Tag Archives: labour

On student debt, big data and academic alienation


Posted by hallymk1

 I

 Mike Neary, in a recent article on Teaching Politically, quotes the Joint Declaration of the Knowledge Liberation Front that emerged from a meeting in Paris in 2011. The Declaration points out the struggle against the financialisation and corporatisation of the University and of academic labour, and then points towards exodus from the restructuring of higher education that is taking place globally.

Since the state and private interests collaborate in the corporatisation process of the university, our struggles don’t have the aim of defending the status quo. Governments bail out banks and cut education. We want to make our own university. A university that lives in our experiences of autonomous education, alternative research and free schools. It is a free university, run by students, precarious workers and migrants, a university without borders.

This weekend we have shared and discussed our different languages and common practices of conflict: demonstrations, occupations and metropolitan strikes. We have created and improved our common claims: free access to the university against increasing fees and costs of education, new welfare and common rights against debt and the financialisation of our lives, and for an education based on co-operation against competition and hierarchies.

 In an earlier posting on exodus and the process of struggle I argued for “way(s) of re-framing the relationships between academics and the public in an age of crisis.” This seems more relevant after the publishing of FBI documents obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) relating to the Occupy movement. These documents bear analysis in the context of higher education for three reasons.

ONE. They reveal the Occupy movement being seen as a potential criminal and terrorist threat even though the FBI acknowledges in documents that organizers explicitly called for peaceful protest and did “not condone the use of violence” at occupy protests.

TWO. They link law enforcement, and governmental agencies to corporate strategy and demands, clearly articulating the kinds of geographies of neoliberalism that Stephen Ball has described in Global Education Inc., and which form hierarchies of power inside global capitalism. Thus, Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF argued that “These documents show that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are treating protests against the corporate and banking structure of America as potential criminal and terrorist activity. These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America.”

THIRD. They tie the University, academic labour and student-life clearly into this discourse. “Documents show the spying abuses of the FBI’s “Campus Liaison Program” in which the FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated information to “sixteen (16) different campus police officials,” and then “six (6) additional campus police officials.” Campus officials were in contact with the FBI for information on OWS. A representative of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

One outcome of this process is that forms of protest against, for example, the marketisation of higher education need to be viewed in light of how they threaten global corporate identities and strategies for profit that are being opened-up by the State. In this, the mechanisms by which established hierarchies maintain their power through financialisation and information-sharing need to be described, and alternative positions developed.

II

Developing alternative narratives is critical because the hegemonic description of what higher education is for is being destabilised. In particular we are witnessing a polarisation of higher education around universities as competing capitals. Thus, in a recent Novara discussion on Finance, Financialisation and English Higher Education, Andrew McGettigan made a series of points that illuminate this argument.

ONE. The formal, higher education system will become increasingly polarised and stratified over time. This will then increasingly make higher education a positional good for individual students-as-entrepreneurs as a differential market develops, with certain HEI brands having more social capital for individual students as they compete in a job/wage market that is increasingly squeezed.

TWO. As the fee cap is lifted, the student debt loan book becomes increasingly important. The new polarity across the sector, with top-tier universities agitating for an unrestricted market, will have the most profound effect. In particular, as the data around the loan book develops this will impact fee structures as some universities will be able to articulate their present value (by demonstrating how students are able to repay outstanding loan balances) and their relationship to future graduate earnings. The £9,000 fee cap is important in securing the State’s overall liabilities but the use of data related to earnings and efficiencies in repayments will be stressed by certain universities to enable them to agitate for an exemption from a fee cap. The importance of this as a strategy can already be seen in the expansion of Russell Group (see the expansion of the Russell Group reported in the THE). Thus we have a diminishing sense of higher education as a publicly-funded, regulated and governed good, with it instead forming a space inside which universities become competing capitals inside a market.

THIRD. We are witnessing the secular transformation of universities into new kinds of corporation that are commercial and financial, rather than having charitable status that provides tuition or research. Where generating revenue is the fundamental corporate strategy, and as public funds dry up in face of private finance, at root the internal functions of the University are changed.

FOUR. Data around the state-backed student loan company/book becomes critical. Loans unlike grants generate information via HRMC. Pattern-matching that links UCAS tariffs to retention data to loans and loan repayments will enable actuarial tables to be produced that in-turn differentiate HEIs and courses and entry grades. This will form the performance metric par excellence because it will have a present and future pound sign attached. Such information means that Government can monitor the spend of public money and possibly remove access to the loan book for certain HEIs or courses. The use of data linked to profitability is therefore disciplinary. As the PCJF analysis of linked FBI files showed, federal agencies were functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America. There is reason, therefore, to suspect that data about student repayment and university performance will be shared across geographies-of-neoliberalism in the same way to discipline behaviour.

FIVE. These data are increasingly problematic because modelling on graduate salaries uses historic data, and we lack complete datasets. Modelling suggests that there is no uniform premium but a polarisation/hierarchy of graduate classes based on social capital accrued. Moreover, our basic assumptions about employability and wages are under threat, and predictability of repayments is a problem.

SIX. The involvement of global private finance is key to the expansion of the sector and the competitiveness of individual universities as competing capitals. Thus, we see Goldman Sachs and the Ontario Teachers Pension scheme lobbying for investment with universities in for-profit joint ventures in foreign markets, funded by bonds or equity. Investment is not for efficiencies in-country (e.g. the UK), but to take the established UK HE model abroad and to monetise degree-awarding powers.

Whether we like it or not private finance and the disciplinary nature of both the student loan book and big data are restructuring academic labour and the idea of the university as a public or socialised good. 

III

Zerohedge’s 75 Economic Numbers From 2012 That Are Almost Too Crazy To Believe, focuses on what the author calls “bubble(s) of debt-fueled [sic.] false prosperity that allows us to continue to consume far more wealth than we produce.” Just a handful of the 75 illuminate the argument made above that student debt is an insidious and inflationary attempt to use higher education reform to discipline our behaviours as consumers inside capitalism. They therefore demonstrate how education forms a single mechanism through which capital can continue to extract value from previously socialised goods. These numbers highlight the attrition of the myth of the growing middle class, empowered through a university education, that can maintain growth and accepted standards of living. They highlight the increasing immiseration of vast tranches of society in the face of debt.

17: According to the Pew Research Center, 61 percent of all Americans were “middle income” back in 1971. Today, only 51 percent of all Americans are.

18: The Pew Research Center has also found that 85 percent of all middle class Americans say that it is harder to maintain a middle class standard of living today than it was 10 years ago. 

19: 62 percent of all middle class Americans say that they have had to reduce household spending over the past year.

20: Right now, approximately 48 percent of all Americans are either considered to be “low income” or are living in poverty.

21: Approximately 57 percent of all children in the United States are living in homes that are either considered to be either “low income” or impoverished.

37: Recently it was announced that total student loan debt in the United States has passed the one trillion dollar mark.

43: 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed last year.

44: The U.S. economy continues to trade good paying jobs for low paying jobs. 60 percent of the jobs lost during the last recession were mid-wage jobs, but 58 percent of the jobs created since then have been low wage jobs.

56: Corporate profits as a percentage of GDP are at an all-time high. Meanwhile, wages as a percentage of GDP are near an all-time low.

We might also want to view Lisa Scherzer’s piece on student debt and the bubble that is affecting older generations who are taking on debt to support family member’s in college, escalating college tuition costs, poor job prospects, and a collapse in real wages. However, the role of big data in maintaining this process is also critical.

IV

I want to quote at length, Steve Lohr in the New York Times, writing about big data, precisely because it highlights how this corporatised technique becomes a mechanism for control. This is important for higher education because using data or information is likely to be used to discipline both universities who need to provide returns to private equity or bond markets, and to students with outstanding, individual tuition debts. Witness McGettigan’s point about the production of usable actuarial tables for repayments related to courses and HEIs. 

Lohr writes:

 These drumroll claims rest on the premise that data like Web-browsing trails, sensor signals, GPS tracking, and social network messages will open the door to measuring and monitoring people and machines as never before. And by setting clever computer algorithms loose on the data troves, you can predict behavior of all kinds: shopping, dating and voting, for example.

The results, according to technologists and business executives, will be a smarter world, with more efficient companies, better-served consumers and superior decisions guided by data and analysis.

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

Here we might wish to focus on Zerohedge’s analyses of Wall Street’s use of high frequency trading, and Karl Marx’s discussion, in Volume 2 of Capital, on Capital’s systemic need to reduce the circulation time of commodities. 

Lohr continues:

Big Data proponents point to the Internet for examples of triumphant data businesses, notably Google. But many of the Big Data techniques of math modeling, predictive algorithms and artificial intelligence software were first widely applied on Wall Street.

Models can create what data scientists call a behavioral loop. A person feeds in data, which is collected by an algorithm that then presents the user with choices, thus steering behavior.

We are thus returned to the use by the State and corporations of data to control and shape behaviour, including threats of protest and exodus.

V

Student debt becomes a key power source for this drive to privatise in the name of efficiencies, scale, value-for-money and impact, and in fact generates a pedagogic and structural view of student-as-consumer that further recalibrates higher education. In a separate posting on Goldman Sachs and the privatisation of the University I drew attention to how Goldman Sachs’ investment banking arm works to develop Higher Education and Nonprofit Institutions teams, by working

with public and private universities and nonprofit issuers nationwide to structure and execute tailored debt capital markets financings. The firm has a dedicated group of credit specialists whose primary responsibility is to assist the investment banking team and issuers or clients in evaluating and achieving their rating potential. They take an active role on the credit analysis, rating strategy and investor sales process. In addition, with specialty expertise in areas such as athletics risk management, royalty monetization, public-private partnerships and online learning technology implementation, our experts can provide advice and financing solutions tailored to the needs of our issuers or clients.

As a result, the internal logic of the University is increasingly prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships as against fetishised products and processes of valorisation.

In the HEA research and policy seminar series reported in the Guardian, Roger Brown has argued that in analysing the impact of debt on the student experience:

We also need an agency that is independent of the government that will take responsibility for addressing these issues on a continuing basis, he added, and “that will be prepared to raise its head above the parapet when necessary, rather than simply being an agency of an agency of the government. We must have some credible, authoritative means of monitoring what happens to the quality of student learning as marketisation proceeds.

However, the risk is that such monitoring merely becomes another form of evidence-based practice that seeks to tweak the internal functioning of a system that is alienating.

