Tag Archives: labour

Educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour inside public higher education


Posted by hallymk1

I have a new paper published over at the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS). The Journal is non-profit making and open, and is a space for Marxist and other Left analysis of education.

My article picks up some of the themes I have been playing around with here, and is titled: Educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour inside public higher education. The abstract is appended below.

Across higher education in the United Kingdom, the procurement and deployment of educational technology increasingly impacts the practices of academic labour, in terms of administration, teaching and research. Moreover the relationships between academic labour and educational technology are increasingly framed inside the practices of neoliberal, transnational activist networks, which are re-defining UK higher education as a new model public service. This paper highlights the mechanisms through which educational technologies are used to control, enclose and commodify academic labour. At issue is whether academics and academic staff developers have a critical or ethical lens through which to critique the nature of the technologies that they use and re-purpose inside the University, and whether such a critique might enable technologies to be deployed for the production of socially-useful knowledge, or knowing, beyond monetization in the knowledge economy.


MOOCs and neoliberalism: for a critical response


Posted by hallymk1

George Siemens published a post over on his blog titled Neoliberalism and MOOCs: Amplifying nonsense. George’s key points in my opinion were that:

“Numerous quasi-connected fields that thrive on being against things have now coalesced to be against MOOCs”

“The more prominent argument emerging is one of classifying MOOCs as neo-liberalism. This is disingenuous.”

I wrote a comment-as-response. It was long. I have decided to republish it here.

Hi George,

There are several moments in what you post/your slides where I feel we need a wider discussion.

1. Critiquing MOOCs is now more fashionable than advocating for them.

Either way, we need to talk about techno-determinism (revisiting Andrew Feenberg’s work would be a good place to start: http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/pub_Questioning_Technology.html) and the reality of technology/technique-as-fetish. MOOCs/whatever need to be critiqued from inside the system of production/consumption in which they emerge. This is deeply political, and has a politics that is amplified by an overlay of crises: socio-environmental; economic; inter-generational etc.. This is why a critique of MOOCs/whatever as they are subsumed inside capital’s drive to reestablish profitability post-2008, and the systemic need to seek out new spaces for that profitability (public education, healthcare etc.), is key. The idea of the MOOC (as learner-focused, enfranchising, entrepreneurial etc.) is secondary to the co-option of the idea for the extraction of value. The fetishisation of the learner or learner-voice sits inside this systemic narrative/critique and needs to be politicised.

2. The faculty response to MOOCs is particularly important.

This is important. MOOCs/whatever risk being co-opted inside a process of global labour arbitrage. We need to discuss that, and not hide behind narratives that either seek to save or restore the traditional university/college/school (whatever that is/was), or that state that traditional educational institutions are vested interests that won’t change.

3. The more prominent argument emerging is one of classifying MOOCs as neo-liberalism. This is disingenuous. First, I don’t think anyone actually knows what neoliberalism means other than “that thing that I’m thinking about that I really don’t like”. Second, if we do take a stance that neoliberalism is some combination of open markets, deregulation, globalization, small government, low taxes, death of the public organization, and anti-union, then MOOCs are not at all neoliberalist.

I think you are wrong here. A number of academics/activists have done wide-ranging work in defining neoliberalism. It is more than a thing I don’t really like. It is a global pedagogic project aimed at subsuming the whole of social life under the treadmill logic of capitalism. It is a project that seeks to deny sociability and to enforce individuated entrepreneurial activity. Under global agreements like GATs it enables transnational activist networks/elites to marketise the idea of the public good in the name of private profit, and to diminish our collective ability to emerge from the current set of crises. There are a number of people/projects seeking social, co-operative responses to this, and critiques of MOOCs/whatever generally end with “what is to be done?”, rather than simply saying “no”. I have blogged about this extensively, and can point to a number of academic critiques that are more than “I don’t like this.” The issue is how/why MOOCs are being co-opted, and we witness this in the UK in the Coalition Government’s pronouncements and those of the private sector/IPPR. In my opinion the co-option of MOOCs inside a specifically-defined neoliberal restructuring of HE is clear. See:

http://www.richard-hall.org/2012/09/02/networks-the-rate-of-profit-and-institutionalising-moocs/

http://www.richard-hall.org/2012/12/05/for-a-critique-of-moocswhatever-and-the-restructuring-of-the-university/

http://www.richard-hall.org/2013/05/20/on-the-secular-crisis-and-a-qualitative-idea-of-the-university/

http://www.richard-hall.org/2013/05/29/on-the-university-and-revolution-from-within/

This also denies the extensive work done by Christopher Newfield amongst others in critiquing MOOCs and education policy in California. http://utotherescue.blogspot.co.uk/

4. The argument is simple: Much of today’s economy is knowledge-based. In a knowledge economy, we need to be learning constantly. Universities have failed to recognize the pent-up demand for learning as the economy has diversified and society has become more complex and interconnected.

Again, I fundamentally disagree. The argument is complex, and the presupposition that the economy is knowledge-based is also wrong. It may well be that knowledge/immateriality is some of what education produces, and the global economy as it has been restructured post-1970s oil crisis has been painted as a knowledge economy. However, this does no favours to the billions in the global South and in the global North who are unemployed, low-skilled, engaged in dangerous manual productive labour, engaged in menial service work, whose work is militarised etc.. This view disenfranchises those who labour globally to enable our rarefied view of the economy as knowledge-based – witness those mining rare earth metals in the global South or laboring in poor conditions in Foxconn factories. It also doesn’t enable us to engage with the crisis of over-production/under-consumption in the real economy, or the dislocation between immaterial labour (or knowledge work) and what has been termed the real economy. William Robinson amongst others would argue that the economy has been globalized and stratified, and the complexities that you allude to merely reinforce the hierarchical power of transnational elites (http://www.richard-hall.org/2013/02/22/the-university-and-the-globalised-learning-landscape/).

Your argument here is also determinist of one view of activity/life, as ostensibly economic. I would argue that we need to restore sociability and to push-back against a view of education that is about economic value or entrepreneurial activity. The demand that you highlight also needs to be critiqued rather than simply accepted (from whom and why?)

5. The reason MOOCs are being classified as neoliberalist is because entrepreneurs see the changing landscape and have responded before many universities.

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

Entrepreneurial activity, effectively a pedagogic project designed to transfer the risk for the creation of value/management of risk from the public to the individual, is a cornerstone of critiques of neoliberalism (Robinson, Lambie, Ball, Lipman, Newfield, Hoofd etc.). If MOOCs emerge from entrepreneurial activity then given the accepted analyses of neoliberalism they fall within that frame. They therefore need to be analysed in terms of the ways in which they are co-opted inside the global system of value production/extraction/subsumption.

6. Don’t blame the ill motives of others for what was caused by inactivity on the part of the professoriate and higher education in general.

Is that what is happening? I guess that the emergence of MOOCs has enabled a critique of education and technology inside this current phase of capitalism. It has also enabled the idea of the university/public education to be critiqued. That is a wholly good thing; nothing is sustainable. However, this is not limited to us-and-them inside the academy. As Newfield notes again-and-again about California, the University is subsumed inside a much wider political context that we need to understand in order that we can take action.

MOOCs/whatever need to be critiqued and alternatives developed in light of that politicisation. That doesn’t mean negating this MOOC or that ds106 or this social science centre or that college. It also means that we do not fetishise them…

7. In your Slide 41: the task of education is not to enculturate young people into this knowledge-creating civilization.

We need to talk about this in light of critical pedagogy. As the edufactory collective have shown, we need a robust and democratic discussion of what education is for – who has power to enculturate and why? What is this knowledge-creating civilisation? I return to the work of Amin and Thrift (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.0066-4812.2005.00488.x/abstract) that: our work is political; that there must be better ways of doing things and resolving crises; that we must help people to out power; that we need to be reflexive. The quote on this slide feels like it is about enclosure and closing down deliberation, in the name of the knowledge economy. In engaging with immanent crisis we need a better way.

Take care.


because solidarity is a weapon


Posted by hallymk1

To continue as we are feels difficult. To wait for redemption, or salvation. Inside this secular crisis. As Cleaver writes:

neither the cyclical business downturns nor the upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist counter-measures (local and international), have resolved the underlying problems of the system in such a way as to lay the basis for a renewal of stable accumulation. Thus, secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

The persistence of crisis. Revealed inside-and-against ever more desperate restructuring. As Phoenix Capital notes for China, with a nod to Brazil and the USA:

China is on the verge of a “Lehman” moment as its shadow banking system implodes. China had pumped roughly $1.6 trillion in new credit (that’s 21% of GDP) into its economy in the last two quarters… and China GDP growth is in fact slowing. This is what a credit bubble bursting looks like: the pumping becomes more and more frantic with less and less returns. Check out the collapse in China’s stock market.

