Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

December 5, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting at the the CAPPE Neoliberalism and Everyday Life conference next September, at the University of Brighton. My abstract is below.

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

On circuits of affect and resistance

November 30, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

This post was written whilst listening to LCD Soundsystem’s last concert at Madison Square Garden.

ONE. Circuits of affect and resistance

Yesterday I attended an ESRC seminar series on Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights. The seminar was on Affective Digital Economy: Intimacy, Identity and Networked Realities. One of the key points that emerged from the day was the need to reconnect a political critique into the lived realities of social spaces like the Allsorts Youth Project, or in work related to transnational communications amongst a diaspora, or where we are thinking about the relationships between spaces, surveillance and mental health. In particular the event had me considering how we abstract the specificities of our individual or community-based struggles, in order:

To find sites of solidarity that enable us to push back against the alienation of capitalist work and the marginalisation or labelling of our identities;
To recognise how we might resist capital as the automatic subject, from the standpoint of labour;
To understand and analyse the relationships between affects, cognition and kinaesthetics, and how they are captured and then subsumed under the circuit of production.

One outcome of this is the extent to which we might see the social circuits of affect or emotion, not as a means for converting immaterial labour into the commodity form, but as a mechanism for refusing and then interrupting the circuits of production, commodity or money capital. This might be done by revealing our systemic alienation from the products of our labour, from our labour itself, from ourselves and from our species-being. Or it might be done by opening-out spaces for sharing rather than trading, and for use-value rather than exchange-value. Or it might be done by redefining the organising principles on which technological systems, technologies and data are used, so that they are co-operative rather than marketised and securitised. Or resistance and pushing-back might be something else entirely.

TWO. Some notes on affect, immaterial labour and cognitive capital

One of the points of contention during the day was whether affect or emotion was a commodity or could be commodified. From my perspective, there was a large amount of confusion around this point, and it connects affect, cognitive capital and immaterial labour. For Beradi, a focus on affect or emotion reveals the mechanisms through which the human soul is commodified through data, databases, being always-on, perceived speed-up, network-centrism and so on, and can thereby be put to work. In this Autonomist tradition, the autonomy or ability of globalised labour to develop its own self-awareness and to utilise technology to act for-itself is critical. Thus, feeling is critical. Here there is no outside of capitalism, and overcoming the alienation of capitalist work demands mechanisms that push back against it, and structures that are beyond its value-form. This idea of negating capital from the point-of-view of the working class as revolutionary social subject is revealed in the epithet in-against-beyond, and predicates critiques of the structures that reproduce capitalism’s domination, like the State and its educational institutions. It is important to recognise that in this view capital needs labour in order to be valorised, but labour does not need capital and is therefore potentially autonomous. This self-awareness or subjectivity is not automatic and demands a co-operative species-being that is cognitively, affectively and kinaesthetically aware.

In classical Marxism, material production forms the basis of all social life and drives the objective history of capitalist social relations. However, radical shifts in technology are important because they revolutionise the valorisation process. For Marx, the magnitude of the value of labour is driven by the labour-time that is socially necessary to produce a specific commodity ‘under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society’ (Marx 2004, p. 129). Thus, academic labour is particularly valuable as a result of the amount of socially-necessary labour-time embedded in its products, which integrate specialised cognitive and material means of production. This promises the capitalist high rates of surplus value extraction or rental income from patents or licenses. However, the people and skills that support such high-end commodity capitalism, are both menial and leverage, and can be made precarious or be outsourced. One outcome of this cognitive work is a view that the material, objective world is replaced by a subjective immateriality that is increasingly inscribed digitally, and which suggests a limitless expansion of the system across the social factory.

Therefore, inside education a focus on immateriality encourages an analysis of the struggle between labour and capital in the creation and commodification of what is termed cognitive capital. Technology is a critical force in the production and accumulation of cognitive capital because it as Žižek notes, it ‘reduces everything to functions and raw materials’, with the result that individual emotions and affects, cultural cues and mores, and the construction of the relations between individuals ‘are themselves the very material of our everyday exploitation’. Educational contexts are vital in enabling capital to find circuits for extracting value from socio-emotional or personalised learning, using technologies like smartphones or personal learning networks. These mechanisms enable capital to enclose and commodify an increasingly fluid and identity-driven set of social relations, which themselves form the basis of further exchange. These processes of exchange are catalysed by, for example, the sharing of personal information on cloud-based social networks that can be aggregated and data-mined. Thus, all activity or work inside the social factory, including the processes of learning serve as the basis for developing new services and applications. For Beradi (2009, p. 90) this construct emerges across the length, breadth and depth of cyberspace from the immaterial labour of knowledge-workers who

move to find signs, to elaborate experience, or simply to follow the paths of their existence. But at every moment and place they are reachable and can be called back to perform a productive function that will be reinserted into the global cycle of production. In a certain sense, cellular phones realize the dream of capital: that of absorbing every possible atom of time at the exact moment the productive cycle needs it. In this way, workers offer their entire day to capital and are paid only for the moments when their time is made cellular. Info-producers can be seen as neuro-workers. They prepare their nervous system as an active receiving terminal for as much time as possible. The entire lived day becomes subject to a semiotic activation which becomes directly productive only when necessary.

In this view, social relations are increasingly structured by technically-mediated organisations like schools and the University, which then re-inscribe socio-political hierarchies that are increasingly technological, coercive and exploitative. This coercive and exploitative set of characteristics is driven by the competitive dynamics of capitalism, and especially the ways in which the socially necessary character of the labour-power expended in producing a particular commodity or innovation or technology is diminished over-time. This reduces the value of knowledge and specific immaterial skills in the market, resulting in a persistent demand to innovate, to become entrepreneurial or to hold and manage proprietary or creative skills.

Thus, constant innovation becomes a central pedagogic project, for instance in: monitoring and stimulating cognition through pervasive technology and mobility; enforcing private property rights through intellectual property and patent law so that a knowledge-rent economy can take hold; opening-up public data and knowledge so that new cloud-based services based on learning analytics can be developed and marketised; amplifying innovations around internationalisation like MOOCs and open educational resources so that world markets of consumption and production of commodities and cognitive capital are opened-up; and organising, disciplining and exploiting an immaterial workforce, or ‘cognitariat’. This is a terrain of conflict, especially as the processes that deliver cognitive capital involve the development of cyborgs or the fusing of objectivised, fixed machinery and human subjects. Instead of the promised technologically-fuelled reduction in toil and labour-time, technology ‘suffers a dialectical inversion and becomes the most unfailing means for turning the whole lifetime of the worker and his family into labour-time at capital’s disposal for its own valorisation’ (Marx, 1993, p. 532).

In the Autonomist tradition, the concept of immateriality is tied to the production of living knowledge, or the general intellect, which offers a theoretical tool to analyse the transformation of labour and knowledge production through the integration of science and technology across society. Thus, it is important that the immaterial world of capital, in which it is believed that accumulation can occur without material production, is inverted so that the fetishised myth of technology as the creator of value is replaced by an analysis of co-operative, socialised labour-power. This can be revealed through a critique of Marx’s (1993) concept of the general intellect, inside-and-against a networked, globalised production/consumption process, as it emerges as mass intellectuality.

THREE. Some criticisms of immateriality or affective capital

Criticisms of Autonomist Marxism have focused on its apparent network-centrism and its concomitant disconnection from the hierarchical, globalised forces of production that shape our objective social reality. The same is also true of those who would make claims for affect or emotion as commodity, or themselves as the source of value (see below Camfield, 2007; Davies, 2011; Robinson, 2004). In particular, there is a tendency to forget the realities of privatisation and outsourcing to the global South, and for the accumulation of natural resources, like rare earth metals, oil and coal, and human capital from that same space, alongside cataclysmic environmental despoilation. Thus, as Camfield (2007, p. 31) argues

biopolitical labour… fails to make distinctions between the different forms of production involved in the production of all that falls within the scope of ‘social life itself ’. In a highly abstract sense, it is possible to talk of labour producing goods, services, social relations, and human subjectivities. Yet it is essential to be able to distinguish the production of ourselves as human subjects through our relationships with nature and each other in determinate socio-material conditions and particular historical moments from the production by humans of, say, microprocessors. Very different kinds of production processes and products are involved. Labour is at the heart of them all, but at different levels of abstraction and in different social forms.

Moreover, entrepreneurial education and the promise of technology in the global North support precarious work and hyper-exploitation for those without proprietary skills, alongside reinforcing transnational hierarchies. Thus King (2010, p. 287) notes that ‘From a structural perspective, even with the transformative powers of digital technology, we are not moving into a post-capitalist age. The fundamental property relationships that underpin the class structure remain intact and have sharply intensified.’ The question is whether and how the connections between sites of exploitation including education and technology can be made.

