Tag Archives: money

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?


A few notes on Pearson and the privatisation of academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

The formation of Pearson College enables the education corporation Pearson Education Inc. to leverage: its learning management system and on-line content produced by academic labour; the partnerships that it has with established academic institutions in the UK, like the University of Sunderland and Royal Holloway College; and its connected educational think-tank; in order to gain fees/rents/profits from an emergent HE market.

The possibility that for-profit providers like Pearson College might gain UK degree-awarding powers was signalled in the UK Coalition Government’s response to its white paper consultation, which noted a desire to enable greater diversity and competition by widening access to University Title.

This quickens the process of destabilising academic labour inside universities, and furthers the questioning of the idea and purpose of a higher education that is publically-funded, regulated and governed. Mechanisms for: separating academic labour from other forms of labour inside the university; for surveilling it through mechanisms like the National Student Survey or the REF; and for commodifying and reifying it for-profit.

Critically, the mapping of academic labour onto new terrains opened-up by Pearson College is also tied to the possibility that the HE administration, teaching and accreditation/examination processes might be separated, enclosed and commodified. Pearson Education runs a for-profit examination board, Edexcel and this underpins the idea of accreditation for-profit, which is also developing elsewhere in terms of massive on-line open courses like Coursera (which wishes to tear down the limits of time, geography and money). Here there is a separation of the teaching process from that of examination or of assessment for learning, and the commodification and enclosure of each process.

Ravitch has written critically about the role of Pearson in the privatisation and monetisation of public education in the USA, stating that

tests are the linchpin of the attack on public education. The politicians throw about test scores as evidence that our entire public education system is a failed enterprise.

This has ramifications for academic labour inside a more competitive and enterprising UK HE market, as the government uses secondary legislation to lever open the sector for privatization. Witness the mass outsourcing of services at London Metropolitan University.

As for-profit providers are encouraged into the sector often using the promises of study at a distance using technology as a catalyst, an architecture is opened-up that threatens the public funding, regulation and governance of HE. The profitability of HE partnerships for companies like Pearson Education highlights how educational technology is developed as a way-in both to the extraction of value from universities, and to the recalibration of the purpose of universities to catalyse such extraction further. Partnerships and leverage are enforced, in-part, because academic labour is shackled inside the demands of performativity revealed in the research evaluations or student satisfaction scores. Engaging with external partners like Pearson for service-driven efficiencies make sense for universities that are being recalibrated as businesses.

Thus, the role of Pearson cannot be disconnected from other recalibrations that affect academic labour inside the University, including: outsourcing of services; securitisation and bond financing; learning analytics as a cybernetic mechanism for surveillance, monitoring and the extraction of new forms of value; the militarisation of academic space; the role of venture capital, joint-ventures, think tanks, policy makers etc., as neoliberal transnational activist networks, acting inside education.

Pearson College also signals the possibility that a surfeit of new, for-profit providers will cheapen the costs of academic labour that does not develop proprietary knowledge or skills. This risks driving down labour costs and increasing precarious academic work based on post-graduate rather than tenured staff. Flexibility, redundancy, productivity, privatisation, restructuring, value-for-money, all underpinned by technology, risk becoming the new normal for academics involved in teaching and research. As the discipline of the market enters HE in the guise of for-profit, technologically-rich operations like Pearson College, the spaces that are available to develop critiques of the recalibration of the University are reduced. There is no alternative.

The point, then, is whether academics can develop new forms of labour in new, collectivised spaces, in order that the complexity of their labour as a process inside HE might be unravelled and re-stitched against technologically-enabled, new public management.

However, even here there is a risk of replicating the systemic inequalities that are promoted through hegemonic positions. As Hoofd argues, all forms of activism and innovation risk their own subsumption inside structural regimes of domination. In fact

the current mode of [neo-liberal] late-capitalism relies on the continuous extension and validation of the infrastructure and the optimistic discourses of the new information technologies. Discourses that typically get repeated in favour of what I designate as the emerging speed-elite are those of connection, instantaneity, liberation, transformation, multiplicity and border crossing.

Thus, even those educators who claim to be hacking or co-creating ‘new spaces’ with students, or developing and deploying personal learning environments or massive online open courses as opposed to institutionalised systems, are operating inside structures that were created with the goal of facilitating global capitalism and which contribute to refining technologies of surveillance and control. Hoofd argues that ‘The idea that subjectivities from social movements are in any way less produced by neo-liberal globalisation is highly problematic.’