This idea of alienation in the face of indentured service and financialisation is highlighted by Gajo Petrović’s essay on Marx’s Theory of alienation. “According to Marx, the essence of self-alienation is that man at the same time alienates something from himself and himself from something; that he alienates himself from himself.” This breaks down into four aspects or characteristics of alienation. The first is the alienation of the results of human labour (the objects produced by human labour constitute a separate world of objects which is alien to us, which dominates us, and which enslaves. The second is the alienation of production itself through alienated labour activity, because our own activity does not affirm but denies and subjugates us. Third, by alienating our own activity from ourselves, we alienate ourselves from our very essence as creative, practical beings. Crucially, Petrović argues that “Transforming his generic essence into a means for the maintenance of his individual existence, man alienates himself from his humanity, he ceases to be man.” Fourth, as an immediate consequence of the alienation of humans from themselves in the face of the market, individuals are alienated from each other. For Petrović “As the worker alienates the products of his labor, his own activity and his generic essence from himself, so he alienates another man as his master from himself. The producer himself produces the power of those who do not produce over production.” So we are left with an element of a totalising system inside which humans are alienated from their humanity.

Our standard refrain in the face of debt is to seek our research opportunities to monitor outcomes and impact, which are themselves alienating. As Neary argues, this is not enough:

In this new financialised world foreign providers can intervene in domestic markets undermining regulatory national frameworks, with devastating consequences for academic labour in terms of insecure employment, increasing precariousness, as well a contravening academic, ethical and value aspirations. The outcome is that academic culture is replaced by an enterprise business culture so that universities come more and more to resemble multinational corporations, with student compliance enforced by a pedagogy of debt.

Thus, what is needed is to understand how we might intensify “the processes of militant/co-research and self-education in praxis”. One way might be to understand how the geographies-of-neoliberalism described by the PCJF’s FBI documents, are allied to the interrelationships between both the techniques of big data and finacialised commodities of higher education, and how they contribute to our alienation from ourselves and each other (as potential entrepreneurial threat or terrorists or whatever). We might then need to ask whether, by describing and analysing the ways in which the State and corporations use such techniques to discipline academic labour and student behaviour and thereby increase alienation, alternatives might be developed.


Some themes and some music


Posted by hallymk1

This year I have written increasingly about the following issues.

  1. The mechanisms through which higher education as a previously socialised or social good has been marketised, in order that value can be extracted from it.
  2. The mechanisms that inscribe the higher education sector inside the circuits of transnational finance capital, in order to enable the extraction of surplus value.
  3. The impact of the historic tendency of the rate of profit to fall on both the higher education sector and individual universities as competing capitals.
  4. The role of technology as a crack through which higher education and universities can be privatised, in particular related to the impact of finance capital and proprietary vendors like Blackboard, Pearson and Goldman Sachs.
  5. The relationships between the university and alternatives to them, student debt, technology and academic labour.
  6. The mechanisms through which technology is used to militarise higher education.
  7. The relationships between student debt, the idea of the student-as-consumer, and the role of technology, in disciplining academic labour.
  8. The techno-determinist co-option of innovation and innovations like learning analytics, BYOD, mobiles and MOOCs, so that their dehumanising impacts are forgotten.
  9. The impact of austerity politics, liquid fuel availability, and climate change on the politics of higher education.

Next year I plan to develop some work on academic labour and forms of activism, and the development of an ethical digital literacy.

Anyway, in writing this stuff I wondered what I had been listening to, and it seems that I have been obsessed with the following things, some of which are from 2012 and some of which are not. The combination of these things may, or may not, explain a lot.

  • Giacomo Puccini: Turandot.
  • Micachu and the Shapes: Never.
  • Sufjan Stevens: The Age of Adz.
  • Low: C’mon.
  • Death Cab for Cutie: The Photo Album.
  • SBTRKT: <untitled>.
  • Orbital: Wonky.
  • The Men: Open Your Heart.
  • Sons of Noel and Adrian: Knots.
  • Bombay Bicycle Club: A different kind of fix.
  • Simian Mobile Disco: Unpatterns.
  • Silverclub: Silverclub.
  • Daughter: various EPs.
  • Stay+: various EPs.
  • Stubborn Heart: <unnamed>.
  • James Blake: Enough Thunder.
  • Bon Iver: Bon Iver.
  • blur: 13.
  • Four Tet: Pink.
  • Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark: Architecture and Morality.

I have created a playlist of this stuff on Spotify, and there are some other collaborative (or not) playlists under my hallymk1 account.

In solidarity.


For a critique of MOOCs/whatever and the restructuring of the University


Posted by hallymk1

I

In analyses of the circuits and cycles of capitalism, interpretations of crises underpin our individual and collective responses to them. In classical interpretations, overproduction/under-consumption or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall have dominated discussions of what might be done to move beyond crises. Critical here is recognising that the discourse of crisis is framed by how capital can overcome the barriers to the production and accumulation of surplus value. Typical mechanisms have been: the implementation of new technologies that revolutionise the production process; new working patterns that increase the productivity of labour; or the destruction of unproductive capitals or institutions, so that the surplus value that is tied up inside them can be released and further accumulated. Inside such analyses, the relationships between civil and political society and the mechanisms through which the battle of ideas can be waged is critical. It is here that the historic idea of the University, and the responses inside capitalism to declining profitability, might be developed.

In the UK we are witnessing the restructuring of higher education as one response to the financial crisis of 2008. Thus, the discourse is of individual student choice, new public management, value-for-money, impact etc.. The reality of this approach is that it tends to work towards individuation and the market as the touchstones of effective and efficient higher education. This then acts as one negation of the perceived historic role of the University. In reflecting on the aspirational and social democratic role of the University post-the 1963 Robbins Review, John Holmwood has recently argued for the university’s “wider social and political value in contributing to culture and an inclusive democracy”. Martin Weller has also argued for the incremental and developmental change emerging inside education, rather than buying into a (generally techno-determinist) view that education is broken.

Such public, developmental arguments for the University and the institutions of education, sit uneasily against the market mechanisms now being foist upon higher education, from consumerisation and student fees, to pay-to-publish, to impact metrics and research excellence frameworks. Each of these mechanisms negates the perceived public, democratic role of the university in the face of the discipline of the market. This is important because, as Karl Polyani argued, “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment… would result in the demolition of society” because through that mechanism the economic system lays down the law to society, and the capitalist economic system takes primacy over the system. In the face of the neoliberal incantation that there is no alternative, higher education is being torn by the mechanisms that Wolfgang Streeck describes for democratic capitalism, namely

…a political economy ruled by two conflicting principles, or regimes, of resource allocation: one operating according to marginal productivity, or what is revealed as merit by a ‘free play of market forces’, and the other based on social need or entitlement, as certified by the collective choices of democratic politics. Under democratic capitalism, governments are theoretically required to honour both principles simultaneously, although substantively the two almost never align.

At issue is how these conflicting principles are affecting higher education, and how the idea of the University as a historic structure is being negated by the primacy of market principles. The arguments over Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are important here because their logic points towards the revolutionary potential of capitalism to overcome barriers and release surplus value for reinvestment and accumulation.

II

Inside the logic of MOOCs is emerging a technology-enabled business model that, for example: enables the student or facilitator to become entrepreneurial or enterprising at lower cost than in traditional educational forms; separates out the structures of the university, like teaching, assessment, student support, careers-matching etc., in order that they are commodified for profit; enables teaching assistants to be used to drive down the costs of academic labour, which are traditionally high inside the University; disciplines the social, co-operative and time-consuming nature of the accumulation process inside universities; and enables capital to release social capital previously accumulated inside the university for its own accumulation and profit. Thus, for instance, we witness how Coursera is “officially in the headhunting business, bringing in revenue by selling to employers information about high-performing students who might be a good fit for open jobs.”

Critical in analysing how and why MOOCs form one attempt by capital to negate the institution of the University, as a function of its internal, market-driven dynamics, is a political economic analysis of their impact. Thus, Anna Fazackerley in the Guardian clearly connects the relationship between investment banking and higher education for profit.

Financiers are hearing stories about a global revolution in online learning in the US, and they are eager for that revolution to catch on over here. But so far they have been disappointed. “UK higher education is extremely good, but the scale of ambition is low,” says Robb. “I was talking to an investor the other day who said: ‘At the moment no university is looking at anything big enough for us to write a cheque’.”

Peter Scott, also writing in the Guardian, argued that market discipline and the power of finance capital in particular is opening-up higher education and corporatising its management, thus disciplining the traditional academic behaviours in the face of hegemonic narratives of what the University as a corporate body should be.

Against this background of investment banking and market discipline, it is interesting to reflect on Clay Shirky’s argument that:

the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it… The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system.

We might ask, for whom and for what is this unbundling taking place? Shirky goes on to make the crucial point that:

In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.

Yet, across the global North we are witnessing the weight of negative prospects that are equally acting as disciplinary mechanisms on the form and function of the University as anything other than a vehicle for entrepreneurial activity.

  • The Bank of England’s Andrew Haldane has stated that debt and an indentured future, in which our labour is securitised, now dominates our foreseeable future: “If we are fortunate, the cost of the crisis will be paid for by our children. More likely it will still be being paid for by our grandchildren.”
  • Zerohedge has reported on The Social Depression Within Europe’s Recession, in particular looking at the rates of suicide, crime, homelessness and poverty in the Eurozone as austerity bites, and destroys the social capital upon which middle class lives were built.
  • RT reports that “The number of American youth who are out of school and unemployed has hit a half-century record high, with 6.5 million teens and young adults staying at home without the skills required to find employment.”
  • Zerohedge highlights the rise in student loan repayment delinquency rates, and Mike Shedlock’s analysis of student loan debt versus graduate earnings reveals that “as student debt piles up, wage growth for college grads certainly doesn’t”. This reinforces the view that a squeeze on profits has been replaced by a squeeze on wages (see the graph on page 6 of this link which takes wages as a proportion of GDP between 1955-2008). This has been accelerated after the financial collapse, as Zerohedge has again shown in its analysis of how labour’s share on national income has collapsed in the USA.

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.

III

In The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism,David Harvey argues that the sustainability of modern capitalism is beholden to rising effective demand and consumerism. In particular, he notes that the creation of new spaces inside and against which surpluses can be invested and returns taken out is critical. Thus, he notes:

The production of space in general and of urbanisation in particular has become big business under capitalism. It is one of the key ways in which the capital surplus is absorbed… The connections between urbanisation, capital accumulation and crisis formation deserve careful scrutiny.

