Tag Archives: futures

on DMU’s Institute for Education Futures


Posted by hallymk1

I’ve been at De Montfort University since 2002 leading on our agenda for education and technology or e-learning or technology-enhanced learning or enhancing learning through technology. In that time I’ve also been pursuing pedagogic research through: first, a raft of national/international projects; second, through publications; and third, as a National Teaching Fellow. This has drawn me increasingly into supporting pedagogic research and innovation across the University, through project work, mentoring, supporting DMU Teacher Fellow and National Teaching Fellow applications, setting up the DMU Academic Commons, and so on.

In late 2014 I set up a Centre for Pedagogic Research (following very useful conversations with Debbie Cotton at Plymouth), but within a year the General Election made it plain that the Government’s direction of travel was to re-focus higher education policy through a new Green and then White Paper, and both new policy and primary legislation. As a result we had to take a position on how to respond to both the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and any forthcoming REF. This catalysed conversations about building institutional capacity and capability related to pedagogic innovation, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and research in our Education Division, in order to create a structured environment for engaging with TEF and REF (Education Studies) at DMU.

The result of these conversations is the creation of a new Institute for Education Futures at DMU, of which I am Co-Director with Dr Sarah Younie. This is an end to my leadership of our education and technology agenda, and a new start in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences, although the IEF will have a cross-institutional role working with staff (and students). I have appended our working Vision and Objectives below. However, it is important to note four things in relation to the IEF at this point.

NOTE 1: The IEF’s work has a clear connection to DMU’s Strategic Framework, which is working towards a corporate step-change in pedagogic practice, innovation and scholarship, including the following.

  • An explicit commitment to teaching quality, in all its forms.
  • The creation of a stimulating teaching and learning environment re-framed through pedagogic innovation.
  • The sustainability of a pedagogic culture rooted in student achievement.

The IEF will generate additional benefits for DMU, in terms of other Framework priorities: a scholarly culture that delivers research with impact; the social and economic development of Leicester (linked to #DMULocal) through research linked to social justice; and diverse international agendas (linked to #DMUGlobal).

NOTE 2: I have already signalled that I would like to see the IEF build capacity for pedagogic innovation democratically and co-operatively (taking on-board some of the co-operative leadership principles outlined in my work with Joss Winn and others), so that we can respond to and attempt to influence strategic priorities. Therefore, the work will be predicated upon:

  • an (infra)structure that enables the sharing of academic practice, skills and knowledge by all staff (academic and professional services) and students;
  • co-operative internal and external funding bids rooted in the TEF criteria of teaching quality, learning environment and student outcomes, alongside the REF focus on impact and environment;
  • the facilitation of grassroots, concrete, thematic networks of educational and pedagogic practice, inside and outside the University; and
  • a mentoring and peer review strategy for outputs and impact.

Sharing, co-operative, grassroots and peer-enabled. Other values and approaches are available.

NOTE 3: I have been an outspoken critic of the Government’s HE proposals for some time. I have blogged extensively about performance management, the TEF, the Green Paper and the White Paper on this blog and through peer review. I have also refused to apply for any post related to the implementation of the TEF. I remain in support of the Second Convention for HE’s aims, and I continue to work with those engaged with co-operative education. However, I work inside a University that is being recalibrated through policy and legislation as a competing business. Thus, my intention through the IEF is to continue to critique our current dystopic HE system, and work for a re-imagining of what HE might be, whilst accepting the concrete reality of my everyday existence inside the University, alongside the limitations that league tables, TEF/REF, and so on, place on my academic labour and my agency. That said, I will continue to work co-operatively for alternative possibilities in my everyday work, and this means working prefiguratively inside the University (in terms of deliberation, values, governing principles and so on). It is crucial that we are able to demonstrate what else might be possible. The maxim here is Render unto Caesar… (cheers Klaus).

NOTE 4: I hope that the IEF will emerge as a self-critical scholarly community, with a level of internal, co-operative self-governance that enables people to find their voice. The focus on Futures in the Institute title is important, and it suggests possible utopias, such as those hinted at by the University of Utopia. Our work may sit against the nostalgic futures craved by Astrov in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (thanks @nosnilwar), but it is more likely to be a re-focusing of potential energy on re-imagining that which continues to be defined for us as a productive educational life, so that we can describe an alternative, social commonwealth.

Vision

The Institute for Education Futures (IEF) will place De Montfort University at the heart of a global pedagogic and educational network engaged in the dynamic interrelationships between educational processes and societies. The IEF will be a bridge between education sectors and types of provider. It will catalyse policy-into-practice, so DMU can address crucial questions about educational futures and become world-leading in this field.

Objectives

The objectives of the IEF are as follows.

  • To act as a bridge between REF and TEF activities.
  • To act as a bridge between different sectors of formal and informal educational practice.
  • To build a REF202X Education Studies submission.
  • To establish a distinctive scholarship culture, in order to inform DMU’s engagement with the TEF, and the delivery of the University Learning Teaching and Assessment Strategy, including support for individual pedagogic projects.
  • To widen and deepen DMU’s educational and pedagogic research culture, including support for early-career researchers and for career-progression, and through publication and public dissemination
  • To create one unified research unit, combining and amplifying research in the Learning Futures Institute, the Centre for Pedagogic Research, and the Education Research Group.

Postscript

The view from my new office is quite nice, if you ignore the car park (unless you like car parks).


Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Working with 20 co-authors, Joss Winn and I have just submitted the manuscript for Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education. The edited collection forms part of Bloomsbury Academic’s series on Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education. Assuming that the review process goes to plan, the book is slated for publication in early 2017.

The original summary, description and key features of the book are noted below. The proposed table of contents is appended thereafter.

Summary

Drawing on the activism of academics and students working in, against and beyond the neo-liberal university, this book critiques academic leadership through the concept of mass intellectuality, with an analysis of the crisis of higher education and the alternative forms that are emerging from its ruins.

Description

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

This book brings together critical analyses of ‘intellectual leadership’ in the University, and documents on-going efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organising higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect critically on efforts to create really existing alternatives. In the process the volume asks is it possible to re-imagine the University democratically and co-operatively? If so, what are the implications for leadership not just within the University but also in terms of higher education’s relationship to society?

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

Key features

  1. The book critiques the role of higher education and the University as an institution for developing solutions to global crises that are economic and socio-environmental. In this way it offers an analysis of the idea that there is no alternative for higher education but to contribute to neoliberal agendas for economic growth and the marketisation of everyday life. The restrictions on the socio-cultural leadership that emerge inside the University are revealed.
  2. The book describes and analyses concrete, alternative forms of higher education that have emerged from worker-student occupations, from academic engagements in civil society, and from the co-operatives movement. These projects highlight a set of co-operative possibilities for demonstrating and negotiating new forms of political leadership related to higher learning that are against the neo-liberal university.
  3. The book argues that the emergence of alternative forms of higher education, based on co-operative organising principles, points both to the failure of intellectual leadership inside the University and to the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge. The concept of ‘Mass Intellectuality’ as a form of social knowledge that is beyond the limitations of intellectual leadership inside the University is critically developed in order to frame socially-useful responses to the crisis.

Contents

Introduction

  1. Mass Intellectuality and Democratic Leadership in Higher Education ~ Richard Hall and Joss Winn

Section One: Power, History and Authority

  1. Pedagogical Labour in an Age of Devalued Reproduction ~ Stevphen Shukaitis
  2. Co-operation, leadership and learning: Fred Hall and the Co-operative College before 1939 ~ Tom Woodin
  3. Academic Voices: from Public Intellectuals to the General Intellect ~ Mike Neary
  4. Openness, Politics and Power ~ Martin Paul Eve

Section Two: Potentialities

  1. The (im)possibility of Mass Intellectuality: Viewing Mass Intellectuality through the lens of the Brazilian Landless Movement ~ Joyce E Canaan
  2. Still spaces in the academy? The dialectic of university social movement pedagogy ~ Eurig Scandrett
  3. Bradford’s Community University: From ‘Constellations of Knowledge’ to Liberating the ‘General Intellect’? ~ Jenny Pearce
  4. Aesthetic Education, Critical Pedagogy and Specialist Institutions ~ Jonathan Owen Clark and Louise H. Jackson

Section Three: Praxis

  1. Six Theses In, Against and Beyond the University ~ Birmingham Autonomous University
  2. Reconciling mass intellectuality and higher education: lessons from the PPE experience ~ Joel Lazarus
  3. Somewhere Between Reform and Revolution: Alternative Higher Education and ‘The Unfinished’ ~ Gary Saunders
  4. Permaculture education as ecology of mind: the head, hands and heart of transformation ~ Tom Henfrey
  5. Mass Intellectuality from the Margins ~ Sara C. Motta

Conclusion: Politics, Aesthetics and Democracy

  1. Practicing What We Preach? Writing and Publishing In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University ~ Gordon Asher

notes on leaving: vulnerability; directional demands; possibility


Posted by hallymk1

On vulnerability

The HE systems of developing countries become more vulnerable to dominance from abroad, while the hybrid nature of the HE systems in most developed countries means that the protection offered by the GATS exemption of ‘services supplied in the exercise of government authority’ has little value in practice…

Finally, it is clear that the outcomes of the TTIP and TiSA negotiations will be heavily influenced, on the European side, by the complexions of the new Parliament, the new Commission, by the identity of the new presidents of Council and Commission and of the new head of external relations. These factors introduce further unpredictability into an already complex situation.

