the contribution of cooperatives to overcoming the crisis: http://bit.ly/1gyzDtk

Lambie on Cuba: http://bit.ly/mIdVzV

Lebowitz on Co-Management in Venezuela: http://bit.ly/1awBnOF

Office Central de la Coopération à l’Ecole: http://www.occe.coop

The Schools Co-operative Society: http://bit.ly/z1YmCA

Joss Winn on Helplessness: http://josswinn.org/2013/07/helplessness/

The Republic of Ecuador. National Development Plan: National Plan for Good Living 2009-2013: Building a Plurinational and Intercultural State. http://bit.ly/GQJi0M

Student as producer: http://studentasproducer.lincoln.ac.uk/

Ds106: http://ds106.us/

Zibechi, R. 2013. Autonomous Zapatista Education: The Little Schools of Below. http://bit.ly/19XfrAF

Miller Medina, J.E. (2005), The State Machine : politics, ideology, and computation in Chile, 1964-1973. MIT Ph.D. Thesis. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/39176

Cleaver, H. 1979. Reading Capital Politically, University of Texas Press: Austin, TX, p. 161. http://libcom.org/files/cleaver-reading_capital_politically.pdf


The University, technology and co-operation


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday 15 October I’m presenting something on “The University, technology and co-operation”, at the Critical Perspectives on Educational Technology symposium at the University of Brighton, UK.

There are some notes on a co-operative pedagogy of struggle here.

My slides are here.

The Spotify playlist that accompanies the talk is here.


Educational technology and the crisis


Posted by hallymk1

I wrote this as I listened to a Jon Hopkins’ Boiler Room mix.

On Tuesday 10 September, I will be taking part in a conversation about technology-enhanced learning and the crisis. This emerged from some work at the Alpine Rendez-Vous 13 Crisis Forum earlier this year.

ONE: we need to talk about capitalism.

Michael Roberts’ work on the next recession has highlighted that: “the key indicators of sustained recovery in capitalism would be rising rates of profit, a sharp pick-up in business investment and substantial falls in unemployment”. Roberts discusses the structural, secular crisis of capitalism in a podcast here, and his analysis is amplified by Phoenix Capital’s view “that the forecast we’ve maintained for well over two years has been validated: the US is in a DE-pression and both Washington and the Federal Reserve have wasted trillions of Dollars. The reality is that what’s happening in the US today is not a cyclical recession, but a one in 100 year, secular economic shift.” On measures of unemployment, labour participation, and industrial production, Phoenix argue that “We’ve spent literally trillions of US Dollars on Stimulus and bailouts[,] and production is well below the pre-Crisis highs” with “the same percentage of the US population are working as in 1978.” For Phoenix this is a structural, secular depression, with an inability of actors in the system as a whole, rather than in sectors of the system, to re-establish stable forms of accumulation and profit. As Jehu notes over at Re: The People, technical, monetarist mechanisms like quantitative easing do nothing for growth “Since surplus value is only produced by living labor, the purchase of dead labor at a markup in the form of assets does nothing whatsoever to increase the mass of profits.” The same is true of the dead labour embedded in technologies that are imposed for efficiencies or productivity gains or for surveillance in the workplace or for the extraction of rents.

TWO: we need to talk about labour-power.

The reproduction of capitalist social relations is coming at a huge price for those who labour globally in the system, including students. Jehu states that monetary policy in the EU is simply “an attempt to obstruct the working class majorities of the member nations from democratic control over their economies.“ It is this democratic deficit that is apparent in the global North in the secular crisis of capital, as those with economic power seek to reinforce their position through mechanisms of indenture, like increased student debt (indenturing the futures of current and as yet unborn generations), the mechanics of accumulation through bailouts and quantitative easing, and the privatisation of previously socialised, historically-accrued value, like healthcare, resources like water, and education. Elsewhere, the horrors of labour in the global South go unreported in those markets they sustain. These realities emerge from the social relationships that are stitched into “our” technologies.

THREE: we need to talk about technology.

It is only against these political economic realities that the place of the University and of technology inside the University can be understood. Such an understanding demands that we critique technology as part of a totality of objectified human experience. We might start with Marx’s formulation in footnote 4 of chapter 15 of volume 1 of Capital that:

Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare  the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.