What might be noted of the Autonomist approach is that its broader categories enable a critique of capitalist work in the networked society, which point to how the whole of human life is systemically enclosed and mined for new services. The connections between immaterial or affective labour in the production of cognitive capital, and their connections to the broadening and deepening of the accumulation of value across the whole of society restructured as a factory, point towards the mechanisms through which technology-rich educational settings are co-opted for work.

When we use the term capital, we might reflect on how it is not only value-in-motion, but also an alienating social relation based on specific, totalising organising principles that are themselves coercive. Any notion of choice, ethics, morals, identity, empowerment, agency and so on, can only emerge as objectified or alienated inside and subjugated through this totality. So affective capital points to asymmetrical power relations, separation, alienated labour and being, and fetishized relations. For example, for a community forced out of its homeland by war, that maintains contact via a synchronous technology like skype, we might ask how they and those of us who tolerate this state-of-being are alienated at each point by capital: in the geographical struggles for means of production that drive war; in the struggle for self-worth and betterment that force us to migrate to earn a wage to subsist; in the promise of a better life that can only exist as capitalist work and the entrepreneurial or neoliberal self; in the fetish of familial or communal connection through the use of technology. In each case, those communities are separated from the land, from their labour, from their society and ultimately from themselves.

One problem of the use of terms like affective capital is that it risks reducing people to human capital or means of production, which are themselves dehumanising. We risk accepting our alienation through its temporary and marginal technological amelioration. Perhaps what is needed is a critique of the forms of political economy/political debate/politics of austerity/war that force us to view human lives and society as restricted by the idea of economic/exchange value. What is certainly needed is a recognition that the forces of production across capitalist society, which are increasingly restructuring all of life as means of production, are also increasingly ranged asymmetrically against the everyday experiences of young people. The question for academics is how to support both critique and the development/nurturing of alternative forms of society that in-turn push-back against the neoliberal agenda that commodifies humanity, including through the co-option and subsumption of affect or emotion or “the subject”.

FOUR. Some references on Autonomia or affect or immateriality

Amsler, S., and M. Neary. 2012. Occupy: a new pedagogy of space and time? The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 106-38.

Arviddson, A. 2007. Ethical Economy. P2P News 156. http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2p156.

Beradi, F. 2009. The Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Transl. F. Cadel and G. Mecchia, with preface by J.E. Smith. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Bonefeld, W. 2010. What is the alternative? Shift Magazine 11. http://shiftmag.co.uk/?p=400.

Burston, J., N. Dyer-Witheford, and A. Hearn. 2010. Digital labour: Workers, authors, citizens. ephemera 10, no. 3/4: 214-221

Camfield, D. 2007. The Multitude and the Kangaroo: A Critique of Hardt and Negri’s Theory of Immaterial Labour. Historical Materialism 15: 21-52.

Casarino, C. and A. Negri. 2008. In Praise of the Common: a conversation on philosophy and politics. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press.

Cleaver, H. 1992. The Inversion of Class Perspective in Marxian Theory: From Valorisation to Self-Valorisation. In Open Marxism, Vol. 2, Theory and Practice, ed. W. Bonefeld, R. Gunn, and K. Psychopedis, 106-44. London: Pluto Press.

Cleaver, H. 2002. Reading capital politically. Edinburgh: AK Press.

Davies, J.S. 2011. Challenging Governance Theory: From Networks to Hegemony. London: Policy Press.

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus. London: Penguin.

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Continuum.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 1999. Cyber-Marx: cycles and circuits of struggle in high-technology capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 2004. Autonomist Marxism and the Information Society. Canberra: Treason Press. http://libcom.org/library/autonomist-marxism-information-society-nick-witheford.

Dyer-Witheford, N. 2010. Digital labour, species-becoming and the global worker. ephemera 10, no. 3/4: 484-503.

Dyer-Witheford, N., and G. de Peuter. 2009. Games of empire: global capitalism and video games. Minnesota, MI: University of Minnesota Press.

EduFactory (2013). EduFactory. http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/.

Foucault, M. 1977. Discipline and Punish. New York: Pantheon.

Foucault, M. 1990. The History of Sexuality. New York: Pantheon.

Guattari, F., and A. Negri. 1985. Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance. New York, NY: Semiotext(e).

Hall, R., and B.C. Stahl. 2012. Against Commodification: The University, Cognitive Capitalism and Emergent Technologies. tripleC: Cognition, Communication and Co-operation 10, no. 2: 184-202.

Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hardt, M., and A. Negri. 2004 Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. London: Penguin.

Holloway, J. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto Press.

King, B. On the new dignity of labour. ephemera 10, no. 3/4: 285-302.

The London Edinburgh Weekend Return Group. 1980. In and against the state. London: Pluto Press.

Marazzi. 2008. Capital And Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext.

Manzerolle, V. 2010. The Virtual Debt Factory: Towards an Analysis of Debt and Abstraction in the American Credit Crisis. tripleC: Cognition, Communication and Co-operation 10, no. 2: 221-36.

Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

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

Neary, M. 2010. Student as producer: a pedagogy for the avant-garde? Learning Exchange, 1 (1). http://learningexchange.westminster.ac.uk/index.php/lej/article/view/15.

Neary, M. 2012. Teaching Politically: Policy, Pedagogy and the New European University. The Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies 10, no. 2: 233-57.

Negri, A. 1988. Revolution Retrieved: Selected Writings on Marx, Keynes, Capitalist Crisis and New Social Subjects, 1967-83, trans. E. Emery and J. Merrington. London: Red Notes.

Negri, A. 1989. The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Negri, A. 1991. Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. New York, NY: Autonomedia.

Newfield, C. 2010. The structure and silence of Cognitariat. EduFactory webjournal 0: 10-26. http://www.edu-factory.org/edu15/webjournal/n0/Newfield.pdf.

Novara Media. 2013. Immaterial Labour Isn’t Working. NovaraFM 2 (38). http://novaramedia.com/2013/04/immaterial-labour-isnt-working/.

Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Baltimore, MA: John Hopkins University Press.

Roggero, G. 2011. The Production of Living Knowledge: The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

Thorburn, E. 2012. Actually Existing Autonomy and the Brave New World of Higher Education. Occupied Studies. http://bit.ly/xzcPRO.

Tiqqun. 2001. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. http://bit.ly/mTWhMI.

Tronti, M. 1971. Operai e Capitale. Einaudi: Turin.

Tronti, M. 1979, Lenin in England. Red Notes Working Class. Autonomy and the Crisis. London: Red Notes.

Vercellone, C. 2007. From Formal Subsumption to General Intellect. Historical Materialism 15: 13-36

Virno, P. 2001. General Intellect. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm.

Virno, P. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).

Wendling, A. E. 2009. Karl Marx on Technology and Alienation. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Winn, J. 2012. Open Education: From the Freedom of Things to the Freedom of People. In Towards Teaching in Public, ed. M. Neary, H. Stevenson, and L. Bell, 133-47. London: Continuum.

Winn, J. 2013. Tag Archive: Immaterial Labour. http://josswinn.org/tag/immaterial-labour/.

On courage that is in-and-against work

November 24, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

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

Anne Morrow Lindbergh.

“You have to carry the fire.”

“I don’t know how to.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Is the fire real? The fire?”

“Yes it is.”

“Where is it? I don’t know where it is.”

“Yes you do. It’s inside you. It always was there. I can see it.”

Cormac McCarthy. 2006. The Road.

I hate hope. I hate the neoliberal sound of it. It’s the kind of bullshit that enables celebrity academics to bang on about hope’s bastard twin, “equality of opportunity”, when what they should be struggling for is equality.

It never used to be this way. I read Jonathan Sachs’ The Politics of Hope, and I connected to the idea that academics might push back against the perceived libertarian revolution, and thereby defend and renew the social structures and institutions on which our growth as individuals and our cohesiveness as a society depend. At one point Sachs argues (Vintage, 2000, p. 137) that:

A strong civil society protects liberty because it diffuses the centres of power. It creates fraternity because it encourages people to work together as neighbours and friends. It promotes equality because it tempers self-help with help to others, and because the help given to others is such as to encourage their participation and eventually independence. Most importantly, civil society constitutes a moral domain, a world of covenants rather than contracts, in which duty, obligation, loyalty and integrity restrain the pursuit of self-interest, in which I learn to value others and win their trust because that is the only way families and communities can be maintained.