Pearson, MOOCs, badges, Coursera, PLEs, PLNs [insert your own innovation], therefore, are each developed inside the logic of capital. Whether they can form a front against the logic of alienation is another issue. In 1966 Marcuse wrote that

The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued servitude. The liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization of things – turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalization of man.

Our response to the reality of Pearson College might then be the same as our response to Coursera or to Change MOOCs or to bring your own device or to [whatever]. We might ask whether and where it is possible for counter-hegemonic networks to develop. We might ask whether and how academic labour might form a rupture in the existing logic. We might ask whether and when it might become possible to reclaim academic labour for democratic engagements in general assemblies, for militant research strategies against their control by capitalist agendas, and for doing, working or labouring in public, rather than for enterprise.


The University and the Cloud: a health-warning


Posted by hallymk1

I spoke earlier today at the 26th UK Heads of e-Learning Forum meeting about Effectively navigating the cloud: The impact of externally hosted learning spaces.

My presentation on the University and the Cloud: a health-warning is on my slideshare.

There is also a theoretical article on emergent technology that includes the Cloud.

See also the recent book, Cloud Time, by Lockwood and Coley.


Educational technology and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday I am presenting at the University of Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at their conference, ‘The Problem of “Dirty Hands” in UK Universities‘.

I’ll be developing some ideas around the theme of educational technology and the war on public education. My slides for the event are at: http://slidesha.re/GNqhFc. My argument will be as follows.

ONE. Educational technology is a site of struggle inside the University, through which the relationships between management and (immaterial) labour are reinforced and re-produced. More broadly the deployment of educational technology is a form of state-subsidised privatisation and is a space through which the marketisation of education can be rooted.

TWO. Through educational technology, labour inside the University is at risk of coercion, measurement and surveillance, in order to meet the marketised demands of competition and profit-maximisation. Educational technology is a way in which hegemonic positions can be protected and developed inside education

THREE. Academics and educational technologists/staff developers are complicit in the ways that educational technologies are deployed at the heart of the University through teaching and research. At issue is whether these same groups have a critical (ethical) lens through which to critique the nature of the technologies that they re-sell beyond a focus on the student experience? How might critical insight about the ways in which educational technologies enable the co-option of University teaching, research and development for value formation and accumulation be catalysed?

FOUR. Uncritical, technologically-mediated behaviours inside the University are conditioned through the politics of education, which reproduces polyarchic governance through a form of the shock doctrine.

  • Polyarchy is an elitist form of democratic engagement that describes what is manageable/appropriate in a modern society, and what is acceptable and what can be fought for in terms of organisation and governance. It rests on universal, transhistorical norms based on the tenets of liberal democracy and capitalism, and which make it unacceptable to argue for other forms of value or organisation. Thus, it is not possible to address the structural dominance of elites within capitalism, or the limited procedural definitions of democracy or participation or power. This political enclosure is reinforced technologically and inside systems of education.
  • The Shock Doctrine focuses upon exacting political control by imposing economic shock therapy. In terms of higher education this focuses upon:

i.    structural re-adjustment through enforced competition and coercion (fee structures and student indenture; internationalisation; distance learning);

 ii.    a tightening/quickening of the dominant, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology (student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity);

iii.    the transfer of state/public assets to the private sector (consultancy; outsourced services);

iv.    the privatisation of state enterprises/elements in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability (state-subsidised privatisation)

FIVE. In response to this ideological or political enclosure, the space for the implementation of educational technologies is legitimised by organisations that support/influence universities. Thus, the HEFCE focuses on technological deployments for cost-reductions, business-process re-engineering and efficiency gains, which themselves might underpin radical transformation of the university as a “business”. HEFCE states that it works with key partners like JISC and the HEA in supporting institutions in technological transformation. The JISC’s Transitions Group has reported the importance of the HE/FE sector for economic growth, and it connects and relates changes in these sectors that are political, financial, technological and competitive. These changes mean that JISC must operate within “stringent new financial realities”, in order that it is “better geared to achieving a large impact”. Thus, recent JISC-Announce emails clearly connect technological innovations to a discourse of “cost savings”, “value for money”, “value and impact”, and organisational efficiency and effectiveness. This legitimation of a discourse that connects educational innovation to fiscal “realities” is also revealed in the HEA’s values, which highlight the importance of value for money and place it alongside the HEA’s other organisational values of student learning and institutional innovation.