The persistence of crisis. The contagion of crisis. Revealed inside-and-against a systemic assault on the future. As the Automaticearth notes of quantitative easing, money printing, and the looming deflationary spiral that will extract value from unborn generations:

What happens with pensions is the same as what happens with unemployment. And with the economy in general, for that matter: all the stimulus measures are mere lipstick for zombies, which are kept undead with trillions upon trillions of dollars borrowed from the future. We reap the undead profit and leave our children with the bill.

The promise of crisis. Revealed as entropy; more than as punctuated equilibrium. As Kunstler notes for the USA:

Everything in America except the Apple stores and a handful of big banks is falling apart — especially the human habitat and households. Suburbia will only lose value and utility. Big cities will have to get smaller (ouch!). Tar sands, shale oil and shale gas will not ride to the rescue (they cost too much to get out of the ground). The entire declension of government from federal to state to local will be too broke to fix the roads and make “transfer payments” to idle, indigent citizens. This populace will lose faith in their institutions… and disorder will eventually resolve in a new and very different disposition of things on-the-ground. If we’re lucky, this will not include cruel despotic leadership and war.

And young people are advised to “consider repudiating your college debt en masse, since the fantasy of repayment is but another mental shackle holding you back from your future.”

The future repatriated to obviate the crisis of the present. The secular crisis inside which all life is subordinated to value. All education is subordinated to value. All knowing is subordinated to value. The crisis of the domination of:

Capitalist rules [that] impose the generalized subordination of human life to work. Whereas all previous class societies have involved the extraction of surplus labor, only in capitalism have all human activities been reshaped as work, as commodity producing labor processes.

The crisis revealed as there is no alternative. The crisis revealed as PRISM; as mastering the internet; inside Brazil as a crisis of representation; as global social domination; as the State’s securitisation of capitalist social relations. Because in the secular crisis:

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

The crisis revealed politically, beyond economic determinism, through refusal. The crisis revealed as solidarity; because solidarity is a weapon. The crisis revealed as the courage to discuss capitalism, and the domination of dead over living labour. The crisis revealed through technology as

the problem of imposing work — and thus of maintaining control — [which] becomes more and more acute [just as] the amount of at least potentially free or “disposable” time rises with unemployment, i.e., wagelessness.

And we see this in the recalibration of higher education around global labour arbitrage, the prestige economy and internships, financialisation and debt, and the extraction of socialised value. And what becomes more clear as we wait for the State and its institutions to reimpose a method of accumulation, and to reimpose the logic and domination of work, is the need to find a means by which it is possible to

substitute the politics of alliance for the replacement of capitalism by a diversity of social projects. A politics of alliance against capital to be conducted not only to accelerate the circulation of struggle from sector to sector of the class, but to do so in such a manner as to build a post-capitalist politics of difference without antagonism. It has been the circulation of struggle which has thrown capitalist command into crisis; it is only through the circulation of struggle that the divisions which continue to weaken us can be overcome. Such circulation, however, is not a matter of propagating anti-capitalist ideology but involves the fabrication and utilization of material connections and communications that destroy isolation and permit people to struggle in complementary ways — both against the constraints which limit them and for the alternatives they construct, separately and together.

And to argue for a co-operative moment for higher education, in this secular crisis. Because solidarity is a weapon.


Some notes on the University, the State and democratic protest


Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Is this (consumer) capitalism?

The Royal Society’s People and Planet reportfrom 2012 argued that there is an urgent need to address issues of climate change and resource availability across the globe. The report argued:

in the most developed and the emerging economies unsustainable consumption must be urgently reduced. This will entail scaling back or radical transformation of damaging material consumption and emissions and the adoption of sustainable technologies. At present, consumption is closely linked to economic models based on growth. Decoupling economic activity from material and environmental throughputs is needed urgently. Changes to the current socio-economic model and institutions are needed to allow both people and the planet to flourish by collaboration as well as competition during this and subsequent centuries. This requires farsighted political leadership concentrating on long term goals.

The relationships between growth and profitability, work and technology have to be addressed unless we are simply aiming to become more efficiently unsustainable. This has ramifications for individuals, institutions, the State, and transnational corporations.

This is more critical given a recent UK Ministry of Defence Strategic Trends Programme report, which highlighted a series of tensions that are likely to emerge around cyber-terrorism, access to resources and the economic impact of increased demand for fossil fuels, climate change, and a normalisation of global GDP. The report argues:

The western ‘way of life’ is often associated with ready access to a wide variety of consumer choice and relatively cheap energy. This is likely to be increasingly challenged as lifestyles follow GDP levels and ‘normalise’ across the globe. This trend will have significant impact within the US and the UK, where the way of life for the bulk of their populations may be challenged by rising energy and resource. prices, and the declining availability of finance to sustain discretionary spending.

Moreover, the report’s authors make a case for rebalancing the economy and using the relationship between education and technology as a driver in that process.

Across the West, it is possible that enrolment on science, technology, engineering and mathematics educational courses will remain low relative to South Asia … Graduates from India and China, will become more visible and lead trans-national companies, particularly in technical and engineering fields. The implementation of long-term strategies to educate the UK population and revive these technical disciplines may be of increasing importance to maintain an innovation base and a competitive national economy. Key-skilled workers, scientists and researchers who develop the complex technologies which underpin cyber security, space, nuclear, stealth and bio-medical technologies will be increasingly prized.

This ties into the recent Institute for Public Policy Research report, A critical path: Securing the future of higher education in England, which highlighted the importance of specific technologically-driven strategies that are designed to rebalance the economy as productive and resilient. In terms of higher education, a much more diverse experience is signalled, for instance through universities embracing “the potential of new technologies by recognising credit from low-­cost online courses so that these may count, in part, towards degree programmes.”

Rebalancing the economy. Rebalancing the State. Rebalancing business-as-usual.

TWO. The tensions between capitalism, education and the State.

What is increasingly clear is that the rush to embrace innovation in services, technologies and cultures has ramifications beyond the maintenance of the rate of profit. For sure, there are important issues of data security and privacy, cyber-terrorism and snooping, alongside matters of outsourcing and raising the digital literacy of citizens. However, these cannot be divorced from the tensions that surround the real-world realities of: sustainability and climate change; the scarcity of resource availability, including rare earth metals, liquid fuel, and water; and maintaining current standards of living in a world of energy scarcity and increased energy costs.

How individuals, institutions and corporations react to these tensions and seek co-operative solutions is of crucial importance moving forward. Increasingly we need to politicise our use of technology inside and beyond education, and to involve students and teachers in discovering or remembering alternative ways of living and creating the world. At issue is where we create/liberate spaces in which debates can take root. In an interesting set of tweets this month Jehu has argued the following:

If you want to fight capital, your cannot fight it on its own terms; you must force it to fight on terrain it does not control.

The capitalists control money; they control production; and they control the state — why would you choose to fight there?

What the capitalists do not control is your free time. They have no way to convert this free time into capitalist profits.

Jehu then reiterates Marx and Engels’ points around the need for association that:

In labor theory the interest of a class, “achieves an independent existence over against the individuals”.

Since the proletariat has no class interest, it can put an end to all classes.

This argument is absolutely critical to Engels’ and Marx’s argument. because it means they have no choice but to enter into a voluntary …

… association to control their conditions of life together.

You can read Jehu’s longer position on the difference between association and the State. However, he makes the important points that:

The critical concept [is]the relation of the state to the class whose interest the state represents in an ideal form… The ideal expression of the interest of the bourgeois class, its general representative, is the bourgeois state… the proletariat have no choice but to enter into a voluntary association to control their conditions of life together. No state can give them this control, only their association… [the proletariat] is incapable of acting as a class and must act as individuals, these individuals must abolish class politics itself — they must overthrow the state.

In a later post, Jehu quotes Zilbersheid reminder that “the abolition of labor [is] one of Marx’s most important ideas:

At the core of the highest phase of communist society, as described in Marx’s early writings, is the abolition of labour. The more famous abolition of private property, the well-known abolition of the state, and the lesser-known abolition of the division of labour are all conditional upon the abolition of labour itself.

At issue then are the mechanisms through which education is recalibrated to reduce free-time and to maintain the legitimacy and hegemony of the bourgeois state. Joss Winn’s points about the University as a means of production feel important here in addressing what might be done.

THREE. Protest against the State and its institutions.

We might then reflect on Dan McQuillan’s point about the anti-austerity protests that have dominated Turkish life for weeks:

this is what austerity governments should fear; the spark… MT @fxmatt4 Cities that have experienced protests: pic.twitter.com/RpLXYuwaV9

We might also reflect on the role of the State in monitoring both free and working-time through surveillance and data infringements, and the mechanisms through which Domestic Networks [are used] to Spy on the World.

We might also acknowledge that academics and universities are complicit both in the enclosure of higher education as a free or public space, and in the research that underpins the State’s hegemony. Moreover in the UK that hegemony threatens to be restructured through at least two further “austerity elections”.