European Universities Association. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). EUA, Background Paper, January 2014.

Best case scenario? There’s continuity of the ministerial responsibilities in BIS and the Bill receives parliamentary scrutiny which shapes it into a better piece of legislation. Worst case? The whole thing is shelved and the sector is faced with with the omnishambles of the short-term Brexit fall-out in addition to the disappearing prospect of overdue legislation for the the advancement of the sector.

Ant Bagshaw, Is the Higher Education and Research Bill dead?

It is not one ideology about the world and Britain’s place in it against another, it has become the old versus the young, the rich versus the poor, the university graduate against the labourer. Dangerous stuff.

David Kernohan, FOTA BREXIT nonsense update 2

This isn’t just a debate where the university sector has a partial opinion from the outside, making contributions about why Brexit would be bad for the finer details of research policy and universities’ business plans. Higher education, or lack of it, is at the heart of what this debate means for our country. Higher education is the core constituency of one of the sides of this divide, and lack of higher education is a central characteristic of the opposing side. Both sides reflect completely different Britains, and the referendum campaign has shown how little they understand each other…

The most overwhelming Leave constituencies are a social milieu that is remote, both literally and figuratively, from higher education: Clacton, Merthyr Tydfil, Boston and Skegness, Easington (County Durham), Barnsley East, Great Yarmouth, Great Grimsby, Walsall North, Stoke-on-Trent North, Rhondda, Blaenau Gwent, Kingston-Upon-Hull East, and Bolsover. Class, education and geography dominate above all else, far more so than the policy debates about the economy and immigration.

David Morris, Experts ignored – time for reflection

On directional demands

This is clearly not the result that many young people wanted or voted for, but most important now is to ensure that students and young people are involved in the decisions that have to be made that will shape their future. We have urgent questions about how the vote to leave will affect students, particularly EU students in the UK and UK students studying in the EU, and call on the government to offer clear assurances to them about their situation.

Megan Dunn, NUS President writes letter to PM

I can feel a sense of shock and dismay among many colleagues today. The ultimate antidote is to be found in the young people you work with. We face a different future: how will you help them prepare for it? How will you help them do better than we did?

Russell Hobby, Brexit will lead to delay in policy – but frustrations should be channeled into positive action

Only a rupture with the institutions of austerity will create the space necessary for the development of a People’s Europe. We need a new union that gives people’s rights primacy over and above the interests of transnational capital, and that defends the free movement of migrants not just within Europe but also from outside it.

John Hillary, War on Want.

Those who want to avoid conservative outcomes must fight for an alternative. That means formulating policy platforms with wide appeal that reconnect with disaffected citizens. It means arguing for ideas and mobilising people to achieve one’s ends, rather than relying on undemocratic institutions to work against the people’s stated preferences. These are the basic functions of a political party. If the Labour Party cannot do these things, it deserves to lose. If it cannot reverse its decline from a popular force into an electoral machine for elite politics, it deserves to crumble into irrelevance so that something better can be born.

Lee Jones, The EU Referendum: Brexit, the Politics of Scale and State Transformation

On possibility

In effect, Podemos’ electoral programs in the various elections – European, municipal, regional and now general elections – set out to give political expression to their myriad demands present in the documents of the hundreds of ‘platforms’ that formed the backbone of Marea Verde. Significantly, within the parameters of the broad consensus provided by the ‘platforms’, education emerged as a fundamental right, rather than simply training, emphasizing its social role in reducing inequalities and as a key instrument for the construction of a more just and cohesive society.

This vision for education that forms the basis of the educational model that Podemos proposes today is openly opposed to the ruinous policies of privatization in education that began in Europe in the 1980s.

It strongly opposes these practices with a keen awareness that the future fabric of our society fundamentally rests on today’s model of education. Faced with the rise of selfish individualism, the depletion of social resources and rights, and the social polarization of a mercantilist and competitive model of schooling, Podemos proposes a model promoting inclusion, diversity, collaboration and openness to the community as fundamental to its success

Cecilia Salazar-Alonso, Podemos on education: the education ‘we can’ have

nationalist resentment is not the only story. Many working class people reject racism – especially in London. The people of Spain and Greece show that a politics of hope is possible in their struggles against austerity, despite the awful conditions they face. Like it or not, the struggle ahead will be over the meaning of Brexit. This is a huge challenge for people who believe in solidarity, open borders, love the diversity immigration brings and reject the delusion that stopping immigration will mean more jobs for “British workers”. At its height in the early 2000s, the anti-globalisation movement rallied around the slogan “another world is possible”. Our common challenge is to find a way of making it happen.

Jonathan Davies, The Coming Fight Over Brexit

The Other Education began in the hearts and thoughts of our communities, where we spoke out to demand education. We decided to create this new, autonomous education so that we can teach and learn in our own language, with our own culture and traditions

Zapatista Education Promotor, Mayan Schools of Dignity

You’ve had a few hours to mourn. Are you going to let the right wing take this as their own or create your own grass roots movements.

Lisa Mckenzie

Our response has begun. The launch of the Alternative White Paper in Parliament on 13 June must mark the beginning of a big movement to restate the argument for Public Higher Education and to build the kind of opposition that will be necessary to defeat the HE Bill. The Parliamentary launch saw the Labour and Liberal Democrat spokespeople for Higher Education speak against the Bill and for the vision espoused in the Alternative White Paper: for Higher Education worthy of the name, understood as a public good, and accessible to all who can benefit.

HE Convention Steering Committee


Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

With Keith Smyth I have a new article out in a special edition of the Open Library of Humanities journal on The Abolition of the University. Our article is titled: Dismantling the Curriculum in Higher Education.

Abstract

The higher education curriculum in the global North is increasingly co-opted for the production of measurable outcomes, framed by determinist narratives of employability and enterprise. Such co-option is immanent to processes of financialisation and marketisation, which encourage the production of quantifiable curriculum activities and tradable academic services. Yet the university is also affected by global socio-economic and socio-environmental crises, which can be expressed as a function of a broader crisis of social reproduction or sociability. As the labour of academics and students is increasingly driven by a commodity-valuation rooted in the measurement of performance, the ability for academics and students to respond to crises from inside the university is constrained by the market. This article argues that in understanding the relationship between the university and society, and in responding to a crisis of sociability, revealing the bounded nature of the curriculum is central. One possible way to address this crisis is by re-imagining the university through the co-operative practices of groups like the Dismantling the Masters House community and the Social Science Centre. Such an exploration, rooted in the organising principles of the curriculum, asks educators to consider how their curriculum reproduces an on-going colonisation by Capital. It is argued that such work enables a re-imagination of higher education that is rooted in a co-operative curriculum, and which might enable activist-educators to build an engaged curriculum, through which students and academics no longer simply learn to internalise, monitor and manage their own alienation.

Keywords: community; curriculum; praxis; sociability; university


New article: technology, co-operative practice and the neoliberal university


Posted by hallymk1

I have a new article out in Interactive Learning Environments. It is based on some work I was involved in with in 2013 with Helen Beetham, Debbie Holley and John Traxler, including a panel at ALT-C on global crises and responses, and an Alpine Rendez-Vous. My article has the following, snappy title: Technology-enhanced learning and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university.

The article is available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10494820.2015.1128214

There is an eprint here: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/QPWM8ZPsjxtVP4dJKqZP/full

Abstract

Neoliberalism is a global pedagogical project aimed at the dispossession of free time so that all of life becomes productive, and education is a central institutional means for its realisation. This project aims at marketising all of social life, so that life becomes predicated upon the extraction of value. In part the deployment of technologies, technical services, and techniques enables education to be co-opted as an institutional means for production and control. This occurs inside both formal and informal educational institutions and spaces, like universities and Massive Open On-line Courses, as one mechanism to offset the tendency for the rate of profit to fall and to re-establish accumulation. This pedagogic project also tends to recalibrate and enclose the roles of staff and students as entrepreneurial subjects, whose labour is enabled through technology. This is achieved through learning analytics, big data, mobility and flexibility of provision, and so on. At issue is the extent to which this neoliberal project can be resisted or refused, and alternatives described. This article will analyse the relationships between technology, pedagogy, and the critical subject in the neoliberal University, in order to argue for the use of technology inside a co-operative pedagogy of struggle. This demands that we ask what education is, before we ask what it is for, or the place of technology-enhanced learning in the university. The article considers whether it is possible to uncover ways in which education might be used for co-operation rather than competition, and what technology-enhanced co-operative education might look like?