SIX. The recent Coalition Government budget for 2012 further tightens control of the technological policy and practice of universities through its focus on: universities working in the “business” of education; on VAT and shared services, and the need to treat “commercial universities” “fairly”; and by creating a research investment fund that “will attract additional co-investment from the private sector”. This reinforcement of the deep connections between commercial and financial leverage, technology, and education-for-employment are part of an on-going governmental discourse about the value/purpose of education, outlined for instance by Michael Gove at BETT.

SEVEN. It is from inside this space that educational technology is implemented by educational technologists, staff developers and technicians, and then adopted by practitioners and students. Thus, the following serve as examples of how technology is often implemented based on problems of performance, efficiency and scale, without a broader, political, contextual analysis or questioning.

  • Cloud Computing is argued for from perspectives of scale and organisational/labour efficiency, with a limited critique of: the geo-political and legal issues that arise, in particular related to national security legislation; the ways in which the cloud enables the separation and surveillance of proletarianised work, and the re-production and redistribution of commodity- and leveraged-skills to low-wage societies through outsourcing (and cutting labour costs for in-house work); the attempts that are being made to commodify and sell the idea of cloud computing in terms of green IT or sustainability, despite the lack of evidence that the cloud is ‘greener’, with industry wrapping itself around this concept as a space for further service-led innovation; and the privatization of public, academic services through outsourcing/consultancy/rent.
  • Blackboard is utilised as a Learning Management System in particular across the global North, and, as with other providers in the marketplace, the Company provides services that are rented by/licensed to Universities that are funded in some cases by the State. In 2011 it was reported that Blackboard had an “expanding footprint in the defense sector”, and that as a result “The Pentagon gets a manageable software program that helps instructors in subjects like military logistics and infantry tactics get a handle on the coursework flow of thousands of occasionally far-flung active duty military personnel. Blackboard, on the other hand, has a neat little honeypot that has, in many ways, saved the company.” Moreover, in 2011 Blackboard was acquired by Providence Equity Partners, a private-equity company. Providence was advised by, amongst others Goldman Sachs, on its acquisition of SRA International, a company that “is dedicated to solving complex problems of global significance for government organizations serving the national security, civil government, health, and intelligence and space markets.” Should those links between the investment banking/finance, defence and education sectors be discussed in the context of a University’s mission or in the sector’s aim to work for the public good?
  • Mobile learning is championed across the sector and by various funding bodies in supporting personalisation and anytime/anywhere learning, with limited critique of this in relation to the human/labour rights abuses that have been revealed in the factories where mobile technologies are manufactured or the mines from where raw materials are produced, and in spite of the threat of the enclosure of content on the open web due to the commercial, competitive imperative to create a market for mobile applications. How should revelations around human/labour rights, especially in the global South, affect institutional policy?
  • The implementation of communications-solutions like MS Lync often underpins an integrated systems architecture that connects communications and information-management capabilities across an institution. However, the development of such architectures also makes possible institutional surveillance of academic practices and labour, and the disciplining of marginalised practices, like the utilisation of open source solutions like Linux, or of practices that are defined outside technocratic norms. Framing discussions about the implementation of specific technologies as politically-neutral instances of problem-solving removes the imperative, for instance, to engage with trades unions about the management and monitoring capabilities of such tools as an aggregated whole. How often do academics or educational technologist discuss labour rights and safeguards when deploying a technology or designing an architecture?
  • The coming fetishisation of learning analytics and data-mining, linked to diagnostic and summative assessment, alongside progression and retention agendas, is in-part technologically-driven, and connects academics to the daily measurement of their practices and to impact measures for teaching. Do educational developers or technologists or academic staff consider the means by which their everyday existence is incorporated inside the means of re-production of capital? Do they consider how technologies further objectify our social relationships as commodities from which value can be extracted through, for instance, the monitoring and harvesting of personal data, the enclosure and control of spaces or applications of consumption, the use of venture capitalism to support specific social networks, and the technological augmentation and capture of affectivity?