Thus, technologies that are produced and consumed at the limits of “man’s modes” of recasting and reforming social relationships offer critical insights into how capital co-opts research and development inside educational institutions (schools, colleges, universities, MOOCs), in order to restructure education for value formation and accumulation. It is impossible to make sense of the use of technology inside education without political economic critique.

FOUR: we need to talk about technology and resistance.

In his twelfth thesis on the secular crisis, Harry Cleaver noted that the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, across both the system a whole and for competing capitals in different sectors of the global economy, is countered by capital through attempts to insert technology or new techniques into production. He states that:

the rise in the organic composition of capital understood as occurring only with a capitalist reorganization of technology that raises productivity and imposes “more work”, [and] we can recognize that this always involves a change in the power relations between capital and the working class. Because the fundamental change involved in such reorganization of technology is the substitution of embodied dead labor (whether in the form of machines or information) for living labor, this tendentially undermines capital’s ability to organize its society through the imposition of work.

There is little sense or point in arguing that technology, as it is imposed inside capitalist social relations, can be emancipatory. It is designed: for personalisation that shapes entrepreneurial pedagogy or activity; or for the extraction of rents; or for an increase in relative surplus value by lowering labour costs or increasing productivity; or for workplace discipline (including of the unwaged labour of students); or for competition between universities as businesses. As Cleaver argues in his fourteenth thesis:

What we really need to do, is not merely to recognize the antagonistic subjects driving the “secular crisis” but to explore the “logics” of these emergent and diverse subjectivities. Such exploration can help us go beyond the appreciation of how they rupture capital to that of articulating and strengthening their development.

Revealing technology’s as a crack for the extraction of value, commodification and privatisation enables Capital’s expropriation of our social relationships for profit to be resisted and pushed-back against.

FIVE: we need to talk about recovering subjectivity.

Resistance and pushing-back are tied to the negation of the marketization of our lives and the negation of technological determinism. This is tied to our ability to fight for a rekindled subjectivity. We need to discover and strengthen how technology might be used to liberate subjectivity (knowledges, practices, organising principles, ways of knowing the world), and, in the words of Cleaver’s fifteenth thesis, to create spaces and places and alliances and allegiances for:

the fabrication and utilization of material connections and communications that destroy isolation and permit people to struggle in complementary ways.

Struggle is everything, and the struggle has to be collective. Not personalised. Not entrepreneurial. Not commodified. As Zibechi notes of the Zapatista Little Schools:

Collective work is one of the cements of autonomy, whose fruits usually spill into hospitals, clinics, primary and secondary education, in strengthening the municipalities and the good government juntas. Not much that has been constructed would be possible without the collective work, of men, women, boys, girls and the elderly.

For the point of education, in the face of this secular crisis, and of socio-political crisis, and of socio-environmental crisis, has to be the organising principles for collective work. It has to be for social solutions rather than for coercion and competition. It has to be for new forms of communal wealth rather than for enclosure and private profit. Thus, in the face of these dualities the point of educational technology has to be re-cast in terms of a critique of liberation.


Some notes towards a co-operative pedagogy of struggle


Posted by hallymk1

ONE: neoliberalism as a global pedagogy of dispossession

Neoliberalism is a global pedagogical project aimed at the dispossession of free time, and education is a central institutional means for its realisation. This project aims at reinscribing all of social life inside the market and for the extraction of value. Thus, education is a central institutional means for production and control, that is embedded in the fabric of neoliberalism’s social production, and that amplifies its effects. For Stephen Ball it is important to recognise both the factors that make-up neoliberalism, and the mechanisms through which it is enacted. Ball analyses several factors of neoliberalism (pp. 3-4).

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

According to Ball (pp. 12-13), these factors are carried or spread via transnational advocacy networks or TANS, motivated by shared values steeped in marketization and the private, in order to leverage tacit or active consent through: information politics (the ability to call-up data quickly); symbolic politics (the ability to tell meaningful, common sense stories); leverage politics (the ability to call on powerful actors); and accountability politics (the ability to use the rule of money to bring pressure on political actors). This process connects and reveals networks of co-operation seeking to co-opt education for-profit, from philanthropic groups sponsoring MOOCs in concert with academics, through to activist groups like The Heritage Foundation, which declares: 

Subtly or overtly, each generation passes American exceptionalism to the next, be it through innovations like Henry Ford and his assembly line; or Thomas Edison and the light bulb; or Steve Jobs and the iPhone, iPod and iPad; or through the encouraging words of parents to their children, assuring them that they can grow up to be anything they like if they put their minds to it and work hard.