 


notes on metricide


Posted by hallymk1

I read these pieces as I listened to The Smiths, Strangeways Here We Come.

it seems that the panopticon is about to be extended across the whole academic hierarchy with the introduction of ‘faculty dashboards’. These are tools which allow data on each academic to be collated into an individual profile showing publications, citations, research grants and awards won. It can be updated daily by the head of department, dean or vice-chancellor. Norms can be established, and of course, extended year-on-year. They may be changed, according to strategic priorities beyond the control, or indeed the value set, of academics.

Morrish, L. 2015. The disciplinary dashboard: from reception class to retirement

Academic Analytics’ unique “flower chart” affords the viewer a visualization of the overall productivity of the faculty within a given academic discipline. Variables on different scales (per capita, per grant dollar, per publication, etc.) and measuring different areas of scholarly productivity can be viewed simultaneously on a single comparative scale based on national benchmarks for the discipline. This powerful graphic facilitates rapid identification of the strongest and weakest areas in a given academic discipline on your campus.

Academic Analytics: Benchmarking for academic excellence

Considering research more specifically, Hazelkorn notes a number of implications arising from the use of league tables, performance indicators and quantitative measures. The central problem identified here is that academic quality is a complex notion that cannot easily be reduced to quantification – the use of proxy variables runs the risk of misrepresenting the qualities of research contributions and may lead to unintended consequences. She contests that there is considerable difficulty obtaining meaningful indicators and comparative data (nationally and internationally), and that the adoption of rankings serves to embed a metrics culture and to down-weight features of research or teaching quality that cannot easily be captured with numbers. This is a perspective echoed by the European Commission’s expert group on research assessment: “Unintended consequences can occur when indicators are taken in isolation and simple correlations are made. This may include overconcentrating on research, favouring particular disciplines of allocating resources and realigning priorities to match indicators.

Further, the use of such indicators is felt by many to risk reinforcing a hierarchical system of institutions that may lead to simplistic comparisons. Such comparisons are hard to justify when aggregate scores show statistically insignificant differences – indeed, an over-emphasis on a small set of indicators risks encouraging perverse behaviour within and across institutions. Comparisons between institutions may lead to an unhelpful focus on the ‘top’ universities worldwide and foster a narrow definition of excellence; such a focus is not likely to be relevant to the institutional goals of universities, where the balance of research and teaching, the geographical focus and disciplinary distinctiveness may vary considerably.

Wilsdon, J., et al. 2015. The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management, pp. 75-6. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363

in any situation where decisions are being made using metric data, how a subject discipline performs in relation to that data will be a critical issue for its potential fate. On the one hand, subject disciplines evolve according to an ‘inner logic’ relating to an audience of subject specialists, but they also develop as an adaptation to external audiences, including policy-makers, etc, some of which are keen to shape universities in the light of metric data.

… at the cutting edge of neo-liberal public policy, universities are no longer being subject to governance by market proxies, they are being marketised directly and metric data is part of the process by which the market in higher education is brought into being.

… Where [] discursive knowledge is aligned with the understandings of elite publics, no particular problem of credibility arises. However, where a discipline has an aspiration to engage with less powerfully placed publics, then a different issue of credibility arises, precisely that of our credibility because we represent a challenge to the certainties of neo-liberal orthodoxies and are witnesses to the consequences of the widening social inequalities with which they are associated.

Holmwood, J. 2013. Death by Metrics. Global Dialogue: Newsletter for the International Sociological Association.

You know you’re in trouble when the discourse turns to ‘journeys’ and ‘destinations’, but it gets worse. Although the government’s Education Evaluation fact sheet constitutes a total failure of logic, it displays a discursive masterstroke, with a chaining of ‘learning outcomes’, ‘performance data’, ‘accountability’, ‘interventions’, and then serving the whole salad up as a solution to ‘social mobility’. And [this] re-designates universities as mere factories for the production of labour inputs…

Morrish, L. 2015. It’s Metricide: Don’t Do It.

The excellence intensification of academic labour is shaped by three aspects (p. 32): teaching quality (TEF); learning environment [which demands that universities open themselves up to part-privatisation for the service redesign and workforce efficiencies of the Treasury’s Productivity Plan]; and student outcomes and learning gain [data]. This is Holmwood’s Academia as big data project amplified by human capital intensity, alongside the incorporation of ‘new common metrics on engagement with study (including teaching intensity) and learning gain, once they are sufficiently robust and available on a comparable basis’. This is not just the excellence intensity of work, but the intensity of motivation to work. It is also the shaming of those who do not enhance ‘Student commitment to learning – including appropriate pedagogical approaches’, or ‘Teaching intensity – measures might include time spent studying, as measured in the UK Engagement Surveys, proportion of total staff time spent on teaching’ (p. 32).

It is important students have information about the composition of the course, including contact hours, to help them make informed choices about the course they choose to study. The [Competition and Markets Authority] identified this as being material information likely to be required by the Consumer Protection Regulations, and as part of the payment, service delivery and performance information required to be provided pre-contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations. (p. 32)

In order to avoid metricide, or the inability to financialise positive outputs/outcomes because of poor data, competition will compel universities to drive down on staff working conditions, including new workload arrangements and increased surveillance of teaching, research and administration. As Andrew McGettigan has noted ‘if you work in HE, then pay bargaining is going to be a dismal business for the foreseeable.’

We are therefore pushed towards the acceptance of further state-sponsored privatisation of HE. This is not re-imagining the university through learning, teaching or pedagogy, but an unmaking of the university in the name of service redesign, workforce restructuring/efficiency and global, high-tech enterprise. This is HE deterritorialised for productivity, so that only those [academics, students, institutions] ‘that innovate and present a more compelling value proposition to students will be able to increase their share’ (p. 54). As a result what emerges from the Green Paper is an assault on collective work: the collective work of students unions; and of the collective work of students and staff as academic labour. Instead we are forced into asymmetrical relationship to the reality of our fetishized and rugged individualism in the market.

Hall, R. 2015. Against teaching intensity.


against teaching intensity


Posted by hallymk1

My reading of the Higher Education Green paper sits alongside that of the Universities and Colleges Union, with its highlighting of the critical absence of staff inside education policy. My reading emerges against the UK Treasury’s Productivity Plan, Fixing the foundations: Creating a more prosperous nation, which stresses the important of human capital intensity. This is a key theme that underpins the Green Paper, and is a central site of potential refusal by academics and students, with pedagogic engagement as a point of departure. My reading is then situated through recent work on social reproduction and the crisis of sociability that is enforced through the hegemony of marketization and financialisation, and which is realised as exploited and alienated academic labour.

Whilst the sector has been used as a means to enforce primitive accumulation, for instance in international markets, it is also being structurally adjusted through the processes of real subsumption. There are vanguards of academics and students who have already experienced and refused these processes and to whom we might listen in becoming our own moments of refusal. In the process we might refuse to compromise with the Government in its measurement and monitoring of academic labour and in its reduction of teaching to ideas of excellence intensity that quantify the classroom. This is a reframing of the Green Paper in the broader, social context of refusal.

ONE. A note on productivity and the loss of time

Marx saw important interrelationships between the production of surplus-value and the length of the working day, the intensity of labour, and productivity (the productiveness of labour).

[W]e have seen that the relative magnitudes of surplus-value and of price of labour-power are determined by three circumstances; (1) the length of the working-day, or the extensive magnitude of labour; (2) the normal intensity of labour, its intensive magnitude, whereby a given quantity of labour is expended in a given time; (3) the productiveness of labour, whereby the same quantum of labour yields, in a given time, a greater or less quantum of product, dependent on the degree of development in the conditions of production.

Here the management and intensity of work-time and free-time become a key terrain of struggle between Capital and Labour. However, the struggle is itself re-shaped by both competition and the stimulation of new, tradable needs and desires, which push the forces of production and the relations of production into tension. This underscores the tensions that emerge from Marx’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy’:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or — this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms — with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.

In Capital, Marx described these tensions in terms of: first, ‘enforcing economy in each individual business’; and second

by its anarchical system of competition, the most outrageous squandering of labour-power and of the social means of production, not to mention the creation of a vast number of employments, at present indispensable, but in themselves superfluous.

Much of our toil is superfluous to the purpose of meeting our basic needs. Instead we are compelled to generate an ever-expanding range of services or products, and to chase them into new terrains or markets. As wasteful is the realisation that we aim to become more productive in the hope that we will have more free time, and yet the system colonises and co-opts that free time, and enforces yet more productivity. We are subjected to increasing levels of excellence intensity of labour across our working lives. And this intensity of labour underscores the desperate search for surplus-value and its materialisation as profit. As a result, Marx argued that we witness how

In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour time.

TWO. The Treasury, human capital and productivity

HM Treasury of the UK Government have attempted to re-frame the struggle between the material, productive forces of society and the existing relations of production, through its productivity plan: Fixing the foundations: Creating a more prosperous nation. The Plan centres productivity and intensified work on an ideological terrain that situates our means of reproducing society or our social relationships, solely through work. All of life is our duty to capitalist work.

Productivity is the challenge of our time. It is what makes nations stronger, and families richer.

