Tag Archives: labour

Notes on hegemony and counter-narratives


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Transnational activist networks for privatisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO. Networks of transnational hegemonic power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE. Hegemonic power needs hegemonic narratives

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

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

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

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

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

FOUR. Transnational organisational principles to confront transnational capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIVE. On the organisation of counter-narratives

Antonio Gramsci. Workers’ Democracy.

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

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


DMU’s UCU teach-in


Posted by hallymk1

Tomorrow DMU’s UCU branch is hosting a workshop/teach-in for students and staff about the higher education industrial action.

The workshop will take place between 10.40 and 12.15 in St Andrew’s Community Hall, Gateway Street. The entrance is on Gateway Street. You walk along Gateway Street with Gateway House and the Font pub on your left. Just past the small car park, on the right is the entrance to the Community Hall. It’s about 30 seconds from the library.

The workshop will discuss:

  • The implications of turning higher education into a market
  • The relevance of the strike for students
  • Student debt
  • De-professionalising the workforce
  • The implications for everyone of university borrowing
  • Alternatives: the 3Cosas action; the Social Science Centre in Lincoln; the Free University Network.

There are a series of readings that might underpin your engagement with this teach-in.

Luke Martell at Sussex manages a list of links to Free Universities and alternative educational projects, alongside links related to occupy and education, and the radical/critical pedagogic underpinnings of those alternatives.

Canada’s New University Solidarity Co-operative.

Discover Society on the political economy of higher education.

Novara media articles on education.

Open Democracy student/worker Occupy Communiques.

radical philosophy articles on education.

Remaking the University on the privatisation of US higher education.

The Social Science Centre, Lincoln UK.

Zerohedge on student loan debt.

The 3Cosas campaign.


DMU Policy Commission: Young people and employment


Posted by hallymk1

With Jonathan Payne at DMU I’m leading a strand of DMU’s 2015 Policy Commission on young people and employment. We met for the first time today to outline the work that we might do together with eight undergraduate and postgraduate students. The students focused on the following.

  • What could be done with schools and in schools around the experience of young people and the labour market?
  • What needs to be done about precarity and zero-hour contracts?
  • How might learning and training be made hands-on or experiential?
  • How might funding be found for study and training?
  • What is the role of businesses?
  • What is the role of apprenticeships?
  • Why is there no Minister of State for Young People?
  • How do we analyse the value of work and worthless work?
  • What is the role of regulation?
  • Can we map out stakeholder responsibilities related to young people and work or employment?

In terms of organising the strand there are two events coming-up: a big brunch on 12 February at noon-2pm; and an event in the DMU Festival of Ideas in w/c 17 March. Attendees should contact the DMU Events Office. Questions relating to this strand should be emailed to the Policy Commission.

However, we will meet to discuss Young People and Employment from 10-11am each Tuesday for the next six weeks in Hugh Aston 2.38. All DMU students are welcome.

The twitter hash tag is for the DMU 2015 Policy Commission is #dmu100

References

Jonathan and I have pulled together some references.

Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (2012). Engaging Employers in Tackling Youth Unemployment, London: CIPD.

Gutman, L. M., and Akerman, R. (2008). ‘Determinants of aspirations’, Centre for the Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No. 27, London: Institute of Education, CRWBL.

Hamilton, V. 2012. ‘Career Pathways and Cluster Skills Development: Promising Models from the US’, OECD LEED Working Papers, 2012/14, Paris: OECD. Available [online] at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/5k94g1s6f7td-en

Institute for Fiscal Studies (on work, employment and pay).

The Intergenerational Foundation (established to research fairness between the generations. IF believes that, whilst increasing longevity is welcome, government policy must be fair to all generations – whether old, young or those to come).

Keep, E. (2012). ‘Education and Industry:  taking two steps back and reflecting’,  Journal of Education and Work, Vol. 24, No. 4, 357-379.

Michael Roberts’ blog, The Next Recession, for an alternative view on employment, wages and work.

New Economics Foundation (2010). 21 hours.

Novara FM podcasts on 21st Century work, precarious employment, real wages and economic growth in a service economy.

Social enterprise at the University of Northampton.

UK Commission for Employment and Skills.

Van Parijs, P (2005). Basic Income: A simple and powerful idea for the twenty-first century.

Weeks, K. (2011). The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries.

Wolf, A. (2011). Review of Vocational Education – The Wolf Report, London: Department for Education. Available [online] at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-vocational-education-the-wolf-report

Work Foundation website on youth and employment.

Zerohedge on the student debt bubble.

The 3Cosas Campaign for equality of terms and conditions between the University of London’s direct employees, and its outsourced workers.


some notes on academic labour and the autonomy of Capital


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Autonomy for whom? Autonomy from what?

William I. Robinson has argued that:

activists and scholars have tended to underestimate the systemic nature of the changes involved in globalisation, which is redefining all the fundamental reference points of human society and social analysis, and requires a modification of all existing paradigms (p. 13).

For Robinson there is no outside of the structuring realities of capitalism, as “the essence of the process is the replacement for the first time in the history of the modern world system, of all residual pre (or non) –capitalist production relations with capitalist ones in every part of the globe.” This echoes Ellen Meiksins Wood’s argument that

we’re living in a moment when, for the first time, capitalism has become a truly universal system…. Capitalism is universal also in the sense that its logic – the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximisation, competition – has penetrated almost every aspect of human life and nature itself.

The academic has no autonomy beyond the amelioration of her labour relations with those who direct the University for the logic of accumulation, commodification, profit-maximisation, competition. Those who direct the University for the market are not simply Vice-Chancellors, but include policy makers, private equity fundholders, credit rating agencies, technology outsourcing forms, publishers, fee-paying students and so on. Inside higher education, the dominant logic is apparently irresistible and insurmountable, especially when faced by the de-collectivised academic. We might ask whether academics have the capacity to resist Capital as the automatic subject, from the standpoint of collective labour. By reasserting labour-power as the foundation of value and of exploitation, and by seeking collective, social redress.

However, such a reassertion or a recovering demands that academics recognise that the scope and depth of their autonomy is limited to problem-solving inside this totalising logic. Is it possible to imagine that academic skills, practices and knowledges might be shared and put to another use, in common and in co-operation? Is it possible to defend the physical and virtual academic commons as spaces for contribution, or as underpinning solidarity economies? Is it possible to live and tell a different, overtly political story of academic labour? Doing so demands that we recognise and push-back against the limits of academic autonomy. As Tiqqun have argued:

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

TWO. The fallacy of academic freedom

Academics might then consider whether it is possible for their labour to be used to re-organise the University along the lines of The Democratic University: A proposal for university governance for the Common Weal. Might this offer a mechanism for reproducing the University as something other than a State-subsidised actor for Capital? The authors of The Democratic University believe that “there is a not-too-subtle redefinition by university managers of ‘academic freedom’ from meaning ‘freedom of academics from us’ to ‘freedom for us from everyone’.” They argue that thee emergent ‘corporate hegemony model’ for University governance

appears to allocate to the university principal a status similar to that of an owner of an enterprise. It has also occured during a period where it has become routine for university management to merge the concepts of ‘academic freedom’ (the protection of academics from interference by university managers) and ‘institutional autonomy’ (the right of university managers to operate without external interference).