I liked this. It connected. It made hope feel important. But the older I get, the more I figure that in addressing the Right’s colonisation of libertarian ideals, tied to a morality framed by specific versions of autonomy and hard-work, and the collapse of privilege into entitlement, and the drive for the private and the contract, hope is never enough. In fact it simply cannot carry the power to renew anything on its own.

Reducing our existence to hope risks creating an everlasting apprenticeship for those externalised liberal virtues or traits or conceits or whatever through which we outsource responsibility for our selves and ourselves, to this corporation or that political party or that drug firm or this University. It leads us to focus on humility, justice, selflessness, participation, accountability to rules which we did not create. If we were just better neoliberal subjects, and redistributed opportunity. If only.

I’m not arguing for an amorality of living, but I’m trying to understand how we might fight to critique the rules that govern shackle our lives. It’s about questioning the hope that things will turn out satisfactorily or that someone or something else might make us happy. Or that it is what it is, but that hard-work and merit will work for you. Hope risks reproducing the worst kind of fatalism that subsumes each moment of our lives. In simply hoping for the best, we risk giving others what John Holloway would call power-over our lives, rather than our fighting for spaces in which we can develop the power-to recreate our lives, or to live for our selves and ourselves.

And this is about justice and it is about community and it is about co-operation and it is about solidarity and it is about faith and it is about morality. And most of all it is about courage. And in this Stephanie Dowrick argues (Viking edition, 1997, p. 13) that:

Courage comes out of and expresses love. This love may be intensely personal or individual, but it is just as likely to express and commitment to the belief that life itself is something marvellous, precious, worth having, worth living fully and, in ten thousand ways, worth fighting for…. courage offers something that can balance fear, draw the sting from it, put it in its place, open us to life, and set us free.

She goes on to connect courage and consciousness; courage and life in the face of acts and behaviours and emotions and uncertainty and complexity. That courage is an attitude that “allows you to learn that even when life has apparently betrayed you life is itself still present.” Hope does not make life possible without the courage to persist, to exist, to be, to be rebuilt with others, to trust and find faith. And it does this moment by moment. Dowrick (p. 24) says:

Courage is love’s miraculous face. It achieves its miracles through transformation. It allows the impossible to become possible; the unendurable to be endured; trust to be renewed; and the unexpected to become the inevitability that opens you to unprecedented insights about who you are, about what life is. When courage stirs, it delivers the strengths you need but didn’t know you had.

The things that we face don’t change through courage, but our relationship to them and to life does. And through courage maybe hope is rekindled against hopelessness; and maybe faith and trust; and maybe tolerance and forgiveness. Built upon daily acts that are personal and social and responsible (in that we are responsible for them), we might take courage to accept and care for ourselves and our lives. And face down those who speak of opportunity or meritocracy or justice or autonomy or hard-working or deserving, without critique. To face-down those who actively dissociate, in our outsourced lives, abstracted by money and productive work, and the tyranny of the clock, and the poverty of capital.

Those in-power who wish to punish those who become “instantly and terrifyingly sick”, by cutting the work-related group of the ESA. Those in-power, who will punish those claiming the Access to Learning hardship fund. Those in-power, who reinforce social divisions by wailing about scrounging. Those in-power who do nothing to reduce child poverty. Those in-power who continually impose the brutalisation of time as it is revealed through work. Those in-power who continually punish others, in order to discipline the rest. And who take not only our time and our labour, but also our humanity.

In this Dowrick argues (p. 67):

Courage is what it takes to be fully human. It’s what pushes us to survive the daily navigation between the known and the not-known; to deal with the inevitable; to create useful distinctions between what we can change and what we cannot. It is what will allow us to go into our own particular versions of hell. It is what will give us the strength and the grace to emerge, and still find life worth living.

And I’m writing this because I need to say something about the moment that courage is needed. The ongoing, seemingly endless moments when courage is needed. And girded by the courage of Kate Bowles, who wrote the following about her life and her family and her crisis, and about the way that our work compresses what is valued and valuable, until it is either stolen or neglected. She wrote:

on Go Home on Time Day this year, I was sitting in a surgeon’s office. It turns out that I have breast cancer, and I found out that very day. And here’s the thing: I first thought about getting something checked out exactly 12 months ago. I found time at the end of 2012 to take a day off work, got a referral from my GP, and then the vague unease passed. So I didn’t chase it up.

Over a busy year being both a full-time worker and a parent to three school-age children, I noticed now and then that the unease came back, and I fought with it in the middle of the night, along with to-do lists and unsent emails and ideas for projects and the anxieties of my co-workers and all of my misgivings about working for an institution whose driving mission is to be in the top 1% of world universities, which seems to me as shallow and demoralising an idea as any I’ve heard since I started working in higher education.

And now here we are.

And now here we are. And for all sorts of reasons I read those five words with an intense scream against the pain that this life has become and the choices we are forced to make, in order to justify our lives as hard-working and worthy of justice. And I scream against the pain of the compromises that are contained in those five words. And I recognise that it is in the moment of a crisis that the things that we do, and the compromises that we make, to be a manager or a co-worker or for the clock or for impact or for efficiency or for whatever, resolve.

The moment of the crisis is the singularity. The moment when everything becomes crystal clear; when timelines collapse and we have some resolution. When the world makes sense. Our lives, our loves, our families, our fears and dreams, the things and the people that we refused or put off, how we lived our lives; resolved in-and-against work. This precious moment in our lives standing in deep, qualitative contrast to the clock that measures our life’s purpose quantitatively.

Kate goes on to talk about courage, based upon the premise that following the singularity or the resolution of the Moment of crisis “you don’t have my consent to use my remaining time in this way.” What a thing to say. What a courageous thing to say about work and about life, and about self-care and self-love, and about what it means to live. She states:

why had it come to me so strongly that it was important to speak back to this kind of dispiriting and divisive [team-building, work] activity, however well-intentioned it might be?

I’ve come to this conclusion: I really have a problem with the culture of work in higher education. Having this diagnosis doesn’t make me special, because it doesn’t make me differently mortal than anyone else. We are neither vampires nor zombies, whatever the craze for playing with these ideas: we are humans, and we are all here together for a very short time, historically speaking. And so that being the case, the question facing us all is this: what do we do about work?

what we need is the courage to put work itself at risk.

The courage to put work itself at risk.

And to live our lives, rather than outsourcing them.

To find solidarity. And maybe some faith and trust, in ourselves and others.

To resist and push-back, against the quanta and the clocks that diminish us.

To expose and explode the moments in time that form our singularities, in order to highlight how some resolution can be found.

To witness the courage we have to recover ourselves. In every moment.

[NOTE: this post is dedicated to Kate. It, like so much of my life these past few years, reflects the perseverance and the compassion of my friends. It’s amazing how the solidarity of others enables courage to be rekindled.]

On Autonomist Marxism and the affective economy

November 21, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

I’m speaking on 29th November at an ESRC seminar series on Digital Policy: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights. The seminar is on Affective Digital Economy: Intimacy, Identity and Networked Realities.

Whilst Josie Fraser will be speaking about our Digital Literacy Leicester Framework Project, I will briefly develop a critique rooted in political economy. My own thinking in this area is derived from a reflection on the autonomist Marxist position that relates the affective domain and network governance to core concepts of the social factory, immaterial labour and cognitive capital, the general intellect and mass intellectuality, and the cybernetic hypothesis. I am interested in how these concepts enable a critical reading of socio-economic developments in information and communication technology. This is particularly important in enabling a critique of the place of education and technology inside the circuits and cycles of globalised capitalism, which is too easily defined as frictionless and networked in the face of the hegemonic realities of hierarchical, transnational forces of production. So my take is that we might use these categories of affective labour etc. to critique how technology-rich educational settings are co-opted for work, in order that possibilities for pushing back against the subsumption of life for capitalist work might be developed.

The seminar offers a space to discuss this theoretical framework/the development of alternatives in the context of the following two questions:

* Who are the major actors currently shaping this economy and how?
* What are the major dangers and risks in affective digital economy?

This is especially so in the context of the intention of the ESRC seminar series that: “At this moment of potentially profound changes in policy and practice, it is crucial to bring together actors with contrasting interests and perspectives to help inform and stimulate further debate and research.”

NOTE: the Occupied Times provides quite a nice description of how our consumption of technologies, and our disengagement or anaesthetised view of them as empowering, is totally disconnected from the material realities of their production. So our circuit in space-time of the consumption of technologies and the affective production of digital artefacts, fails to connect or recognise the everyday realities of the appropriation of lives and livelihoods that exists either in the mines that produce the raw materials (Tin, Coltan etc.) that go into our consumer technologies or the factories that build them. The clean outer shells of our hardware and software tools distance us from the immiseration of other human beings and forms a layer of false consciousness. Beneath the cloud and inside the tablet lies a proletarianised hell, reinforced with every click.