The drivers of productivity are well understood: a dynamic, open enterprising economy supported by long-term public and private investment in infrastructure, skills and science. A nation flourishes when it uses the full skills of all its people in all parts of that nation. (p. 1)

The Productivity Plan is central to an analysis of the HE Green Paper, which situates higher learning through human capital theory. This is a critical insight flowing from Andrew McGettigan’s work on The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment, which sees ‘undergraduate study as a stratified, unequal, positional good dominating future opportunities and outcomes.’ Thus, the Treasury argue (p. 8) that

Our excellent university sector cannot be kept competitive, and open to all who can benefit, unless we make hard choices about funding.

These hard choices are foregrounded here as the Teaching Excellence Framework [TEF] ‘to sharpen incentives for providing an outstanding education to students’, and also increased competition from new entrants to the HE market to ‘deliver better value for money’.

Investment is an essential part of raising productivity. In today’s economy that is not simply a matter of increasing the stock of machines, equipment and essential physical infrastructure but also, crucially, the development of human and intellectual capital. (p. 15)

The TEF is therefore a critical moment of real subsumption that intensifies academic activities, in terms of how the curriculum is structured and delivered, and how it is monitored. The TEF ‘will inform student decision-making, continue to support a high average wage premium for graduates and ensure that students’ hard-won qualifications keep their value over time’ (p. 28). Thus, as John Holmwood argues for the Green Paper, we might note that the Plan ‘represents the familiar neo-liberal package of de-regulation via markets together with strong central direction’, which reinvents work/Academia itself ‘increasingly [as] a ‘Big Data’ project’. In the case of Academia the contexts for this project are now both teaching and research.

In terms of readjusting the relations of production, the Plan hollows out a space to be governed by a modern competition toolkit and the active choices of consumers.

Competitive markets are fundamental to fostering productivity growth. They compel firms to be more efficient and innovative, allow new businesses to enter markets and ensure that the best firms grow (p. 59).

During the last Parliament, the government created the independent Competition and Markets Authority [CMA], bringing existing competition authorities into a more streamlined body and modernising the competition toolkit. The government’s role is to ensure that the regime continues to be amongst the best in the world… to ensure that consumer enforcement capability effectively supports competition and better regulation objectives (p. 60).

The disruption of cultural norms that have been negotiated over time is central to this approach. The Plan’s digital-determinism (and the re-focusing on Digital Transformation) sits at the centre of a desire to break-up unproductive positions and to forge industry transformation. In part this is by breaking established labour relations. In part it is situated through transnational engagements between service providers like universities, and service innovators like communications and infrastructure corporations, or financiers like venture capitalists. These new transnational associations, pivoting around enterprise are ‘driving productivity by ensuring that firms continually strive to improve their efficiency and better meet customers’ needs’ (p. 61). The transnational imperatives of such innovations are central to the Plan’s proposals for exports and international markets, but also to ‘further trade liberalisation’, including The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) (p. 67).

Yet, as Holmwood notes for the HE Green Paper, it elides enterprise, active consumption and growth, whilst ignoring the structuring realities of an economy rooted in precarious employment and debt:

All values are reduced to economic values, but in place of a promise to re-balance the economy, the economy is increasingly directed toward short-term profits and financialisation. Economic inequalities widen, the proportion of ‘graduate jobs’ declines, and the claim that this can help increase social mobility is increasingly hollow.

However, the Treasury view situates these entrepreneurial processes of financialisation and marketization inside the drive for public sector productivity rooted in the needs of employers. Moreover, it ties efficiencies to issues of labour intensity that are shaped by Single Departmental Plans, ‘which will identify key priorities for every department, and will act as a vehicle to link inputs to outputs’ (p. 75). The Plan notes that November’s Spending Review will focus attention on: service redesign and value-for-money; restructuring organisation and workforce; and prioritising technology and data. In part this is a response to a perception of poor decisions ‘about resource allocation across the economy, preventing capital and labour from finding their most productive uses and weighing on productivity growth’ (p. 76). However, it is also a response to ‘the relatively low cost of labour since the crisis [that] may have led firms to substitute away from investment, reducing the effective amount of capital workers can use and thus reducing productivity’ (p. 76).

The Plan places universities squarely in the frontline of this restructuring around service redesign, workforce, and technology/data. Here the key is productivity that emerges from a freeing up of the market, so that capital and labour can flow between sectors or across sectors, and so that new associations of capitals or businesses emerge. Here service redesign is a function of HE providers working in partnership with hedge funds, publishers, technology corporations, and so on, so that capital can be reallocated. Productivity also emerges from efficiencies that emerge inside and across existing providers, whereby human capital might be reallocated. Critically, for the health of the economy as a whole, the Plan supports

disruptive innovators and ensures competitive pressure on the tail of low productivity firms. This requires an open economy with flexible and competitive markets, where expanding firms can access the labour, land and finance they need (p. 81).

Open intensity. A productive life. Life as work. The new normal.

THREE. Teaching Excellence Intensity

HM Government’s Green Paper, Fulfilling our Potential: Teaching Excellence, Social Mobility and Student Choice, looks to enact the Productivity Plan inside English HE, and roots its proposals as the denial of a history of work on teaching quality and quality enhancement. It collapses the contexts of struggles over: teaching and pedagogy; existing educational inputs and outputs; the idea that students are purchasers, consumers and/or producers; and determinants of value for money that are held by families as purchasers, taxpayers as underwriters, and employers as innovators. These contexts are collapsed onto one ideological terrain that seeks to delegitimise alternative conceptualisations of HE.

The HE Green paper amplifies the roll-out (c.f Stephen Ball) of a specific neoliberal agenda, which has a long ideological lineage, through which the terrain for the marketization of everyday life was prepared. In English HE this is witnessed in the recent history of: the move of universities and HE into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills; the raising of fees under New Labour; the Browne Review; the ramping-up of fees, and the HE White Paper under the Coalition. These moments normalised the idea of mass HE rooted in active consumer choice and open data, career-ready human capital, and global competition (p. 10). Thus, these moments prepare Academia for short-term productivity fixes that are rooted in bureaucracy, and which demand that students and academics surveil and monitor themselves, in the name of:

the development of a positive work ethic, so that they can contribute more effectively to our efforts to boost the productivity of the UK economy (p. 11).

This is a productivity that is shaped by:

(1) the length of the [academic] working-day, or the extensive magnitude of [academic] labour; (2) the normal intensity of [academic] labour, its intensive magnitude, whereby a given quantity of [academic] labour is expended in a given time; (3) the productiveness of [academic] labour, whereby the same quantum of [academic] labour yields, in a given time, a greater or less quantum of product, dependent on the degree of development in the conditions of [academic] production.

In order to develop the forces of academic production, active consumer choice is central, and this emerges against data about ‘Course quality, teaching intensity and contact hours’ (p. 11). Entrepreneurial intensity is central to this prescription for academic productivity. UCU’s response presents a counter-narrative that teaching is an inclusive, collegial endeavour, and that is enriched through peer-review, and which depends upon the labour conditions of both teachers and students.

Everyone recognises the need for high quality teaching, but unless government places staff at the centre of the process and addresses underlying issues like casualisation, low status of teaching, lack of career progression and lack of funding, the green paper is unlikely to achieve its stated objectives

This focus on the Green paper as an attack on labour rights and conditions of work, designed to drive service redesign and workforce efficiencies, questions whether, as David Kernohan notes, ‘the TEF can become a [] vehicle for a community of interest based around a common idea’, without being centred around academic labour struggles. In particular, this is because academic labour and teaching intensity are rooted in attempts to de-professionalise HE. As UCU note, any TEF will be transplanted onto a fractured terrain.

Temporary contract working is endemic across UK higher education, with 69,000 (43%) out of a total of 161,000 contracted academic staff on non-permanent contracts. Among 40,000 teaching only staff, 29,435 (73%) have non-permanent contracts. These figures do not include the 75,000 so called ‘atypical’ academic staff who are also largely engaged in teaching but who are usually employed only on an as and when basis and have little access to CPD, career development or other scholarship opportunities

These data about teaching excellence intensity might enable conversations about: the precarious, indentured reality of English HE; how tuition fees are spent (p. 12), which discusses the labour costs of the work of students as well as staff, and then re-opens debates about wages for schoolwork; HE as exchange-value and tradable asset, rather than publically- or socially-useful value; changes to behaviour that are grounded in interpretations of projections about future earnings, which are themselves historically-hedged; changes that emerge from inside pedagogic relationships and through the curriculum; and a desire to limit higher learning to data and value-for-money:

The TEF will increase students’ understanding of what they are getting for their money and improve the value they derive from their investment, protecting the interest of the taxpayer who supports the system through provision of student loans. It should also provide better signalling for employers as to which providers they can trust to produce highly skilled graduates. (pp. 12-13)

This is the proposed structural adjustment of HE to meet the needs of the Treasury’s Productivity Plan.