A question then becomes what is the role of the University in the process of legitimising protest or in carving-out the terrain that Capital does not control, including widening unproductive time or creating non-value driven social relationships? Inside the secular crisis, what is the relationship between the University, the State and democratic protest? Is it possible to rethink the idea that the University might be other than means of production? That it might contribute liberated knowledge and alternative, counter-hegemonic histories, or curricula infused with praxis, to the co-operative art of protest and dissent?


On the University and revolution from within


Posted by hallymk1

On Sunday Kate Bowles tweeted that:

The tiny problem for the idea that Coursera will “revolutionize” all of our education systems is that revolution usually comes from within.

This made me think about the inside/outside of education, and the idea that certain spaces might be (falsely) considered to be open/closed irrespective of the dynamics of Capital. For Marx in Volume 1 of Capital, there was increasingly no outside, merely the silent compulsion of competition that drives the constant revolutionising of the forces of production across the system. This latter point is critical to any meaningful analysis of the current crisis – this is a systemic process and not one that is neatly contained inside different tentacles of capitalist production. Marx wrote that:

Modern industry never treats views or treats the existing form of a production process as the definitive one. Its technical basis is therefore revolutionary, whereas all earlier modes of production were essentially conservative. By means of machinery, chemical processes and other methods, it is continually transforming not only the technical basis of production but also the functions of the worker and the social combinations of the labour process. At the same time, it thereby also revolutionizes the division of labour within society, and incessantly throws masses of capital and of workers from one branch of production to another. Thus large-scale industry, by its very nature, necessitates variation of labour, fluidity of functions, and mobility of the worker in all directions (Capital, Volume 1, p. 617).

This also impacts the ways in which resistance might be formulated. As Cleaver notes in his theses on the secular crisis the constant revolutionising of different spheres of production is met by a multiplicity of responses. Here, forms of recognition and solidarity across spheres are critical.

When looked at positively, in terms of their struggles for their own interests (beyond mere resistance to the imposition of work), the interests of this complex “working class” are multiple in the sense of not being universally shared. The interests of one group are not exactly the same as those of another even if the realization of those of the one would facilitate the realization of those of the others. Thus there is a problematic relationship between the notion of a working class for-itself and the multiplicity of interests for which different groups of people struggle. “The” working class which struggles against capital, and whose antagonism threatens capital’s survival, is actually a multiplicity moving in a variety of directions made up of equally diverse processes of self-valorization or self-constitution.

In higher education this is important where we identify the spaces through which the sector is being opened up for-profit and for value extraction. Previously I have written about Stephen Ball’s idea of philanthrocapitalism, which drives ‘a move from palliative to developmental giving’, which restructures charity or giving in the name of capitalism. Here benefactors are consumers of social investment and philanthropy for educational ends is geared around entrepreneurialism. There is a clear need to see a business return on cultural or educational giving. Thus, there is an increasing use of commercial or enterprise models of practice as a new generic form underpinning what Ball calls ‘venture philanthropy, philanthropic portfolios, due diligence, entrepreneurial solutions and so on.’ Ball argues that philanthrocapitalists often seek silver bullet solutions to grand challenges, which in turn utilise business partnerships, to develop technical, generic or universally-applicable, and scalable solutions. The idea is that strategic giving that is problem-focused, interdisciplinary, time-limited and high impact will ‘extend leverage’ between the private and public sectors. The Gates’ Foundation and its sponsorship of educational programmes and MOOCs is one such mechanism through which the private cracks open and revolutionises the public space.

Such leverage is also created through policy, as witnessed in the recent Amendments to California State Senate Bill 520 on MOOCs, which promise public funding for the public elements of public/on-line private partnerships. In order to force each segment of California’s public education system (community colleges, state universities and the University) Christopher Newfield argues that Senate President Darrell Steinberg has created a system of “grant programs” for intensifying reliance on online programs and providers, in order “to avoid a serious discussion about [the public/State’s] reinvesting in California’s educational system”:

Steinberg is proposing to impose upon the three segments millions of dollars of new costs. Even if the State does provide funding for these costs that money could be spent in other less speculative ways. Far more likely is that the Segments will be driven into partnerships with online providers so as to share the upfront costs of meeting Steinberg’s timetable.

Nor is there any means set up to assure that no public funds are spent on private interests. Should the segments enter into partnerships with the online providers, they will likely contract out services and use public funds to pay for them. Despite the rhetoric of social justice, venture capital will demand a profitable return on its investments. Moreover, as the for-profit MOOC providers have demonstrated, their business is information and they claim that the information they gather on students is their property. I see no way around the notion that public funds will indeed be diverted to “private aspects” of the partnerships.

This is another mechanism through which the system revolutionises the means of production and division of labour across increasingly intertwined branches of production. The MIT Technology Review makes this point for personal data and the kinds of big data that California wishes to make open and accessible through its educational “grant programs”:

What’s more, the economic importance of products fueled with personal data is growing rapidly. According to the Boston Consulting Group, as methods for basing transactions on a person’s digital records have spread from banks to retailers and other sectors, the financial value that companies derived from personal data in Europe was $72 billion in 2011. The consultants concluded that “personal data has become a new form of currency.”

Access to and control over data and the means by which it can be commodified and marketised therefore becomes one more revolutionary productive force. This is also seen in the recent statements about the Georgia Tech/Udacity/AT&T on-line Master’s Degree partnership about which Inside Higher Ed wrote:

Georgia Tech this month announced its plans to offer a $6,630 online master’s degree to 10,000 new students over the next three years without hiring much more than a handful of new instructors. Georgia Tech and Udacity, a Silicon Valley-based startup, will work with AT&T, which is putting up $2 million to heavily subsidize the program’s first year. The effort, if it succeeds, will allow one of the country’s top computer science programs to enroll 20 times as many students as it does now in its online master’s degree program, and to offer the degree to students across the world at a sixth of the price of its existing program

Placed alongside policy that proscribes public/private partnerships and the public availability of retention, progression and outcomes-related data that emerges from state-funded programmes, this creates a set of spaces inside which the forces of production are restructured for-profit. These types of partnerships show the deep penetration of the private, for-profit sector of the economy into the public sphere: there is no outside of the systemic need to overcome crises of accumulation and the need to maintain the increase of the rate of profit through a control of the organic composition of capital and the rate of surplus value that can be extracted.

In the UK there is an equal avoidance of a serious discussion about the public/State’s funding of education, in spite of the attempts of groups like Million+, for example in its report Do the Alternatives Add-Up? Elsewhere, Professor David Eastwood, the incoming Chair of the Russell Group of Universities, has argued that the Coalition’s refusal to increase the cap on fees for “public” higher education will lead to “a 16 per cent real cut in the tuition income of institutions.” Eastwood argues that with no increase likely before 2017 “That should put a stop to glib discussions about enhancement and improvement. We are managing pretty massive efficiency gains in the delivery of educational programmes over the next five years.” This underscores a point I made on the University and a revitalised public about how specific policy activities that are located in secondary legislation like the Budget, or in technical consultations over white papers and funding, signal “a cultural shift that sets a direction for marketization through tactical engagement. It is less about fighting the battle for ideas in public than it is about laying markers for marketization. One might argue that it is not about creating a deliberative space to discuss the realities of public or socialised education and what the University is for, but it is about cracking or fracturing what exists, in order to extract value from that system.”Thus, the introduction of fees and the subsequent fee-cap, alongside pressure for outsourcing and public-private partnerships, are being used to constrain and then restructure the work of universities as competing capitals, including with for-profit and on-line providers.

As a result, it becomes increasingly difficult to look at the restructuring of higher education as anything other than a revolutionising of the forces of production aimed at overcoming the limits of accumulation in the systemic production process. As Marx notes in the Collected Works (Vol. 5, pp. 431-2), throughout history

some persons satisfied their needs at the expense of others, and therefore some – the minority – obtained the monopoly of development, while others – the majority, owing to the constant struggle to satisfy their most essential needs, were for the time being (i.e., until the creation of new revolutionary productive forces) excluded from any development.

Moreover, Marx argued that it is the mechanisms through which human society could recapture human nature against the profit-motive, which we should seek to reproduce. This is not the human nature of the MOOC-defined, self-made, neo-liberal superman; it is “species life”.

Since human nature is the true community of men, by manifesting their nature men create, produce, the human community, the social entity, which is no abstract universal power opposed to the single individual, but is the essential nature of each individual, his own activity, his own life, his own spirit, his own wealth… The community of men, or the manifestation of the nature of men, their mutual complementing the result of which is species-life…” [Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 217.]