For the citizen and end-user, the experience of technology throughout post-WWII decades has been one of increasing degrees of separation between the internal blood and guts of the machine – from hardware to code – and the soft, alluring outer shell of the commodity form. All the traces of isolation and alienation that stem from this formula place an increasing number of steps between the immediate sensory encounter and the reality of the machine.

To catch a glimpse of the world removed at the heart of this machine, consider this century’s resources warfare in Congo. With the tech sector operating on the back of corporate appetite, the pressure to produce is carried from the drawing boards of Silicon valleys to the point of production’s material origin. In Congo, where demand for hi-tech device resources such as Tantalum has escalated in recent years beyond the capacity to supply, this pressure has only served to fuel the wider conflict over the control and appropriation of these resources. This situation is estimated to have claimed the lives of more than 5 million people, making it the world’s deadliest conflict since the second world war.

Here we can trace commodified communications technology born from the arse-end of violence to the mouth of your receiver. From ass to mouth – the food chain of 21st century technology production crosses gulfs, from violence to exploitation, until reaching civility; a history revealed only through the will to examine the world beneath the shimmering electronic propaganda of the new Samsung or Apple device.

We find ourselves removed from the very tools we use, encountering an unarticulated domain between production and use. The space-time contours of everyday social life are dramatically revised. This is especially true in our use of technology and how we mediate our relationships with the ‘real world’, as it becomes harder and harder to define and separate our technological identities from the idea that we also exist ‘in real life’. Our agency, as political beings, flows in between these spaces; interacting and composing itself from the vast caches of information that circulate on the network while at the same time being coerced by the near-universal grammar of our state of technology.

For a co-operative university

November 19, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

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

Our discussion takes as its premises the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the domination of merchants in higher education

November 9, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

Merchants dominate producers now. Commercial capital and money-dealing capital dominate productive capital. The expropriation of surplus value from producers by merchant capital is a primary source of profit. In educational production, in the production of curriculum resources, in the funding of research centres, in the building of physical and technological infrastructures, in the deployment of learning analytics, in the management of the student loan book, do educators and/or students have hegemony? Do educators and/or students dominate the agenda? In the idea of open education or of the MOOC, who has power? When we are told that education must become effective or efficient or innovate, who is heard? In the deployment of organisational development or of lean systems thinking or of zero-hours contracts or of £9,000 fees, who has a voice and who is marginalised?

It is worth re-thinking how merchant, credit and finance capital affect the inner workings of education, in particular as universities are being reconstructed as businesses. As they are being reconstructed as competing capitals, subject to the coercive logic of competition. And it is coercive. The coercive role of money as it is insinuated inside educational practice reinforces its own reification and more importantly fetishizes, for example, the student, or the entrepreneur or technology. As Pilling noted, Marx identified this idea of fetishisation as it flows through the bourgeois political economics of the kind that serves as analysis of the current crisis. He wrote:

under commodity production relations between men take the form of relations between ‘things’. The social relations are indirect relations, relations mediated through these things, and men simply ‘represent’ or ‘personify’ these things in the market place. Now Marx chastised the political economists for taking these forms ‘as given’ (by Nature) and not as social forms arising under definite historical conditions, forms which would therefore disappear under new social conditions. Those who accept the social relations of capital ‘uncritically’ in effect attribute to things in their immediate manifestation properties which, in point of fact, have nothing in common with this immediate material manifestation as such. The attention of Ricardo was directed almost exclusively to discovering the material base of definite social forms. These forms of social being were taken as read and therefore lying outside the scope of further analysis. It was Marx’s aim to discover the origin and development of these social forms assumed by the material-technical production process at a definite stage in the development of the productive forces.

In the current recalibration of education, we witness a media that denigrates public education and celebrates charter schools or academies, we witness a higher education for employment rather than for being, we witness a fetishisation of the student at the heart of the system, we witness think tanks related to global consultancies like McKinsey or PA or Pearson or to institutes like the IPPR calling for public/private partnerships and marketised open education. In each of these witnessings, we are unable to step away from the specificity of “broken education” (see, for example, this PA Consulting Delivering Education Reform paper), in order to critique the structures of domination, and who has power, and why. In pushing back against charter or free schools alone, or in pushing back against student-as-entrepreneur, or in pushing back against credit ratings for universities, we cannot possibly make sense of these individual aspects unless we develop a critique of how they relate to the generality of the reproduction of capital.

What we are witnessing for instance in the open education movement is its fetishisation as an open threshold of access, as low-cost of entry, as emancipatory, as freeing-up resources for “developing nations”. What we do not see is its co-option by commercial capital, in the form of global educational merchants like Coursera or EdX or FutureLearn, for the extraction of surplus value and for labour arbitrage and for commodity-dumping. Coursera states that it:

is an education company that partners with the top universities and organizations in the world to offer courses online for anyone to take, for free. Our technology enables our partners to teach millions of students rather than hundreds. We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education that has so far been available to a select few. We aim to empower people with education that will improve their lives, the lives of their families, and the communities they live in.

Coursera then mediates flows of educational products that it does not produce, in terms of the content or pedagogies of its partners or the data that is harvested from its students. One interesting point here is that for-profit educational merchant capital drives the specific development of capitalist, educational production that is separated from the sphere of production. It is not based on direct exchange between producers and consumers, but on mediated and just-in-time provision. So it is subject to the same drives to maximise the extraction of surplus value from producers and products without contributing to the circuit of production, except in forms that enable speed-up or mobility.

In the case of FutureLearn this means developing an organisation structure that is exclusive and excluding of certain providers or producers, based on maximising profits. Thus, David Willetts argued:

FutureLearn is not accessible for all of our universities. They have taken a view about the universities that they are going to allow into FutureLearn, so the other universities are going to need another route if FutureLearn won’t have them and there are other providers around and of course, part of what they will offer is help in some of the analytics as well. I think this is coming up the agenda, because clearly other universities outside the Russell will want to go down the MOOC route as well, and I completely understand that, and if I were in their shoes I would want them to do it. So there are other platforms that you may want to join, where including, and I am sure included in their terms, will be assistance in the analytics that you need to get your courses online.

In response Tim O’Shea noted that:

I think you were correctly cautious about the idea that the Government would intervene to support a particular platform provider, because there is a diversity of platform providers in the US, there is actually three in Silicon Valley, there is FutureLearn here, and then there are some free platforms, like Course Builder, that is provided by Google, so I think for the government to intervene would be messy.

In facilitating corporate power, intervention may be denied but in creating an education market through secondary legislation, state intervention is critical. Thus, open education or the MOOC or whatever technological or organisational innovation has to be critiqued, not in terms of student costs or empowerment or democratising of learning, but inside-and-against the flows of capital and the attempt to reassert stable forms of accumulation. Thus Sarah Grossman in the Chronicle relates the profusion of commercial MOOCs to international competition, the needs of venture capital for spaces in which to invest surpluses, and to the extraction of surplus value through education at work:

Japan’s answer to Coursera and edX, Schoo, announced this week that is had raised $1.5-million from venture-capital firms, including Itochu Technology Ventures, the Anri Fund, and the Incubate Fund. Offering more than 130 courses, Schoo is aimed at a Japanese audience of mainly office workers in their late 20s and early 30s.

The market, defined by corporates operating as commercial capitalists, is divorced from the realities of educational production as a social activity, and is recalibrated around the individual production and consumption of educational services and products. Thus, students are recalibrated not as social learners but as individual entrpreneurs able to access educational services and products in a global market.

However, what is also clear in this process of commercialising education is Marx’s view in Volume 3 of Capital that where merchant capital is hegemonic, then limits emerge in the spaces for productive or industrial capital. Marx argued that:

Within capitalist production merchant’s capital is reduced from its former independent existence to a special phase in the investment of capital, and the levelling of profits reduces its rate of profit to the general average. It functions only as an agent of productive capital. The special social conditions that take shape with the development of merchant’s capital, are here no longer paramount. On the contrary, wherever merchant’s capital still predominates we find backward conditions. This is true even within one and the same country, in which, for instance, the specifically merchant towns present far more striking analogies with past conditions than industrial towns.

The independent and predominant development of capital as merchant’s capital is tantamount to the non-subjection of production to capital, and hence to capital developing on the basis of an alien social mode of production which is also independent of it. The independent development of merchant’s capital, therefore, stands in inverse proportion to the general economic development of society.