Is the democratisation of governance to reflect the needs and demands of the ‘wider community’ of the University possible, given that power in that wider community is increasingly vested in transnational finance capital? This occurs through bond issues, through the sale of student loans, through outsourced provision. As the university is simply a pivot for the creation of an association of capitals designed for competitive edge, can the idea of the Democratic University contribute to a freedom that enables emancipation or social justice or subjectivity beyond the politics of austerity? If so, should academics be looking elsewhere for solidarity models and alternative organising principles and co-operation?

This focus on politics and organisation is a focus on recovering subjectivity as an academic and a labourer. As Cleaver notes in his final two theses on the Secular Crisis of capitalism, this idea of recovering subjectivity through radical democracy is critical in liberating humanity from the coercive laws of competition and the market. For Cleaver, the creation of a revolutionary subjectivity is entwined with the need to develop:

[a] politics of alliance against capital… not only to accelerate the circulation of struggle from sector to sector of the class, but to do so in such a manner as to build a post-capitalist politics of difference without antagonism.

Here the idea of academic as labourer is central, rather than academic as fetishized carrier of specific skills, practices and knowledges. To situate academic labour inside global labour relations is critical, because then as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues:

We really can begin to look the world not as a relationship between what’s inside and what’s outside capitalism, but as the working out of capitalism’s own internal laws of motion. And that might make it easier to see the universalization of capitalism not just as a measure of success but as a source of weakness… It can only universalize its contradictions, its polarizations between rich and poor, exploiters and exploited. Its successes are also its failures.’

THREE. Academic labour and the autonomy of Capital

However, increasingly academic labour is revealed as being deliberately framed inside a structure that exists for the autonomy of Capital.

  • It is increasingly depoliticised: for instance, its networks that promote teaching excellence do not focus on critical or radical pedagogy, but rather on employability or the student experience or financial literacy or problem-solving.
  • It is increasingly kettled by money, efficiency and income-generation, and as a result it is incapable of refusing the REF or impact measures. It is increasingly individuated in practice and driven by competition, so that the sale of the student loan book, or the use of secondary legislation to open-up the sector for privatisation, cannot be opposed.
  • It is increasingly regulated by groups whose remit is efficiency or impact or opening-up the sector for profit: thus, the HEFCE focuses on technological deployments for cost-reductions, business-process re-engineering and efficiency gains, which themselves might underpin radical transformation of the University as a global “business”.
  • It is disciplined by the internal policies of universities, which increasingly focus upon: victimisation of dissent; the corporate use of social media; on academic codes of conduct and professionalism; on assessments of workload management and labour intensity of academics; on monitoring research; on strategies for organisational development; on customer relationship management, and so on. These policies are increasingly not negotiated but imposed with an impact on workload and stress. These policies increasingly impinge on the curriculum and pedagogy; the form a disciplinary framework against which academic freedom in teaching and research are redefined; they form a dataset against which academics can be judged.
  • Its power is reduced through the use of internal structures of the University that subvert negotiation with collectivised labour, as they agree decisions that materially affect the role and identity of the academic. The question is whether the management structures, including committees, programme boards, working groups and so on, can enable academic labour to resist its co-option for impact, or for efficiencies, or for student-as-consumer, or for employability, or for piloting curriculum and pastoral innovations that affect workloads and identities? Can teaching excellence awards, which emerge from that management structure, become other-than individuating, to push-back against specific ways of performing inside the University?

In defining a structure that enables academic labour to be renewed as part of a social struggle for subjectivity, and in order to address social, political, economic and environmental crises, collective action, through a renewal of trades unions acting in association with students-as-activists, is critical. This collective action associates collective labour, inside both the University and those associated capitals that form the University’s wider community. Solidarity needs to encompass the University and its outsourced or private partners. As the idea of the academic and her labour, and the labour relations inside the University, is disciplined through outsourcing, restructures, employability agendas, the hosting of open days on weekends, by strike pay not being docked at 1/365, by changes to personal tutoring being imposed, by changes to workload, through the impact of management decisions about fees/debts etc. on material, academic practices, by the removal of academics from decision-making bodies like Senate, such wider associations are needed as part of a radical, societal, democratic project of refusal.

Such projects cannot be developed through management committee structures and external consultancies/organisations and teaching excellence awards that are focused on normalising “the student experience” or on delivering staffing and labour efficiencies through organisational development. Finding mechanisms to renew collective action and collective negotiation and collective organising in associated, co-operative forms is critical if academic labour is to be part of a struggle for subjectivity. If academics are to recognise their solidarity as labour. If academics are to liberate their labour and its products, themselves and their sociability from the market. If academics are to become active in a process of refusal and pushing back.


Some notes on academic labour and fronts of struggle


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. The State will not save the public University

The idea of neoliberalism as a globalising, disciplinary discourse is especially important in Stephen J. Ball’s work on Global Education Inc.. Ball argued that the State has a critical activist role in regulating for the market and for enterprise, and not for the society of people. In this model, the State is proactive in acting as midwife to the re-birth of public assets as market-oriented commodities. Ball traces the development of neoliberalism very deliberately as a discourse designed to promote shared libertarian, market-oriented entrepreneurialism that in-turn fosters a new nexus betweeen capital and the State, in order to re-shape all of society inside Capital’s hegemonic, totalising logic. In part, Ball sees this as facilitated by networks of power and affinity that enable the re-production of ‘geographies of social relationships’ that are in the name of money, profit, choice and deregulation. These geographies form shifting, transnational assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce power-structures, and which consist of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers, philanthropists/hedge-funds, technology firms and so on.

In this description of neoliberalism, the focus is on how uncertainties are created in the spaces in which the State operates, so that common-sense stories of the value of private enterprise in ‘leveraging’ both performance and cost reduction can be told, and so that those stories can be connected to a meta-narrative of there is no alternative. In turn these meta-narratives seize and co-opt evidence-based practices and academic judgements to reinforce World Bank and IMF orthodoxies that are related to structural readjustment, freedom and choice. Thus, the networks of interconnected actors and corporations, acting as transnational advocacy networks, reinforce dominant positions through: policy forums and advocacy; conferences; prizes; media attention; control of funding; research programmes and outcomes; evidence-based reports; regulation; MOOCs; consultancy agendas; new public management etc..

Jonathan Davies has argued that it is easy to overstate the power of network affinities in pushing back against neoliberal politics, and that such an overstating leads towards network fetishism. He states (p. 152):

network analysis draws attention to the production, reproduction and contestation of power and the manner in which alliances forged around congruent interests and resource interdependencies reinforce asymmetric power relations. The target of critique is the proposition that network-like institutions and practices are proliferating, that they are based on novel forms of sociability and that they transcend structures of power and domination. Networks can be a powerful organising tool, but whether cooptive or insurgent, they have no special potential.

Davies questions the relationship between governance networks and network governance, and insists that critique has to be based upon capitalism, class and spaces for resistance. Such public spaces might include those highlighted in this Open letter to Occupy. He places (p. 140) “A call for critical research in order to consider how different forms of public action, from critical engagement in governance networks through to militant confrontations with the state can lead to self-transformation and learning.” In addressing the ways in which the University is being co-opted for value and for the market, it is crucial that the relationships between the University (including its organising principles and labour relations), the State apparatus that defines/marketises education, and the transnational associations of capitals/businesses that feed off public goods, are revealed.