Information about the quality of teaching is also vital to UK productivity. In an increasingly globalised world, the highest returns go to the individuals and economies with the highest skills. However, the absence of information about the quality of courses, subjects covered and skills gained makes it difficult for employers to identify and recruit graduates with the right level of skills and harder for providers to know how to develop and improve their courses. (p. 19)

TEF should also prove a good deal for employers and the taxpayer. The aim is to improve the teaching that students receive, which in turn should increase their productivity and help them secure better jobs and careers. It should enable employers to make more informed choices about the graduates they recruit… With higher returns, more graduates will be able to pay back more of their loans, reducing the amount that needs to be subsidised by the taxpayer in the longer term. This is on top of the benefits to taxpayers from having a stronger economy powered by a higher skilled workforce. (p. 21)

This is the excellence intensification of academic labour rooted in a restructuring of the relations of production through explicit connections to active consumer choice and a functioning competition and markets authority (p. 27), which can ensure that the HE terrain is opened-up for trade liberalisation and the TTIP. As Datta has argued, TTIP is pivotal because it protects access to the market for corporations operating across borders. Moreover, the UK Government has made no reservations to the application of these protections in education, and indeed the coupling of the Green Paper and the Productivity Plan to TTIP mean that ‘the experiment in the market operation of the higher education sector could potentially be irreversible’.

The last leaked draft of TTIP is expressed as applying to services which are performed commercially. In an education market which is characterised by a mixed economy of both privately and publicly funded, profit-making and non-profit making institutions, education services are likely to be treated as within the scope of the TTIP treaty.

The excellence intensification of academic labour is shaped by three aspects (p. 32): teaching quality (TEF); learning environment [which demands that universities open themselves up to part-privatisation for the service redesign and workforce efficiencies of the Productivity Plan]; and student outcomes and learning gain [data]. This is Holmwood’s Academia as big data project amplified by human capital intensity, alongside the incorporation of ‘new common metrics on engagement with study (including teaching intensity) and learning gain, once they are sufficiently robust and available on a comparable basis’. This is not just the excellence intensity of work, but the intensity of motivation to work. It is also the shaming of those who do not enhance ‘Student commitment to learning – including appropriate pedagogical approaches’, or ‘Teaching intensity – measures might include time spent studying, as measured in the UK Engagement Surveys, proportion of total staff time spent on teaching’ (p. 32).

It is important students have information about the composition of the course, including contact hours, to help them make informed choices about the course they choose to study. The CMA identified this as being material information likely to be required by the Consumer Protection Regulations, and as part of the payment, service delivery and performance information required to be provided pre-contract under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations. (p. 32)

In order to avoid metricide, or the inability to financialise positive outputs/outcomes because of poor data, competition will compel universities to drive down on staff working conditions, including new workload arrangements and increased surveillance of teaching, research and administration. As Andrew McGettigan has noted ‘if you work in HE, then pay bargaining is going to be a dismal business for the foreseeable.’

We are therefore pushed towards the acceptance of further state-sponsored privatisation of HE. This is not re-imagining the university through learning, teaching or pedagogy, but an unmaking of the university in the name of service redesign, workforce restructuring/efficiency and global, high-tech enterprise. This is HE deterritorialised for productivity, so that only those [academics, students, institutions] ‘that innovate and present a more compelling value proposition to students will be able to increase their share’ (p. 54). As a result what emerges from the Green Paper is an assault on collective work: the collective work of students unions; and of the collective work of students and staff as academic labour. Instead we are forced into asymmetrical relationship to the reality of our fetishized and rugged individualism in the market. Here our pedagogic decisions and the relationships that flow from them are to be governed by the TTIP, the CMA and the proposed Office for Students.

FOUR. Value-for-money: there is no alternative.

This policy space is further constrained by money, and in particular cash-flow forecasts and the need to generate operating and investment surpluses. As noted by HEFCE in its Financial health of the higher education sector, 2014-15 to 2017-18 forecasts ‘relatively small changes in key assumptions can have a significant impact on an HEI’s ability to generate surpluses’ (p. 1). This shifting terrain of short-term signals being shaped by active consumer choice and competition is overlain onto a

trend of falling liquidity (cash) and increasing sector borrowing… The sector expects its liquid funds to fall from £7.7 billion as at 31 July 2014 to £5.0 billion as at 31 July 2018, equivalent to 67 days of expenditure; the lowest level reported since 31 July 2006. At the same time, the sector expects borrowing to increase from £6.7 billion at the end of July 2014 to £9.2 billion at the end of July 2018, by which time the sector would be in a net debt position of £4.1 billion. The trend of increasing borrowing and reducing liquidity is unsustainable in the long term. (p. 2)

Crucially, the Financial Health report notes that as ‘charities, HE institutions are obligated to ensure that they remain sustainable and do not expose themselves to undue risk. Strong liquidity is particularly important given the level of uncertainty and risk that currently exist in the sector’ (p. 2). Yet as McGettigan notes, the corporate forms of English universities and their relation to finance capital have been continually questioned.

In 2013, a government report on HE as an export suggested that universities should consider whether charitable status (and ‘objects’) had outlived its usefulness. [He quotes]

Although this [charitable status] model has many strengths, it does not lend itself to rapid growth. The governance structures and obligations of charities, or of bodies of similarly ancient pedigree established by Royal Charter or equivalent instruments, were not designed to grow rapidly, or to run a network across the world.

This trails the Green Paper’s questioning of the governance arrangements of universities so that they better reflect business needs (p. 68), and which then enable engagement with venture capital. This potentially connects to HEFCE’s argument that ‘forecasts assume that the capital markets continue to have confidence in the sector, which depends upon their risk assessments of the sector and individual HEIs’ (p. 3), and the Green paper’s focus on weak or low-quality providers exiting the market, in order that the sector can leverage confidence and finance. As McGettigan notes elsewhere, the real significance of the Green Paper may turn on the proposed changes to the corporate form and governance structures of universities, by enabling private and venture capital to establish associations or joint ventures. Through governance and corporate form, the relations of production across the sector are to be recalibrated, so that teaching excellence intensity can be normalised. Thus, HEFCE’s warning (p. 26) that ‘The reduction in cash balances, the increase in borrowings, and the increasing volatility of income streams point to an increase in finance risk’, folds pedagogic practices and the framing of teaching excellence inside a wider struggle over the financial viability of the sector and of academic labour.

FIVE. What is to be done?

Martin McQuillan asks:

is there any voice today that has the political credibility and intellectual capacity to offer an alternative vision for universities in England? Will one emerge from within the sector? University leaders should not be distracted by the shiny new bauble of achieving Level 4 TEF status. As custodians of our universities they need to think about what is best for higher education in England. Is it really the end of the post-war dispensation of public institutions and public service and the opening up of those institutions to global equity capital? There is a choice to be made here and it is a more profound one than our next mobile phone provider.

Responses from UniversitiesUK, and groups like Million+ and the Russell Group would suggest forms of compromise. Equally, the inability of groups like the Association of National Teaching Fellows to reconcile student work as a form of academic labour that might have points of solidarity with the work of academics, means that notionally professional groups are unable to confront the crisis of social reproduction that is the enclosure and marketization of HE. Moreover, as Kernohan and McQuillan note, the Green Paper either targets managers in the performance management of staff through the data-driven normalisation of practice, or it enforces structural adjustment inside institutions so that more students can be recruited and taught more efficiently. Hence we witness the abundance of technological innovations designed to reproduce the learning environment as a precursor for the restructuring that will be required in order to deliver learning gain. Here is the terrain over which collectivised teaching excellence will be lost to individuated teaching intensity.

The most meaningful questions emerge from the labour movement, from specific student groups, or from academic associations that attempt to make concrete the lived reality of Government reforms, for instance in terms of student debt or academic precarity.

Bringing in experts, we ask: what are income-contingent loans, who profits from your debt, how does the experience of having debt affect student wellbeing and life chances, and in what ways do fear of debt and the types of loans that are sold to students perpetuate inequalities? We also hear from activists on how debt can be resisted and how we can move from the idea of individual responsibility to collective action.

Students in debt

The document’s logic has “students” at the heart of the system. If and only if those students can afford to pay higher fees, study full-time, and what they want is what employers want.

Sorana Vieru

And in a terrain that is described fiscally, where money is the critical and universal reference point for academic value that is itself immanent to future earnings, it becomes difficult if not impossible to imagine, as Emran Mian argues, ‘that university teachers can choose how to influence these metrics positively, in dialogue with other subject specialists.’ The political economics are increasingly loaded against academic labour in its relationship with institutional managers who, as McQuillan argues elsewhere, are invoking a disciplinary framework designed to break collective bargaining and collective working arrangements. Moreover, even if, as Mian notes, ‘university teachers take the lead on talking and responding to their students – they’re much closer, if you like, to the critical market-moving information’, it is unclear how such depoliticised talking will trump the governing power of performance metrics that militate against the messy and complex realities of the delivery of the curriculum. It is particularly unclear how this will play-out in the face of the reproduction of an increasingly precariously employed, efficiency-scarred, technologized and redesigned academic labour force. As a result, such talking risks becoming a form of hedging against the quantified curriculum, rather than emerging over time through classroom relationships. In any case, those relationships will be increasingly and intensively squeezed by managers gaming the TEF.