Independent mercantile wealth as a predominant form of capital represents the separation of the circulation process from its extremes, and these extremes are the exchanging producers themselves. They remain independent of the circulation process, just as the latter remains independent of them

So Marx argued that where commercial capital and money capital dissolve previous forms of production and destroy the communities on which they were based, then they in-turn they become the community. So the public University is declared to be beyond hope and is under global pressure to reform, or become revolutionised as an organisational form for the accumulation of capital, be that social, cultural or commercial/financial. David Harvey refers to this as the “solvent effect” that is also conjunctural with the development of a world market, alongside flows of commodities, virtual trade, new colonialism, and the increasing subordination in this current phase of capitalism of production to trade and commerce. The domination of commercial capital over production is witnessed in: working conditions of outsourced employees, generally in the global South, in call centres and factories that produce consumer goods; the labour rights of those mining the raw materials that go into the same consumer goods; and the proliferation of zero-hour contracts, precarious employment and the generaton of a surplus population (witness the growing number of Ph.D.s with no chance of tenure or the UK’s free schools that can require no teaching qualifications). Witness Apple’s sub-contracting of labour to Pegatron and Foxconn and the recent claims made about labour costs and labour rights related to Taskrabbit, or the claims about labour arbitrage related to teachers, the use of adjunct labour and MOOCs.

However, as Marx writes in Volume 3, this also re-focuses us on the act of production, rather than on the circuits of money or commercial capital, as the truly revolutionary social activity. Thus, David Wiley’s call at #opened13for open education to save students a billion dollars cannot be seen as revolutionary or democratising. It needs to be critiqued as fetishistic. What does it tell us about who has power in the open education movement? What does it tell us about the roles of merchants, in the form of commercial and money-dealing capital, in the open education movement? What does it tell us about open education as a discourse of power where money drives the agenda? What does this tell us about our social relationships and the production of a pedagogy that is truly critical?

The problem with reducing open education to a discourse related to money is that far from enhancing democratisation, it reinforces the impact of proletarianisation noted above. So when Willetts argues for MOOCs as opening-up new markets for UK business, or when educators give keynotes that focus upon saving student money, or where educators celebrate conferences with partners in the petrochemical industry, transnational finance capital, the Rand Corporation and Pearson (as well as organisations more acceptable to left-leaning academics), it is important to ask about the role of power in the relationships that frame that educational space. Where does power lie between finance, merchant and productive capital, and the individual producers and consumers of educational products? The domination of commercial or finance capital drives low prices in the sphere of production, and that restructures organisational forms through efficiency drives or technological innovation. Where educational corporations control most of the surplus value that is produced they can define production (processes, labour rights, shifting indemnities, who manages risk). One of the outcomes of this is labour arbitrage and a refusal to negotiate with labour, or an attack on trades unions. As employment is made precarious amongst individuated and separated educational producers, collectivisation is negated and ultra-exploitation or proletarianisation emerges.

So we need to move away from fetishizing the MOOC or the student or the money savings that can be made or the democratising of educational life, to examine how merchants dominate over our educational experiences, inside a new world market that has been opened-up by both the nation State and transnational organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. We need to examine how our modern condition as labourers inside higher education is being revolutionised by technology and new organisational forms like MOOCs, as a result of the evolutionary processes that enable capitalism to overcome the limits imposed by crisis. These limits are socio-economic (fossil fuel depletion, climate change and so on) and are recalibrated as sustainable business or green growth, and they are economic in the current depression.

At issue for educators is how do we read this evolution? Is it to be fetishized as a specific and superficial function of the present? So do we really think that it is technology that is opening-up emancipatory or democratic educational possibilities? Or are those technologies and organisational forms a result of capital attempting to overcome the limits imposed by a falling rate of profit and labour relations? Is open education, in fact, to be analysed in terms of the general rules of motion of capitalism? Where money and commercial capital hold sway, as they do in the current condition, overcoming spatial and temporal barriers through mobility enable Capital to dominate over production and consumption. How should educators react?

However, there is a moment of hope. As Harvey (pace Marx) notes, merchant capital is predatory but it is subordinate to the production of surplus value, even if it controls those who produce it. Therefore, that merchant class and its financial co-operators have to make an ideology, media etc. in its corporate image, in order to underpin its power. This connects to Britt’s 14 points on the rise of the fascist state. As Jehu notes:

The present crisis arises from the fact that there is a mass of superfluous capital that cannot, under any circumstances, become real capital — that is, cannot produce surplus value and, therefore, profit. This mass of superfluous capital poses the constant threat to the mode of production of a general devaluation of the existing capital as a whole. If a general crisis of devaluation is to be avoided, the state must run deficits, i.e., it must spend more than it takes in in tax revenue. State deficit spending is, therefore, not determined by the needs of society (and, in particular, by the needs of the social producers), but by the needs of the owners of capital, who, if they are to avoid a nominal devaluation of this superfluous capital, must hand it over to the state to be consumed unproductively in return for interest payments.

The question is how to reveal and critique the material conditions of the working class, including those of teachers, educators and students, as they are subordinate to autonomous commercial and/or finance capital. How is it possible to recuperate the autonomy of educational producers in a way that pushes back against the hegemony of venture capital or MOOC providers acting as commercial capitalists? Is it possible to develop forms and stories of co-operative production and consumption that are beyond the money-form or cost savings? Is it possible to critique the idea of public rather than open education, and as a result to liberate skills, knowledges and practices against their marketization, and where they do not act to drive down wages through speed-up, or labour mobility, or the creation of proprietary skills that can be commodified? Is it possible to push-back against the use of open education to create a reserve army, or surplus population, of skilled workers as a disciplinary tool on wages?

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

At issue is whether we can help students to develop the analytical tools that enable them to understand the interdependencies of this world and thereby to critique power. Can we help them to change the world in the face of capital as the automatic subject, and against the dominance of our educational lives by finance and commercial capital?

Some notes on the creation of a higher education market

November 6, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO. A new higher education market of commodity producers

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE. Catalysing a new higher education market

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

It’s about a university education as an entrepreneurial good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But then we immediately make the economic case

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so the market is the only way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On co-operation, accumulation and the University

September 14, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday I heard a series of speakers, including Rachel Wenstone from the NUS, Malcolm Ryan as the ALT Conference co-chair, and Alan Ford from the University of Nottingham, speak about educational institutions as spaces for partnership-working between staff and students. This was, in Wenstone’s argument, to be enacted in-part through staff “training”, in Ryan’s through encouraging the student to become a change-agent (although student’s have a rich-history of leading change, witness the current Chilean experience, student activism in Kenya and the almost mythical 1968), and in Ford’s through internationalisation agendas. What emerged might be categorised as forms of entrepreneurial educational activity designed to reassert the hegemony of stories of growth and work, which are in-turn linked to a belief that there is no alternative: to internationalisation agendas that simply act as spaces for commodity-dumping or demand-management, or labour arbitrage; to re-training academics so that they become more productive; to the fetishised student voice.

This narrative is predicated on the idea that business-as-usual, in the form of economic growth, demands that we submit our lives to the reassertion of stable forms of capital accumulation, and that we submit our views of partnership, or the student voice, or cultural sensitivity, to the dictates of expanding markets. Moreover, this narrative, amplified by the Guardian Higher Education Network’s discussion on HE and economic growth, ignores the political and economic realities of the crisis tendency of the capitalist mode of production. It also ignores global responses from the labour movement to that crisis, in the form of the lessons that are emerging from the current Mexican educational protests, or the waves of education strikes that are planned in the UK, or the precepts based on content, form and structure of education that emerged from the International Student Movement’s Joint Statement. Critically, the latter argued that: “all educational entities/institutions should be democratically structured, meaning direct participation from below as a basis for decision making processes.” This is not the change-agency, or partnership-working that infects most educational discourse in the UK.

It is, therefore, increasingly difficult to understand the idea of education or the University without an engagement with the immanence of crises in capitalist modes of production, and more especially the systemic inability of Capital to overcome the limits to growth and reproduce itself. Thus, as is argued in a piece on debt and misery in Endnotes:

The differentia specifica of capitalist “economic” crises — that people starve in spite of good harvests, and means of production lie idle in spite of a need for their products — is merely one moment of this larger crisis — the constant reproduction of a scarcity of jobs in the midst of an abundance of goods.