TWO. The University disciplined globally

William I. Robinson’s nine theses on our epoch also picks-upon this call for a range of critical engagements in a range of public domains, including the relationship between higher education and universities and the State, in order to describe the established order, its organising principles, and alternatives to it. Pace Robinson, we see that the University is restructured inside a global mechanism for the accumulation of value. Moreover,

activists and scholars have tended to underestimate the systemic nature of the changes involved in globalisation, which is redefining all the fundamental reference points of human society and social analysis, and requires a modification of all existing paradigms (p. 13).

Thus, capitalist globalisation denotes: a world of generally-impoverished labour, where capital is fighting for its survival through the politics of austerity; power that is incubated through technology, including in the changing face of production and of labour relations; and the hatching of transnational capital out of national capitals in the global North (following the transnational capture of state apparatus of control in the North and the attempt to do so in the South). This process is as live for the University and the academic as for any other sector/labourer, through precarity, outsourcing/leveraging skills, privatisation, indentured study and financialisation, labour arbitrage and organisational development/efficiency.

However, this process has several contradictions and leads to Robinson’s nine theses, which increasingly impact the life and work of academics and students.

First, the essence of the process is the replacement for the first time in the history of the modern world system, of all residual pre (or non) –capitalist production relations with capitalist ones in every part of the globe.

Second, a new ‘social structure of accumulation’ is emerging which, for the first time in History, is global.

Third, this transnational agenda has germinated in every country of the world under the guidance of hegemonic fractions of national bourgeoisies.

Fourth, observers search for a new global hegemon and posit a tri-polar world of European, American, and Asian economic blocs. But the old nation-state phase of capitalism has been superseded by the transnational phase of capitalism.

Fifth, the ‘brave new world’ of global capitalism is profoundly anti-democratic.

Robinson states (p. 21): “The trappings of democratic procedure in a polyarchy do not mean that the lives of the mass of people become filled with authentic or meaningful democratic content, much less that social justice or economic equality is achieved.”

Sixth, ‘poverty amidst plenty’, the dramatic growth under globalisation of socioeconomic inequalities and of human misery, a consequence of the unbridled operation of transnational capital, is worldwide and generalised.

Seventh, there are deep and interwoven gender, ethnic and racial dimensions to this escalating global poverty and inequality.

Eighth, there are deep contradictions in emergent world society that make uncertain the very survival of our species – much less mid- to long-tem stabilisation and viability of global capitalism – and portend prolonged global social conflict.

Ninth, stated in highly simplified terms, much of the left world-wide is split between two camps. These are: the neo-Keynesians that seek rapprochement with capital, based on social democracy and redistributive justice; those who see capitalism as inherently wicked and to be rejected/resisted without working through a coherent socialist alternative to the transnational phase of capitalism.

Robinson describes a world of structural adjustment by both the State and transnational organisations, in order to support the politics of permanent structural violence against the world’s majority. He notes (p. 27):

we should harbour no illusions that global capitalism can be tamed or democritised. This does not mean that we should not struggle for reform within capitalism, but that all such struggle should be encapsulated in a broader strategy and programme for revolution against capitalism. Globalisation places enormous constraints on popular struggles and social change in any one country or region. The most urgent task is to develop solutions to the plight of humanity under a savage capitalism liberated from the constraints that could earlier be imposed on it through the nation state. An alternative to global capitalism must therefore be a transnational popular project… The popular mass of humanity must develop a transnational class consciousness and a concomitant political protagonism and strategies that link the local to the national and the national to the global.

The question is then whether academics recognise these theses in their own alienation, and if they do then what might be done? Is it possible for academics to contribute to “a transnational popular project”?

THREE. For association

This point has been reinforced by Jehu in his resolutions for 2014, which focus upon the self-as-activist in pushing against capitalist work, and against the fetishisation of the State as some kind of moral arbiter between Labour and Capital. Jehu appears to be clear in looking for an activism that lies beyond the politics of democratic capitalism situated inside states, and he encourages all those who labour or who sell their labour-power in the market

not to employ the state, but to abolish it and replace it by association… that is immediately universal — global — and encompasses workers of every nation. We have to go back to our roots and remember that workers have no country. The working class is the material expression of the dissolution of all nations, classes, religions, etc.

This global, associational focus is important because emancipation is not possible inside a life defined by capitalist work.

Labor is not neutral: it does not just create wealth for a few, it creates poverty for billions side by side with this wealth. Labor is itself the active creation of poverty and misery, it is active self-impoverishment of the laborers; there is no palliative that can change the nature of labor, nor prevent the population of the planet from falling further into poverty. Any argument for labor — for full employment — is simply an argument for poverty, misery and environmental devastation.

Thus, Jehu argues that “Going beyond capitalism precisely means going to a set of conditions that violate ‘how capitalism works’ in every sphere of social life.” This is itself critical because the way in which we produce goods is the way that we produce society. So the current organising principles for society are based on the exploitation of labour. This then underpins the politics of austerity, and the move against welfare, or for growth or for the ideology of there is no alternative, or the disciplining of students who protest debts. Thus, we see increasingly the State acting as enforcer, in order to stimulate spaces for growth or jobs that includes education and the University. We also witness an increasing struggle for power between transnational associations of capitals and labour, including academic labour.

Part of this power-struggle focuses upon the need for higher education to contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of a society whose sole aim is economic growth through jobs. We do not witness a move towards shorter working hours, or leisure-time activities, or autonomy in defining a life that is beyond entrepreneurial activity, or in supporting an education that is beyond employability. Higher education and the role of academic labour is defined globally against the ability of the transnational capitalist class to extract value/profit and to fix labour as wage-earner capable of consumption. Jehu highlights how this underpins a politics that is for jobs and not shorter hours, and for jobs rather than the environment (witnessed under the Abbott Government in Australia) and that is for labour-intensity rather that capital intensity, because there is a point at which labour efficiencies damages the purchasing power of labour in a world market. This reveals a structural tension between technological and organisational efficiencies for labour and the possibility for finding other means to use a reserve army of labour that is as true for academics as for any other sector of the economy.

FOUR. Precarity and the living death of capitalist work

In two recent pieces on the attrition on and deterioration of work in Australian universities, Kate Bowles has highlighted the problems in seeking redress from inside the University as an autonomous organisation. Instead she argues for a more humane approach to the management of change and to understanding the ways in which academic work or labour is being restructured globally. Of those involved in change programmes, she notes:

please make sure that you’re really well informed about the labour market conditions in the sector you’re promising to disrupt. We’ve had two years of listening to you about the democratisation of student access to education, and the efficacy of student management; now let’s hear your thoughts on improving the human experience of work in higher education—and not just for the handful of mostly male tenured celebrities at top-tier US institutions you’re using to promote your brand.

Because until you really understand the rapid, serious deterioration of work in higher education, your chances of achieving sustainable change, the change that you want to be part of, are nil.

In discussing tenure, Kate argues that Australian academics are in an increasingly precarious position, especially in light of the threats of outsourcing/leveraging elements of their work, of casualisation, and of perceived market specialism.

Many Australian universities have in their three year contract with their workforce the capacity to redeploy or retrench academics if the discipline market shifts, or technology makes a difference in very unexplained ways, and it’s no longer in the business interests of the organisation to commit to the expense of someone’s permanent salary. This is what makes the culture of continuous departmental restructure so serious. While universities shuffle their salary commitments around the disciplines to optimise their ranking performance, academics now also need to imagine remixing their expertise quickly to be something else if that’s the way the wind blows—which is to say that expertise itself has already been redefined as a barrier to flexibility.