SIX. On the crisis of academic sociability

There is increasing emphasis being placed on the global crisis of sociability that is Capital’s inability to re-establish stable forms of accumulation. This crisis is one of social reproduction that amplifies and exacerbates the worst excesses of the market.

  • It is witnessed through the frame of care-based work, which enables individuals to be reproduced or to get some of their physical needs met (childcare, housework, and so on), by outsourcing it to family members or employees, so that wage-earners can return to the market each day to sell their labour. This work of care is gendered and racialized.
  • It is witnessed through increasingly precarious employment, the assault on social security, State repression of marginalised groups, unaffordable rents, mental health crises, lack of access to basic amenities including water and healthcare, and disciplinary policing.
  • It is witnessed in the rise of companies purportedly involved in the sharing economy like Uber, AirBnB, TaskRabbit and Postmates, which enable a digital transformation of sectors of the economy whilst failing to provide any form of social security or employment rights.
  • It is witnessed in the inability of indebted individuals and States to lift externally-imposed capital controls, and in the profusion of anti-labour trades union legislation.
  • It is witnessed in the increasing failure of the curriculum across the globe to respond to its racialized nature, leading to academic struggles like #rhodesmustfall, #millionstudentmarch and #whyismycurriculumwhite. In large part these struggles are fuelled by the indignation of students of colour against the on-going colonial condition of the university as an export strategy for specific hegemonies.

This is the separation of workers from their means of subsistence or reproduction, or the increasingly precarious state of that separation, which legitimises particular voices, such as those promoting intensity/productivity/excellence. Keir Milburn argues that this ‘subordinates you to a timing and framing determined by someone else’s strategy’.

As Devi Sacchetto argues, this applies transnationally because ‘The geography of production is now organized in different areas depending on the kind of commodities that are produced and on the lead and sub-contracting firms’. Thus, it applies across HE because the university is being reconstituted as the producer of commodities rather than relationships and practices, in-part through changes to its corporate form and governance that usher in new joint ventures.

In response to the generalised (non-HE) crisis of sociability, there has been a call for the social strike, as a means of generating alternative political actions rooted in solidarity across social relationships. Such actions connect society and the factory through the critique of social conditions that tend to immiserate.

Overcoming the limits of present forms of organization means to cut across the artificial division between labour and social struggles, and to bring organization on a transnational level, coming to terms once for all with the fact that the national level of action is by now clearly insufficient to build an effective power. Labor and social struggles must find a common political ground of connection.

Final document from 1st Transnational Social Strike Meeting.

This is increasingly live because, as Alisa Del Re notes:

In Europe the reproduction of individuals is subject to a continuous fluctuation between “social” and “private.” The social is the space of direct manipulation, organized by laws, public expenditures, customs, and moral rules that crush the individual’s ability to desire. The private is coarsely idealized as the space of freedom, but in most cases it reveals itself as the dominion of neglect, misery, frustration, powerlessness, and loneliness.

It becomes important to ask how we might ‘organize vulnerability and turn it into political action’ on a scale large enough to enable new relations of social reproduction that respond less to the market and transnational prescriptions of what market freedom entails. Such a reimagining would focus upon a social reproduction that was rooted in equality between different human bodies, rather than being rooted in the equality of data flows. Such a reimagining has to find spaces inside the university, but increasingly it has to hear and propagate those alternatives that emerge beyond, in social centres or on the Commons, or in responses to austerity.

Thus, a critical response to the HE Green Paper is

making the new conditions visible, disrupting the circulation of capital and directly socialising, collectivising and communising our social relations, reproduction and struggles… Most obviously this involves striking (or otherwise acting) in ways that maximise feelings of collectivity and enhance general levels of sociability.

Keir Milburn

A social strike is a strike that occurs on multiple terrains and spaces. By this I mean it’s a strike that is not confined to one workplace, sector or locality. It’s not enacted by a single homogeneous subject but by a multitude of different subjects. It allows some fluidity in changing from one identity to another, say from worker to mother to student and back again. It isn’t defined by the singular identity of worker, a worker that is always a worker regardless of the multiple other demands from other ‘roles’. After all work is omnipresent, it continues long after we leave our official places of work, we work as producers but also we work on the other side of the relationship, as consumers, as clients and service providers. The social strike offers the possibility of building up relationships of solidarity, communication, knowledge, and shared culture, and in doing so recognising their importance in twenty-first century class formation. To be able to strike today means we cannot strike on only one terrain. To disrupt the flow of capital  we need to block all of its avenues – both metaphorically and literally.

Alex Long

Thus, working to situate the restructuring of HE against other social strikes and directional demands, forms one means of pushing-back against the ideas of teaching excellence intensification and of staff/students reduced to human capital. Such moments of solidarity are intentionally counter-hegemonic and would highlight how so much of social [academic] reproduction is predicated on voluntary, unwaged labour, such as that enacted in the home or by students, or by precariously employed labour. Such moments of solidarity would be rooted in specific, social and directional demands grounded potentially in the liberation of free time beyond teaching or study intensity, or in the idea of debt-free education, or in a re-focusing of education on collective well-being, or in harnessing education to global emergencies like climate change. They would need to connect, in Bue Rübner Hansen’s terms, academics and students to ‘[a] constitutive heterogeneity of the exploited and expropriated populations of the world’, which recognises ‘the self-organization and composition of differences and particularly of different strategies of life and survival.’

In these terms, common struggle is critical in refusing the precepts of the Green Paper. Such common struggled would join with those who are calling for refusal of TTIP, beyond education and in terms of other social goods like healthcare. It would connect intergenerational refusals of debt and indenture, which are shackling families with debt so that they become competitive rather than co-operative. It would connect with others who are precariously employed, in order to work-up moments of refusal and negation, and to demonstrate alternatives. Critically, Hansen notes, this is predicated upon collective work.

the practical task of class composition – which is necessary for posing the problem of the abolition of the proletarian condition concretely instead of remaining stuck in mutual competition and abstract hope – consists in developing collective strategies of life and survival which either combine, supplement or make superfluous individualized forms of reproduction.

Here academics and students have a central role because

theory, considered as a part of such movements, is the active effort to disseminate strategies of combination and struggle, and of elaborating commons and transversal points of connection between different struggles. Taking seriously the fact that resistances and networks of solidarity preexist irruptions of open struggle means to go beyond the faith in spontaneity. This entails an ethics of militant, embedded research, knowledge production, and popular pedagogy, which proceeds through practices of collectively mapping of the possibilities of composition, and reflections on how to connect and extend networks of trust and solidarity. It implies sharing tools of organizing and tactics of struggle, taking measure of the rumors and whispers, and engaging in small struggles in ways that can help them transform fear and mistrust into courage and solidarity.

As Marx argued in the Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council of the First International, this implies aiding ‘every social and political movement tending in that [same] direction’.

It is impossible to reconcile the central conditions of the Green Paper and the Productivity Plan to non-marketised/financialised pedagogic relationships. This is the prescribed direction of travel that frames the classroom economically though relations of production that subjugate people, as human capital that can be made productive through discipline.

Discipline is basically the mechanism of power by which we come to exert control in the social body right down to the finest elements, by which we succeed in grabbing hold of the social atoms themselves, which is to say individuals. Techniques for the individualization of power. How to supervise [surveiller] someone, how to control his conduct, his behavior, his aptitudes, how to intensify his performance, multiply his capacities, how to put him in a place where he will be most useful: this is what I mean by discipline.

Michel Foucault, “The Mesh of Power.”

Revealing the increased disciplining of social reproduction reveals the crisis of sociability that infects HE, and yet it also offers directions for alternatives. At issue is how to connect opposition to teaching intensity and learning gain, to rent strikes and labour relations/rights inside the University (including those of students), alongside the fight for living wages and pension rights for professional services staff, and then beyond to the complex and heterogeneous global struggles for liberation. This means that ‘a lot of things need to be changed on the ground in order for a massive economic and political transformation to be possible’ (Steven Shaviro). But we have to begin somewhere.


The University and the Secular Crisis


Posted by hallymk1

I’ve had an article published in the Open Library of Humanities, based on my inaugural lecture. If you want to revisit those fun-times, you can do so here.

The article is also on “The University and the Secular Crisis”, and it can be accessed here. The abstract is as follows.

The economic crisis of 2008 was followed by a persistent recession, with low levels of growth, weak aggregate demand, and high levels of underemployment or unemployment. For several recent authors this forced an engagement with the idea that the global economy is witnessing a secular stagnation or crisis. This article is situated against the changing landscape of English HE and seeks to understand the implications of the secular crisis on that sector, and on the idea of the University. It examines how responses to the secular crisis have amplified the twin forces of marketization and financialisation that are reconstituting the higher education sector for the production, circulation and accumulation of value. It then places this analysis inside the political economic realities of there is no alternative to the logic of choice and competition. The argument is then made that as this cultural turn affects the idea of what the University is for, both historically and materially, academics and students need to consider the potential for developing post-capitalist alternatives. The central point is that by developing a critique of the restructuring of higher education and of the idea of the University through political economy, alternative forms of knowing and developing socially-useful practices can emerge.