Whilst Harvey is thinking about physical space as a motive for consumption and production, this might also be applied to the mixed physical/virtual spaces inside which higher education is folded. This is important for analysing technologically-driven innovations as one possible negation of the idea of the University, because higher education in whatever form is inscribed inside the totality of capitalism. Thus, the idea of the neoliberal University needs to be addressed against the circulation of capital, and in response to potential blockages that might induce a crisis by constricting capital flows. I want to hint at these as ways in which innovations like MOOCs might be analysed, in order to reflect on higher education and the idea of the University inside neoliberalism. The issue then will be what is to be done?

ONE. How do we understand the historic university as a potential blockage to (human, social, financial etc.) capital flow, and MOOCs as one response to overcome it? For Harvey, overcoming blockages involves analysing the following seven factors, which I have edited in the current context.

  1. Assemblage of the Initial Capital: e.g. universities as congealed intellectual and social capital/value that is socialised in form and needs to be commodified, marketised and privatised.
  2. The Labor Market: e.g. how a global market impacts a commodified higher education
  3. The Availability of the Means of Production and Scarcities in Nature: e.g. the impact of open access and service-driven rents.
  4. Technological and Organization Forms: e.g. the impact of new forms of higher learning or higher education like MOOCs or autonomous social science centres on universities.
  5. The Labor Process: e.g. the impact on academic labour’s historic autonomy of automisation, lean management etc..
  6. Demand and effective demand: e.g. the place of informal education, and the relationship between student debt, time and profitability.
  7. Capital Circulation as a Whole: e.g. the impact of the idea that there is no alternative to an entrepreneurial higher education that serves the market.

TWO. What is the relationship between the University and crises of under-consumption fuelled by a lack of credit? Under-consumptionist arguments have focused on the recessionary impact of falling wages, and labour’s lack of access to a surplus through which effective monetary demand for the commodities that are produced across the economy can be maintained. Crucially, this also includes the services and commodities produced or represented by education. Inside the market, as is witnessed by governmental economic strategy/fiscal stimulus, the key is that entrepreneurs are persuaded to invest. Mechanisms for doing this include lowering costs to re-start demand, or opening-up credit, or persuading people to take out loans or to stop hoarding money as savings. The marketisation of higher education, the role of investment banks and publishing houses in developing alternative services using technology, and the nature of the MOOC as an alternative (set of) business model(s), sits inside-and-against this background of demand for and consumption of commodities/services, in order to maintain the rate of profit.

THREE. What is the relationship between the University and the productive extraction of surplus value? Simon Clarke has argued that capital needs to create the conditions for the renewed production of surplus value through the control of labour power and the means of production in appropriate proportions. It does not do this by stimulating appropriate levels of consumption. This is important in terms of higher education because the University is a large store of human, social and finance capital, which might be commodified and released into new, gobalised markets. At present the UK Government is manufacturing this process by opening-up the sector through financialisation and indenture so that previously socialised surplus value can be accumulated by corporations or entrepreneurs. The key here is to overcome the limits of profitability inside capitalism as a whole, with higher education as one department or tentacle of the system of capitals. Innovations in the provision of higher education as a service or commodity need to be related to this point about surplus value.

Isaak Rubin, in his classic Theories of Surplus Value, argued that to understand the mechanics that underwrite the totality of capitalism a critique of value was central. He argued that value is a social relation among people, which assumes a material form and is related to the process of production. The theory of value is related to the working activity of people. In this, ‘The subject matter of the theory of value is the interrelations of various forms of labor in the process of their distribution, which is established through the relation of exchange among things, i.e. products of labor.’ Thus

‘The social form of the product of labor, being the result of innumerable transactions among commodity producers, becomes a powerful means of exerting pressure on the motivation of individual commodity producers, forcing them to adapt their behaviour to the dominant types of production types among people in the given society.’

Where educational relationships form one strand of a production relation that is framed by commodities, then those relationships tend to take the appearance of relationships between the things for which and through which people relate. Hence, in the current moment we see the ‘reification’ of MOOCs as the seat of productive relations between people. This process underpins the creation of social capital and subsumes people under the capital-relation, just in a different space. Whilst the University as a public good might act as a barrier to the reification of educational goods or services, where that barrier is torn down through marketization or securitisation or massification, the social form of things appears as a condition for the process of production. Thus, the MOOC is declared to be revolutionising education.

As a result, we need to analyse the MOOC as a reified, entrepreneurial space inside which education as commodity is produced and consumed, and through which surplus value in a range of forms can be extracted and accumulated more easily. Value is crucial because as Rubin highlights it connects commodities and the relations of production that create them, to technological and labour-driven productivity, alongside the social nature of that productivity.

FOUR. What is the relationship between the University and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall? Basu and Vasudevan have written about Technology, Distribution and the Rate of Profit in the US Economy: Understanding the Current Crisis. They highlight that we need to understand the role of technology in maintaining the rate of profit:

Marx’s discussion of technological change, accumulation and profitability gives a primacy to technology in driving profitability. Capitalist competition compels a process of technical change that deploys increasing capital intensity and mechanization as a means of extracting a larger surplus from labor. This pattern of labor-saving technological change is critical to Marx’s formulation of the law of tendency of the falling rate of profit.

Thus, in the current crisis of capitalism we witness a persistent decline in capital productivity that exerts an inexorable downward pull on profitability. For these authors there is a mix of productivity, labour market discipline, and the imperative to reduce circulation time, that catalyses innovation in the forces of production, in-part through technology.

[T]he pervasive adoption and growth of information technology would have almost certainly played an important role in shaping the particular evolution in the nineties when capital productivity showed an upward trend. New forms of managerial control and organization, including just-in-time and lean production systems have been deployed to enforce increases in labor productivity since the 1980’s. The phenomena of “speed-up‟ and stretching of work has enabled the extraction of larger productivity gains per worker hour as evidenced the faster growth of labor productivity after 1982. People have been working harder and faster. Information technology has facilitated the process. It enables greater surveillance and control of the worker, and also rationalization of production to “computerize” and automate certain tasks.

Critically, much of the research and development that underpins privatisation or marketization, or the creation of new services and products, is driven by state-subsidies, including those from inside the University, and with ready access to global markets and off-shoring certain elements of production such state-subsidised privatisation allows a further cheapening of investment capital alongside making labour more intensive. The interrealtionships between MOOCs, finance capital and the University need to be addressed in the face of the global relocation of production of certain services, the need to overcome declining rates of capital accumulation, and the need to increase capital intensity, as barriers to the maintenance of the rate of profit.

FIVE. What is the relationship between the University and the hegemony of Transnational Activist Networks? See my previous on MOOCs and hegemony/hierarchy and the rate of profit. As Heinrich has argued ‘Capital has become totally vendible, within and across borders. There are no crown jewels any more. With the exception of “national-security” companies and other such oddities, every asset is now fair game. During the recent crisis, the U.S. authorities all but begged sovereign wealth funds to buy U.S. assets.’ The negation of the historic University and academic labour inside it has to be seen against the hegemonic power of neoliberal networks that form geographies of accumulation.

SIX. What is the relationship between the University and capital’s desire to annihilate circulation time? The time for capital to complete one circuit is given as Production time + circulation time = Labour-process time + idle time (pauses in production, time in which means of production are held in stock) + circulation time. Critical then in the turnover of each capital and in the extraction of surpluses is the ability of capitalists to minimise the idle part of production time by enforcing just-in-time processes, innovating technologically, and in enforcing labour productivity patterns like shift work. Circulation time is also decreased through the use of high technology, by ensuring that the means of production are supplied in a reliable manner, by extracting rapid payments and by delaying their own payments to suppliers. Thus, in education we see the equivalent of theHigh Frequency Trades or algorithms and ghost exchanges that exist in high finance, in the use of data-mining and learning analytics, in the use of technologies to monitor working practices, in squeezes on academic labour through productivity drives, in work-based learning strategies, in the drive to quicken the accreditation process (why take a degree in three-years if you can do it in two?), and in describing cultures that prioritise being “always-on”. The key is to drive down idle time and to maximise the speed at which capital can be turned-over. In this space slowing down is a revolutionary act.

Crucially, as Marx points out in Volume 2 of Capital, capitals seek to reduce the circulation time in order to reduce the period for which their capital is unproductive, and thereby increase the rate of profit (since the same capital can now produce more surplus value). Economic sectors with a long total circulation time i.e. those requiring large fixed-capital investments which pay back only slowly, appropriate some of the surplus-value produced by those sectors lighter on their feet. In The Grundrisse, Marx argues that the circulation and accumulation of capital cannot abide limits. When it encounters limits it works assiduously to convert them into barriers that can be transcended or by-passed. This focuses our attention upon those points in the circulation of capital where potential limits, blockages and barriers might arise, since these can produce crises of one sort or another. A longer circuit-time has a negative effect on the expansion of capital, and it is against this dynamic of agility, flexibility and speed that the business models of MOOCs, and the reaction of universities to them, might be analysed.

IV

One might argue that MOOCs are one form of capital’s attempt to overcome barriers to the creation and extraction of surplus value and profitability. In this way they are seen to be revolutionary but only on capital’s terms, and certainly not on those of academic labour or of students. However, it might also be useful to see them in terms of a negation of the historic idea of the University, in its social democratic form. In such an analysis, we might reveal marketised imperatives that are driving higher education inside the totality of capitalism. Neither MOOCs nor the University mean much outside such a systemic analysis, and any understandings developed without such work will tend to degenerate into platitudes about student participation, agency or marginalisation inside the traditional classroom, or assertions that education is somehow broken.

At issue then are Shirky’s questions: what is higher education and who is it actually for? How is higher education delivered and who might be involved in delivery? One of the interesting points that the MOOC debate raises is then around academic exodus from the marketised University. In addressing this previously I argued that the University/MOOC/whatever, cannot be separated from its social environment because the University does not have an autonomy of action. In reality, what the University/MOOC/whatever does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the University/MOOC/whatever does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any University/MOOC/whatever that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from it. Our forms of education and the social relationships revealed inside them are situated and alienated inside capitalism.

The implication of this is to question how academic labour might take an activist stance where it is politicised inside whichever space it finds itself. Thus I argued

the interstices between academic and public, and between accreditation and informal learning, and between the private and the co-operative are surrounded by political tensions, and culturally replicated structures of power. Any process of academic activism demands academic reflexivity in understanding how academic power impacts the processes of assembly and association and historical critique.