She then points to an Australian Fair Work Commission judgement, which decided in favour of an Australian University that:

“A category E professor is a far more expensive employee for the School than a Lecturer A or B employee. The retrenchment and redundancy provisions of the Agreement are objectively intended to allow the University to address commercial imperatives arising from changed business circumstances. A practical approach to the construction of the Agreement favours a conclusion that does not oblige the University to retain that far more expensive employee to perform work that can be, and is presently, performed by significantly less expensive casual employees in the Lecturer A or B classification. [emphasis, as they say, not in the original]”

This whole judgment is painful to study. At its heart is the story of three real people fighting unsuccessfully to keep the jobs they signed up for, and a union fighting alongside them; hidden behind this are all the stories of their significantly less expensive colleagues whose terrible working conditions have become the very low-lying marker in the struggle for fair work in sustainable universities, and whose situation could yet get worse under MOOC-driven disruption and tech-supported unbundling of work.

This unbundling of academic labour highlights the subsumption of that work under the politics of neoliberalism that is about power-over the world. Precarity and the lack of tenure, the role of technology, the use of organisation development or neuro-linguistic programming or cognitive analytical therapy, outsourcing, the entrepreneurial turn and employability strategies, and so on, need to be critiqued against the clash of social forces catalysed by transnational capital’s need to control labour. These are each mechanisms played out in educational domains that are increasingly formed of associations of private capitals/businesses, and which form a discourse of accumulation and labour arbitrage. This discourse is enforced by states through primary and secondary legislation, through funding mechanisms, through research allocations, and through curriculum/evidence-based pronouncements.

FIVE. Academic labour and fronts of struggle

Recent academic work on the intensity and geographical spread of protest points towards creating “fronts of struggle”, which are for societal mobilisation against the rule of money. This not only highlights how power deliberately uses policy, law and practice in a polyarchic manner to ossify inequality, but more importantly develops associations that are for equality. They are deliberate in their focus on defining publically and radically, social justice and radical democracy that is beyond private property and growth and there is no alternative. Rather than simply being against elites, they describe a courageous or fearless politics that is for the public.

One marker for this is an analysis of The National Plan of Ecuador, which “recognizes and stresses that the global transformation towards knowledge-based societies and economies requires a new form for the creation and distribution of value in society.” Whilst hamstrung in the first instance by the law of value and its connections to the market, spheres for the circulation of commodities and debt, and the State, the project does offer mechanisms for creating “commons-based infrastructures not just for knowledge, but for other social and productive activities”. It also points to a future beyond capitalism, that is formed of “material infrastructures that make the emergence and thrivability of open commons possible.” This appears to resonate with the horizontal and associational aspirations of the Frente Popular Darío Santillan (FPDS), to create supra-national networks of production.

Academics might then consider whether it is possible for labour to re-organise the University along the lines of The Democratic University: A proposal for university governance for the Common Weal. Also at issue is whether a process of radical democratisation might then be a transitional moment in the move towards a structure that is beyond the actually existing University as a State-subsidised actor for Capital. This highlights the increasing tension between academic freedom and institutional autonomy; a tension between corporate and democratic forms, the management of which echoes the co-option/privatisation of public spaces and public values, and the disciplining of protest and resistance. As universities are subsumed under the law of value and disciplined for growth, “there is a not-too-subtle redefinition by university managers of ‘academic freedom’ from meaning ‘freedom of academics from us’ to ‘freedom for us from everyone’.” The question is how academics might contribute to an activism that point to alternatives that are beyond capitalism?

 


The University, the crisis and academic activism


Posted by hallymk1

I’ve just submitted this for the Higher Education Academy’s 2014 conference. It’s not contentious to me. But let’s see if it gets accepted…

Short abstract: The University is broken. The game is up. It is conditioned by neoliberal politics through the tenets of growth, financialisation and securitisation. Its twin contributions to society take the form of debt and privatisation. At issue is which knowledges and practices can be liberated from the University before it is too late.

Outline: This session will describe how the idea and reality of the University is conditioned through the triple crunch of peak oil (or more specifically a lack of ready access to liquid fuels), climate change and economic crisis. Collectively these form a crisis against which higher education is recalibrated and restructured. However, in the face of a global neoliberal politics that constrains what can be contested, it is increasingly difficult to see beyond the everyday realities of economic growth, the normalisation of debt-driven study that takes the form of indenture, and the disciplining of academic labour through outsourcing, privatisation, financialisation, impact measures, organisational development, and so on.

 

The concern then is that these factors become reinforcing, and that the drive for GDP and growth recalibrates the University around the rule of money. Inside this marketised space/time an agenda of privatisation based on evidential assertion or problem-solving theory is presented as de-politicised and normative, and enables private providers, working with private equity, technology firms, transnational finance, think tanks and politicians to lever open public education for profit. In this space/time, student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education.

 

In the face of the triple crunch, and of the volatility imposed by the interrelationships between peak oil, our climate realities, and economic futures, what is the role of those who both labour and study in higher education? Can they say no, refuse, push-back or define alternatives? Or do acquiescence and exodus describe the only options? What kinds of conversations are academics having with society about our need for “more sophisticated financial engineering” to underpin increasing student debt? What kinds of conversations should academics be having with young people and their parents about the relationships between debt, real wage collapse, unemployment and precarity, in the face of the added volatility of access to the resources that keep the economy growing and climate change?

 

This paper will question the role of academic as activists in developing alternative methods of liberating knowing, knowledge and organisation, away from the University and into society more widely. Is it possible to liberate higher education from the space-time of debt and privatisation? The paper will briefly reference historical examples from South America, from global student/worker protests and occupations, and from the co-operatives movement, in order to ask whether it is possible for academics to describe a different space-time?

Keywords: Crisis, co-operation, neoliberalism, university, academic, liberation, space/time

Audience: This session is aimed at anyone who wishes an open discussion about the power and politics of higher education, and the ways in which critique of the organising principles for the University might be developed. In this way the session is designed to discomfort attendees, in order that a mirror can be held up to our practices as academics, and co-operative alternatives described.

Impact: The session is deliberately counter-hegemonic. My hope is that participants question the dominant narratives around higher education and find the courage to develop solidarity networks that lie inside, against and beyond the formalised university. If they do, then that is its impact.

Key messages:  

  1. The University is in crisis.
  2. Academics need to critique their role in maintaining the dominant narratives of economic growth and there is no alternative.
  3. Academic working with students have a key activist role in defining an alternative set of organising principles for higher education in society.

 

 

 


17 things about 2013


Posted by hallymk1

I wrote this whilst I listened to the tunes that defined 2013 for me.

What did I learn this year?