At issue is how to promote such a species-life through education in ways that recapture production as a social activity. This is more pressing as the policy and practice of austerity threaten to unleash revolutionary social forces. As Reuters reports: “German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned on Tuesday that failure to win the battle against youth unemployment could tear Europe apart, and dropping the continent’s welfare model in favor of tougher U.S. standards would spark a revolution.” In-part this is more pressing because, as Jehu argues:

we have achieved a five-fold increase in total material wealth produced annually between 1964 and 2012 in the United States. Yet, for all this increase in material wealth, poverty still exists… real material [agricultural] output rises to 500% overall and labor needed in agriculture falls 88%; yet, despite this improvement in material wealth, 43 million workers still live in poverty… Despite these facts, Washington tells us we cannot afford our current material standard of living. Politicians say either retirement has to be delayed and medical coverage cut, or Washington must go still deeper in debt… Now ask yourself: If you are working twice as long as your parents, producing five times as much material wealth, should you be better or worse off than they were? So where did all that increased wealth go? Since you are, in fact, poorer than your parents, it is obvious none of that increased wealth made its way into your pockets.

Inside this systemic process of revolutionising the forces of production and increasing global output, real wages have collapsed in the face of strategies for accumulation. The issue is whether a “direct form of communal manifestations of life carried out in association with others – [that] are therefore an expression and confirmation of that social life” (Marx, Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 299) might be realised that incorporates increasingly alienated social forces in the global North, as well as those largely ignored in the global South. This requires that we have a more mature discussion of the possibilities for production that lie beyond for-profit. In higher education this includes recognition that the sector is being restructured (revolutionised?) from within, by outsourcing, philanthrocapitalism, MOOCs etc., and that spaces for resistance and refusal need to be created and supported in solidarity actions so that we recapture our existence and our production as a social activity, for-society  rather than for-profit. It is here, and in celebrating existence for-society, that a revolution from within might begin.


The University and the secular crisis


Posted by hallymk1

In retrospect Steve Smith’s article linked in a previous posting on the University and the rule of money is important in highlighting that the UK Government’s austerity agenda will tighten considerably in the aftermath of the next General Election in 2015. He is clear that the squeeze on incomes for universities will give little room for manoeuvre, and one outcome is that the sector as a whole risks further stratification and restructuring, as institutions operating as competing capitals look for securitisation or financialisation coupled to attacks on labour rights and efficiency drives.

It is salutary to remember that the idea of the University and issues of funding are situated within the politics of austerity and the fiscal realities of an ideological attack on the sector. It should be noted that this is a deeply political attack that has seen resistance from groups of students and public sector workers and trades unions, but limited critique from the sector’s leaders. It is only Million+ that has developed an on-going critique based on the Government’s economic projections. Thus, in March 2013, the CEO of Million+ wrote:

Once the loss to the Treasury of reduced participation (which in turn leads to reduced tax receipts) and the inflationary impact of higher tuition fees are taken into account, the short-term savings will be outweighed almost six and a half times by the long-term costs of the new system.

In developing a meaningful critique, it is important to place the context of University funding, and the concomitant restructuring of the idea of the University for entrepreneurship and employability, in the context of the UK as a de-developing economy. Speaking at the LSE in September 2012, Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson stated their thesis that that the historical trend for the UK economy in the last century has been managed decline arrested by quick fixes like access to North Sea oil revenues and the stimulus of the deregulated City. Elliott and Atkinson argue that the UK is in a long decline, signalled now by an economy that is 4% smaller than it was when the financial crisis hit, and which is emerging from recession slower than it had during the Great Depression. They note that: the cost of the economic downturn is in excess of £200bn; real incomes are down, with the IFS stating that it will be 2016/17 before incomes reach 2004 levels and with an increase in levels of poverty; banking is “big, bust and corrupt”; successive rounds of Quantitative Easing and purchasing of gilts has underpinned much higher real inflation than that reported in the CPI, with no respite for savers; and the Treasury has had to borrow in excess of 550bn thereby doubling the debt.

For Elliott and Atkinson, the macro-economic context, inside which higher education is framed, is one of blunder, fudge and self-delusion. Revenues from the UK economy’s strong suits in some services and consultancy areas, aerospace and IT, as well as some universities, are not enough to overcome the lack of strength elsewhere, notably in manufacturing and the bubble sectors (student debt, financial services and banking). On top of this they point to the lack of oil and gold assets, contracting asset prices, and the lack of equity, alongside historic weak growth, in order to argue that any focus on rebalancing the economy is nonsense. They argue that this is the result of decades of macro-economic policy that has framed the UK as a giant hedge fund. Moreover, a series of roll-backs of labour rights through attacks on Trades Unions, plus privatisation related to market efficiencies, has focused minds on productivity, but has led to an overreliance on debt as incomes are squeezed. In driving forward productivity manufacturing has been seen as secondary to services, including finance, consultancy, and increasingly education. Regulation and forms of credit control have been secondary to enterprise and innovation.

Crucially for Elliott and Atkinson, the crash in 2008 enabled the economy’s defects, which had been covered by three decades of financialisation, to be revealed. These defects include: chronic debt; a long-term attrition on real wages; illiteracy amongst large numbers of the public; a pension time-bomb; no plan for replacing oil/gas/nuclear energy; a deficit in tax receipts, which make socialised payment for the welfare state problematic; dysfunctional banking services; an overreliance on exports to Europe at a time of contraction; and an overreliance on the imports of assets including skilled labour. Moreover, there has been a balance of payments deficit since 1983, and in spite of talk about global markets, the UK’s international net asset position is negative to the tune of £325.6bn. There is: a deficit on trading goods; no rebalancing of the economy towards exports and away from consumption, so that engines of growth are consumer debt and mortgage lending, and not science and education; a private sector that has not invested but hoarded, with cash balances worth £754bn but levels of business investment at less than 2% per annum. For Elliott and Atkinson this is a bet on deleveraging and disinvestment. Moreover, Government-borrowing and rescue packages, plus loan guarantees and outsourcing, which are hidden from the balance sheet, total another £612bn of debt.

They argue that this highlights that the UK is experiencing a qualitative change in its economic status, and in how it views and structures itself, as it de-develops. It is locked into a world of increasing competition and rivalry over energy and resources, including labour. Thus, we face a reality checkpoint, as large segments of the UK population are threatened with increasing impoverishment and unreliable access to power, fuel, food, education, health and shelter. For these authors what is needed is an economic plan, which focuses on the roles of the market and the State, and that we will make better choices if we regard the UK as a submerging market economy.

The Elliott and Atkinson thesis connects to: the views of those in the financial press that fiscal austerity has not worked and needs to be geared around both public and private investment and recapitalisation; the recent article byHerndon, Ash and Pollin that critiques the original research on the relationship between public debt and GDP growth that underpinned austerity; and the calls of the IMF for the Government to rethink its austerity agenda in the face of weak growth. In each of these analyses the outcomes of a 2012 Europaeum report on the impact of fiscal policy on higher education is amplified:

the economic downturn has, on the whole, had a negative short-term impact upon public higher education programmes.European universities are being affected in many different ways during the current economic crisis – with winners and losers already emerging, and the differences set to be multiplied over the coming years depending on how the winners use their comparative advantage, and how the losers can best mitigate the effects of cuts through so-called efficiency savings or by raising new sources of income.

The University then, is being restructured as part of a response to a secular crisis, and academic work, productivity, the rate of profit and labour arbitrage are central to this issue. As Harry Cleaver’s first thesis on the secular crisis noted:

We are writing and talking about secular crisis because neither the cyclical business downturns nor the upturns, nor a whole series of capitalist counter-measures (local and international), have resolved the underlying problems of the system in such a way as to lay the basis for a renewal of stable accumulation. Thus, secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

This is a point that Aaron Peters makes in his article on workfare as one of capital’s responses to the crisis. As Peters notes:

A discussion of surplus population is central to any enquiry as to the relationship between workfare and the secular crisis. The hypothesis runs that within the contemporary global economy there is a large and growing ‘surplus population’ that is incapable of accessing the labour market. Alongside this group is another yet larger one which frequently includes the ‘working poor’; temporary workers, part-time workers, agency workers, those on zero hours contracts and increasingly since 2008 the precarious self-employed. We know that this second group has grown throughout not only the course of the last several decades but particularly so since the Global Financial Crisis.

Yet employability and individual entrepreneurship developed through an appetite for debt and securitisation underpin the very restructuring of higher education in the global North. They are part-and-parcel of the changing organic composition of- capital and the restructuring required to deliver productivity and growth. What is clear is that there is no such analysis emerging from the leaders of universities, even whilst the austerity agenda that drives the restructuring of the sector is under attack from financial journalists, academic activists and even the IMF. The risk here is that even if a counter-narrative is developed through an analysis of the secular crisis, it is too late to recover the University in any form beyond that of competing capital subsumed under the dictates of money. Securitisation, indentured study, labour arbitrage, internationalisation, commodity-dumping in the global South, the enclosure and privatisation of previously socialised goods are all locked-in.