Revealing this process in a participatory way matters because, as I noted about whether universities care too much about students:

We are witnessing a recalibration and enclosure of the idea of the student, not as a co-operative, associational subject, but as a neoliberal agent, whose future has become indentured. This subject is individuated, enclosed and disciplined through her debts and is enmeshed inside a pedagogy of debt, in order that s/he becomes entrepreneurial in her endeavours and outlook. The idea of education… is of indentured study, where the risk of failure is not borne socially, but is transferred to the individual. Thus, the [UK Coalition Government] seeks to extend New Labour’s choice agenda, driven by metrics, data and money, as the university is restructured as a new public service. In this way the student-as-entrepreneur, and data/analytics about satisfaction, retention, progression etc. are used as mechanisms to discipline academic labour. The relationships between academic and student are recalibrated in the face of the rule of money and the cybernetic techniques that underpin it…

This type of problem-based thinking ignores politics and ideology, and is based around the kind of risk-management and algorithm-based high frequency trading that underpins entrepreneurial activity in the financial markets. It is almost wholly divorced from the realities of the humane relationships that academics seek to develop with their students. The corporatisation of data, underscored by profit, negates our humanity.

There are then, as series of tensions inside the University. The University is a confused space that is being restructured around money, profit, performance management, customer relationship management and so on. It is from inside this new public service that [Michael] Gove declared that he wished students to benefit from “the incredible number of opportunities offered by twenty-first century capitalism.” This is the fantasy of the entrepreneurial student inside the treadmill logic of business-as-usual.

Critical then, is an understanding of how cybernetic techniques abstract our everyday existences as students-teachers so that they are controlled and entrepreneurial. The step-beyond that is to describe how critical pedagogies of co-operation and association might be developed that are public, radical and participatory. Or, as Thorburn argues, we need to find mechanisms for actually existing autonomy.

TWO: the Cybernetic Hypothesis as pedagogic project

For Marx in the Grundrisse, as the general intellect of society was appropriated by capital through the application of science and then congealed inside machinery, techniques and technologies for control became crucial. In particular, a culture was created inside which both the high-speed circulation of commodities could become a normatively good thing, and unproductive time was perceived to be unethical. One outcome of this process was the use of technologies to open-up and monitor labour, including academic scholarship, in order that production processes could be systematised and made more lean or efficient. Thus, the collective Tiqqun argued that:

That is to say, cybernetics is not, as we are supposed to believe, a separate sphere of the production of information and communication, a virtual space superimposed on the real world. No, it is, rather, an autonomous world of apparatuses so blended with the capitalist project that it has become a political project, a gigantic “abstract machine” made of binary machines run by the Empire, a new form of political sovereignty, which must be called an abstract machine that has made itself into a global war machine.

As a result, technology has become increasingly inserted inside hierarchies of control, so that judgements about performance can be exerted instantaneously and systemic risk reduced. The overlaying of technological determinants onto societies that can be connected through these flows of data and networks encourages a universal belief in rationality; that the only path to truth is through big data and learning analytics, rather than co-operative judgement.

Thus, as Joss Winn in his notes on The Cybernetic Hypothesis, states:

Cybernetics as manifest in the Internet, ICT and the ‘new economy’, has definitively supplanted the liberal hypothesis. Cybernetics includes liberalism and at the same time transcends it. The critique of liberalism is no longer worth the effort because liberalism is obsolete, nothing more than a ‘residual justification’ for the crimes of the ‘new model’, that is cybernetics.

The development of technocratic, data-driven structures that manage risk and promote control underpins the cybernetic hypothesis. The emergence of cybernetics focused upon the science of control mechanisms, through which the exchange of information would create stability. This is especially important in maintaining the hegemonic power of transnational finance capital through a system that uses digital technologies like high-frequency algorithms to make decisions at high speed. In legitimating an expanding system of hierarchical control that protects the momentum of an inflationary system, information-work and the use of data-mining or analytics to generalise, monitor and control behaviours is vital.