  1. I lost faith in myself. I am trying to find it again. Starting with my being.
  2. It is my faith in others that will enable me to recover my faith in myself. I need to understand how to earn faith in myself, reinforced by other’s faith in me.
  3. I feel like all I did in 2013 was survive. I learned that it is possible to survive. It is tiring to survive. But it is possible.
  4. There are some amazing people in my life, whose belief in me is greater than my self-doubt.
  5. Fuck hope. Remember courage.
  6. I can be a moody bastard. I apologise to you if you have suffered as a result. Please know that I am working on it.
  7. I will never abandon my 8 year old. As a result I will never abandon you. This is the truth that they could never see/hear.
  8. The University is broken. Irrevocably. Marketised. Privatised. Technologised. Entrepreneured. Out of the public sphere.
  9. The options are to say no, and to resist, and to push back, and to call people out, and to do so in solidarity. The options are to do these things collectively, using trades unions and pop-ups unions and strikes and protests and demonstrations and insurrections and refusals, in public spaces/times.
  10. The options are also to prepare for exodus from capital. To celebrate use value and not exchange value. For open and public association and solidarity, against private, indentured lives.
  11. To exodus is to pay down your debts, to learn some new, tradable skills, to access communal tools, to know and love/earn faith in your neighbours.
  12. I need/want/hope to be more involved in the Social Science Centre. Co-operation is the thing.
  13. My alienation is now at issue. How do I overcome my alienation from my labour, the products of my labour, my self/humanity and other people? There is something here about faith, courage, tolerance, and solidarity.
  14. I wonder whether it is possible to liberate academic labour from the living death of capitalist work? Is it possible to find spaces to liberate and repatriate knowledge, ways of knowing, organising principles, before they are commodified/enclosed out of our reach?
  15. I am increasingly pessimistic that society has the will to overcome the triple crunch of climate change, peak oil/resource availability, and this secular crisis of capitalism. It is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. See 11.
  16. I am increasingly convinced that the academic only matters as activist. See 13.
  17. What is to be done? Always.

beyond the space-time of debt and privatisation


Posted by hallymk1

In a paper from 2011 entitled Questioning Technology in the Development of a Resilient Higher Education, Joss Winn and I looked at the interrelationships between peak oil, narratives of economic growth, and the idea of the university. We argued the following (NOTE: I’ve stripped the references out, except for Hirsch, both of which you really should read).

The importance of oil to economic growth will become an increasing concern to universities, which are themselves seen as engines of growth. Hirsch (2008) has calculated that a decline in the global production of liquid fuels (i.e. unconventional and conventional oil) would lead to approximately a 1:1 ratio in the decline of global GDP. In the same article, the post-peak decline in oil production is calculated to be between 2% and 5% per year, suggesting a similar decline in GDP. By comparison, the decline in GDP during the global recession from 2008 to 2009 was 5%. In the United Kingdom, the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security has likened the effect of an imminent ‘oil crunch’, due mid-decade, to the current credit crunch. Their report also shows the ‘highly suggestive’ correlation between oil price spikes and US recessions, stating that every US recession since 1960 has been preceded by rapid oil price rises, and that when the price of oil exceeds 4% of US GNP, a recession occurs shortly afterwards. In March 2011, this equated to an oil price of around US$80 per barrel, and therefore April 2011’s price for dated Brent spot crude oil of US$118 per barrel is a threat to economic growth in oil-importing countries. Moreover, within capitalism, a threat to economic growth is a threat to social stability, as is noted whenever there is a recession or conflict, with clear implications for the role of HE.

These issues were amplified by the US Department of Energy’s ‘Hirsch report’, which stated:

The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented. (Hirsch et al., 2005, p. 4)

The difficulty of moving away from the use of oil is highlighted by the Hirsch report, which states that ‘a minimum of a decade of intense, expensive effort’ is required to migrate from our current use (Hirsch et al., 2005, p. 5). Businesses have strategically targeted waste in energy usage of technology, and attempted to profit from its measurement and monitoring as part of a strategy to roll out smart technologies, which themselves are highly contentious. Relatively little has been done to address this anticipated problem within HE due to its focus on business as usual. Within the current model, business as usual extends the global demand for oil by at least 15% over the next 25 years.

If you want to see Hirsch talk about the risks of peak oil and its impact on growth, its relationship to national geopolitics and transnational corporations, and our (in)ability to mitigate the decline in oil supply, in order to maintain growth or in fact manage de-growth, I recommend this talk from 2007. One of the key risks in this scenario is of an energy crunch that suspends capitalism, in that it makes growth impossible or precarious. A US Joint Forces Command report from 2010 warned of a possible shortfall in global oil output by 2015:

A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions.

The interplay of the triple crunch of peak oil (or more specifically a lack of ready access to liquid fuels), climate change and economic crisis are creating an increasingly volatile global context, against which higher education is calibrated. And that’s without talking about the geopolitical threats to a global economy underwritten by petrodollars. Moreover, as Nafeez Ahmed notes in a Guardian report on a lecture by a former BP geologist:

The fundamental dependence of global economic growth on cheap oil supplies suggests that as we continue into the age of expensive oil and gas, without appropriate efforts to mitigate the impacts and transition to a new energy system, the world faces a future of economic and geopolitical turbulence:

“In the US, high oil prices correlate with recessions, although not all recessions correlate with high oil prices. It does not prove causation, but it is highly likely that when the US pays more than 4% of its GDP for oil, or more than 10% of GDP for primary energy, the economy declines as money is sucked into buying fuel instead of other goods and services… A shortage of oil will affect everything in the economy. I expect more famine, more drought, more resource wars and a steady inflation in the energy cost of all commodities.”

According to another study in the Royal Society journal special edition by professor David J. Murphy of Northern Illinois University, an expert in the role of energy in economic growth, the energy return on investment (EROI) for global oil and gas production – the amount of energy produced compared to the amount of energy invested to get, deliver and use that energy – is roughly 15 and declining. For the US, EROI of oil and gas production is 11 and declining; and for unconventional oil and biofuels is largely less than 10. The problem is that as EROI decreases, energy prices increase. Thus, Murphy concludes:

“… the minimum oil price needed to increase the oil supply in the near term is at levels consistent with levels that have induced past economic recessions. From these points, I conclude that, as the EROI of the average barrel of oil declines, long-term economic growth will become harder to achieve and come at an increasingly higher financial, energetic and environmental cost.”

This volatility in geopolitics, access to energy, and global GDP is important for those who work and study in higher education, because we are entering a phase of increasingly complex financial mechanisms for indenturing study, which tie both institutions that are leveraged in the financial markets and students whose futures are sold through loans to the myth of infinite growth (or business-as-usual). This is a risk because as I note elsewhere:

it is private (rather than public) debt, and excessive leveraging of debt that tends to push capital into structural crises. The leveraging of private debt through excessive student loans, whilst giving a short-term financial fix for some leaves a deeper structural legacy related to crises of demand. So we end up with an inflated set of financial assets that bear no resemblance to the value of real assets in the real economy, and in the process of deleveraging the ponzi scheme leaves those individuals with high levels of debt at most risk.

This space of high-levels of individuated risk and of futures defined by individual and institutional debt is the world that defines the work of educators and students. Where bailouts meet austerity, where the realities of a quadrillion dollars of debt underpin politics in the United States, where student debt and therefore student education forms part of a coming sub-prime crisis, and where in spite of the rhetoric about higher education and employability, the realities are youth unemployment and long-term falls in real wages, or precarious employment.

And I haven’t even mentioned a future framed by oil, rising oil prices, or carbon. Yet, these matter because as Roger Pielke Jr argues:

We can simplify these four factors even further. Population and income together are simply GDP, or aggregate economic activity, and the production and consumption of energy reflect the technologies of energy supply and demand. The resulting Kaya Identity — as his equation has come to be called — simply says:

Emissions = GDP x Technology

With this simple equation before us, we can see the fundamental challenge to reducing emissions: A rising GDP, all else equal, leads to more emissions. But if there is one ideological commitment that unites nations and people around the world in the early 21st century, it is that GDP growth is non-negotiable. Right now, leaders on six different continents are focused on efforts to grow GDP, and with it jobs and wealth. They’re not as worried about emissions.