At issue then is Cleaver’s third thesis on the secular crisis, that of the struggle against capitalist work:

Capitalist rules impose the generalized subordination of human life to work. Whereas all previous class societies have involved the extraction of surplus labor, only in capitalism have all human activities been reshaped as work, as commodity producing labor processes. Those processes produce either use-values which can be sold and on which a profit can be realized or they produce and reproduce human life itself as labor power. Antagonism, resistance and opposition accompany this imposition because this way of organizing human life dramatically restricts and confines its development. People struggle both against their reduction to “mere worker” and for the elaboration of new ways of being that escape capitalist limits.

How might we develop educational spaces into which knowing and subjectivity might be developed, based in-part on socialised knowledge that is liberated from formal educational spaces? As Cleaver notes in his final two theses, at issue is the creation of a revolutionary subjectivity that is based upon

the liberation of alternative, self-determined social “logics” outside and beyond that of capital.

Such a revolutionary subjectivity is entwined with the need to develop

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

It is the secular crisis outlined by Elliott and Atkinson, the IFS and the IMF, and revealed inside-and-against the political economy of austerity, that is reshaping the very idea of the University. If we are to develop a meaningful, socially-constructed and democratic set of alternatives, they need to be placed against-and-beyond the secular crisis that is restricting and re-inscribing the very idea of the University.


Critical Pedagogies Symposium: educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

I’m pleased to be presenting at a symposium titled Critical Pedagogies: Equality and Diversity in a Changing Institution, in Edinburgh in September. I’m going to speak about “Educational technology and the enclosure of academic labour inside public higher education”. My presentation links to the following symposium topics:

  • Teaching within and beyond the classroom space; teaching as activism; virtual learning environments;
  • Effects of neoliberal policies and philosophies in institutional life; Education as commodity.

Abstract: across higher education in the United Kingdom, the procurement and deployment of educational technology increasingly impacts the practices of academic labour, in terms of administration, teaching and research. Moreover the relationships between academic labour and educational technology are increasingly framed inside the practices of neoliberal, transnational activist networks, which are re-defining UK higher education as a new model public service. This paper highlights the mechanisms through which educational technologies are used to control, enclose and commodify academic labour. At issue is whether academics and academic staff developers have a critical or ethical lens through which to critique the nature of the technologies that they use and re-purpose inside the University, and whether such a critique might enable technologies to be deployed for the production of socially-useful knowledge, or knowing, beyond monetization in the knowledge economy.


for the social content of academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

I: on social domination

In his Critical Social Theory and the Contemporary World, Moishe Postone argues that:

history, grasped as the unfolding of an immanent necessity, should be understood as delineating a form of unfreedom. That form of unfreedom is the object of Marx’s critical theory of capitalism, which is centrally concerned with the imperatives and constraints that underlie the historical dynamics and structural changes of the modern world. That is, rather than deny the existence of such unfreedom by focusing on contingency, the Marxian critique seeks to uncover its basis and the possibility of its overcoming.’

Postone reminds us that our everyday reality is shaped by labour-power. This shapes the commodities and capital relations that emerge as the concrete products of labour and the objectified forms of social mediation. At the heart of capitalism lies a structure of social mediation that is alienated from us as consumers and producers of the world because our everyday world is shaped by the objective, material reality of capitalist accumulation. The subsumption of labour for the accumulation of wealth means that inside capitalism there is no possibility that the individual, however, entrepreneurial, can be realised as a being for herself. Emancipation inside capitalism is impossible for the person whose very existence depends upon her ability to sell her labour-power as a commodity in the marketplace. The processes and techniques that structure life inside-and-against capitalist work only serve as forms of social domination. Thus, Postone argues:

Although there is a growing shift away from manual labor, the development of technologically sophisticated production does not liberate most people from fragmented and repetitive labor. Similarly, labor time is not reduced on a socially general level, but is distributed unequally, even increasing for many. The actual structure of labor and organization of production, then, cannot be understood adequately in technological terms alone; the development of production in capitalism must be understood in social terms as well.

For Marx, there is a need to understand how the historical subject is alienated from the products of her labour and the labour process itself, and as a result how she is alienated from herself and her species being. This final form of alienation is that of the individual from other individuals, in-part through the instantiation of competition inside the individual-as-entrepreneur and in-part through the denial of the social content of labour. Thus, Marx argued that the recovery of the general intellect or of socially-useful knowledge, science and technology, revealed at the level of society, was critical where it was developed through association with others. The key is co-operative practice that can refuse the material alienation of capitalist work, and that might enable alternatives to be imagined.

II: on labour arbitrage and the assault on academic labour

The realities of globalisation and of labour arbitrage place an increasing pressure on our ability to face-down hegemonic narratives of entrepreneurialism and the self-made nature of success inside education. In a recent post on Globalisation and the University, I argued that academics need to understand the following.

  1. The global processes oflabour arbitrage, whereby technology is used to deskill and discipline global labour, including inside the academy. This stands against the ideal of many educators for the democratic agendas of digital literacy or learner’s rights.
  2. How transnational capital uses the global processes of competition and free trade agreements to discipline transnational labour, through the use of cloud technologies and outsourced services, through workplace monitoring, and increasingly friable labour conditions.
  3. How globalised, neoliberal cultural norms emerge from the objective conditions of capitalist work, and the everyday reality of those objective conditions for those who work in the global South and whose work in the global North is proletarianised. This includes the ways in which universities reinforce those objective conditions and act as institutions of the state in underpinning the agency of transnational finance capital, like investment banks, management consultancies, technology firms, private equity etc..

The critical space around which the continuing assault on academic labour is being developed has been further restructured by two recent developments: first, proposed legislation in California that connects budget cuts and outsourcing; and second, the publication of an IPPR paper on higher education. These two developments form part of the policy/practice backdrop to an interconnected, neoliberal restructuring of higher education for the market. They connect think-tanks and the vendors of educational technology, to the technology-led outriders of educational reform in the sole name of economic growth and value, and to the politics of austerity. In this, the place of academics and their labour is subsumed under the ideas of the student-as-consumer, the need to catalyse an entrepreneurial society in which economic risk is transferred from society to the individual, and the material realities of globalised labour arbitrage.

Thus, Inside Higher Ed reports that “California lawmakers detailed a plan Wednesday to require the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including classes offered by for-profit companies.” Moreover, the Bill “would force all the state’s colleges – from community colleges to the University of California at Berkeley – to reduce overcrowding by allowing students to enroll in dozens of outsourced classes.” The Bill’s sponsor, Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, “said the bill would reshape higher education”. Budget cuts have reduced “California’s budget-weary public higher education [system’s ability] to meet student demand”, with reports of 500,000 students being turned away.

Zerohedge among others have reported on the realities of the student debt bubble, and I have written elsewhere about the interconnections between education, technology and student debt, and “the structural need for capital to seek out rents or profits from new educational spaces, based on either the reduction in the circulation time of commodities or the creation of new services, applications or information flows.” Inside economies that are addicted to debt, and which are based on a promise of repayments through deregulated, globalised, entrepreneurial zeal, the use of technology to crack open education and restructure academic labour practices is critical. Thus, Inside Higher Ed reports the concerns of The California Faculty Association, the union that represents professors in the California State University system:

We are seeing a whirlwind of new technologies – as well as proposals on how to best deploy them – coming to the fore and as such, it is imperative that we clearly understand what is, and what is not, working. We want to maintain academic credibility and the delivery of accessible, quality public education, rather than chase the latest private sector fad.

Inside Higher Ed notes that “The proposal could meet opposition from faculty worn down by years of budget battles.” Bob Samuels writes about this very point in more detail and focuses on the mechanisms through which this type of political restructuring underpins the outsourcing of academic practices.

Senator Steinberg is pushing a bill that will potentially outsource many of the University of California lower-division courses to outside course provides like Udacity and Coursera. Here we see one of the clearest examples of privatizing a public good. The state cuts the UC budget for years, and then the same people who cut the budget say we should now turn to online education to deal with the mess. Of course they add that faculty will have a say, but the question is which faculty, and can they stop a plan that is supported by the university president, the governor, and now the legislature?

In this view, the social content of academic labour formed inside the University as a space for association is alienated, objectified and subsumed inside the material realities of marketization and private-sector accumulation. The links between austerity-driven education policies, student debt as an engine for business-as-usual, the use of technology to discipline academic labour, and the threats of outsourcing, are used to restructure the relationships between academics and society.

This hegemonic narrative is reinforced by think-tanks through reports that connect higher education to the market and entrepreneur, and a life that can only be described in terms of work-readiness or personal failure. This is clear in the Institute for Public Policy Research’s paper, An Avalanche is Coming. The paper allegedly “challenges every player in the system to act boldly”, although the key player who voice is marginalised is the academic, and this is understandable given the paper’s focus on restructuring academic labour in the face of the material realities of economic growth:

Citizens need to seize the opportunity to learn and re-learn throughout their lives. They need to be ready to take personal responsibility both for themselves and the world around them. Every citizen is a potential student and a potential creator of employment (p. 5).