We might bring this to bear on the idea of the MOOC as one negation of the University, in order to attempt to argue for what higher learning inside a system that promotes alternative value-forms might be. This is not to fetishise or celebrate the University/MOOC/whatever. Rather it is an attempt to critique the participatory traditions and positions of academics as organic intellectuals, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. How do students and teachers contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction in whichever spaces are comfortable for them? These spaces might include networks of free universities or co-operative universities, but they need to be deeply politicised critiques of the ways in which the historic university and historic ideas of higher education are being co-opted for the market. Only in so-dong might the negative prospects outlined above, of indenture, collapsing real wages, unemployment and depression, themselves be negated.


Do universities care too much about students?


Posted by hallymk1

I presented earlier today at the London Festival of Education. I blogged what I intended to say here. What I wish I had said is given below.

FIRST. On care: one might define care as a positive perception of assistance that enables the person who is cared about to cope with emotional issues and to perform mental or cognitive activities. It is deliberately situated inside a psycho-social framework of cognitive and emotional elements. The work of Donald Winnicott is important in this space, in defining a good enough environment, and a good enough set of social relationships that enable individuals to become agents in their own world to the best of their ability. Association with others is critical.

SECOND. In the face of the politics of austerity we are confused about the very idea of the University, including its purpose, form and relationships between staff and students. Is it public? Is it private? Is it to be marketised? Is it for the knowledge economy or the knowledge society? Is it for profit over people?  An interrelated confusion is about the idea of the student. Is s/he a consumer? Is s/he a producer of her lived educational experience? In the face of such socio-cultural uncertainty we might ask, is it possible to judge whether universities care too much about students?

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

FOURTH. Data, learning analytics, key information sets and so on were highlighted by Gove, a man who once declared that anyone put off going to University by fear of debt shouldn’t be there anyway. He stated in the morning Q&A that “judgements [about students and their performance] require care”, and that those judging students should “rely on data rather than conjecture.” This type of problem-based thinking ignores politics and ideology, and is based around the kind of risk-management and algorithm-based high frequency trading that underpins entrepreneurial activity in the financial markets. It is almost wholly divorced from the realities of the humane relationships that academics seek to develop with their students. The corporatisation of data, underscored by profit, negates our humanity.

FIFTH. There are then, as series of tensions inside the University. The University is a confused space that is being restructured around money, profit, performance management, customer relationship management and so on. It is from inside this new public service that Gove declared that he wished students to benefit from “the incredible number of opportunities offered by twenty-first century capitalism.” This is in spite of: the reality of global protests against the enforced implementation of austerity; the reality of enforced controls on capital and migration; the reality of a collapse in real wages since the 1970s, and the huge disparity between the wealth owned by capital and labour across the global North; the reality of catastrophic climate change, peak oil and access to abundant energy. This is the fantasy of the entrepreneurial student inside the treadmill logic of business-as-usual.

SIXTH. One might develop the point that as the corporate university tries to develop the characteristics of the entrepreneur in its students, it cares to discipline its labour-force through performance management and the rate of profit. However, inside and against this fragmented space, groups of academics and students are attempting to move beyond the pedagogy of debt, to define something more care-full, where the staff/student relationship can become the beating heart of an alternative vision for higher education as higher learning beyond the University and inside the fabric of society. This is the true psycho-social scope of care in these educational relationships.

SEVENTH. Thus we need to move beyond the list of private and marketised providers selling and re-selling services into collectivised educational spaces (witness the adverts and brochures inside the Festival goody-bag). We need to move beyond Gove’s statement that educated people are “authors of their own life story”, in order to see that the University is a vehicle for the reproduction of capitalist social relationships and value-forms. In moving against and beyond this moment, we might consider care in an associational form, either inside the curriculum as the beating heart of the university or in the raft of alternative, radical educational projects outside formal higher education. We might then consider Marx’s point that “only in association with others has each individual the means of cultivating his talents in all directions. Only in a community therefore is personal freedom possible… In a genuine community individuals gain their freedom in and through their association.”

A fuller presentation about some of these issues is here.


On carbon democracy and the future of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

PART ONE: on oil and capitalism

In a paper on Carbon Democracy, Tim Mitchell, historian at Columbia University argues that the production and maintenance of democracy, and the bodies that encompass civil and political society in the global North, have been underwritten on the assumption that unlimited and relatively cheap oil will produce endless economic growth. He concludes that this model, and therefore the institutions that support actually existing liberal democracy in the global North cannot survive the exhaustion of these fuels and associated climate change. In this, his work connects to that of Friedrichs, who suggests that in terms of state-wide responses to peak oil there would be different reactions in different parts of the world, ranging from predatory militarism to authoritarian retrenchment and the mobilization of local resilience. It also extends recent International Monetary Fund work that connects the geological and technological limits on oil production:

our prediction of small further increases in world oil production comes at the expense of a near doubling, permanently, of real oil prices over the coming decade. This is uncharted territory for the world economy, which has never experienced such prices for more than a few months… we suspect that there must be a pain barrier, a level of oil prices above which the effects on GDP becomes nonlinear, convex. We also suspect that the assumption that technology is independent of the availability of fossil fuels may be inappropriate, so that a lack of availability of oil may have aspects of a negative technology shock. In that case the macroeconomic effects of binding resource constraints could be much larger, more persistent, and they would extend well beyond the oil sector.

Mitchell extends the space in which technological, geological and political economic limits or boundaries to the production, distribution and consumption of cheap oil affect the political functioning of capitalism. Thus, he

traces ways in which the concentration and control of energy flows could open up democratic possibilities or close them down; how in the postwar period connections were engineered between the flow of oil and the flows of international finance, on which democratic stability was thought to depend; how these same circulations made possible the emergence of the economy and its unlimited growth as the main object of democratic politics; and how the relations among forms of energy, finance, economic knowledge, democracy, and violence were transformed in the 1967-74 oil-dollar-Middle East crises.

The idea that our histories of access to and control over fossil fuels are deeply connected to the ways in which the institutions of political and civil society developed is important, not only in helping us to see the limits of our democratic institutions, but also in helping us to visualise the ways in which network infrastructures or networks of governance are used to amplify structural, hegemonic power. For Mitchell the key to developing the idea of ‘the economy’ and of creating finance structures that could be de-coupled from gold in order to maintain the value of the dollar and the power of the United States of America was control over energy.

The carbon itself must be transformed, beginning with the work done by those who bring it out of the ground. The transformations involve establishing connections and building alliances—connections and alliances that do not respect any divide between material and ideal, economic and political, natural and social, human and nonhuman, or violence and representation. The connections make it possible to translate one form of power into another. Understanding the relations between fossil fuels and democracy requires tracing how these connections are built, the vulnerabilities and opportunities they create, and the narrow points of passage where control is particularly effective.

It is therefore important to understand both how specific, historical, energy-economies arise, and the limits that the connections, dependencies and networks of governance that are imposed in order to control those energy-economies by dominant classes. These classes impose control through arrangements of people, finance, expertise, and violence that are assembled in relationship to the distribution and control of energy. The actually existing institutions, values and cultures of civil society flow from that space.

However, it was the move away from coal and towards oil-based economies that enhanced the reality of network governance structures in supporting the power of established groups, because

whereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an electrical grid, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns.

On one level, oil made power more resilient because of changes in the way forms of fossil fuel energy were extracted, transported, and used. Grid-like energy networks are less vulnerable to the political claims, strikes or the withdrawals of labour of those whose work kept them running. However, this dynamic fluidity in the production and distribution of oil was problematic for corporations with global ambitions but with localised control. If oil could move along pipelines or by sea relatively easily, then ‘petroleum companies were always vulnerable to the arrival of cheaper oil from elsewhere.’ For Mitchell this vulnerability, and the mechanisms imposed by cartels or states for the production of scarcity, like post-war subsidies to Saudi Arabia from the USA, and building domestic markets in the USA based on cheapoil, set further limits to the democratising potential of petroleum.

For Mitchell, it is the perceived democratising potential of petroleum that is key. Access to cheap oil underpinned the dollar and the US economy following the 1967-74 economic crisis, and subsequent narratives of economic control took no account of carbon emissions or renewal and retrieval rates for oil fields or of peak oil. Thus, consumers in the global North were promised a deterministic, progressive future. Oil enabled the global economy to be de-coupled from material production, and to become transactional and inflationary.

Democratic politics developed, thanks to oil, with a peculiar orientation towards the future: the future was a limitless horizon of growth. This horizon was not some natural reflection of a time of plenty. It was the result of a particular way of organizing expert knowledge and its objects, in terms of a novel world called “the economy.” Innovations in methods of calculation, the use of money, the measurement of transactions, and the compiling of national statistics made it possible to image the central object of politics as an object that could expand without any form of ultimate material constraint. In the 1967-74 crisis, the relations among these disparate elements were all transformed. Those relations are being transformed again in the present.

In 1975, Robert Tucker, a Sovietologist at Princeton University who had argued for US isolationism, was quoted in a Congressional report on Oil Fields as Military Objectives: A Feasibility Study as questioning how US cultural power in the world could be maintained without wider military engagements that supported its political hegemony.

Even the few among us who have argued for a radical contraction of America’s interests and commitments have done so on the assumption that the consequences of an American withdrawal would not be a world in which America’s political and economic frontiers were coterminous with her territorial frontiers, and in which societies that share our cultures, institutions, and values might very possibly disappear.

Here then the realities of geopolitical power were amplified through the control of oil and further impacted cultural power and economic security. This is also a key point of Mitchell’s analysis: the collision of peak oil, high energy prices that are affecting economic growth in the global North, and the deleveraging of the transactional economy are all underpinning a new politics of austerity that reframes democracy and democratic institutions, as well as the institutions of civil society, like schools and universities.

If the emergence of the mass politics of the early twentieth century, out of which certain sites and episodes of welfare democracy were achieved, should be understood in relation to coal, the limits of contemporary democratic politics can be traced in relation to oil. The possibility of more democratic futures, in turn, depends on the political tools with which we address the passing of the era of fossil fuel.

PART TWO: on dynamic energy-economies, educational networks, and universities

This argument about the implications of oil shocks on democratic institutions is important for educators because it acts as a rejoinder to accepted narratives of: there is no alternative to economic growth; or that the University must be a seat of entrepreneurialism and employability; or that higher education is simply a motor for economic growth. It forces us to question whether, inside a world of reducing access to cheap, liquid fuels, what kinds of educational futures that are defined by neoliberal capitalism are viable? However, it is also important for educators because it offers a model of analysis for the relationships between: capital as a social relationship; sites of energy production and distribution; governance networks; and structural constraints on the flows of capital and power. This model might work as well for education as it does for energy.