The concern then is that these factors become reinforcing. That the drive for GDP and growth recalibrates the University around the rule of money. That inside this space an agenda of privatisation based on evidential assertion or problem-solving theory is presented as de-politicised and normative, and enables technology firms, working with private equity, transnational finance, think tanks and politicians to lever open public education for profit. That student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education and the use of technologies inside that sector.

And things continue to worsen, as Andrew McGettigan writes in his notes to the transcription of the Project Hero report of the Rothschild Investment Bank to the Coalition Government of 2011, designed to facilitate a sale of existing student loan debt starting in 2013. McGettigan states that:

One of the most interesting aspects of the Rothschild review is the detail provided on the rejected models, not least because of the centrality of the suggestion that universities could be encouraged to underwrite the risk of poor graduate repayments through debt issues or equity stakes in special purpose vehicles.

Rothschild conclude their report with a new suggestion in relation to all loans: that the government look further into the possibilities offered by ‘tranching’ the loan book in order to attract a better price. In effect, suggesting that the product to be sold is broken down into smaller sizes than whole cohorts. This has significance for assessing whether the much riskier ‘coalition loans’ can be sold (as David Willetts appears to be suggesting as a future funding solution). As each of these cohorts will enter the repayment system with £12billion of debt in total, any feasible sale requires more sophisticated financial engineering.

There are two approaches to tranching outlined by Rothschild: the first relates to a structuring of repayments and risk according to different ‘seniorities’; the second to structuring the product by the ‘underlying characteristics’ of the individual loans themselves.

In the face of the triple crunch, of the volatility imposed by the interrelationships between peak oil, our climate realities, and economic futures, is business as usual really possible for those who labour and study in higher education? What kinds of conversations are we having with society about our need for “more sophisticated financial engineering” to underpin increasing student debt? What kinds of conversations should we be having with young people and their parents about the volatile relationships between debt, real wages, unemployment and precarity, in the face of the added volatility of access to the resources that keep the economy growing? Volatility heaped upon volatility, so that indentured study itself underpins an increasingly precarious promise of a valuable and value-laden working life.

Precarity and volatility, as Ilargi notes at The Automatic Earth, underpins the transfer of resources to those with power and the accumulation of wealth by an elite, which threatens a clash of social forces. This clash is already happening in student/worker occupations, indignations, demonstrations, strikes, and so on, that are aimed against neoliberalism and austerity across the globe. Ilargi notes:

If we presume that a connection exists between the increase in debt on one side and the increase in “asset value” on the other, then I would say chances are we’re looking at both a gigantic wealth transfer from the poor towards the rich and a huge bubble that allows that to happen, and that will make the poor even poorer when it bursts. Which seems inevitable, because debt by itself cannot create value.

And if I’m right, what we’re seeing is not the incredible resiliency of the markets, and no real increase in asset value, but an increase in the threat to the social cohesion of our communities, cities and nations.

The Automatic Earth has long argued that in the coming revaluation, individuals and communities need: to pay down their debts (unless you wish to lose your lives as indentured student/worker or your homes as mortgagee, which are someone else’s assets); to learn some new, tradable and communal skills; to buy some communal tools; and get to know your neighbours. As we career towards an increasingly volatile energy/economic outlook, with the realities of devaluation and debt looming, and increasingly complex mechanisms being sought for locking down and making precarious the future of both higher education institutions and its students/academics, I wonder whether the only response that academics have is that there is no alternative? Or whether academics can develop alternative methods of liberating knowing and knowledge and organisation, and which are beyond the space-time of debt and privatisation.

Addendum: in a piece on the UK’s jobs crisis, Ha-Joon Chang argues that work insecurity, the collapse in real wages, unemployment, mental health problems and a lack of well-being, are hidden from serious discussion. He states that “this wider crisis – perhaps we can call it the “general living crisis” – is not seriously discussed because over the last few decades we have come to neglect work as a serious issue.” This is certainly true of higher education, which has been re-geared around entrepreneurial education and the Government’s growth agenda. Inside the University there is no alternative to an education for the living death of capitalist work. As Marx notes in volume 1 of Capital:

The capitalistic mode of production (essentially the production of surplus-value, the absorption of surplus-labour), produces thus, with the extension of the working-day, not only the deterioration of human labour-power by robbing it of its normal, moral and physical, conditions of development and function. It produces also the premature exhaustion and death of this labour-power itself. It extends the labourer’s time of production during a given period by shortening his actual life-time.

As Chang notes, we need to talk about the reality of this as we expect our students as scholars to consume and produce more debt.


On the University, protest and a post-capitalist imagination


Posted by hallymk1

Marx was clear that given the nature of capitalist social relations, there can be no balanced growth or equilibrium reached inside production for the market. The history of crises, and of both State and transnational responses to those crises, crystallises that reality further. Unfortunately for those living and working inside higher education this is being realised as the University moves from its formal subsumption under capitalist social relations to its real subsumption. This process involves the restructuring of higher education as a terrain for exchange value, rather than simply for the production of use values, and as a site for the expanded reproduction of capital.

This restructuring is painful bordering on the excruciating for many, and it is imposed in-part through measures like: the announcement in the Autumn Statement of 30,000 extra university places next year and the abolition of all number controls in 2015-16; the calls for the removal of the cap on fees; increased privatisation and outsourcing; encouraging alternative providers; the sale of the student loan book; the use of REF/impact measures for academic labour, and so on. Each of these tactical arrangements furthers the deterritorialisation of the idea that the public/social might underpin the organising principles for higher education. As a result we are left in asymmetrical opposition the State’s use of force to impose marketization. Market forces, indeed.

On the sale of the loan book, Andrew McGettigan has questioned:

why would you sell this asset class at the bottom of the market? that is, when the economy is only just beginning to recover from recession. If you believe in ‘the growth to come’, wouldn’t you be better holding on to an income steam [sic.] tied to graduate earnings?

So one is left to question whether this tactic is simply a deeply political move that is designed for the purpose of fundamentally restructuring the future direction and organising principles of higher education? One result is that it becomes impossible to go back. Moreover, each provider becomes a competing capital in a system of expanded reproduction, and is forced to become part of an association of capitals rather than simply a provider of education.

The potential for higher education to be folded inside a broader system of expanded reproduction is important for reinvestment or reallocation purposes across a global economy. However, this potentiality is disciplined by credit and debt and that bears its own risks. As the mainstream economist Jeremy Sachs recently argued, “The U.S. economy, and the world economy, cannot recover sustainably by propping up consumers for yet another binge.” Yet Phoenix Capital continue to argue that debt-related binges are exactly what is fuelling any semblance of growth:

So, we have investor sentiment showing record bullishness, investors are piling into stocks at a pace not seen since 1999-2000: at the height of the Tech Bubble, earnings are generally falling, the global economy is contracting, and the Fed is already buying $85 billion worth of assets per month.

We all know how this bubble will burst: badly. It’s just a question of when. The smart money is either selling into this rally (Fortress and Apollo Group) or sitting on cash (Buffett). They know what’s coming and are waiting.