This is a world described entrepreneurially for work, and for a recalibration of education and its structures for individuated success or failure. The social nature of learning, and the associational opportunities that education affords, are negated because the focus for technology-fuelled universities has to be:

creating value for their students (p. 5)

and this form of value can only be realised inside capitalism for the accumulation of wealth. As a result of this need to create and extract value on an individual level:

The traditional university is being unbundled (p. 5).

Thus, the report focuses upon the role of the twenty-first century University and new, private providers in:

ensuring education for employability?

breaking the link between cost and quality: “In the era of modern technology, when students can individually and collectively create knowledge themselves, outstanding quality without high fixed costs is both plausible and desirable.”

restructuring the entire learning ecosystem to support alternative providers and the future of work. “A new breed of learning providers is emerging that emphasise learning by practice and mentorship. Systematic changes are necessary to embedding these successful companies on a wider scale.” (p. 6)

This focus on outsourcing academic practice and knowledge, private-sector commodification of academic knowledge, and in reducing the costs of academic practice, mean an on-going assault on academic labour. Thus, the IPPR paper asserts that academic autonomy threatens a reduced student experience and creates systemic risk through the tensions innate in academic labour-relations, because:

faculty lead and undertake the research and (sometimes) the teaching, the two activities which drive the key outputs. The relationship between faculty and the organisation itself is fundamentally tense, in a way that is not true of other organisations of intellectual merit. Consultancies, for example, create incentives in which individual consultants are driven by organisational goals. Universities cannot (and should not) do the same. (p. 27)

Moreover, in a world where the teaching of academic stars is globally available:

These scholars are a far cry from the run-of-the-mill faculty making their (often good) living from a combination of teaching, research and consultancy. While the stars may attract the students, these are the people who actually teach them. (p. 27)

Thus, in the paper the hegemony of technology in reshaping academic labour is critical, and this enables think-tanks and consultancies to work with emerging neoliberal public policy like that being invoked in California to “delineat[e] a form of unfreedom” inside-and-against the University. This is laid out through “The ubiquity of information and the near-zero cost of storing and transmitting it means that universities no longer own the monopoly over the expression of ideas in courses. EdX has made many of the courses taught by Harvard and MIT academics available for anyone in the world to use” (p. 38). Critically then, this is about a process of restructuring higher education for the market, and an assault on academic labour through the global processes of arbitrage. Here technological innovation “potentially provide a much more efficient market for teaching and learning than the university ecosystem – and for many people this might be the best way to improve their lives through learning”, and this means that “For traditional universities, a dramatic rethink of how faculty use their time and how they interact with students will be central to future success” (pp. 44-5).

Thus, the costs of a university education, and more especially the costs of academic labour in a globalised market, are underpinned by a narrative that situates education inside-and-for individuated capitalist work, and which reinforces the process of alienation. As a result:

Learning and work are becoming inseparable – indeed one could argue that this is precisely what it means to have a knowledge economy or a learning society. It follows that if work is becoming learning, then learning needs to become work – and universities need to become alive to the possibilities… Since technology can aggregate large amounts of data and communicate it decisively, methods other than the award of the university degree could mark a person as prepared for employment. (p. 52)

III: redeeming academic labour

Thus, academic labour is under assault both inside-and-beyond the University through a focus on capitalist work, rather than socialised living or socialised knowledge or socialised goods. The driver for this is the production/consumption processes of economic growth and the real subsumption of the University inside the material realities of the market. Universities must conform to the neoliberal ideal of the entrepreneur who succeeds in the market or they must be disciplined by external providers like MOOCs:

Economic value creators – in the shape of entrepreneurs – are defined by their ability to effectively turn raw resources into a bigger whole. They are increasingly likely to employ fewer full-time employees and instead outsource key deliverables to those that demonstrate the highest competency in a particular task. This competency is measured by their track record in that task, not by their underlying credentials. People will need to learn constantly and increase their skills. (p. 55)

This is the new normal for higher education in the global North, and the terrain on which academics need to find solidarity and resistance, and then push-back. This terrain in one in which universities will increasingly be driven through competition to find ways to reduce costs, to outsource services and provision, to meet the needs of globalised finance capital including the edicts of bond markets, credit rating agencies and private equity, and to reinscribe their students as present and future customers. At issue is the role of academic and professional service staff unions in critiquing this material reality and in finding alternatives that “seek[] to uncover its basis and the possibility of its overcoming.” Reclaiming labour-power inside the University is one such starting point and it is based on solidarity actions across the global North and the global South. In a space that is being restructured for value extraction against academic labour, spaces for association and solidarity are pivotal.

Over at Music for Deckchairs, Kate Bowles has argued:

At the heart of this two-tier system of elite university providers and mass university markets will be unbundled digital delivery of content, online platforms, locally supported tutoring and proctored testing. And Pearson are standing by with the clinical strength solutions to all the problems. So at the very least, this report is a strong case for higher ethical standards in research and analysis of educational markets by vendor stakeholders. Pearson have an extraordinary conflict of interest here, which is a very weak basis on which to try to gain our trust.

And it’s not a radical proposition: it’s a reheat of every argument being had everywhere about MOOCs, college tuition, university branding, ranking and funding, graduate employability, the emerging Asian markets (which is truly an awful way to think about individual students), young people and technology, the campus experience, the global superstars. The whole minestrone.

What’s missing is a vision for change that any of us would be proud to be part of.

Defining that vision demands that academics seek to reclaim the social content of their labour against the neoliberal processes of labour arbitrage. As Rikowski argues, we need to find and articulate alternatives:

the politics of human resistance is not only concerned with opposing the reduction of education and training to labour power but also holds out for modes of education and training aimed at meeting human needs and opening up realms of freedom. At this point, the politics of human resistance also needs to intersect with a more generalised anti-capitalist education otherwise it embraces only one dimension of the negativity required for progressive social change: i.e. resistance to the reduction of education and training to labour power production – without offering alternative forms of education and training.

The challenge is to take these social struggles that exist inside-and-against the University and infuse them politically, using globalised technologies, in order to open-up a counter-hegemonic space or global commons. It is only through the politicising of academic (student/teacher) labour through solidarity actions that truly transformational change which addresses social need and marginalisation beyond the market can be realised. Universities are critical sites in the globalisation of this struggle, as is the student/teacher as producer/consumer of material relations that are beyond the subjective. They form sites of struggle that are against those spaces described in the IPPR paper or Steinberg’s Bill. They form spaces through which we might replace the restructuring and reorganisation of global society for capital accumulation. They form spaces for the realisation of pedagogic models and ideas of public education that maintain counter-hegemony. It is time for academic labour to find its voice or to lose those spaces to the market.


On the structural adjustment of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

I

I’ve been trying to develop an argument that the development of innovations like MOOCs, learning analytics, personal learning networks etc. are a form of structural adjustment of higher education. In previous posts I have argued that MOOCs and other specific technologically-driven innovations need to be critiqued in terms of their impact on the historic forms of the University and the idea of academic labour. Thus:

The political economic background against which the University’s mission and role is played out is one of indenture, collapsing real wages, unemployment and depression. It is against this background that the political economics of MOOCs might be addressed, as one form of the negation of the historic role of the University, and as a mechanism through which capital can extract rents (through access rights or accreditation) or release (social or human capital as) surplus value for the market. One important strand that emerges from any such analysis surrounds the meaning of academic labour and the role of academics as organic intellectuals.

Beyond their capitalisation by transnational networks to attempt either the restructuring of the University or the release of the surplus intellectual value contained inside it for entrepreneurialism, technological innovations are also aimed at maintaining an increase in the rate of profit. Hence the role of transnational educational corporations like Pearson, or of transantional finance capital, like Goldman Sachs, in the privatisation of higher education, with technology as a crack in that idea that the University might be publically-financed, governed and regulated.

Structural adjustment across the globe has taken very specific forms, promoted by transnational organisations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. There has been some pushing back against the imposition of structural adjustment, for example in Malawi where subsidies for grain fertilizers were re-introduced in 2005 to alleviate famine in the face of global pressures.

The important lesson for policy-makers in other African countries, which continue to battle with chronic hunger and food insecurity, from the Malawi turnaround, is the fact that it has been triggered solely by a government policy intervention- a reintroduction of deep fertilizer subsidies as part of the 2005 Fertilizer Subsidy Policy. This policy was implemented at the cost of inviting the wrath of the donor community, particularly the IMF, World Bank and the USAID.

However, the story of structural adjustments ties into Naomi Klein’s precepts that underpin the shock doctrine and the impact of austerity politics.

  • The relentless law of competition and coercion [the rush to internationalise].
  • The impact of crisis to justify a tightening and a quickening of the dominant ideology [student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity].
  • The transfer of state/public assets to the private sector under the belief that it will produce a more efficient [smaller, less regulatory] government and improve economic outputs [outsourcing; service-driven innovation].
  • Lock-down of state subsidies for “inefficient” work [Arts and Humanities subjects].
  • The privatisation of state enterprises in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability [creating a political and socio-cultural space that encourages the privatisation of HE].
  • A refusal to run deficits [pejorative cuts to state services].
  • Extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt [increased fees; the use of bonds].
  • Controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology.