Thus, rather than talk about corporations controlling the flows of oil through technologies for its production, distribution and consumption, educators might reflect upon the mechanisms through which flows of intellectual capital are being privatised, and the ways in which knowledge is being commodified through governance networks like MOOCs. I noted previously in a post on networks, the rate of profit and institutionalising MOOCs that

In this argument the network is placed asymmetrically against the realities of hegemonic power that is catalysed and reproduced in the political and economic centralisation that is so characteristic of crisis-prone capitalist modernity. The reactions of central governments and finance capital to the post-2008 crisis bear witness to this process. For Davies then, the research evidence in the public policy, sociology and public administration spheres point to the fact that

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

Technologies are central in this clash, for whilst it is possible for some people to connect globally and ubiquitously, those same technologies form the medium of hierarchical power. The challenge then becomes to analyse how those technologies interact with the everyday reality of interpersonal connections, and to uncover the power relations that they embody. Critically this is a historical project, because network governance theory misreads past and present, ignores that networks are prone to resolving into hierarchies and incremental closure, that they reproduce and crystallise inequalities, and that distrust is common. In this way, the emergence of technologically-mediated network governance enables capital to develop and enculturate ideal neoliberal subjects.

Thus inside and against the university, and inside and beyond the network, there is a move away from higher education being state/publically-funded, state/publically-governed and state/publically-regulated, so that the knowledges, services and structures of universities in the global North are set-up in competition and are being privatised. Alongside this approach, techniques of control and surveillance like student satisfaction scores and research excellence frameworks begin the process of disciplining academic labour and controlling the scarcity or abundance of academic knowledge.

However, as with access to the distribution of energy and fossil fuels, points of vulnerability for existing, ruling groups also exist. Inside the increasingly privatised higher education space, where those existing groups are crystallised inside established universities, those vulnerabilities based on price, value and the rate of profit are realised: in private providers like BPP who are able to offer lower-cost, marketised experiences; inside publishing corporations like Pearson who control access to a range of content and draw-down on a range of analytics and market capitalisation to drive their market share; and inside educational innovations like MOOCs which appear to act like dynamic systems able to channel knowledge against slower-moving, institutionalised spaces.

This latter point seems important in light of Mitchell’s argument about why oil enabled capital to discipline labour and extend the consumer economy, through its fluidity and dynamism, as opposed to the less resilient (from capital’s perspective) coal-based economy. Pace Mitchell one might argue that

whereas the movement of [intellectual capital inside universities] tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, [intellectual capital beyond the university] flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an electrical grid, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of [intellectual capital] can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns.

This is not to fetishise MOOCs or academic networks or academic commons as the antithesis of traditional institutions, in their ability to work in agile and innovative ways. My point is to question whether allegedly network-driven innovations like MOOCs, at whatever scale, are perceived to be ways of overcoming perceived blockages in the production, distribution and consumption of knowledge, or social or intellectual capital. In this scenario they would form separate mechanisms, beyond special purpose vehicles or private think tanks that directly partner with universities, through which established corporations could partner or sponsor or underwrite knowledge creation in the public domain. The rationale for so-doing would be to co-opt proprietary knowledge from which rents could be taken later or to promote further a specific, neoliberal cultural discourse. Witness the sponsorship of specific MOOCs by particular corporations or philanthrocapitalist foundations.

Where the infrastructures to create such proprietary knowledge lie inside the University, for example inside high performance teams or in high technology laboratories, then the incentives are threefold: firstly, to partner with universities to crack open the space inside which such knowledge is created so that it can be commodified; secondly, the privatised service-industries that lie beyond the university operate as a disciplinary mechanism on those academic workers with commodity or leveraged skills, like those in professional services or in programming or management, as work can always be outsourced or wages reduced; and thirdly, educational or governance networks offer a mechanism for the relatively cheap acquisition of those commodity or leveraged skills. Thus, one positive side-effect for capital as it operates inside and against the university as a publically-regulated and funded space is in the use of these mechanisms for the extraction of value that has been historically and socially accrued through taxation and public governance. Alongside the threats posed to the idea of the university from external educational networks like MOOCs and waves of outsourcing, the threat that social and intellectual capital might also be produced or distributed beyond the University acts as a disciplinary mechanism inside it.

PART THREE: demonstrating for the University

Thus, a set of contradictions is revealed between: intellectual or academic networks and institutions; the material reality of the university and the ideal, public state accorded to it historically; the imposed economic realities of austerity politics and the democratic ideals of academic labour; and the coercion/violence of the state and the university as a space for democratic and public representation. However, we are witnessing a crisis of education inside neoliberal capitalism. This is represented by a clash between an education that is/was framed in terms of public, networked and civic ideals, and the idea of the neoliberal subject, educated through debt with accreditation as a form of individuated accumulation. This forms, as Winternitz noted:

an expression of the underlying basic contradiction of capitalist society; the social character of production and the private character of appropriation and consequently the tendency of boundless, rapid expansion of production on the one hand, the limitations of consumption on the other hand.

The internal contradictions involved in the tendency of the rate of profit to fall find their expression in crises. As a space previously free from the impact of that crisis, higher education now forms a space inside which it might be resolved through privatisation, indenture and commodification. One might go further to argue that in the same way that the crises of the twentieth century were aggravated by the power of monopoly capitalism in controlling basic raw materials, like coal, oil, iron and steel, there is a perceived crisis inside neoliberal capitalism that relates to the control of intellectual capital by universities rather than corporations or entrepreneurs. In order to overcome the barriers to the reproduction of intellectual capital, governments need to create a market for higher education that can overcome or drive down monopoly prices.

Thus, it is possible to view internationalisation agendas or the use of open education projects, either as catalysts for the creation of new markets for the intellectual capital and knowledge produced in the North, or as responses to the slackening of the accumulation of capital in the global North, or as responses to the growing pressure to export capital to/from the global South. This might include the outputs of open education where it catalyses new markets or demand for products and services through which the rate of profit can be maintained. Therefore, enclosing the global South inside the neoliberal education project also enables capital to fight against the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, through outsourcing, the reduction of costs of production, and in the struggle for new markets. However, in so-doing it intensifies those contradictions which catalyse systemic crises. As Marx noted capitalism’s tendency to crisis becomes deeper and more violent as the contradictions and complexities of capitalist production grow. As Winternitz argued

The cure of the evil is not to stop or to retard the development of productive forces, but so to change the basis of economic life that the satisfaction of the needs of the people, instead of capitalist profit, becomes the driving and regulating principle.

At issue then is how to take those open education projects or internationalisation agendas or the work of high performing teams or with high technologies inside the university and to make them public, beyond the rule of money. For Henry Giroux, this matters because our ‘new politics of disposability and culture of cruelty represents more than an economic crisis, it is also speaks to a deeply rooted crisis of education, agency, and social responsibility.’ How do we use the university and the academic labour that is undertaken inside and beyond a range of open/closed networks to do work in public, or to liberate intellectual capital as a form of mass intellectuality? In Raymond Williams’ terms this demands demonstrations. Linking to Mitchell’s questioning of whether we have the democratic structures to help us to manage the political crises that emerge from dislocations to our energy-economies, Williams argued that.

Demonstration then, though only one means, is a necessary response to a society of that kind, which builds official opinion on established lines, and which has reduced previous political channels to instruments or diversions. To go out and speak in one’s own terms, directly, has become a central political need, and it is, of course, a challenge which the system in the end knows it must take seriously… Under a strain like this, it’s time, not simply for those of us who are demonstrators, who want a new democratic politics, but for the society itself, a society more and more openly based on money and power, to change and be changed.

But how this might be effected? For demonstration demands political action in the world, and whilst Williams was arguing for his academic engagement for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, we might begin to discuss how inside-and-against the neoliberal university we demonstrate our ability to co-develop curricula that actively critique dominant narratives of economic growth. This might help to re-define the university or higher education as a state/publically-funded, regulated and governed set of spaces, which in turn support a wider, open educational agenda to dissolve knowledge into the fabric of society as a form of higher learning or mass intellectuality.

For Giroux’s this is pressing because ‘the commitment to democracy is beleaguered, viewed less as a crucial educational investment than as a distraction that gets in the way of connecting knowledge and pedagogy to the production of material and human capital.’ In Mitchell’s analysis this political role is more important because ‘The possibility of more democratic futures, in turn, depends on the political tools with which we address the passing of the era of fossil fuel.’  However, Giroux also holds one of the possibilities for radical change, through the connections between educational institutions and networks that are founded on critical pedagogy. He states ‘Such democratic public spheres are especially important at a time when any space that produces “critical thinkers capable of putting existing institutions into question” is under siege by powerful economic and political interests.’ Thus

Connective practices are key: it is crucial to develop intellectual practices that are collegial rather than competitive, refuse the instrumentality and privileged isolation of the academy, link critical thought to a profound impatience with the status quo, and connect human agency to the idea of social responsibility and the politics of possibility… This is a message we heard from the brave students fighting tuition hikes and the destruction of civil liberties and social provisions in Quebec and to a lesser degree in the Occupy Wall Street movement. If educators are to function as public intellectuals, they need listen to young people all over the world who are insisting that the relationship between knowledge and power can be emancipatory, that their histories and experiences matter, and that what they say and do counts in their struggle to unlearn dominating privileges, productively reconstruct their relations with others, and transform, when necessary, the world around them. Simply put, educators need to argue for forms of pedagogy that close the gap between the university and everyday life.

The university, educational networks and the broader domain of higher education are critical sites of hegemonic power, and critical spaces in which we might develop counter-narratives that speak of a renewed civil society in the face of peak oil and climate change. How we engage academics, student and citizens inside and beyond higher education must form part of a broader emancipatory discourse. We need to find mechanisms for developing a mass intellectuality that might help us co-operatively to address Mitchell’s fundamental questions, which themselves supersede the neoliberal discourse of economic growth.

PART FOUR: postscript

This is why I will be marching for the alternative on October 20, 2012.


some questions on academic identity and the crisis


Posted by hallymk1

An informal reading group met last night to discuss Niall Ferguson’s Reith Lectures. The general consensus was that the lectures represent a crisis of hegemonic neoliberalism, with a picture being created of the structures of political and civil society being re-geared for the maintenance of established power relations that are fashioned inside capital. Inside this picture there is no possibility to see beyond determinist ends as Ferguson presents assertions as fact in a rhetorical blaze.