Thus, the dynamic of this crisis is played out through student debt as a gateway to future employability, through the entrepreneurial turn inside universities as wealth generators, through the commodification of research, through the subsumption of student and staff academic labour in the name of the reproduction of the capital-labour relation, and the increasing workload pressures and threat of precarious employment across universities. Yet we witness the ongoing inability of the system to reproduce the capital-labour relation, even in the face of the abolition of non-marketised spaces (free education, free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare and so on), in order to find new demand for commodities and the circuit of capital. These spaces open-up a terrain for accumulation that is based upon the enclosure of place and the separation of people from the land. But as Endnotes states, this separation

has to be perpetually repeated in order for capital and “free” labour to meet in the market time after time. On the one hand, capital requires, already present in the labour market, a mass of people lacking direct access to means of production, looking to exchange work for wages. On the other hand, it requires, already present in the commodity market, a mass of people who have already acquired wages, looking to exchange their money for goods.

This perpetual separation spreads to the virtual space, and enables universities, through MOOCs or distance learning, to open-up new markets, Moreover, through the commodification of digital infrastructures, it enables new services to be turned into products and sold or to be rented out. In this way, although movements claim to be for “open” or “free” on the web, without a democratic control of that infrastructure, and without a social or communal definition of its value, it simply becomes a new set of spaces to be enclosed for the creation of value, or the dictates of competition, or the extraction of rent.

This is witnessed in the drive for technological or technique-driven innovations that can maximise profitability, through an increase in relative surplus value. This, in itself, drives the co-option of universities as competing capitals, as businesses that have been reconfigured financially and technologically for valorisation and productive labour. The need to re-establish profitability and stable forms of accumulation across a global system means that labour needs to be disciplined, for instance through training or entrepreneurial productivity or the threat of precarious employment or a renegotiation of contracts and labour rights. This is part of the cycle of capital that subsumes productive power, in order to enable accumulation and the production of relative surplus value. The latter depends upon increases in productivity that are technologically-driven, through mechanisation, automation, the conversion of services into products, or the forced co-operation of labourers in any production process. However, technological innovation drives unemployment or an attrition on wages, as the labourer’s skills are instantiated inside the machine. As Marx noted in Volume 1 of Capital (p. 627) the expansion of the system beyond its limits is driven

by methods which lessen the number of workers employed in proportion to the increase in production. Modern industry’s whole form of motion therefore depends on the constant transformation of a part of the working population into unemployed or semi-employed hands.

As Endnotes argue:

For Marx it is in and through this process of expanded reproduction that the dynamic of capital manifests itself as its own limit, not through cycles of boom and bust but in a secular deterioration of its own conditions of accumulation.

Thus, the mechanics of accumulation, demand for and types of employment, technologically-mediated changes in production that drive efficiencies, are all interconected. As new sectors, like education, are subsumed inside the logic of capital accumulation and valorisation, and as universities are restructured as competing capitals, the focus becomes ways of maintaining the rate of profit. Thus, it becomes natural that universities, like any other capital, would wish to “economise on labour”, through productivity gains and technical changes.

One might see the rise in internationalisation, including the MOOC agenda, as part of this shift from labour-intensive to capital-intensive production. As Marx noted (Capital, vol. 1, pp. 622-3)

On the one hand… the additional capital formed in the course of further accumulation attracts fewer and fewer workers in proportion to its magnitude. On the other hand, old capital periodically reproduced with a new composition repels more and more of the workers formerly employed by it.

Not only do labour-saving technologies spread across the system, leading to a relative decline in the demand for labour, but they are irreversible, making the drive for constant, entrepreneurial reskilling critical for anyone who wishes to survive in the system. However, more generally the technological determinism that drives the general, relative decline in labour demand also threatens to outstrip capital accumulation. In Capital, Volume 3, Marx argues that over time “moral depreciation” affects the gains made by technological innovation where the new machine:

loses exchange-value, either by machines of the same sort being produced cheaper than it, or by better machines entering into competition with it. In both cases, be the machine ever so young and full of life, its value is no longer determined by the labour actually materialised in it, but by the labour-time requisite to reproduce either it or the better machine. It has, therefore, lost value more or less. The shorter the period taken to reproduce its total value, the less is the danger of moral depreciation; and the longer the working-day, the shorter is that period. When machinery is first introduced into an industry, new methods of reproducing it more cheaply follow blow upon blow, and so do improvements, that not only affect individual parts and details of the machine, but its entire build. It is, therefore, in the early days of the life of machinery that this special incentive to the prolongation of the working-day makes itself felt most acutely.

One outcome of this process as it is generalised is de-accumulation and a secular crisis, whereby both workers and capital fall out of contracting sectors or industries and are unable to find new sectors in which to insert themselves. The drive for reskilling and empoyability in education sits inside this critique, but is also indicative of the inability of more and more workers to reproduce themselves by selling their labour-power. The vast numbers of Ph.D.s without work, the move towards on-line learning, the increasing rates of youth unemployment across the globe, are all indicators of this secular crisis. We increasingly see an educated class of workers who are unable sell their labour-power at the rate they need to pay down their debts, to act as consumers, and to eat/clothe/shelter themselves (i.e. reproduce themselves), that is assuming they can actually find work at all. In Marx’s terms (see Chapter 25 of Volume 1 of Capital) we are seeing the proletarianisation of ever-increasing numbers of educated young people:

who produce[] and valorise[] “capital”, and [are] thrown onto the street as soon as [they] become [] superfluous to the need for valorisation.

One caveat to that is that it is through the policy activity of the State, in converting the process of education into a service for Capital (through training in basic commodity or leveraged skills, or in creating spaces for skills that can be commodified), and then into a commodity for valorisation (like the creation of courses that must be purchased by students using a debt-driven fee, or the commodification of research as knowledge transfer or incubation, or the sale of student data to publishers), that education is transformed. Critical in this transformation is the subsumption of the circuits of educational practices and knowledges inside the circuits of capital. Education (c.f. low-cost degrees, student-as-consumer or entrepreneur, or MOOCs) becomes a series of individually-purchasable commodities, which open-up new markets and mass markets, as costs fall and production increases [pace Endnotes].

The process of academic proletarianisation, in the reduction of academic labour to low-cost production and consumption of courses or educational commodities, or precarious employment, or debt-driven partnership between staff and students, is that there are few escape routes outside of the system. This is more than the politics of having to sell ones labour-power in a market, in order to reproduce oneself. It is governed by the fact that specific process innovations inside education as a business-sector, driven by technological innovation, tends to lead to unemployment as labour is automated. The promise, witnessed in the UK Government’s new obsession with the digital as the backbone of new jobs and employability, runs up against the historical reality that innovation drives an attack on labour costs including rising unemployment, and that setting surplus labour or capital “free” forces them to look to sectors with decreasing labour requirements themselves (e.g. nanotechnology, cloud technology, biotechnology are each incredibly mechanised).

In part these decreased labour requirements are forced by the generalisation of productivity gains and technological innovation globally across the system. As the system has automated manufacture, and global demand for manufacturing labour falls, there is less need for co-operation between labourers to be enforced. Thus, valorisation is based not upon co-operation, as Marx argued in Capital Volume 1, but upon collaboration between individuals acting as entrepreneurs in a global economy. However, automation leads to a diminished scale of accumulation, and inevitably to crisis. As Marx noted in Chapter 16, central to an understanding of crisis was the relationship between stable forms of accumulation, technological innovation and labour-efficiencies, and the production of relative surplus value:

The production of absolute surplus-value turns exclusively upon the length of the working-day; the production of relative surplus-value, revolutionises out and out the technical processes of labour, and the composition of society. It therefore presupposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means, and conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation afforded by the formal subjection of labour to capital. In the course of this development, the formal subjection is replaced by the real subjection of labour to capital.

However, for Endnotes, in the current secular crisis of capitalism, even the real subsumption of sectors that were previously unproductive and not directly part of the valorisation process cannot halt the:

Unprecedented weakness of growth in the high-GDP countries over the 1997-2009 period, zero-growth in household income and employment over the whole cycle, the almost complete reliance on construction and household debt to maintain GDP — all are testament to the inability of surplus capital in its financial form to recombine with surplus labour and give rise to dynamic patterns of expanded reproduction.

One outcome is generalised proletarianisation. As they go on:

the trajectory of surplus capital distorts the trajectory of surplus labour described by Marx, and not only in the ways that we have already described. Most importantly, surplus capital built up in international money markets over the last 30 years has masked some of the tendencies to absolute immiseration, through the growing debt of working class households. This tendency, which has kept the bottom from falling out of global aggregate demand, has equally prevented any possibility of recovery, which would be achieved only through the “slaughtering of capital values” and “setting free of labour”. For while asset-price deflation may raise the possibility of a new investment boom, the devalorisation of labour-power will, in this context, only lead to increasing levels of consumer default and further financial breakdowns. Thus it is not only its capacity to generate employment, but the sustainability of the recovery itself which remains in question today… Any question of the absorption of this surplus humanity has been put to rest. It exists now only to be managed: segregated into prisons, marginalised in ghettos and camps, disciplined by the police, and annihilated by war.