This focus on structural adjustment and shock is important in the unfolding crisis of higher education, and it relates directly to MOOCs/technological innovation and change, precisely because we are witnessing the policy space being recalibrated to marginalise the idea of the University as a public good. Within UK HE, the move by the last Labour administration to place higher education within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and their introduction of a fee regime, the Browne Report and the Coalition Government’s subsequent response to it, have turned the global economic crisis into a means to quicken the privatisation of the state, and to attempt the strangulation of possibilities to energise transformative, co-operative relations. This places previously socialised goods like healthcare and higher education in the vanguard of austerity-driven shock, which designs “to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy”. The extraction of value, or the state-subsidized privatisation of higher education (in Christopher Newfield’s terms) is what follows.

II

This line of thinking is important because of two recent statements that further shape the policy/practice space of higher education. The first is the latest statement released by Moody’s, the credit rating agency, about higher education, and the second is the funding letter from DBIS to the Higher Education Funding Council for England. Each of these documents is critical in recalibrating the ways in which we are allowed to think about higher education and what higher education is for.

Inside Higher Education reports that:

Moody’s analysts caution that revenue streams will never flow as robustly as they did before 2008. The change will require a fundamental shift in how colleges and universities operate, they say, one that will require more strategic thinking. “The U.S. higher education sector had hit a critical juncture in the evolution of its business model,” wrote Eva Bogarty, the report’s author. “Most universities will have to lower their cost structures to achieve long-term financial sustainability and to fund future initiatives.”

Moreover:

The report notes that colleges will have to rely on more strategic leaders who address these challenges through better use of technology to cut costs, create efficiency in their operations, demonstrate value, reach new markets, and prioritize programs. Many of those efforts could be grounds for disputes with faculty members or other institutional constituents unless leaders can get the collective buy-in that has long been the staple of higher education governance.

Thus, in terms of the mechanisms through which profit might be generated, in particular given the attrition on enrolment being reported in global North due to rising costs (see this report on families being priced out in the USA and hand-wringing over falling admissions in particular in the Russell Group universities in the UK):

The ratings agency argues that they are an opportunity for market leaders — those institutions that already have diverse revenue streams and brand recognition — to further improve their position. Such institutions could find ways to monetize MOOCs by potentially granting credit for a fee, licensing their courses to other institutions and advertising. Moody’s also notes the possibility of technology to increase faculty productivity by increasing the number of students one faculty member can serve, potentially creating efficiencies in the long term.

Whilst Moody’s is reflecting on HE in the USA, it has clear ramifications for UK HE, as institutions are seeking credit ratings for bond issues, and because transnational organisations like credit ratings agencies are integral to the geographies of neoliberalism that underpin transnational activist networks (TANs) that are in-turn adjusting the space inside which the University operates. Thus there is a space being opened up by the inter-relationships between ratings agencies like Moody’s, global finance capital, like Goldman Sachs, global private education providers like Pearson and Blackboard Inc., think-tanks like Pearson Education, and policy makers or administrators.

Whilst the report highlights the impact and risk profiles of both the growing issues of a student debt bubble and ensuring that the degrees awarded are of sufficient quality, a third issue is developed in the report and that is labour relations. Structural adjustment demands a restructuring of labour costs and practices, as is witnessed by the Troika’s actions in Greece. This is also hinted at in the Moody’s report which Inside Higher Education notes:

The report notes that any efforts to prioritize programs will likely run into opposition from various campus stakeholders. The governance model of universities vests varying authority in boards, managers, and faculty members. Even when faculty members are cut out of decision-making, the institution of tenure gives them leverage.

At issue then is the role of organised labour in the University sector, and its ability to push back against the restructuring of individual institutions or the sector as a public good. This is more important in the UK given the DBIS letter to HEFCE about funding. The letter highlights:

  • the pace of change through the clear link between HEFCE and ensuring that the Coalition’s “reforms are delivered in a timely and efficient way” [para 5];
  • the focus on competition through enabling alternative providers to enter the emergent HE market [para 6];
  • the focus on generating a culture of philanthropy or what has been called “philanthrocapitalism” [para 7];
  • the co-option of organisations like the Higher Education Academy, which have a vision to support the student experience, teaching excellence and innovation, to the service of the Government’s readjustment strategy and entrepreneurial/industrial agenda [para 11];
  • the imperative to develop information and learning/institutional analytics as a central disciplinary tool for managing higher education agendas [para 14];
  • the generation of universities as sites of service-driven change and marketisation [para 15];
  • the co-option of publically-funded “university research infrastructure”, in order to underpin “strategic research partnerships between universities, businesses and charities” that enables economic growth through state-subsidised privatisation [para 16];
  • the use of science and research by “selectively funding on the basis of only internationally excellent research,” to drive further competition between universities [para 18];
  • the explicit shackling of HE to the Coalition’s industrial strategy, so that the idea of the university is driven by economic growth [para 20];
  • the use of the term “legitimate students” playing into an agenda that continues to demonise “the other” inside and across UK society [para 21];
  • the use of a risk-based approach to HE, which Andrew Haldane has critiqued for its lack of respect for non-linearities and its inability to model contagion [para 23];
  • the use of financial incentives to model social mobility as a disciplinary function [para 25]
  • the imperative to seek efficiencies through outsourcing [para 26];
  • the demand that the pay and conditions of academic labour are managed with “restraint” [para 26];
  • the use of core and margin student numbers as a policy lever, now through custom and usage rather than primary policy the everyday reality of higher education, that creates the objective conditions for a competitive market to be structured [paras 30-35].

Some University leaders, notably DMU’s VC, have reacted to this letter by outlining how it impacts the relationship between staff and students, with a focus on student charters, admissions policies, and the development of a “Darwinian approach to enrolment” that prefigures an increasingly competitive higher education policy. Quite how this Darwinian approach plays out in terms of: University missions and diversity; the idea of the university as a public good; the use of financial mechanisms like bonds; the impact of a differential approach to implementing fees; a new regulatory approach for cross-sector organisations like HEFCE and the QAA; and the relationships between management, unions, academic labour and students; needs more meaningful critique across the sector.

III

The pace of change demands that alternatives or spaces for critique and action are developed, in particular because those TANs are restructuring the idea and the reality of higher education. In terms of how innovations are presented inside civil society in terms of social mobility, or reducing the rights of academic labour, or in terms of economic efficiencies, or in terms of access and student rights, or more brutally in terms of socio-economics in terms of the rate of profit and addressing issues of under-consumption, a critical emergent issue is about the place now of organised academic labour inside the University, and the role of, for example, UNISON and UCU. In this I am reminded of Paul Mason’s argument after the March 26 2011 anti-cuts demonstration in London, when he argued that

The big takeaway from today is that the trade union movement – though dominated by the public sector – is certainly a force to be reckoned with: what it chooses to do now will be interesting because Miliband’s strategists certainly want nothing to do with the mass, co-ordinated strike movement advocated by Serwotka, Len McCluskey etc.

We tend to forget, because we obsess about political parties, that in organisational terms the unions are much bigger than the Labour Party itself. Indeed the Labour Party branch banners I saw were often carried by a few, oldish, colourfully dressed people, whereas unionists tended to be younger and very “branded” by their professions or unions, as with the Unison Filipino Nurses, the FBU etc.

Another note: we tend to think of the public sector unions as white collar or from the service industries but this was not true of today: there were many tens of thousands of manual workers in their bibs, hi-vis uniforms etc. I met binmen from Southhampton furious that they pay is being cut; and of course the Firefighters, designated “stewards” in order to deter the anarchists from coming anywhere near the demo.

In terms of higher education there are clearly issues of labour relations and solidarity within the sector between different unions, and across sectors that now matter. Thus, there is a second emergent issue, related to this issue of solidarity, namely the relationship between formal higher education and the academic labour located therein, and those alternative educational projects that still survive two or three years after they originally coalesced. These alternatives might be MOOCs, where they have not been co-opted for capital, rent, profit or restructuring, but more importantly they include ideas like the Social Science Centre in Lincoln or the Workers Education Association or adult education providers, or the educational spaces opened up by, for example, the transitions movement. How we connect across the range of spaces that exist so that they can co-exist, energised by organised academic labour in the face of structural adjustment is our emerging challenge.


On the entrepreneurial university and the social factory


Posted by hallymk1

In the Economic and Social Manuscripts Marx described how by developing the body of the factory, or machinery organised into a system with labour subsumed under that system, capitalists worked:

  • to annex labour-power inside machinery that freed them from the organised power of workers to remove their labour;
  • to annex the labour of those whose labour-power was less costly and so enabled further extraction of surplus value, in this case of women and children, thus augmenting “the number of human beings who form the material for capitalistic exploitation”;
  • to confiscate further the worker’s disposable time, by extending the hours of labour;
  • to increase productivity, as a means of systematically getting more work done in a shorter time, or of exploiting labour-power more intensely;
  • to deskill the worker to embed that technical content inside the form of the machine, so that the capitalist might be emancipated from the restraints that are inseparable from human labour-power.