EIGHT. These examples serve to highlight the risks in any uncritical, techno-determinist deployment of technology. So we might ask, what is to be done? This is important in the face of governmental/funding policies that are in-turn constricted by transnational global capital, and in particular by the compression and enclosure of time and space wrought by technologically-transformed, finance capital. It is natural that those who work inside universities would escape into problem-solving tactics like ‘social inclusion’ or ‘equality of opportunity’, which are liberal themes so often connected to discourses that emerge around emergent, assistive or participative technologies.

NINE. However, everyday scholarly activities are becoming increasingly folded into the logic of capital through, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing. 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.

TEN. Yet the University remains a symbol of those places where mass intellectuality can be consumed, produced and more importantly contributed to by all. Academics then have an important role in arguing against the conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and hence private property, catalysed through processes of virtualisation that are driven by the commodification of research and teaching and the emergence of commercially-viable, proprietary products that can be marketised. The capitalist processes of deskilling and automation, fetishisation of products, and proletarianisation of labour are at the core of this process.

ELEVEN. This struggle is given life in the range of radical academic projects and occupations in the UK, which are an attempt to re-inscribe higher education as higher learning dissolved into the fabric of society. In some cases these projects are working politically to re-define issues of power. In most cases they see the institution of the school or the university as symbolically vital to a societal transformation. They form a process of re-imagination that risks fetishisation or reification of radical education, but which offers a glimpse of a different process that shines a light on the University as one node in a global web of social relations. This also focuses upon rethinking in public the role of academics in society, facilitated through educational technologies but realised in concrete experiences on solid ground.

TWELVE. Thus, in the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production. In the critique of knowledge production, revealed through the production/consumption of specific educational technologies, the University can grow in excess of its symbolic role. Thus, students and teachers might reconsider how they engage with these technologies, in order to contribute to a re-formation of their webs of social interaction. How do students and teachers contribute to public dissent against marketisation, domination and foreclosure?


Presentations about the assault on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting two linked papers on higher education/the assault on public education in the UK.  I’ll blog what I plan to say here, and link to my slideshare.

The first presentation is at Brighton’s Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics, at their conference, ‘The Problem of “Dirty Hands” in UK Universities‘.

Title: Educational technology and the war on public education

Abstract: This paper will discuss the ways in which educational technologies reflect and amplify the commodification of the University as a set of spaces and practices, and how technological determinism and narratives of technology-as-progress reinforce academic complicity in the processes of marketisation and enclosure of higher education. Such complicity is determined by the uncritical manner in which educational technology is procured and deployed inside Universities, and the ways in which that deployment further commodifies our educational experiences.

Thus, state-subsidised capitalism, revealed through the engagement of private technology providers, outsourced solutions, the enclosure of the web through locked-down technologies, and consultancy in educational technology, will be related to critiques of the neoliberal assault on the idea of the University. In uncovering this relationship, the power that academics have in defining how they can operate in the University, and the place of technology in that struggle, is important. Thus, in suggesting strategies for academic agency or activism, the paper will highlight how using open technologies in public might help to re-inscribe a different set of possibilities upon the University.

This might be viewed as a crack in the Coalition’s assault on education as a public good. At issue is whether students and teachers are able to recapture educational technologies in order to dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest and to develop alternatives. This might be seen as an attempt by capital to enter, control and enclose what has previously been seen as open source or as the terrain previously set-out and negotiated by hacktivists. However, it does open up a space for academic activists working with programmers and educationalists to challenge the dominant logic of how we construct and re-produce our educational worlds as commonly-defined, social goods, against state-subsidised capitalism and proletarianised work. We might then consider how to re-engage our actions and the technologies we deploy asymmetrically; to refuse and push-back against marketisation, to realise the possibilities of the hacker ethic, and to use technology to describe more social forms of value.

The second is at the Discourse, Power and Resistance: Impact conference, at the University of Plymouth. I will base my talk on this slideshare presentation.