‘Quality Assessment’ and Completing the Market in UK Higher Education


Posted by hallymk1

Over at The Disorder of Things, Lee Jones has posted a response made by 80 academics to HEFCE’s Review of Quality Assessment. I have added my name to this, and I am grateful to Lee for his leadership and energies on this response/refusal.

HEFCE proposes a radical shake-up of these arrangements. Its main ideas are as follows.

  • The funding bodies will shift from assessing quality directly to merely certifying HEIs’ own internal QA processes as meeting a ‘baseline quality’ threshold. This is described as a ‘light touch’ approach that would supposedly reduce the regulatory burden. The proposals are open-minded about whether any routine checks would ever be conducted once HEIs are certified with a proposed ‘kite mark’. HEIs’ governing bodies, which would assume overall responsibility for quality, would merely certify their ongoing compliance in annual reports. The QAA is apparently to be scrapped. But funders would ‘intervene’ rapidly if there is suspicion of a collapse in standards.
  • Internal QA would be guided by data on ‘student outcomes’, presented in an easy-to-follow format (though the proposals, for now, eschew ‘star ratings’ – that’s probably for the TEF). The proposed goal is ‘constant improvement’. This is presented alongside contradictory goals like curbing grade inflation. This is perhaps the most problematic aspect of the proposals, as discussed further below.
  • The system of external examiners would be ‘professionalised’ (which assumes we are not already professionals). Externals would be trained and accredited by some additional body. While this is not quite an ‘OFSTED’ for HE, the tendency of the bureaucracy to expand to meet the growing needs of the bureaucracy means it could well evolve into an external inspectorate. At the very least it means external examiners are likely to become progressively divorced from the activities they are meant to be judging.
  • To help curb grade inflation, there are also calls for internal and external examiners to form (inter-)disciplinary groups to develop shared assessments of work – a sort of nationwide moderation process. The idea is to help police the pass/fail and 2(i)/2(ii) borderlines. Anyone who has ever marked assessments (i.e. virtually no one at HEFCE) will know that even expert judgements within a single department can vary substantially, but the notion here is that hundreds of academics working within very different traditions and environments with very different learning objectives can somehow agree definitively what constitutes a ‘59’ and what constitutes a ‘60’. At the very least, coupled with ‘professionalised’ external examination, this is likely to create pressures for curriculum standardisation.

Our response focuses upon the following.

  1. This is not a ‘light touch’ regime at all. The proposals would merely displace regulatory activity into HEIs themselves and into new regulative spaces such as the external examiner accreditation and macro-moderation bodies (which, of course, HEFCE does not wish even to fund).
  2. The proposals do not acknowledge that self-regulation in an era of markets always fuels over-compliance because of its inherent vagueness and because the reputational costs of non-compliance are potentially disastrous.
  3. These proposals seek to extend the marketisation of HE. Post-Browne, whilst the cap on fees was lifted to £9k, universities were expected to compete on price, driving ‘efficiency’. The provision of ‘Key Information Sets’ including earnings data for degree programmes would enable ‘consumers’ to make the ‘right’ choices about how to ‘invest’ in their ‘human capital’. The assumption was that students would only be willing to pay high prices for a high ‘return’ on their ‘investment’. Universities would accordingly be pressured into maximising the employability of graduates. Higher quality and institutions and subjects which offered more intellectual capital would expand, while lower-quality universities and ‘irrelevant’ subjects would contract.
  4. HEFCE’s QA proposals are an effort to disrupt this status quo by lowering barriers to ‘market entry’ for private providers and thereby trigger the price competition that has so far largely failed to materialise. HEFCE seeks to do this in two ways.
    • By relativising the notion of ‘quality’. HEFCE states that because there is growing ‘diversity of providers, provision, and students’, we should abandon a ‘one size fits all’ approach to quality. It suggests that ‘there are “student experiences” – and therefore different conceptions of “quality” – that could and should be determined by the mission of the provider, the type of provision, and the needs of the student.’
    • By making it easier for ‘new providers’ to attain and retain their accredited status. Rather than being exposed to ongoing inspections by the QAA, all they would need to do is demonstrate compliance with a low baseline and then self-certify thereafter (with or without a ‘probationary’ period included in the proposals).
    • NOTE: the rationale of all this is to deflate the notion of what constitutes ‘quality’ higher education in order to allow private providers who cannot meet current standards to enter the market. An example of what is presumably envisaged is Coventry University College Ltd (CUCL), a subsidiary of Coventry University. CUCL offers part-time degrees in vocational areas like law and accountancy. Its staff teach 40+ weeks per year and consequently are not engaged in research; most are not ‘academics’ but merely ‘deliver’ teaching. It students are denied access to facilities afforded to Coventry University students, like library borrowing rights or participation in the student union – justified explicitly on the grounds that such things are ‘added extras’ and not all students want the same ‘student experience’. As a result of shaving its provision and costs to the bone, CUCL charges fees below £6,000 per year.
  5. There is no reason to believe that price competition will benefit students or have any beneficial impact on quality. The whole logic of these proposals is to destroy an existing notion of ‘quality’ HE, defined by tough regulation and the historic culture of British universities, and introduce a variety of possible definitions of ‘quality’, some lower than the current definition. What is called a set of proposals on ‘quality assessment’ actually seeks to reduce average quality. This is a deliberate attempt to usher in a multiple-tier HE system with HEIs having ‘different missions’ and ‘different students’. The implication is clearly that it should be acceptable for some students to opt for cut-price, low-quality (sub-prime) HE if it meets a low baseline standard, and the low expectations of their particular ‘consumers’.
  6. We are concerned that private providers will specialise in cheap-to-provide vocational courses that are attractive to students seeking remunerative post-graduation employment. This will drain established HEIs of income that they currently use to cross-subsidise more expensive subjects. If universities are forced to compete on price, or lose market share, cross-subsidy may become impossible and render many departments financially unviable.
  7. Moreover, price competition can only be pursued by worsening the wages and conditions of staff.
  8. A final highly problematic element of the proposals is the use of data on ‘student outcomes’ as a proxy measure for teaching quality.

The reasons why using student outcomes data are wrong are outlined in an open letter on the Disorder of Things, which all academic colleagues are invited to sign.


notes on saying “no” to the TEF


Posted by hallymk1

educational value-in-motion

it is clear that universities must do more to demonstrate they add real and lasting value for all students.

Now that we are asking young people to meet more of the costs of their degrees once they are earning, we in turn must do more than ever to ensure they can make well-informed choices, and that the time and money they invest in higher education is well spent…

While there will be financial incentives behind the TEF, with those offering high quality teaching able to increase fees with inflation, the TEF will not just be about accessing additional funds – I want it to bring about a fundamental shift in how we think about and value teaching in our universities.

we need a simpler, less bureaucratic and less expensive system of regulation. A system that explicitly champions the student, employer and taxpayer interest in ensuring value for their investment in education and requires transparency from providers so that they can be held accountable for it.

Johnson, J. 2015. Higher education: fulfilling our potential.

[T]he creative power of [an individual’s] labour establishes itself as the power of capital, as an alien power confronting him… Thus all the progress of civilisation, or in other words every increase in the powers of social production… in the productive powers of labour itself – such as results from science, inventions, divisions and combinations of labour, improved means of communication, creation of the world market, machinery etc., enriches not the worker, but rather capital; hence only magnifies again the power dominating over labour… the objective power standing over labour.

Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin, pp. 307-8.

overwork for the love of teaching

Speaking to parents and students since taking on this job has confirmed for me the extent to which teaching is highly variable across higher education.

There are inspiring academics who go the extra mile, supporting struggling students, emailing feedback at weekends and giving much more of their time than duty demands.

These are the people who will change our children’s lives

Johnson, J. 2015. Higher education: fulfilling our potential.

The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers — a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity — which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state.

Marx, K. 1990. Capital, Volume 3. London: Penguin. p. 927

There’s little doubt that “do what you love” (DWYL) is now the unofficial work mantra for our time. The problem is that it leads not to salvation, but to the devaluation of actual work, including the very work it pretends to elevate — and more importantly, the dehumanization of the vast majority of laborers.

If profit doesn’t happen to follow, it is because the worker’s passion and determination were insufficient. Its real achievement is making workers believe their labor serves the self and not the marketplace.

Nowhere has the DWYL mantra been more devastating to its adherents than in academia… The reward for answering this higher calling is an academic employment marketplace in which around 41 percent of American faculty are adjunct professors — contract instructors who usually receive low pay, no benefits, no office, no job security, and no long-term stake in the schools where they work.

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

Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.

Tokumitsu, M. (2014). In the Name of Love. Jacobin Magazine, Issue 13.

please drink your TEF data responsibly

Pace Wilsden et al. (2015), we might note the following.

There are powerful currents whipping up the metric tide.

Across the [teaching] community, the description, production and consumption of ‘metrics’ remains contested and open to misunderstandings.

Peer review, despite its flaws and limitations, continues to command widespread support across disciplines. Metrics should support, not supplant, expert judgement.