Education forms a critical new terrain inside which high technology is used for control. This includes developing new services like learning analytics, implementing mechanisms for performance management, and predicting futures as educational spaces become financialised through student loans and bonds. Technology is used to reinforce regimes of biopower that seek the panoptic monitoring, surveillance and measurement of all activity. In this view, cybernetics is ‘not just a technological history but a history of the changing social networks that connected these technologies to the function of the state and its management’ (Miller Medina, 2005, p. 17). Thus, economic and technological interdependence restrict human agency and the possibilities for emancipation because cybernetic rationality demands and reinforces certain digital and material behaviours, practices, attributes and competencies. In turn, this crystallises the power of technocrats, administrators or education corporations for risk management, as well as the identification of entrepreneurial behavours.

The fight against forms of cybernetic control is not one of destroying or refusing high technology, but rather focuses upon using technology and technique to reveal the internal, totalising dynamics of capitalism. From this position, alternatives rooted in self-organisation and a societal complexity based on variety, improbability, and adaptability emerge. For Tiqqun, this forms the negation of the cybernetic hypothesis through a return to what it means to be human. A critical role for educationalists using technology inside-and-against the cybernetic hypothesis is to develop educational opportunities that highlight the development of counter-narratives of commons, co-operation, sharing, and openness, and against the separation and alienation of money, price, quality, and competition. As Tronti (p. 105) argued, at issue is the extent to which the forms of control that pervade human existence inside the social factory can be revealed and alternatives critiqued so that ‘capital itself [] becomes uncovered, at a certain level of its development, as a social power’.

This uncovering of a social power with a desire for order, certitude and totality, has been revealed increasingly as a new governance mentality: the crisis revealed as PRISM; or as mastering the internet; as the State’s securitisation of capitalist social relations; and as the Defence Cyber Protection Partnership, which “is being positioned as a model that other industries can replicate to shore up their security.” This is governmentality through cybernetics in the face of the secular crisis:

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

On one level, as Joss Winn argues, “Cybernetics entered into the operation of capitalism with the intention of minimizing uncertainties, incommensurability, the kinds of anticipation problems that can interfere in any commodity transaction. It contributes to consolidating the basis for the installation of capitalism’s mechanisms, to oiling Capital’s abstract machine.” On another, as Tiqqun noted cybernetics and systems thinking enable the State to introduce surveillance and data capture devices in the “construction of a decentralised real-time gridding system. The common intent of these devices is total transparency, an absolute correspondence between the map and the territory, a will to knowledge accumulated to such degree that it becomes a will to power.” This neoliberal will-to-power forms an abstract pedagogic project.

THREE: an abstract pedagogic project.

Werner Bonefeld has argued that in order to understand the operating and organising principles on which capitalism is based, we need to understand the processes through which labour or work inside capitalism is abstracted and the relationship of abstraction with time. Understanding time is critical because it underpins how we analyse the production, circulation and exchange of commodities, and their relationship to value or the production of surplus value. Critiquing this is pedagogically powerful, and sits in antithesis to the pedagogical imperative of neoliberalism to abstract life and surplus value. Social production in capitalism is based on the use of labour-power to produce commodities that can be exchanged in the market and realise value that can be set in motion once more as Capital. Thus, Bonefeld quotes Marx’s work in the Critique (vol. 29, p. 286) that ‘[o]n the one hand, commodities must enter the exchange process as objectified universal labour time, on the other hand, the labour time of individuals becomes objectified universal labour time only as a result of the exchange process’. The reality of this is the deep interconnections between processes of production, circulation and exchange, and time, because capitalist social relations emerge from a tension between those who would invoke time-based efficiencies to raise the rate of surplus value extraction and those fighting for more free-time. Time is money and money is time. Bonefeld states:

If then, capitalism reduces everything to time, an abstract time, divisible into equal, homogeneous, and constant units that move on from unit to unit, dissociated from concrete human circumstances and purposes, then, time really is everything. If ‘time is everything, [then] man is nothing; he is, at the most, time’s carcase’ (Marx, 1976, p. 127). Marx expresses the same idea in Capital arguing that the worker is ‘nothing more then [sic.] personified labour-time’ (1983, p. 233). (Bonefeld, 2010, p. 7).