Marx writes that

The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. The separation of the intellectual powers of production from the manual labour, and the conversion of those powers into the might of capital over labour, is, as we have already shown, finally completed by modern industry erected on the foundation of machinery. The special skill of each individual insignificant factory operative vanishes as an infinitesimal quantity before the science, the gigantic physical forces, and the mass of labour that are embodied in the factory mechanism and, together with that mechanism, constitute the power of the “master.”

One hope for emancipation from this living death is that because capital depends on the exploitation of labour-power, in order to extract surplus value and maintain increase in the rate of profit, it needs different ways to relate to labour. In early industrialisation the factory enabled efficiencies in production and highlighted the mechanisms through which the social content of labour might be developed. The factories therefore offered ways in which the combination of labour might enable an amelioration of working conditions through trades unionism and collective bargaining. It was the ways in which labour might understand its power, and its power revealed socially as mass intellectuality, that could offer a way out. Developing and hoarding individuated skills was only a means to diminish our individual selves, and merely reinforced our dehumanisation, ostensibly through our alienation from others and ourselves.

In more recent work by autonomist Marxists, this analysis of the factory and the social content of work has been extended to develop the idea of the social factory, in which our individuated selves, or ourselves located inside family units, provide the very privatised matter upon which consumption and production can be extended. Thus, inside the idea of the social factory the whole of our lived experience is a space that can be contracted for, privatised and commodified, in order that surplus value can be legitimately extracted from it. As well as in our working existence, in our leisure we become alienated from ourselves, and unable to become fully human. What it is to be human is commodified inside a system where we have very limited power to be anything at all. Our every action, “like”, friendship, relationship simply offers a space for new services and products to develop. Moreover, the normalisation of working in/at/from home, and the bleeding of boundaries between work and home, including the technologies used in those spaces, thus enables capital to normalise the power of capitalist work over life.

The idea of the social factory enables a critique of gender relationships and the family in enabling labour-power to be reproduced for capital. This forms an extension of the mechanisms through which a surplus can be extracted because the family is developed as a space inside which production/consumption for profit can be nurtured, but also because the family, rather than “work”, nourishes the worker so that s/he is fit to return to work each day. Moreover, the social factory is a space inside which the general intellect and the application of science to production and consumption can be rolled out beyond the limits of formally contracted work, in a less collectivised space. Moreover, our leisure time is converted into cognitive work as our (inter)actions are mined in order that they provide opportunities to create new services or products. In this our engagements with a range of technologies fold our personal lives into the world of work, as we work to bring our own devices into the workplace, thus opening-up and merging our personal data, relationships and practices to the desires and will of the workplace. As a result of our atomised and often contractual relationships, the threat of non-compliance, strikes or work-stoppages is reduced.

There is an increasing critique of the relationship between the social factory and cognitive capitalism, in particular in the individuation of everyday experiences and relationships that are increasingly seen as contracted or contractual. One of the key markers of Marx’s work on machinery and on labour-power, in its English, factory deployment was the focus on social content of meaningful work. This enabled the worker to be seen as a social being and to see one route for amelioration of the worst excesses of capitalism to be through combination. It also offered ways of seeing the social content of labour as a crisis for capital, although capital would use information generated across the social factory to depress wages and exert control.

It is inside this critique that we might now turn to the idea of the entrepreneurial university and, in particular, the relationship between entrepreneurialism in education and technology. This relationship is critical if we are to address how the individual and the social content of labour are being developed inside-and-against the institution, and if we are to point towards a possible set of educational alternatives. In a recent essay Ronald Barnett has argued that the discourse surrounding higher education and the idea of the University is limited and limiting. He has written that the idea of the entrepreneurial dynamics of the University rests on a shared vocabulary.

A vocabulary quickly emerges among politicians, state officials, university rectors and vice-chancellors of the “global economy”, “competition”, “success”, “customers”, “surplus income”, “multiple income streams” and “knowledge transfer”. The entrepreneurial university is, as we may term it, an endorsing philosophy. It notes that the university is caught up in the burgeoning knowledge economy and sets out a mission that further encourages movement that is already under way.

Barnett then argues that critiques of this position from a public-good or neoliberal/financialisation perspective lack positivity and form dystopian, unhopeful spaces. He argues that “The whole debate is hopelessly impoverished” and lacks imagination, ignoring both the mechanisms through which imagination, innovation or creativity are opened-up as immaterial labour or cognitive capital for profit, and the deeper structural limitations of any alternative based on hopeful imagination inside capitalism. Imagination or creativity risk becoming liberal sops that connect to a discourse of economic growth, and inside the reality of austerity politics their very foundation needs a political economic critique.

So Barnett argues that we need to overcome “a fear of imagining” where “universities have convinced themselves that they are boxed in, unable to think or act in ways that are going to contribute to the world’s well-being.” He believes that “we should not be too pessimistic: some universities across the world are becoming systematically imaginative and encouraging of imaginative ideas.” Only he cannot give any examples of his “feasible utopias”. Does he mean the imagination shown in the global occupations? In the raft of alternatives to the enclosure of the university by austerity politics and the rule of money, in California, or in the edufactory collective, or the knowledge liberation front, or in protests in Dhaka, Addis Ababa, London etc.? What does this mean for the relationships between students, academics and administrators? What about the relationships between universities and the State, where consent and coercion are being redefined?

One way to begin to look at this problem of the idea of the university, is in the deployment of technology inside universities, which has emerged alongside an almost total lack of meaningful, mainstream critique of technologies and techniques, in particular inside educational technology communities. In this is witnessed the mis-engagement with the idea of social learning and socialised critique. The vogue for bring your own device, for personal learning networks as personalised brands, for promoting technologies and creativity, and now for entrepreneurialism, are presented as strands inside an emancipatory discourse. In particular, these vogues are connected to: technological innovation and the desperate need for the next innovative idea; individuated views of how the educational system might be made to work better, so that those whom it has failed might be redeemed; work-based efficiencies being spread into our everyday lifeworlds, in order that we might become better producers/consumers; narratives of economic growth and recovery. In the politics of austerity against which technological innovation is asymmetrically placed, there is an increasing stress on the role of the individual to reduce their social needs and to increase their contractual, commodity-based portfolio. In this new set of narratives the deployment of innovative technologies, increasingly linked to ideas of entrepreneurialism, as seen to be unquestioningly central.

Thus, we see the drive for technology-driven entrepreneurialism inside the university, increasingly connected to the narrative of economic growth. However, the assumptions that underpin this relationship then demand a further set of questions, in particular inside higher education which is increasingly being seen as a motive force for catalysing an entrepreneurial, business-focused life-world.

  • Does an entrepreneurial university experience reinforce the transfer of risk for failure and indebtedness from society as a whole to the individual, underpinned by a new fee structure? Does it reinforce the individuated inequities of human/social capital? Does it reinforce the demonization of those deemed not entrepreneurial in their practices or techniques?
  • Does an entrepreneurial university experience further remove individuals from the social content of their labour? Does such an experience reinforce the contractual, atomised nature of our relationships that are increasingly based on private property?
  • Does a focus on individuated entrepreneurialism reinforce precarious forms of labour? Does its recreation inside higher education reinforce the politics of austerity?
  • Does a focus on educational entrepreneurialism enable society as a whole to address the crises of austerity, climate change and liquid fuel availability?
  • Do technologies, and ideas like bring your own device, personal learning networks, MOOCs and learning analytics, bear systemic analysis, so that educators can understand whether they individuate further our experiences, reduce them to contractual, privatised worlds, and further remove their social content, or not?

In this process we might remember that for all our focus on technologies like ipads or raspberry pi as emancipatory/entrepreneurial in their ability to enable digital literacies or creativity (whatever that is) to flourish, they are still manufactured from components and minerals that are themselves produced in environments that immiserate others. We might ask, to what extent is our entrepreneurialism afforded at the personal expense of other human beings?

In asking these politicised questions I am interested in remembering the social forms of our labour, identified inside the factory and reinvented in the social factory, and the social content that is held therein. It is in the process of socialising our labour, and in catalysing and releasing that labour as mass intellectuality that we might begin to offer alternatives that move us away from business-as-usual and the poverty of the politics of austerity. It is in the revelation of the mechanisms through which universities contribute to the idea of contractual, privatised entrepreneurialism and become key agents in structuring the dynamics of the social factory that might enable alternative forms of sociability to be developed, against-and-beyond the university. These need to be more than simply in the name of business-as-usual or the vagaries of imagination or hope. It is against this view, situated very specifically inside the current global crisis of capitalism, that the purpose and reality of technology-fuelled, entrepreneurial education needs to be addressed.