Inappropriate indicators create perverse incentives. There is legitimate concern that some quantitative indicators can be gamed, or can lead to unintended consequences… Linked to this, there is a need for greater transparency in the construction and use of indicators, particularly for university rankings and league tables. Those involved in [teaching] assessment and management should behave responsibly, considering and preempting negative consequences wherever possible, particularly in terms of equality and diversity.

Similarly, for the [excellence] component of the [TEF], it is not currently feasible to use quantitative indicators in place of narrative [excellence] case studies, or the [excellence] template. There is a danger that the concept of [excellence] might narrow and become too specifically defined by the ready availability of indicators for some types of [excellence] and not for others. For an exercise like the [TEF], where HEIs are competing for funds, defining [excellence] through quantitative indicators is likely to constrain thinking around which [excellence] stories have greatest currency and should be submitted, potentially constraining the diversity of the UK’s [teaching] base.

Wilsdon, J., et al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363, pp. viii-ix.

the coming wave of ‘education evaluation’, threatens to supplant traditional understandings of universities as communities advancing public knowledge. Current regulations governing the awarding of degrees aver that standards are maintained and safeguarded only by the critical activity of the academic community within an institution. It will be harder and harder to recall that fact.

McGettigan, A. (2015). The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment. Political Economy Research Centre, Papers Series 6, p. 6

I want to see much more data being made available for academics to analyse and potentially link with other data sets.

Johnson, J. 2015. Higher education: fulfilling our potential.

choice and the war on academic labour

To ensure students have real choice that reflects their diverse needs, we must continue to open up the higher education market and put in place a regulatory framework that reflects today’s challenges.

This government values competition. We want a diverse, competitive system that can offer different types of higher education so that students can choose freely between a wide range of providers.

Competition not for its own sake, but because it empowers students and creates a strong incentive for providers to innovate and improve the quality of the education they are offering. That’s why, back in July, we published our Productivity Plan, ‘Fixing the Foundations’.

It set out how we’re going to boost productivity in this country. Among other goals, it promised to remove barriers to new entrants and to establish a risk-based framework for higher education, reducing burdens on some so we can focus oversight where it is needed.

Johnson, J. 2015. Higher education: fulfilling our potential.

What are the characteristics of a quality assessment system that would incentivise, support and recognise outstanding learning and teaching? Should the scrutiny of institutional quality improvement activities be a component of a quality assessment system?

Quality Assessment Review Steering Group. 2015. The future of quality assessment in higher education. HEFCE, p. 6.

Another way of putting this is from the flip side: there will be real-term cuts to the funding of institutions that do not fare well under this system. Since assessment will presumably be relative from a single budgetary pot, this is a zero-sum game in which some universities are to be slowly de-funded.

It seems that the government wants to decouple fee increases from social mobility while at the same time controlling the expansion of private provision according to teaching metrics. The end point looks likely to be to cut all public support for teaching outside the fee loan system and to squeeze the loan system to drive up competition (while getting rid of social mobility regulators like OFFA). Lots of universities won’t survive that kind of move, but will be replaced by new teaching providers.

Eve, M. 2015. TEF, REF, QR, deregulation: thoughts on Jo Johnson’s HE talk

The difference between the individual value of the cheapened commodity and its social value vanishes. The law of the determination of value by labour time makes itself felt to the individual capitalist who applies the new method of production by compelling him to sell his goods under their social value; this same law, acting as a coercive law of competition, forces his competitors to adopt the same method.

Harvey, D. 2010. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. London: Verso, p. 168.

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

Marx, K. 2004. Capital, Volume 1, London: Penguin, p. 617.

With capital and labour thus released, new branches of business are constantly called into existence, and in these capital can again work on a small scale and again pass through the different developments outlined until these new branches of business are also conducted on a social scale. This is a constant process.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1864). Economic Works of Karl Marx 1861-1864. MECW Volume 34.

and the damage this does

Constant restructuring, constant changes in policy and procedures, and the constant increase in demands have created a state of acute anxiety and utter demoralisation for all staff at every level.

Shaw, C., & Ratcliffe, R. (2014). Struggle for top research grades fuels bullying among university staff. Guardian HE Network.

In the Darwinian world of pro-cycling at the end of the 1990s, racing teams learned that the only way to level out competitive opportunity was to meet the standards set by the most committed. To ride within the limits of your own ability became naive, disloyal to the team, and uncompetitive. Young riders waited to be invited to join the inner circle who were doping, and accepted pills handed to them on the basis that it would make them healthier; team management understood and allowed this to happen, because results had become the currency for economic survival, not just for individual riders, but for vast whirling enterprises of sponsorship, employment and profit… [Academics] overwork like cyclists dope: because everyone does it, because it’s what you do to get by, because in the moment we argue to ourselves that it feels like health and freedom.

Bowles, K. 2014. Beyond a Boundary.

Even radical faculty who seek to enact transformations outside the university find themselves performing within the university as managers not only of their own labor, but of that of their students and their colleagues, designing curriculum and imposing regulations that require students be physically present and adopt a certain performative attitude during class time through the coercive metrics of attendance and participation grades.

Meyerhoff, E., Johnson, E., & Braun, B. (2011). Time and the University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 10(3), p. 493.

marketise everything

“we need to bust this system right open”

Jo Johnson in the Financial Times.

while taxpayers and students bear all the risk, there is little sign of the promised savings to the public purseor of the competitive and innovative education market that we were promised’… if Johnson really wants a better-functioning market in higher education, he should ponder new means of incentivising would-be students to assess the value of institutions and courses on offer – regardless of whether or not he reforms the requirements for validation.

One of these would be replacing the current system of tuition fees and loans with a commission system, in which graduates pay a commission to their university on their earnings for a fixed number of years, or up to a fixed total amount, or a mix of both. This would allow the market to do better what markets do well: empower the good to drive out the bad.

Goodman, P. 2015. Jo Johnson wants the higher education market to work better. Here’s a way of ensuring that it does. Conservative Home.

Such an anti-vision of higher education – let the market determine what should be offered – unfortunately meshes with a stratified higher education sector which mirrors an increasingly unequal society… the next phase of higher education policy [] will exacerbate the erosion of public knowledge from the institutions traditionally most associated with it.

McGettigan, A. (2015). The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment. Political Economy Research Centre, Papers Series 6, p. 2.

what is to be done?

Pace Wilsden et al. (2015), we might note the following, replacing research with [teaching].

Responsible [TEF/learning gain] metrics

In recent years, the concept of ‘responsible [teaching] and innovation’ (RRI) has gained currency as a framework for [teaching] governance. Building on this, we propose the notion of responsible metrics as a way of framing appropriate uses of quantitative indicators in the governance, management and assessment of [teaching]. Responsible metrics can be understood in terms of the following dimensions:

Robustness: basing metrics on the best possible data in terms of accuracy and scope;

Humility: recognising that quantitative evaluation should support – but not supplant – qualitative, expert assessment;

Transparency: keeping data collection and analytical processes open and transparent, so that those being evaluated can test and verify the results;

Diversity: accounting for variation by field, and using a range of indicators to reflect and support a plurality of research and researcher career paths across the system;

Reflexivity: recognising and anticipating the systemic and potential effects of indicators, and updating them in response.

Wilsdon, J., et al. (2015). The Metric Tide: Report of the Independent Review of the Role of Metrics in Research Assessment and Management. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.4929.1363, p. x.

The risk is that academics seeking to resist this further privatisation of knowledge will be cast as vested interests seeking to protect an old, inadequate system lacking in transparency. We will end up on the wrong side of the argument. The difficulty: How to articulate what is threatened? How to defend forms of knowledge which are not subordinate to private returns? Academic freedom and autonomy now face a more pressing, insidious, financialised threat than the traditional bugbear of direct political interference. But all this may prove too abstract for effective resistance. I have no glib solution to which you might sign up. But when hard times find us, criticism must strike for the root: the root is undergraduate study as a stratified, unequal, positional good dominating future opportunities and outcomes. What might find broader public support is a vision of higher education institutions that are civic and open to lifelong participation, instead of places beholden to the three-year, full-time degree leveraged on loans and aiming to cream off ‘talent’.

McGettigan, A. (2015). The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment. Political Economy Research Centre, Papers Series 6, p. 8.

But we might say “no”//refuse//exchange our “no”, as a starting point

The temporality of no is one of urgency. To think in terms of yeses suggests a different temporality, the patient construction of another world. This is important, but we are forced by the destructive dynamic of capital itself into giving priority to the urgency of no.

Those who command live in fear of the refusal of those whom they command and spend much of their time and a very large part of their resources trying to prevent it. Refusal is at the core of the struggle for another world: strike, mutiny, boycott, disobedience, desertion, subversion, refusal in a thousand different ways. In order to make another world, we must refuse to make capitalism. We make capitalism (as Marx insists in his labour theory of value). If capitalism exists today, it is not because it was created in the eighteenth or nineteenth century, but because it was created today, because we create it today. If we do not create it tomorrow, it will not exist tomorrow. The question of revolution is not “how do we destroy capitalism”, but “how do we stop creating capitalism”?

Holloway, J. 2011. No.