In this view, Governments need to generate reinvestment and productive capacity, in order to reinstate meaningful growth that is not simply based on consumption and mortgage-debt. However, as Michael Roberts notes, corporations are increasingly unwilling to make productive investments, preferring to hold financial assets like bonds, stocks and cash. This would indicate that the returns on productive investment are too low relative to the risk of making a loss. Thus, investment in new technology or research and development, which requires considerable upfront funding for no certainty of eventual success, is stalling. In spite of limited venture capital involvement in MOOCs and the engagement of some universities in bond markets, as Audrey Watters queries, at issue are both the business model for higher learning and how its providers will make money in the medium-term.

Roberts amplifies the importance of understanding this problem for higher education, because “In order to compete, companies increasingly must invest in new and untried technology rather than just increase investment in existing equipment.” This is riskier because R&D is costlier to finance and requires firms to hold a greater cash buffer against future shocks. Thus, says Roberts, “companies have to build up cash reserves as sinking fund to cover likely losses on research and development.” As universities are restructured as competing capitals or businesses, the relationships between investment, capital intensity, labour productivity and profitability or the ability at least to service debts through surpluses, become critical.

A central issue in judgements that will need to be made about these interrelationships and especially investment opportunities will be appetite for risk. In a speech on profitability and investment in the UK private sector, Ben Broadbent from the Bank of England noted:

Even if the crisis originated in the banking system there is now a higher hurdle for risky investment – a rise in the perceived probability of an extremely bad economic outcome… In reality, many investments involve sunk costs. Big FDI (foreign direct investment) projects, in-firm training, R&D, the adoption of new technologies, even simple managerial reorganisations – these are all things that can improve productivity but have risky returns and cannot be easily reversed after the event.

This matters for academics and students in an increasingly opened-up UK higher education market, not just because the Government is cracking the public sector for the extraction for value and profit, and as a space inside which excess surplus value can be invested, but also because secondary legislation and customary practices are becoming mechanisms for the creative destruction of capital. As Michael Roberts notes in a separate blog-post, levels of corporate debt and poor rates of return on investment mean that:

According to research by the ‘free market’ Adam Smith Institute, 108,000 so-called zombie businesses in the UK are only able to service the interest on their debt, preventing them from restructuring. In a way, this is holding back a recovery in overall profitability and new investment because “Zombie firms stop workers and money being redeployed to more productive uses, they prevent new, better firms entering the market, they undermine competitiveness, reduce productivity and slow the growth of the whole economy.” In other words, they slow ‘creative destruction’ of capital by the liquidation of the weak for the strong.

It is too easy to see how the creative destruction of certain institutions and the reappropriation of their capital assets will flow from marketization.

We might therefore usefully question how Government higher education reforms are situated against a critical political economy of the restructuring of the idea of higher education. Whilst we may argue that there is an ideological hatred of the public or the poor or the disadvantaged by those in-power that is visceral and neoliberal, we also need to recognise, as Roberts does, that reforms are driven by the “dominance of the capitalist sector” and in particular by finance capital. The sale of the loan book, outsourcing, MOOCs, precarious academic labour, are all refracted through this reality. To call for public re-investment for higher education, as Roberts again highlights, “does not ensure a rise in profitability for the capitalist sector as a whole… [and] As long as the capitalist sector is dominant in the major economies, that is what matters.”

Thus, for universities, the opening-up of the sector to the coercive laws of competition is likely to mean more outsourcing and association with the private providers of services and commodities, more engagement in finance (bond) markets, limited use of venture capital for technological innovation, and a faster pace of organisational development and restructuring, each focused on capital or labour intensity, and the production of surplus value. However, this will simply expand the contradictions inherent to capital into the sector, rather than enabling those contradictions to be overcome.

One result is likely to be the removal of the fee cap for indentured study, in order to raise effective demand. For the Russell Group this will provide an opportunity to service the global, bourgeois consumption of “high-class”, expensive educational products. For the rest there will be a fight for low-cost consumers or for a foreign trade in international students/labour that is a form of arbitrage. One of the problems in all this is that market-forces tend to be anarchic (witness Phoenix Capital’s statement noted above about the looming bear market) and incoherent, and a poor guide to managing production and abundance/scarcity of resources. This is as true of academic labour as of any other form as it is subsumed under the dictates of competition and the production/accumulation of surplus value.

One of the critical questions in this restructuring relates to the response of academics and students inside the system. In a reflection on the Autumn Statement, Andrew Westwood argued:

After all of the arguments about both the affordability and the desirability of a mass higher education system, George Osborne has come down firmly and decisively in favour of both. I thought we had lost that debate – that faith in mass human capital and the knowledge economy had been irreparably damaged. I was wrong and I’m pleased about that.

That should be something to celebrate.

This statement is distasteful because it reduces humanity to “mass human capital”. As I note elsewhere, it is actually a “flagrantly despicable term to reduce people to”. However, economically it is also deeply flawed. The argument is that the worker’s labour power is her capital in the commodity form, and that education will help her to build that capital and deliver a return. As David Harvey notes, this might work in artisan/craft societies, but in the transition from craft to capitalist work this level of autonomy is restricted to capital alone as the automatic subject. The craftsman or artisan can only survive as she is able to sell her labour power in the market for a price, and to purchase her own means of reproducing that labour power. Her labour power is only capital in the hands of the capitalist. The worker is not able to make use of her skills, but sees these subsumed under the means of production of the capitalist class. She is therefore alienated from both her own labour power, which is used by the capitalist to extract surplus value, and from herself. The academic’s/student’s/worker’s skills are never their own autonomous capital. If they were human capital then they would be capable of returning interest. However, the academic/student/worker has to labour; she cannot live off the revenue that accrues from her alleged human capital.

There is no choice for the academic/student/worker but to labour as a form of coercion, and to upskill as an entrepreneur as a form of coercive practice. It is in-part as a negation of this coercion that we witness new “site[s] of occupations, strikes, road blocks and picket lines as students and workers rally against privatization.” Whilst these are related to specific issues to do with 3cosas, outsourcing, the privatisation and enclosure of university space, or cops off campus, as NovaraMedia note this is a specific reaction to the political management of austerity that is aimed as the dispossession of public, free space and time. It is designed to mobilise lives around the search for money. As Joseph Kay notes, this has ramifications for the idea of the University:

the choice to be inside the university is disappearing. Whether by escalating indebtedness, involuntary outsourcing, or indeed, summary suspension for political activity, exclusion from the university is making a comeback. At the same time, whether to be against the university is also becoming less of a choice, since the university, at least in its present form, is increasingly against us.

We confront the university less and less as a place of an idealised ‘Education’, and more and more as an exploitative boss, a spendthrift landlord, a creditor, and an instigator of violent repression. The blood on the pavement at UCL symbolises this shift.

Blood on the pavements of our universities is a marker that the State and its institutions will impose acceptance of indenture and a shift in incomes from the poor to the rich, and from the UK to London, and an attrition on real wages, and precarious employment, and ballooning unemployment, and the overcoming of stagnation through financial asset booms, credit-fuelled property ownership and exorbitant bourgeois consumption.

This reminds me that I wrote two years ago, pace John Holloway, about exodus either by Capital from any University that was in opposition to the dictates of the market, or by academics from the University as it was reinscribed for value:

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

In the face of this reality, and that of cops on campus, I went on to state that:

Yet the University remains a symbol of places where mass intellectuality, or knowledge as our main socially-productive force, can be consumed/produced and contributed to by all. The University remains a symbol of the possibility that we can create sites of opposition and ontological critique, or where we can renew histories of denial and revolt, and where new stories can be told, against states of exception that enclose how and where and why we assemble, associate and organise.