In understanding the changes that are impacting the higher education sector, developing a critique of the relationships between technology and technological innovation, new managerialsm and financialisation, and the impact of structural weaknesses in global capitalism, is critical. Moreover, it is important to critique these changes historically and geographically, in order to understand how political economics shapes the space in which higher education policy and practice is recalibrated for capital accumulation and profitability. Educational innovations like staff-student partnerships, students-as-change-agents, open educational resources, MOOCs, bring your own device, personal learning networks etc. have to be seen in light of the relationships between: technological innovation; the competitive demand to overcome the historical tendency of the rate of profit to fall; the disciplinary role of the integral State in shaping a space for further capital accumulation, against labour; the relationship between labour- and capital-intensity; and the subsumption of networks and network theory to the neoliberal project of accumulation and profitability.

Inside the University a critical question becomes what is academic labour for? Can it be reinscribed for co-operative practice, as against its subsumption inside mechanics for collaboration as neoliberal practices of enforced connection and coercian inside the market for valorisation. This is important where, as global student communiques remind us, co-operation is underpinned by a constant and immanent democratising of the organising principles and organisation of our society and our work. Collaboration inside the market can only offer a politics of subsumption in the search for outlets for profitable investment for supluses and new sources of demand.

At issue for academics and student is recovering the mechanisms through which their labour is made collaborative, as opposed to co-operative, and through which it is co-opted or coerced for valorisation. As Jonathan Davies reminds us capitalist modernity, and the reproduction of the capital-labour relation, is predicated upon control:

coercion is the immanent condition of consent inherent in capitalist modernity. As long as hegemony is partial and precarious, hierarchy can never retreat to the shadows. This dialectic plays out in the day-to-day politics of governance networks through the clash between connectionist ideology and roll-forward hierarchy or ‘governmentalisation’.

Moreover, Friedman reminds us that it is control that centres our (academic) labour in the process of valorisation, and in the subsumption of the processes and practices of education to services and commodities:

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. Markets function and flourish only when property rights are secured and can be enforced, which, in turn, requires a political framework protected and backed by military power… the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

How and where might we contest the idea that education, and that the University, must reproduce forms of entrepreneurial activity that reassert the hegemony of stories of growth and work? Can this contestation be done inside the University? Or is the game up? Is the only possibility to fight for alternatives beyond formal institutions as we liberate knowledges, skills, technologies and practices from inside? Is it possible to do anything other than “re-appropriate (‘detonate’), ‘occupy’, these moments of space-time through ‘a new pedagogy of space and time’, which can be characterised as the production of critical knowledge in everyday life” (Neary and Amsler, p. 108)?

Educational technology and the crisis

September 9, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

ONE: we need to talk about capitalism.

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

TWO: we need to talk about labour-power.

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

THREE: we need to talk about technology.

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

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

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

FOUR: we need to talk about technology and resistance.

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

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

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

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

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

FIVE: we need to talk about recovering subjectivity.

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

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

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

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

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

Educational technology, academic labour and a pedagogy for class struggle

September 1, 2013
Posted by hallymk1

On Friday I’m presenting at the Critical Pedagogies: Equality and Diversity in a Changing Institution, Interdisciplinary Symposium at the University of Edinburgh.

There is a fuller paper here.

My slides are here.

I intend to make the following points.

ONE: on social control and the wage.

In an article from 2005 on the universities in the crisis, George Caffentzis argued that:

In the University two forms of unwaged labor for capital is [sic.] appropriated:

1. the development of new “forces of production” through scientific research and what Marx called “the power of knowledge objectified”;

2) the reproduction of labor power and so reproduction of the hierarchy of labor powers of different qualities (selection, division and stratification).

Thus capital appropriates science and education as a costless part of the cycle of its own reproduction.

Caffentzis notes that from the student protests of the 1960s in the USA, there had been a move to control universities through fiscal realism, but also by redefining the university for work, as a means of production. In this process, technology or the the power of knowledge objectified was critical across commodified disciplines. Thus, he argued:

Discipline over students is not accomplished with the old schoolmasterish ways (grading) but through connecting in a very explicit way work in the university with waged work: the job. The “new vocationalism” is not only to be found in the community colleges but it is also in the higher levels of the system where law, medicine, psychology, business administration, become the dominate departments. The social control jobs are used as social control: control through work if there ever was any!

Social control, validated through the subsumption of academic credibility to capitalist value, is critical in this process, and connects to what we now see as the drive for the entrepreneurial university or the student-as-entrepreneur. In this guise the student and the academic are more than consumers, they are willingly able to subsume their lives and their curricula to the creation of value. This includes the reinvention and reproduction of their selves inside the very processes that manufacture value. Caffendtzis argued:

What goes on at the university is work, namely schoolwork. It is work done to prepare to do more work. Its essence is selfdiscipline both in a specific and a general manner. The specific aspect of being a student is the learning of certain technical skills that can lead to greater productivity in specific jobs that require these skills. The general aspect of being a student, however, is infinitely more important: being self-regulating, self-controlled, etc.

Thus, as Nick Riemer argued about the ongoing strike at Sydney University:

vice-chancellors and their deputies now enthusiastically enact the values of competition, league-tables, performance indicators and similar managerial fetishes with all the fervour of recent converts.

Caffentzis connects this managerialism and techniques for control to the wageless labour of students. He argues that this unwaged nature veils such work as a form of “personal choice”, so that where it is refused/violated/plagiarised it is pathologised. This unwaged status, which is also linked to high levels of student debt that has to be paid down, matters because as unwaged workers students are used to reduce labour costs outside the University. This chart of the generational spread of student debt hammers home the point that the links between labour inside/beyond the University, the politics of the wage, and institutional restructuring need to be developed if an oppositional space is to be created. For Caffentzis, by being unwaged and depoliticised/separated from academic labour, “Capital can restructure the schools and increase intensity and productivity requirements at little cost.” This unwaged labour of students has pedagogic implications for academics and the definition of their disciplines through their teaching and their research. Is it possible to escape the discipline and reproduction of capital’s social relationships inside and beyond the University?

TWO: on academic labour.

In a recent blog post, Joss Winn has argued that we need to end the reification of the content of academic labour in its administrative, teaching and research functions, and instead “focus our critique on the form of academic labour”. He notes that in doing so:

we find that an academic contract or a non-academic contract refers to the same dual qualities of labour: commodity-producing concrete and abstract labour. By focusing on the form of labour, rather than its content, we can only critique it rather than reify it. What is there to reify when we uncover the capitalist mode of production and the inhuman role and purpose of labour?

To focus on the form of labour, rather than its content, unites all wage workers in solidarity rather than setting us against each other in terms of skills, experience, opportunity, achievements and recognition. Such a critique of ‘academic labour’ can only lead to the negation of academic labour, first conceptually, and then, through further critique and struggle, in practice towards a different form of social wealth, which is not driven by the imperative of the production of value at all costs.

One possibility for widening this space for solidarity may be through the connections between work inside/beyond the University and its unwaged/waged nature, and the subsumption of work inside the University for entrepreneurial, value-driven activity, outlined by Caffentzis. Is it possible to use the subsumption of the University inside the treadmill logic of capitalism and for the reproduction of its social relationships, to demonstrate solidarity between student-academic-worker, and the shared forms of exploitation? If so, is it possible to liberate the content of academic labour from the University and for social ends, inside new co-operative spaces? What might such liberation mean for pedagogic development and the place or critique of technology inside the University?

THREE: technology and the enclosure or control of academic labour.

Do academic collectives have a critical or ethical lens through which to critique the nature of the technologies that they use and re-purpose inside the University, beyond a limiting focus on enhancing the student experience? How might critical insight about the ways in which educational technologies enable the enclosure of academic labour for value formation and accumulation be catalysed? To what ends might such a critique be put?

Against a backdrop of the enclosure and marketization of activity and relationships inside the neoliberal university, educational technology is an important domain through which value-driven strategies play–out. This process is complex and is related to the ways in which some educational functions prove profitable and can be privatised. For example, some vocational training can be provided at low-cost using part-time or precariously employed, post-graduate lecturers engaged with the resources of on-line open education or distance learning. Publishers are able to leverage their market capitalisation and access to content and learning management systems to sell services into education. Private equity funds are engaged in the purchase and development of established learning management systems and related educational applications, in order to sell services into tertiary education.