However, the arrow of the evening pointed towards the idea of academic labour in the current crisis, and in particular towards the following questions.

  1. What is the role of the academic in a world that is being refashioned by rent-seeking elites who are energising what Žižek has described as “the four horsemen of the apocalypse”: ecological distress (impending ecological catastrophes); economic distress (the global financial meltdown); biological distress (the biogenetic revolution and its impact on human identity); and social distress (social divisions leading to the explosion of protest and revolutions worldwide).
  2. What is the role of the academic in the face of issues of intergenerational justice, or the compact between present and future? These are not simply confined to debts securitised against futures as yet unknown or unborn, in order to pay down our present economic crisis. They are also issues of future access to liquid fuel resources upon which economic growth is predicated and the ability to emit carbon without being poisoned by past emissions. Intergenerational justice is a function of the social pressures that might be brought to bear upon the economic/environmental injustices bequeathed upon our children through greed.
  3. What is the role of the academic in contesting a world that produces a semi-enslaved labour force, through precarity, indentured wage labour, the threat of unemployment, technological surveillance, strike-breaking or the politics of austerity? In the face of the global collapse in real wages and the proportion of global wealth owned by labour, as opposed to capital, what is the purpose of a higher education framed by employability?
  4. What is the role of the academic in the face of securitised socio-economic institutions, and the imperative to maintain the increase in the rate of profit, which then underpins structural readjustment policies? How might the academic act against capital’s demand for reduced circulation time in the generation and exchange of securitised commodities, based in-part on technological innovation and in-part on the collapse of risk inside those securitised commodities?
  5. What is the role of the academic in the face of the hegemonic power of undemocratic, transnational activist networks of finance capital, think tanks, politicians etc.? What is the role of the academic in making a case for reality against theses for finance capital, supported by groups like the National Endowment for Democracy, where the means of production and forces of production are outsourced in order to maximise the rate of profit and value extraction from labour?
  6. What is the role of the academic in the face of the hidden fist of the State that protects the hidden hand of the market? Friedman argues that: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. Markets function and flourish only when property rights are secured and can be enforced, which, in turn, requires a political framework protected and backed by military power… the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”
  7. What is the role of the academic in the face of growth that is increasingly being re-spun from credit, witnessed in QE3, and which is unsustainable and lethal to the needs of labour?
  8. What is the role of the academic in the face of conservative politicians who would define the law in the name of private property, rather than human rights? How do academics act against this anti-democracy that seeks a context for property rights that underpins unfettered competition, securitisation and marketisation?
  9. What is the role of the academic where the threat of national defaults in Spain and Greece are presented as a threat to global order? How do academics engage with the mechanics of control imposed by a transnational troika, but which might in-turn be an emancipatory moment for social movements inside those states? How do academics assess the social movements that are generated from protest against austerity, to present democratic alternatives and spaces for manoeuvre? Where are the spaces inside higher education for understanding and engaging with social forces that have historically been the catalyst for democratic change, rather than a supposedly benign bourgeoisie? How might students be involved in this process?
  10. What is the role of the academic in arguing for a resilient education that is diverse, modular and connected into feedback mechanisms? How does this enable universities to become sites where students come to understand the objective conditions that exist inside capitalism? How does this enable students to overcome the truisms that surround the idea of student-as-consumer, in which the driver is developing the individuated skills of the entrepreneur? The risk in the separation and individuation of students-as-entrepreneurs is that the responsibility for failure is handed to the individual rather than being collectively/socially negotiated and owned.

Networks, the rate of profit and institutionalising MOOCs


Posted by hallymk1

I

In an excellent article on Technology, Distribution and the Rate of Profit in the US Economy: Understanding the Current Crisis, Basu and Vasudevan scope the connections between falling capital productivity, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and technological innovation. Specifically they argue that the period preceding the current financial crisis in 2008 witnessed a significant and sharp fall in capital productivity and hence in profitability, and that this counteracted the rises that were accrued from the widespread implementation of information technology, techniques of new managerialism and the tendency towards financialisation in the previous three decades.

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

This is an on-going discussion and this post is a starting point for some ideas that will develop over time, in particular in trying to understand how technologically-mediated innovations might be analysed alongside critical pedagogy, in order to demonstrate alternative positions.

II

Historically technological innovation has been seen as a response to economic stagnation or to crisis, not simply to act as a brake on wages but also to renew capital productivity. However, for the period immediately prior to the financial crisis of 2008 this does not appear to have been the case. Basu and Vasudevan argue:

The investment-seeking surplus generated by the enormous and growing productivity of the system is increasingly unable to find sufficient new profitable investment outlets [my emphasis]. Monopoly capitalism faces a tendency toward stagnation as a consequence of the gap between the growing economic surplus and existing outlets for profitable investment. There is a continual need to find new ways to profitably invest its surplus and new sources of demand. But rather than invest in socially useful projects that would benefit the vast majority, capital has constructed a financialized “casino”. Capitalism in its monopoly-finance capital phase becomes increasingly reliant on the ballooning of the credit-debt system in order to escape the worst aspects of stagnation.

This then underpins a structural weakness at the heart of the global system of capitalism, which has seen a tendency to overproduction and a decline in the return on capital investment in manufacturing and productive sectors of the economy. This in-turn has underpinned both an attrition of real wages since the 1970s and the flight into precarious and immaterial labour and the valorisation of virtual or cognitive labour, alongside the ideas that promote creativity and enterprise as levers of economic renewal. Historically this has also witnessed debt-driven investment in education, through: a turn to vehicles like increasing student fees and the bond markets; opening-up the sector to marketised solutions, outsourcing and hosted services, shared services, and human capital controls (in student numbers, in legitimating certain groups of foreign students, in restructuring labour etc.); and, a focus on shackling the subjectivity of labour to governmentality through performance measurement and surveillance. Thus, higher education continues to witness the implementation of technologies for value extraction, command and coercion.

In this process, technologies for sharing, for service-driven innovations, for ubiquitous computing, for personalisation etc. are seen to be strategically critical. This reflects Marx’s emergent mature work, in which technological innovation is linked to capital accumulation and increasing profitability. Developing a technological lead drives competition between businesses or between different capitals, and this drives the production/consumption cycle and hence profitability. Competition compels other capitalists towards technological innovation and increasing capital intensity, in order both to extract a larger surplus from their own labour-force, and to discipline that labour-force under the threat of restructuring or unemployment. This is an on-going pattern of technological change driven by a need to extract surplus value and decrease dependency on variable labour costs.

For Basu and Vasudevan, the period leading up to 2008 was critical in recalibrating the economies of the global north around the widespread adoption of technologies and new managerialism. They argue that

The pervasive adoption and growth of information technology would have almost certainly played an important role in shaping the particular evolution in the nineties when capital productivity showed an upward trend. New forms of managerial control and organization, including just-in-time and lean production systems have been deployed to enforce increases in labor productivity since the 1980s. The phenomena of “speed-up‟ and stretching of work has enabled the extraction of larger productivity gains per worker hour as evidenced the faster growth of labor productivity after 1982. People have been working harder and faster. Information technology has facilitated the process. It enables greater surveillance and control of the worker, and also rationalization of production to “computerize” and automate certain tasks.

Critically the fall in cost of hardware and software infrastructure meant that productivity gains were achieved with smaller increases in capital outlay. In terms of UK HE, a large part of the initial development costs for innovation and development in educational technologies was state-subsidised through project-funding, transformation programmes, and investments in national infrastructure. This lowered the cost of capital investment for individual universities or colleges as competing capitals. One result is that labour-productivity has been increased without necessitating increasing capital intensity, and thinking about the sector as a whole, rather than individual universities as businesses, this has also been catalysed by globalisation and outsourcing services that are of low value and jobs that are of low surplus value extraction.

The twin problems for capital of this approach are of declining rates of accumulation, as the increase in the organic composition of capital tends to diminish the rate of profit where there are fewer employees to exploit and more technology or techniques to manage, and a fall in local capital intensity or productivity through what Marx called moral depreciation. In Capital, Volume 3, Marx argues that over time “moral depreciation” affects the gains made by technological innovation where the new machine

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

As a result, the drive under the treadmill logic of competition becomes to deliver constant innovation across a whole socio-technical system, in order to maintain or increase the rate of extraction of relative surplus value, and to tear down the barriers of under-consumption. This implication is crucial inside a higher education sector that is being recalibrated for enterprise inside a competitive system, and where technological innovation is perceived to drive profitability.

Historically, we have witnessed a technological recalibration of the higher education sector under the drive for productivity and efficiency, and in the name of an enhanced student experience that is managed through techniques like the national student survey. The subsumption of universities-as-businesses, or as competing capitals, further amplifies this process. However, it also disciplines the investment decisions of those individual businesses, which are no longer underwritten by the State as a backer of last resort, and this threatens a new vulnerability that is manifested in capacity utilisation, a squeeze on production/product prices, and the need to maintain profitability. The growth of financialisation in the sector, in order to protect investments, might temporarily alleviate any weakness of demand for the products of the university. However, in the medium-term, individual universities are constrained by the structural weaknesses of the global economy that are loaded towards financialisation and the ongoing process of deleveraging private debt as public liabilities, the need to become profitable in a market, and new forms of competition from private providers. These new forms of competition might be rival organisations with degree-awarding powers, or they might be partnerships of accrediting organisations operating through MOOCs, or they might be hedge funds providing venture capital for technologically-driven innovations.

III

In their paper Why does profitability matter? Duménil and Lévy argue that profitability and stability are linked, and that the rate of expansion of a capitalist economy is underpinned by the general rate of profit that can be generated, the capital that can be accumulated is then re-invested for further surplus value extraction and profitability. This underpins investment decisions and technological innovation. Thus, as Basu and Vasudevan note:

It is equally important to untangle the drivers of profitability, to decompose the rate of profit into its underlying determinants. The trends in labor productivity, capital productivity, and profit share are important in unraveling the role of technology and distribution in determining the trajectory of the profit rate.

In untangling these drivers in the global economy, the role of networks and networked learning has been emphasised as a driver for economic renewal and growth. Jonathan Davies has written extensively, critiquing network governance, and has pointed out that the idea of the ‘network society’ is complex and contested, and that it rests on some simple claims.