This process of abstraction is critical and it is reinforced educationally. Abstract labour as it is revealed inside-and-against exchange in the circulation of commodities has a value related to time, and specifically as that time is described socially in the market. Central to this idea of abstraction as against concrete labour is the social character of labour in capitalism. Capitalism consists of private labour, purchased for its ability to become labour-power, which under the direction of the capitalist becomes “directly social in its character… [as] socially determined individual production” (Marx, Grundrisse, p. 83). The process of exchange reveals the value of the commodity and the socially-defined time that went into it. As Bonefeld notes (pp. 10-11), this demands equality between commodities in the market based upon time: “Exchange cannot take place without equality, and equality not without commensurability… What the commodities have therefore in common is human labour in the abstract and this labour comprises a purely social reality.” This social reality is based on labour-time expended, and in the drive for productivity or value-for-money or against idle-time, time subsumes people as individual labourers.

This subsumption is driven by the fact that the measure of value is socially necessary labour-time, which objectifies or abstracts the individual from her self. In the production of commodities this labour-power is abstracted from the labourer, and abstracts her from her labour, her products, her time, and her self. Marx (Capital, Vol. 1) viewed socially necessary labour-time as the source of all value. Rather than being conceived of as units of labour measured in hours or days, it is conceived as the amount of labour time required by a worker (or academic/student) of average productivity (and therefore skill), working with tools (like learning technologies) of the average productive potential, required to produce a given commodity (inside the cybernetic hypothesis this might include immaterial, informational or data-driven commodities). Thus, in the higher education context, more-skilled academics reduce the average time and increase productivity, whilst unskilled academics contribute less social value. The current discourse around the knowledge economy, focused upon generating new, technical skills for jobs that have not yet emerged in the name of economic growth, forms part of this agenda. Abstraction is thus a pedagogic project, enforced through neoliberal politics and the mechanics of cybernetics.

Revealing the relationships between increasingly abstracted labour and reduced socially necessary labour time enables value to be seen as a complex social relation, rather than a material practice. This also reveals the pedagogic principles behind the repetition of technology and its automation of creative tasks that abstract academic work from the staff and students engaged in those practices. This level of abstraction of the academic’s labour-power from the process and reality of capitalist work enables social domination, which is impersonal, increasingly rationalised, and managerially constrained. Technology in the knowledge economy reveals how the autonomy and agency of academics and students as knowledge workers can be marginalised where they have no proprietary knowledge that adds to a university’s relative surplus value. Moreover, techniques and technologies enables capital, in the various forms of higher education, to disperse production organisationally through home-working, outsourcing, MOOCs and privatisation into society, in order to remove academic labour’s collective, social power.

This then refocuses pedagogy on the production of the abstracted, entrepreneurial individual capable of regulating herself against abstracted time, both in the here-and-now of producing commodities, and in the indentured future that demands that fees-as-debts are paid-back. Both the present and the future are claimed for Capital as abstracted labour. It is crucial for the expansion of the system based upon value-in-motion, or the extraction of surplus value, that this abstract version of labour working in an universe of abstracted time, is maintained. This rests on the control exerted over labour’s collective, social power. The discipline of the market demands the discipline of capitalist time, more productive labour-time, and a reduction of free-time. Capturing free-time and alienating it from the individual so that it becomes productive of surplus value in some form (through commodifying new services, analytics, relationship management and so on) is a critical, neoliberal, pedagogic project. A question is then, is it possible to liberate time and sociability from capital? If so, can this be enacted co-operatively? 

FOUR: for a pedagogy of struggle

Liberating time from Capital demands really existing autonomy. It demands struggle. For Tiqqun:

“Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are grow. The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that autonomy is for everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be amplified. The present form taken on by the civil war is above all a fight against the monopoly on autonomy. That experimentation will become the “fecund chaos,” communism, the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.”