Thus, technologies are insinuated inside a broader system of enclosure, which underpins accumulation by dispossession as a way in which surplus academic labour or rents can be extracted from individuals and institutions. In terms of surplus academic labour, academic management is able to bypass agreements on contracted staff teaching hours by moving more work on-line and then counting it as administration rather than formalised contact hours with students. Equally, the development of discourses around innovation and teaching excellence that are explicitly linked to work that is undertaken on-line catalyses a competitive environment between individual staff, and this in-turn acts as a lever to extract surplus labour. In this way, constant innovation can be normalised or routinized within the administrative load of academic staff, and performance can be monitored and disciplined. In terms of rents, for-profit technology providers are able to utilise and mine institutional data, especially where services like learning management systems and widgets or plug-ins are hosted for the institution, in order to develop and sell new services.

Such services, often related to personalisation and workflow efficiencies, are driven by institutional competitiveness in the HE market and the need to appear innovative and efficient in service delivery, and they enable the extraction of profits from fees on products that are contracted for. Technology has become a crack through which private corporations can enter the publically-funded, governed and regulated education sector, using public/private partnerships and outsourcing in service-delivery. Is it possible to struggle against control inside the curriculum?

FOUR: technology and the curriculum

In a recent Guardian comment piece, the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne made a clear connection between economic growth, the digital economy, the need for entrepreneurial digital skills and education. He stated:

it is vital for our economy that British students are once more taught how to program code and master the tools of the digital age.

From September 2014, the new national curriculum will require that students aged between five and 16 are given the skills they need to build apps and write computer programs. The curriculum will cover theoretical ideas and practical problems, software and hardware systems – and it certainly won’t be an easy ride. Students will be given a thorough understanding of logic and set theory, and they’ll need to master difficult concepts such as algorithms, programming languages and the architecture of the internet.

Osborne has also championed the Make Things Do Stuff campaign focused on making for the digital economy. This clearly connects us back into discourses around unwaged labour, and around the development and commodification of proprietary skills (those of entrepreneurs in this narrative), as well as those that are leveraged and more basic or interchangeable. It also highlights Winn’s point about the stratification or reification that emerges if we discuss academic labour as rarefied or special.

Using technology as a cipher for opening-up education for business imperatives, amounts to a form of what Newfield calls ‘subsidy capitalism’, in which ‘the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.’ The new public management focus on business defining the curriculum, and by association recalibrating teacher or academic training and development, reflects Newfield’s point for the USA that:

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

This is the deeply politicised and increasingly enclosed world onto which educational technology and academic labour needs to be mapped, beyond simple economic utility. It is from inside this enclosed space that educational technology is interpreted and implemented by educational technologists, staff developers and technicians, and then adopted by practitioners and students. In taking a more meaningful stance, Feenberg (1999, p. 87) argues for

[a] critical theory of technology [that] can uncover that horizon, demystify the illusion of technical necessity, and expose the relativity of the prevailing technical choices.

At issue is reclaiming a politics of technology in education, against a determinist or essentialist position, or one that covets entrepreneurial digital skills. It is important, therefore, to develop examples of how technology impacts academic labour based on problems of performance, efficiency and scale, and to highlight how a broader, political, contextual analysis might be developed. This might be based on a revelation of the relationships between academic labour and: cloud computing; learning management systems like Blackboard; approaches to coding for kids; corporate publishers like Pearson; surveillance and monitoring technologies, including the relationship with PRISM; and technologies that emerge from the militarisation of the university.

FIVE: for a critical pedagogy?

Elsewhere I have written about the relationship between educators and consumers in the global North and the conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is in-part impacted by the mining of Coltan. I wrote that:

Thus, for instance, the ‘Raspberry Pi‘ is connected to the desire to engage young people in programming through affordable, flexible, mobile devices that reveal the inner workings of the machine as it relates to programming. Yet, there has been little discussion of the component parts that make up the machinery, and how they are sourced. The machine uses a broadcom corporation bcm2835 SoC (system-on-a-chip). According to a company engagement report made by the Triodos ethical bank in 2011, broadcom was uneligible for ethical investment during that financial year because of their performance regarding conflict minerals, co-operation with repressive regimes and on human rights.

This position has been made more complex in a 2012 Triodos report, which argued that:

In 2012 Triodos reconsidered its position on the sourcing of columbite-tantalite, or coltan. This highly heat resistant mineral is capable of holding high electric charges and is therefore used in electronic devices, such as mobile phones and laptop computers. Coltan is frequently sourced from the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Since the 1990’s an extremely violent conflict has taken place in the DRC that has already claimed more than 5 million lives. Because of the role mining of coltan plays in financing this war, electrical equipment and ICT manufacturers that source coltan from the DRC have in the past been excluded from the investment universe. In recent years so-called conflict minerals (next to coltan these include tin, tungsten and gold) received increased attention from companies, and from investors and regulators. The recently adopted Dodd Frank act in the US, forces American listed companies to report on the use of ‘conflict minerals’ in their 2014 annual report. Yet a boycott is not always good, especially not for local populations. In other parts of Congo where the conflict is less prominent, the boycott led to increased poverty among local people. In reaction to this problem, the electronics industry initiated the promising Conflict Free Smelter Programme (CFS), covering many conflict minerals. We now include companies that source coltan from conflict-free parts of the DRC when they participate in the CFS program in the Triodos Sustainable Investment Universe. In 2012, Triodos Sustainability Research engaged with 36 companies on this issue. The replies of 25 companies satisfied our criteria and these companies are selected for sustainable investment. Nine companies are not selected and with two companies dialogue is pending.

Broadcom, which supplies the bcm2835 chipset for the Raspberry Pi has been listed by Triodos as follows.

Broadcom Corporation designs, develops, and supplies semiconductors for wired and wireless communications. Broadcom performs well on social issues. An important sustainability issue in the semiconductor industry is human rights, in particular related to the use of Coltan. Broadcom adheres to the EICC Code of Conduct requirements and has obtained declarations from its suppliers that any metals used in manufacturing Broadcom products are not derived from minerals mined or processed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which could fuel the civil war.

The Broadcom-Raspberry Pi case is important because it highlights how connections can be made between the content of academic labour in the definition of curricula, the technologically-mediated forms that such labour takes, and the realities of labour rights across the globe. As technologies like the Raspberry Pi gain ground in the classroom, there is a need to understand the ethics or humanity of their manufacture, and to frame these processes pedagogically and socially. This demands that the development of entrepreneurial digital skills and the deployment of entrepreneurial technologies or techniques are seen in terms of the processes that enable the reproduction of social relationships across global capitalism.

One outcome of such a critique framed pedagogically might be to open-up spaces for solidarity between those who consume or make in the global North, using technologies that are mined for and produced in the global South. What decisions are made by educators and universities about technologies and their socio-environmental, humanitarian, and political impacts? What power do students and academics have to affect and change the technological decisions inside and beyond the University? How does this (lack of) power affect the curriculum and its (un)democratic forms or pedagogies?

Thus, the Enough Project has developed the Conflict-Free Campus Initiative which

draws on the power of student leadership and activism to bring about peace in Congo. By encouraging university officials and stakeholders, both of whom are large purchasers of electronics and powerful spokespersons, to commit to measures that pressure electronics companies to responsibly invest in Congo’s minerals sector, students are voicing the demand for conflict-free products from Congo.

This role stretches beyond student activism to the ways in which the curriculum might be reimagined critically and socially, and in ways that take account of Winn’s call for the “negation of academic labour, first conceptually, and then, through further critique and struggle, in practice towards a different form of social wealth, which is not driven by the imperative of the production of value at all costs.” In defining the mechanisms through which educational technology is used to commodify and control academic labour, as well as in further stratifying forms of labour, and in distancing consumers in the global North from the realities of their consumption in labour rights across the globe, it becomes possible to push back where the curriculum and its pedagogic forms are reimagined at the level of society rather than the commodity.

As Cleaver argues in Reading Capital Politically, this demands that we restate and redefine this through class struggle across the whole of society with the focus of that struggle against Capital. For Cleaver, the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the autonomous organisations that exist within and between both the factory and the community, with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of “working class power… at the level of the social factory, politically recomposing the division between factory and community.” For critical educators deploying critical pedagogic responses, the question is how to use technology politically to recompose the realities of global struggles for emancipation, rather than for commodification. Overcoming global problems demands that universities do not simply outsource solutions, but that they act as public spaces for the co-operative and social use of technologies in the name of socially-useful knowledge.

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