  1. That modern capitalist society is too complex, fragmented and disordered for effective command management.
  2. That universal education enables us to challenge power, undermining our traditional commitments to family, faith, flag and fraternity.
  3. That the universal welfare state and rising prosperity liberate us from narrow and selfish economic concerns, creating the conditions for a more sociable and trusting personality to emerge.
  4. That ubiquitous communications technology provides the infrastructure for clever, critically-minded, prosperous and sociable people from all walks of life to connect with one another in pursuit of their ever-changing projects and goals.

As Davies notes, these precepts form the building-blocks of ‘horizontalism’; the belief that we live in a world of networks, that networking is a good thing to do, and that we can only understand the world if we apply network-theoretical concepts.

In this view, not only does the network apply to government-citizen partnerships, knowledge transfer, community engagement and so on, but also to projects of opposition to governmental agendas like those related to austerity. Thus, opposition is often framed by the idea of the multitude as distributed, decentred, swarming sets of resistances that form flows or circuits against a capitalist project that is represented as an Empire of accumulation. Thus, whilst the network forms a space for accumulation and profitability, it is also a counter-hegemonic space designed for organising resistance, for developing solidarity through occupation, for developing militant responses to the creation of the edufactory, for general assemblies, or for the work of groups like Anonymous.

Yet as Davies argues, ‘network governance is part of the hegemonic strategy of neoliberalism – the visionary, utopian and profoundly flawed regulative ideal of late capitalism.’ Network governance in this view is a problem-solving strategy, designed to make the capitalist project function more smoothly, rather than emerging as a strategy designed to critique the power-relations that exist inside capitalism, in order to overthrow them. Thus, the network is directed towards functionalism, for unearthing practical solutions to practical problems, based on a normative bias towards trust-based relationships nurtured inside networks that are often technologically-mediated. Thus, connectionist [or cybernetic] capitalism is described in terms of autonomy, rhizomes, spontaneity, multi-tasking, conviviality, openness, availability, creativity, difference, informality, interpersonal connections and so on. This underpins the idea that postmodern capitalism is weightless or infinitively creative, diverse and immaterial.

Crucially, Davies asks questions related to the relationships between governance networks and network governance. The latter is an ideal-type that rests upon the post-structural claim that the network is proliferating in form and underpins our everyday activities, based on ethical virtues like trust and empowered reflexivity. Network governance is seen to be a rupture with the past. The idea of the governance network refers to recurring and/or institutionalised formal/informal resource exchanges between governmental/non-governmental actors. This is the space that claims a democratic, decentralised opportunity to deliver change and choice, masked as new public management. Thus, for Davies the central question becomes why governance networks do not live up to the promise of network governance, which is important in delivering for and in communities? Why do hierarchies and management for command proliferate and dominate?

In this argument the network is placed asymmetrically against the realities of hegemonic power that is catalysed and reproduced in the political and economic centralisation that is so characteristic of crisis-prone capitalist modernity. The reactions of central governments and finance capital to the post-2008 crisis bear witness to this process. For Davies then, the research evidence in the public policy, sociology and public administration spheres point to the fact that

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

Technologies are central in this clash, for whilst it is possible for some people to connect globally and ubiquitously, those same technologies form the medium of hierarchical power. The challenge then becomes to analyse how those technologies interact with the everyday reality of interpersonal connections, and to uncover the power relations that they embody. Critically this is a historical project, because network governance theory misreads past and present, ignores that networks are prone to resolving into hierarchies and incremental closure, that they reproduce and crystallise inequalities, and that distrust is common. In this way, the emergence of technologically-mediated network governance enables capital to develop and enculturate ideal neoliberal subjects.

Critical in this argument is coercion and coercive practices. For Gramsci, this rested upon the idea of the integral State, which is the product of the formal institutions of civil society and of political society. This formation underpins the creation and reproduction of instruments and artefacts of hegemony, like technologies and educational organisations, which themselves enable social resources to be harnessed in the name of accumulation and profitability. However, in order to maintain a hegemonic order that is always contested and resisted, instruments of coercion and consent are required. These instruments include techniques of surveillance and workplace monitoring or analytics, alongside pedagogies of debt and indenture, and state-backed violence against dissent. This latter point is critical because, as Davies notes, contracts have to be enforceable. Violence is integral to the commodity form and the realisation of exchange value. As a result, coercion is immanent and in dialectical relationship with consent in a continuum from direct repression to the governmental management of subjectivity.

This is the world that frames the network in education. This is the world that frames the use of technology inside education. Education is developed inside a world of hierarchy and the dialectical interplay of consent and coercion, where, as Perry Anderson noted, without state-enforced coercion and the threat of violence, ‘the system of cultural control would be instantly fragile, since the limits of possible action against it would disappear’. The network is conditional on the threat of disciplinary violence and the immanence of governmentality that, in turn, disciplines subjectivity. More brutally, for those who believe in the emancipatory potential of educational technology, and the power of connectivist networks, Friedman offers the timely rejoinder that:

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

IV

I want then just to write a few words about the current fetish for MOOCs, in order to open-up an avenue of thinking about hegemony and hierarchy in higher education, and the possibilities for academic labour to utilise technology to critique responses to the current crisis of capitalism that is recalibrating the sector. In this project, it becomes important to highlight, as Stephen Ball and Jonathan Davies have, the importance of network analyses that focus upon the production, reproduction and contestation of power, and the processes through which alliances, like Ball’s neoliberal transnational activist networks, that emerge from shared ideologies and resource interdependencies further reinforce asymmetric power relations. For Davies, critique needs to unearth the relationships between consent and coercion, between power and command structures, between network-like institutions and more formalised, traditional institutions, in order that the claims that are made for networks as delivering new forms of sociability that transcend structures of power and domination can be better understood. There is hope that in this process of critique the power of academic labour to produce alternative value forms, and forms of social organisation and governance for higher education, might be offered up.

Networks are important in connecting people, ideas and materials that are revealed in the relationships between technology and formal/informal institutions, and which underpin the reproduction of capitalist social relations and the need to maintain the increase in the rate of profit. However, beyond organising resources, there is a disconnection between the hoped-for humane, trust-based ideals of networked learning and the hard realities of hierarchical power. This resolves itself inside procedural problem-solving that locates, for example, MOOCs within the everyday realities of capitalism, and which in turn hope to experience them as less coercive or institutionalised than traditional educational institutions, and capable of resolving the student/teacher as a subject. The theorising of MOOCs has to-date rested on this kind of problem-solving theory, essentially based on student/teacher autonomy and participation, rather than as a transformational critique of the structural inequalities realised inside capitalism, through which the realities of wage labour make such autonomy practically impossible.

Thus, much of the discourse around MOOCs focuses upon ideas of openness and monetary freedom, and the creeping institutionalisation of alternative forms of education. David Kernohan has written about networked learning communities in which ‘Some courses are open as in door. You can walk in, you can listen for free. Others are open as in heart. You become part of a community, you are accepted and nurtured.’ Chatti focuses upon the management of networked learning in order to leverage ‘knowledge worker performance and to cope with the constant change and critical challenges of the new knowledge era’ Graham Attwell has highlighted the increasing institutionalization and rental/profit-based creep in the MOOC debate. Cathy Gunn aligns her argument with this institutional co-option of MOOCs or open courses, and she believes that ‘change in current traditions of higher education for many institutions will most likely require disruptive innovations outside of the academy first and we can see the evidence of the first seeds of that through the open course movement.

The mechanisms by which capital adapts and colonises work that takes place at the margins and then subsumes it inside the processes of self-valorisation are not new. However, for MOOCs this reality is amplified by the reflections of the team of teachers and researchers associated with the MSc in E-learning programme at the University of Edinburgh who began the development of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) for the Coursera platform.  They argued that:

while MOOCs and the open education movement generally may not achieve everything – the democratisation of education, or the freeing of the world’s knowledge – they can achieve something. They can open up good teaching and interesting curricula to new groups of learners; they can help draw students into higher education who might otherwise not have ventured there; they can engage unprecedented numbers; and they can be a vehicle to continue to push at our collective notions of what constitutes the educational project.

Critically, this focus is then on new markets and technological approaches to opening-up new domains for profit or rent, with a secondary gain that appears to be just beyond reach, namely democratisation. An interesting side-effect of this normalisation or institutionalisation of alleged innovations like Coursera is the recent concern over the weakness of peer-assessment inside the MOOC experience by Audrey Watters.

This educational commentary then tends not to reflect on or to develop critiques of the network inside education policy and practice, or on the power of networks to reinforce hierarchy and hegemonic power-relations. This depoliticisation and lack of a political economy of MOOCs or other educational technology innovation is emerges from George Siemens’ argument that

MOOCs, regardless of underlying ideology, are essentially a platform. Numerous opportunities exist for the development of an ecosystem for specialized functionality in the same way that Facebook, iTunes, and Twitter created an ecosystem for app innovation.

This dismisses the political processes and practices that run through MOOCs, and their users’ political positions, in order to claim a neutral ‘platform’ for innovation. Siemens identifies that MOOCs

are significant in that they are a large public experiment exploring the impact of the internet on education. Even if the current generation of MOOCs spectacularly crash and fade into oblivion, the legacy of top tier university research and growing public awareness of online learning will be dramatic.

However, this significance needs to be understood inside-and-against the logic of capital’s drive for innovation in the name of the rate of profit, and its tendency to subsume labour practices inside technologically-mediated forms of coercion, command and control. This is the space against which Siemens’ claim that ‘The value of MOOCs may not be the MOOCs themselves, but rather the plethora of new innovations and added services that are developed when MOOCs are treated as a platform’ needs to be analysed. It is the ways in which MOOCs and the services, analytics, content, affects, relationships, immateriality etc. that are derived from them are then valorised that might offer a glimpse of how the neoliberal educational project is being defined and how it might be resisted and undone.

How those “services” are reclaimed in order to reproduce the structural and systemic inequalities of capitalism might also form a central strand in the development of a political economy of educational technology. This is crucial because it is about the on-going circulation and exchange of commodities inside the social factory as a central space for the production and consumption of cultural artefacts. This is central to the practices of MOOCs, for as the Change MOOC notes:

When a connectivist course is working really well, we see this greate cycle of content and creativity begin to feed on itself, people in the course reading, collecting, creating and sharing. It’s a wonderful experience you won’t want to stop when the course is done [sic.].

At issue then is how to connect the participative nature of pedagogic or educational ideas like MOOCs and the on-going aspiration for educational technology to become transformative, to the dialectical interplay between networks and hierarchies as they are resolved inside the hegemonic realities of capitalism. How might such an analysis enable alternative political projects to emerge that challenge orthodoxy and promise more than simply lifelong learning or work-based learning or learning for enterprise or learning for employability or education for growth? An approach might emerge from a historical and comparative analysis of radical education projects like the Social Science Centre that are geographically and politically grounded in a different set of spaces from network/task/informational-centric innovations like MOOCs.