For Miller Medina (p. 22), attempting to recover the governing principles in Chile from 1964-73, “This history, therefore, is not just a technological history but a history of the changing social networks that connected these technologies to the function of the state and its management.” Moreover, the deployment of technologies throughout the State’s institutions “helped solidify a particular articulation of the state that was supported by new claims to legitimate power” (Miller Medina, p. 96). This is not necessarily the co-option of institutions, technologies and techniques for Capital. The example of Chile under President Allende offers a critical analysis of a different possibility. Miller Medina (p. 252) quotes Allende:

We set out courageously to build our own [cybernetic] system in our own spirit. What you will hear about today is revolutionary – not simply because this is the first time it has been done anywhere in the world. It is revolutionary because we are making a deliberate effort to hand to the people the power that science commands, in a form in which the people can themselves use it.

Yet Miller Medina (p. 333) also demonstrates how co-operative technical and technological practices tend to be co-opted in the name of repression:

After the military coup in 1973 the Pinochet government used computer technology in the service of its political repression, surveillance, and disappearance, policies that were part of Operation Condor. Although we are still uncovering information on Operation Condor and do not know the full extent of this cooperative intelligence network, available documents from U.S. and Latin American archives describe the Condor data bank — modeled after the police network Interpol, without its judicial safeguards — and the encrypted Condortel telex network.

One of the questions for radical academics is how to bring alive the co-operative, participatory histories and traditions that have existed, in order to reveal possible alternatives to the neoliberal pedagogic project. This involves uncovering the mechanisms through which academics and practitioners are empowered to say “no” through networks of solidarity and co-operative practices. These examples might include critiques of the following. 

  • The governance principles that underpin the responses of the Co-operative movement to the crisis, not in order to re-establish business-as-usual, but to demonstrate actually existing co-operative, social production.
  • The transnational nature of the co-operatives movement, and the importance of associational democracy in social production and consumption. How might these associational networks enable organic intellectuals to emerge and new ideas to take root against hegemony?
  • The situated, local importance of community co-operative learning trusts as networks of mutual support, like the Burton Co-operative Learning Trust or the Cornwall schools co-operative. Is it possible to use such co-operatives to challenge, occupy and reinvent ideas of impact, observation, gifted-and-talented, school improvement etc.? How might extended partnerships of young people, providers, educators, academics, businesses, parents, work in peer-support groups and wider networks to refuse to be subject to value-in-motion?
  • The models for mutualism that exist in football governance through industrial and provident societies and community interest companies. How might these act as nodes of solidarity that enable association to reinforce co-operative, social production of free-time away from the market?

At issue is whether actions that demonstrate the solidarity of liberation can form a pedagogic project that forms a lived social critique of capitalism, in order to offer an alternative vision for society. In educational terms this then questions whether there are other co-operative governing principles for universities or for higher education at the level of society. This demands that we ask what education is, before we ask what it is for, and it that we see education as a process of becoming that refuses socially-necessary labour time and abstracted labour. It also demands that we liberate free time, and this takes courage in the face of the discipline of the State and the market enacted cybernetically through analytics, big data, biometrics, drones, and attenuated ideas of privacy.

One part of this approach to liberation is to think about mechanisms that disrupt the circuits and production of capital as a social system. These may include renewing Ball’s neoliberal factors co-operatively.

  • The sociability of everyday life, in order to realise new opportunities for co-operation and against value.
  • Reconfiguring governance through an appeal to the co-operating self, with the public and the mutual at its heart.
  • Co-operatives acting transnationally in association and mutuality, to define alternative value-forms that are against the logic of the market.
  • To consider several active waves of co-operation: proto (revealing the intellectual project of the socio-cultural histories of co-operatives); roll-back (of neoliberalism); and roll-out (of new co-operative forms, modes of governance and regulation).
  • The creation and extraction of co-operation is predicated upon mutualism and association rather than individuated mobility and connectivity.
  • The mutual structures that enable co-operation are polymorphic and isomorphic.

In this process we might reduce abstraction and witness new forms of sociability based upon co-operating, rather than having our time and labour co-opted. A different way of connecting our fragmentary natures beyond the market may enable humanity to be made concrete and celebrated. A refusal of abstraction and individuation entails a refusal of the cybernetic hypothesis that maintains the neoliberal pedagogic project. In critiquing the relationships between the individual and the State-market duality in Discipline and Punish, Foucault (p. 138) argued that “These relationships take the form of a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location across and beyond the state. These overlap, repeat, or imitate one another according to their domain of application, they converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method.” The question is whether co-operative education might enable spaces and times (or space-times) for life to be lived as an associational, mutual, transitional process, rather than as an outcomes-based blueprint.