Increasingly I doubt that this is the case. Increasingly I believe that the game is up, and that the crucial actions now is liberating participatory knowledge, practice, skills and organising principles, and forming co-operative associations that can begin to describe alternative forms of value beyond the market. As I wrote at the time of the last set of occupations:

academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction? How do students and teachers contribute to workerist and public dissent against domination and foreclosure?

As Kay notes: “we need to take the rage, and direct it into agitating and organising in our everyday lives.”

In this, Michael Roberts argues that we need to discuss value and organisation:

we must replace a system of production for profit and a society based on greed and self-interest with one that is commonly owned and planned for the needs of all and based on cooperation and support.

Academics need to consider how they contribute to a discussion about social reproduction that is post-capitalist co-ordination. That enables a “postcapitalist imagination”. The social is clearly possible, and we have countless examples of dissent and alternatives to neoliberalism, like: that currently being worked through in Ecuador; or in the ALBA grouping of nations; or in the Mondragon Co-operative; or in the Paris Commune; or in solidarity economies; or in the Social Science Centre; where the social relations of production might be refocused around associated workers rather than associated capitals. These examples, and those of students in occupation, offer hope that new social mechanisms or organising principles, which in turn enable solidarity networks to manage direct decision-making, might enable a transition to a different institutional structure as part of a transition to a complex, post-capitalist society.

In managing co-ordination, we might look at co-opting the principles of the very organisations in which we work, namely universities as pivots for associations of capitals. These associations not only produce means of production but also organise other means of production as inputs in a larger, networked production process. How might those principles, and in fact those means of production be co-opted and traded for use rather than exchange? The capitalist organisation of the University as an association of capitals addresses co-operation in terms of command and control. How might we co-opt this for co-operative ends and to create solidarity networks that might help us to manage issues of energy availability, climate change, poverty and so on, and more broadly the transition to a post-capitalist world? Where and how might academics and students recover their labour as a “postcapitalist imagination”?


On rage (as an empowered and productive member of society)


Posted by hallymk1

This blog is autobiographical. But then you knew that, right? You knew that when I talk about emancipation or the struggle for communism as the negation of my negation or against my alienation or for a world beyond false consciousness, that this was deeply personal as well as political. That I am against my/your/our life’s subsumption under someone else’s rules; against my/your/our alienation inside someone else’s structuring realities. That I am for the world made concrete and useful through co-operation, rather than its restructuring for exchange and the market.

That you can trace the tropes I talk about on here to my life in-against-and-beyond therapy.

That being in-and-beyond therapy is the most deeply political act of my life because it is emancipatory.

And in this process and in this moment, one of the things that is surfacing is anger at the world. Anger at our collective subsumption under the dictates of the market, which is enforced by the disciplinary hand of an increasingly securitised State. Anger that demands that I/we say no, and push-back, and refuse, and look for alternatives that are increasingly outside of the institutionalised realities of competitive, marketised higher education.

And this is also anger at the realities of my past. Framing this present.

And a boy left alone in the corner of a room. With fear framing his ever-present.

And that is one of my critical realisations; that the cognitive and emotional and past and present are interwoven; and that I can trust to this and have faith in it. That who am I now depends on who I was then. And that I need to integrate that eight year-old boy inside my adult-self. And that I cannot understand my adult-self that is presently in-and-against Capital and capitalist social relations, unless I understand my adult/boy-self that is equally in-and-against my/his past.

And although systemically academics are restructured against feeling and for critical thinking or critical reasoning or whatever neoliberal ideal will deliver REF-able, impactful outcomes, my struggle for integration and against further alienation reveals a struggle for a life that is much more qualitative. And so every time I hear about quantified time, or outcomes, or impact, I bleed a little. And I feel the screw turn. And this feeling of bleeding or constriction or enclosure is critical because it threatens to be disciplinary. It threatens to dis-integrate the emotional from the cognitive in me/us, or to map or codify or commodify our affective existence. To put our souls to work and to quantify them.

This is why communism, or the fight for the commons, or for co-operation, becomes qualitatively meaningful, in the face of the incremental objectification of our everyday existence, through cops on campus, or precarious labour, or the privatisation of public space, or the indenturing of our young people’s futures, or whatever. This is a qualitative turn of the screw in an anti-social or inhumane direction that is to be resisted. Everywhere. In this life.

This secular crisis of capitalism reveals the inhumanity of the objectification of my/your/our time and space, or space-time. And this is why I struggle against the living death of capitalist work. It is why I struggle for faith in humanity rather than the market. Because the loss of so much of my past makes me recoil at the threat to our collective futures imposed by austerity or debt or climate change or Fukushima or whatever. And which anaesthetises academia to the external realities of this world, in the name of money/impact.

And this qualitative turn of the screw is only amplified by the reification of critical reasoning or thinking. This reification that denies our need to integrate the cognitive and the emotional (and there is a reason that Bloom wrote about the affective domain although it was almost an afterthought), and that argues that I might think myself well. That critical thinking about depression and anxiety, or some other (cognitive) behavioural stricture or neuro-linguistic re-programming or coaching manualisation, might lead to recovery. That there might be a pill that will make me better/happy. That there might be a download from the Matrix that cures me. For the market. An empowered and productive member of society.

And it has taken me over five years in therapy to learn to listen to my feelings. To know that qualitatively my gut knows, and that I should trust it. Through experience and survival it knows, and I know. So when my chest is gripped with anxiety but my gut is calm, I know there is another way. When they are both in seizure, then we have a problem.

And this feels important because I am trying to reflect on what Clementine writes, in relation to her rage at her Mom’s impending surgery:

As I sit here in my chair in dads office, crying for the first time about all this shit, I want to just sit here and scream. But I don’t want anyone to hear me. I don’t want to be what they think that I ought to be. I’m not. I’m not crying because I’m sad or I’m breaking. I’m crying because I am so fucking mad. I am so mad that there’s nothing that can calm me down. There is nothing I can’t deal with but just because I can deal with it doesn’t mean that it’s not painful as fuck holding it back.

It took me years to realise that this was/is me, in this life at work and at home, searching for something and not knowing that what I desired was an integrated self. That I spent so long holding my rage back that it consumed me as depression and anxiety, although as it happens this was also formed through shame. And that I spent forever trying to cope with the anger that spilled out as a fight against injustice or marginalisation or power-over, of students or those without homes or those with no voice, and for a different set of organising principles. And that deep-down this was a fight against my own historical and social marginalisation.

And the more I think about Clementine’s pain in holding back her fucking mad-ness, the more I wonder about the ways in which as an academic I am trying to find mechanisms to integrate my fucking mad-ness and my rage at the world as it is, inside my life as a whole. And this stands against critical thinking and against medicating my emotions. And this, I think, is where critique emerges for me as a powerful, political and therapeutic tool for the systemic analysis of the ways in which I and my self are alienated in this world. And this prefigures the emergence of my focus on sociability and on co-operative alternatives. It is the interplay between rage, courage and critique that reveals and then co-opts the fucking mad-ness. For something different. Enabling me to feel it and live it and understand it, and put it to use.

For love.