A different approach might also be to align explicitly the tenets and precepts of critical pedagogy as a struggle for subjectivity, as an act of protest and resistance to dominant forms of educational structure (including MOOCs) that is designed as emancipatory practice, with the opportunities opened-up by technology. This demands that educators and technologists inside-and-beyond the university are less defensive about their work and their practices and develop alternative forms as overtly political projects. For as Amsler notes:

Any education that seeks to demystify popular ideologies; expose the subtle ways that power works through language, bodies, and representations; facilitate the imagination of radically different modes of life; and produce knowledge to orient political action represents, in various forms, a broad faith within critical pedagogical politics that there is something inherently transformative about criticality. And it is the possibility to practice such forms of education, which is, in the ascendance of the uncompromising force of market logics throughout public life, being contracted, cramped, enclosed, or foreclosed. Indeed, the need for the critical attitude has become urgent in the face of declining levels of popular support for nonutilitarian education, and a wider tolerance for complexity and otherness within the public sphere is on the decline. The overarching mood in education, including in universities, is therefore one of crisis; the broad response, one of defence.

It is through the critique of normative positions, including network governance, in response to the crisis of capitalism and the restructuring of education as a neoliberal subjectivity, that new subjectivities might emerge. The landscape for this is deeply historical and needs further political economic analysis. Whilst some emergent analysis has been attempted of innovations like MOOCs, in terms of hybrid pedagogies, the current crisis in the forms and management of the University in the global north would benefit from a deeper understanding of how educational technology and innovations are co-opted for the valorisation of capital. We might then be able to develop spaces that are networked, in which we can ask how academic labour might be reclaimed. This requires an engagement with critical pedagogy that moves higher education beyond simply addressing the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.


a note on the subsumption of academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

I

I am becoming more interested in the transition or transformation of academic labour inside an increasingly neoliberal university, and the ways in which technology is used to quicken that transition and discipline that labour. In this I am reminded of the transitions outlined by Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from the formal to the real subsumption of labour under capital. I am not arguing here that we are finally seeing the real subsumption of academic labour under capital, or that it hasn’t yet occurred. However, I am interested in how policy and practice, and in particular the politics and political realities of higher education are now disciplining academic labour, in order to amplify that subsumption and remove opposition to the rule of money. The realities of the quickened pace of the real subsumption of academic labour inside the university as business and higher education as corporate sector bear analysis.

II

In the formal subsumption of labour under capital, as noted in this libcom discussion:

  • the worker confronts the capitalist, who possesses money, as the proprietor of his own person and therefore of his own labour capacity, and as the seller of the temporary use of the latter;
  • both meet as commodity owners, as seller and buyer, and thus as formally free persons, between whom in fact no other relation exists than that of buyer and seller, no other politically or socially fixed relation of domination and subordination;
  • the objective conditions of his labour (raw material, instruments of labour and therefore also means of subsistence during labour) belong, completely or at least in part, not to him but to the buyer and consumer of his labour, therefore themselves confront him as capital;
  • the more completely these conditions of labour confront him as the property of another, the more completely is the relation of capital and wage labour present formally, hence the more complete the formal subsumption of labour under capital;
  • as yet there is no difference in the mode of production itself. The labour process continues exactly as it did before — from the technological point of view — only as a labour process now subordinated to capital;
  • there develops within the production process itself a relation of domination and subordination, in that the consumption of labour capacity is done by the capitalist, and is therefore supervised and directed by him;
  • there develops within the production process itself a greater continuity of labour.

With the real subsumption of labour under capital, as noted in the same libcom discussion:

  • changes take place in the technological process, the labour process, and at the same time there are changes in the relation of the worker to his own production and to capital;
  • ·         the development of the productive power of labour takes place, in that the productive forces of social labour are developed, and only at that point does the application of natural forces on a large scale, of science and of machinery, to direct production become possible;
  • therefore, there is change not only in the formal relation but in the labour process itself. On the one hand the capitalist mode of production — which now first appears as a mode of production sui generis [in its own right] — creates a change in the shape of material production;
  • this change in the material shape forms the basis for the development of the capital-relation, whose adequate shape therefore only corresponds to a particular level of development of the material forces of production;
  • the worker’s relation of dependence in production itself is thereby given a new shape. This is the first point to be emphasised. This heightening of the productivity of labour and the scale of production is in part a result of, and in part a basis for, the development of the capital-relation;
  • capitalist production now entirely strips off the form of production for subsistence, and becomes production for trade, in that neither the individual’s own consumption nor the immediate needs of a given circle of customers remain a barrier to production; now the only barrier is the magnitude of the capital itself;
  • on the other hand, where the whole of the product becomes a commodity (even where, as in agriculture, it partially re-enters production in natural form), all its elements leave the circulation and enter into the act of production as commodities;
  • for production to occur in a capitalist way, an ever-growing minimum of exchange value, of money — i.e. of constant capital and variable capital — is required to ensure that the labour necessary to obtain the product is the labour socially necessary, i.e. that the labour required for the production of a single commodity = the minimum amount of labour necessary under average conditions;
  • for objectified labour — money — to function as capital, it must be present in the hands of the individual capitalist in a certain minimum quantity;
  • the capitalist must be the owner or proprietor of means of production on a social scale;
  • it is precisely the productivity, and therefore the quantity of production, the numbers of the population and of the surplus population, created by this mode of production, that constantly calls forth new branches of industry, operating with the capital and labour that have been set free;
  • in these branches capital can once again work on a small scale and again pass through the various phases of development required until with the development of capitalist production labour is carried on a social scale in these new branches of industry as well.

With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete revolution takes place in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of labour, and in the relation — within production — between the capitalist and the worker, as also in the social relation between them.

III

So we might think about the recalibration of academic labour inside the University against the following precepts of real subsumption, with some examples that need fleshing out.

  • changes in the technological process, the labour process, and changes in the relation of the worker to his own production and to capital:
    • digital labour: “Digital technology is facilitating on-going efforts by employers to replace full-time, tenured positions with part-time, precarious employment”;
    • proletarianisation and internships: “Unpaid research posts represent the latest step in the ‘proletarianisation’ of the academy”;
    • proletarianisation of post-graduate practice: “HE institutions, faced with a funding crisis, are attacking the conditions established academics and PG employees alike”.
  • the productive forces of social labour are developed:
    • big data: “The data show us that there are some specific teaching practices which appear to promote higher levels of student achievement”;
    • learning analytics: “A [] needed transition is one that moves LA research and implementation from at-risk identification to an emphasis on learner success and optimization… Theoretically, LA has potential to dramatically impact the existing models of education and to generate new insights into what works and what does not work in teaching and learning. The results are potentially transformative to all levels of today’s education system”;
    • personalisation and work-based learning: “mainstream approaches to work-based learning are constructed under the human capital ideology without taking the lived experience of working people and race, class, gender relations into account”.
  • a change in the shape of material production:
    • course closures: “the university could now concentrate on offering the best possible experience to its main markets”;
    • the lean university: “The Lean University project will play a vital role in the University’s strategic development and shaping the way we work”.
  • production for trade
    • the international trade of higher education;
    • neoliberal education restructuring: “Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation. The roughly $2.5 trillion global market in education is a rich new arena for capital investment.”
  • This heightening of the productivity of labour and the scale of production
    • Pearson College;
    • privatization: “In what follows, I outline four strands of privatization as a formative alternative taxonomy: changing corporate form; marketization or ‘external privatization’; outsourcing; and joint ventures, or collaboration, with private capital.”.
  • the whole of the product becomes a commodity
    • student as consumer: “the Government’s proposals will improve their experience as students, expand their choices and make universities more accountable to students than ever before”;
    • the discipline of debt: “student debt, in its prevalence and amounts, constitutes a pedagogy, unlike the humanistic lesson that the university traditionally proclaims, of privatization and the market”;
    • agendas of choice: “Increased tuition fees mean students will be more selective in their choice of studies in Clearing 2012 due to concern over debt”.
  • an ever-growing minimum of exchange value, of money — i.e. of constant capital and variable capital — is required to ensure that the labour necessary to obtain the product is the labour socially necessary:
    • bond finance: “Universities currently borrow about £5bn, largely through bank finance. But they probably have the capacity to generate close to an additional £4bn to £4.5bn… Time and time again we hear back from investors that they would desperately love to get their hands on anything to do with the university sector and it is surprising that no one has gone to that market yet”;
    • Strategies for effective higher education fundraising.
  • the capitalist must be the owner or proprietor of means of production on a social scale.

IV

This latter point brings me to the politics of higher education and the ways in which political society advocates in the name of the real subsumption of academic labour to the dominant order. The political realities of Vice-Chancellors as CEOs of businesses for whom the reality is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall cannot be ignored. This places them in the context of networks of neoliberal, transnational advocacy networks. This political reality disciplines the actions that academic managers and administrators can take, either supported by the State or quiescent in the face of its power, and places them in opposition to those academics and students whose labour they need to recalibrate for the market.

As a result we see a range of political actions aimed at disciplining academics and students, including, but not limited to:

Similarly, this has given birth to a range of solidarity actions, communiqués, and free universities, that are not simply a recasting of higher education in liberal terms around the notion of economic libertarianism or cost-free learning (as pervades the MOOC debate). These are deeply political claims for higher learning, and a critique and reclaiming of the university against-and-beyond capitalism.

However, the accrual of executive power within universities acting as corporations and the use of technology as a mechanism for surveillance and performance management, means that the explicit subsumption of academic labour under the realities of competition, productivity, efficiency and profit is inevitable. In this process the realities of force and political will by those with power-to create a dominant order trump individual protests. Force married to political will then invades the cultural realities of civil society, so that no matter how we argue for education as a public good, it is subsumed under the rule of money.

In this process of ensuring that the capitalist is the owner or proprietor of means of production on a social scale, the politics are the thing. How might a counter-narrative be generated that connects academic labour to student protests and the broader work of protests against austerity? What is the role of academic trades unions in coalescing and amplifying protest so that pushing-back against recalibration becomes possible? Or in the face of the logic of discipline and coercion, and a political will amongst networks of legislators and academic managers for recalibration, is the scope for the university to be regenerated as a space of resistance and protest too limited? In fact, is some form of exodus the only option?