On the co-operative University as a field of opportunity


Posted by hallymk1

Yesterday @chunkymark interviewed @aaronjohnpeters. Peters made the important point at 12.31 in the video that the lead-into and beyond the next General Election in 2015 offers a relatively unique “field of opportunity” for recasting a politics of opposition and alternative to those of austerity. The question Peters then poses is: “how do we respond to that [field of opportunity]?” He goes on to state that we need to find “sustainable forms of opposition”, which lie inside-against-and-beyond traditional party and union structures and that refuse to outsource renewal and change to those in power. If we are to delegitimise those who have delineated a politics of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession, then we need alliances and allegiances of “constructive engagement” that enable us collectively to define our power-to create the world. At least this is my interpretation.

Peters reinforces this with the cry of “They all must go!” (¡Que se vayan todos!) that emerged from the social struggles againstArgentina’s debt crisis a decade ago, including protest, outing represssion, delegitimising of those in-power and relegitimising other forms of working and co-operating, the recovered factories movement, neighbourhood assemblies, and so on. Naomi Klein sought to stich a sense of global solidarity into that movement by making explicit connections for instance to the Icelandic protests against transnational elites of politicians and CEOs in 2002. She argues that “governments that respond to a crisis created by free-market ideology with an acceleration of that same discredited agenda will not survive to tell the tale.”

The social struggles against the restructuring of Argentina have been mapped in an edition of affinities from 2010 on The New Cooperativism. It is clear that Central and South America provide a rich-veing of possible stories of solidarity, democracy, and autonomy, which are themselves predicated upon different organising principles of production. As Lebowitz notes for Venezuela this is then predicated upon the interests of a whole society and not those in-power, and it demands that we find ways to critique private property, the exploitation of labour, and production solely for profit, in order to redefine units of social property, forms of social production organised by workers, and production for the needs of communities. Lebowitz argues for co-management between workers in enterprises or firms, and society/communities.

Co-management implies a particular kind of partnership–a partnership between the workers of an enterprise and society. Thus, it stresses that enterprises do not belong to the workers alone–they are meant to be operated in the interest of the whole society. In other words, co-management is not intended only to remove the self-interested capitalist, leaving in place self-interested workers; rather, it is also meant to change the purpose of productive activity. It means the effort to find ways both to allow for the development of the full potential of workers and also for every member of society, all working people, to be the beneficiaries of co-management.

We might also take something here from the experiences of Cuba, in raising healthcare (witnessed in Haiti and Venezuela) and educational attainment, at lower levels of GDP and environmental impact. As George Lambie (p. 35) notes in his deconstruction of the Cuban Revolution in the Twenty-First Century ‘The problem is that territorially restricted capital is less able to compete with its transnationally mobile counterpart.’ Thus, in the face of the neoliberal refrain of social mobility communities need new ways to exit the drive to compete with transnationally mobile capital, and to define new methods of working and producing life. This includes the role of the University in supporting those communities and societies in widening their own field of opportunity and inscribing sustainable forms of opposition and alternative.

Lambie (p. 47) argues that this is crucial because purchasing power parities now show global inequality to be significantly greater than the most pessimistic had thought. Poverty in tied to a lack of mobility and opportunity, limited access to social services, deteriorating working conditions, insecure employment etc., and a disconnect with politics that is framed corporately and where power is located in supra-national classes of actors. For De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford this means that we might refocus the core institutions of everyday life around “an organizational commons, [where] the labour performed is a commoning practice, and the surplus generated, a commonwealth.” They argue for “an acknowledgement of the contribution to collective productivity of every life” and forms of “self-organised associated labour” that can enable a circulation of the commons and the value of commoning.

At issue is the governance of the University as a form of self-organising associated labour, which is able to create sustainable forms of opposition and alternative, in the face of the politics of austerity and dispossession, and more long-term, in the face of the crisis of accumulation. Is it possible for the University to be a public good that helps to legitimise and reterritorialise local forms of social production? On what basis might the University as co-operative endeavour help to liberate communities from the corporate power-over them?