Title: In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University

Abstract: This paper will briefly discuss the political possibilities for academic activism in the face of the shock doctrine, or neoliberal responses to socio-economic and environmental disruption, in the UK. The paper will argue that academic activism and occupation offer sanctuaries in which critiques of the idea of higher education can develop. It will be argued that they offer possibilities for academics and students, contributing as scholars to a shared process, to be against the foreclosure of the idea of higher education by the twin pedagogies of debt and the kettle. This process offers spaces in which such scholars can re-conceptualise and negate the alienation of their labour as capitalist work inside the academy. In the face of global disruptions in social access to both historic capitals and liquid energy resources, a radical critique of capitalist social relations inside the University holds the possibility of moving beyond this neoliberal foreclosure, towards revolutionary transformation enabled through processes of self-creation and praxis. It is intended that this brief paper will take 15 minutes and offer 20 minutes for discussion of possibilities for scholars to stand inside the neoliberal University, to be against its enclosure of the possibilities for higher learning, and to move beyond its foreclosure of resilient futures.


On Elsevier and the academic project


Posted by hallymk1

The Cambridge Mathematician, Tim Gower, has highlighted a campaign against the publisher Reed Elsevier for the tripartite crimes of: high pricing; bundling, which pushes what Gower hints are inappropriate or poor quality journals with those that are good; “ruthless” behaviour in cutting off access to all their journals where libraries attempt to negotiate better deals; and their support for SOPA, PIPA and the Research Works Act. Whilst Gower mentions earlier criticism of business practices, the main thrust of his argument is outrage over the pricing of and access to publically-funded research. In fact, Gower accepts the commercial logic of publishing’s current stranglehold over higher education as a business. He argues:

Returning to the subject of morality, I don’t think it is helpful to accuse Elsevier of immoral behaviour: they are a big business and they want to maximize their profits, as businesses do.

However, in an earlier set of criticisms about Elsevier, Tom Stafford reminds us of that Company’s involvement in arms fairs and the subsequent academic campaign against them. This was very much an ethical campaign of academic groups working in association with organisations like Campaign Against The Arms Trade. For Stafford, unlike Gower, the ethics of business were central:

I felt that Elsevier were making academics complicit in the arms trade and that this was something we, collectively, could take a stand on and where I, personally, could effect a difference.

In part the success of the campaign outlined by Stafford was based on de-legitimisation of Elsevier’s engagement in the arms trade through its involvement in arms shows, and linking this to pre-existing, global networks and associations, in order to hit the company’s economic value(s).

The pre-existing global networks that academics define offer more than a limited, horizon for their activism, beyond perceptions of academic freedom, or open access, or monetisation, or the alleged needs of developing countries. However, the case against Elsevier’s engagement in the arms trade for profit throws the limited and limiting scope of much academic argument for/against methods of production/distribution of content into sharp relief. Too often the only language that we have is money. Money as value is almost the only form of academic cohesion that we are able to articulate. Thus, David Wiley opines that “Open education currently has no response to the coming wave of diagnostic, adaptive products coming from the publishers” and calls for more(state?) funding “Because this stuff costs so much to do, if no one steps up to the funding plate the entire field is at serious risk.”

And yet the State and its institutions (at least in the global north) have demonstrated a willingness to enclose and discipline academic practice in multiple ways, from physically kettling students to psychologically kettling academics through the REF. Moreover, the landscape of higher education is riven with State-encouraged public/private partnerships, outsourced technologies/services, knowledge transfer/exchange partnerships, engagements with closed services for the production/distribution of content/learning. This historic enclosure of academic work, reinforced through governmental regulation, then enables rent to be extracted by corporations, in the form of subscriptions or licenses.

The key here is that the value of our work, or our labour, forms part of the productive/distributive relations of capitalism. This is not a debate that stops at the simple production of reified content or open educational practices. In short academic labour or immaterial labour or cognitive capitalism has value, in-part through its production of immaterial things in the form of content, and profit can be squeezed from it. In a time of austerity, rents provide a more sure form of income; so why should we see any respite for those who are forced to license or rent spaces that have been regulated away from open/enclosed? In fact, as the rate of production of surplus value from riskier, financialised, private ventures is reduced, a migration towards enclosing public spaces and extracting value from them is natural. As I have argued elsewhere

This amounts to a form of what Christopher Newfield calls “subsidy capitalism”, which “means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.”

And so there are two issues interconnected here, and they are linked to the value of academic work as labour. The first is the reality of academic work inside capitalism, which means a reduction of the debate about open education to the addition of value and the subsumption of open under dominant labour processes. As Joss Winn and Mike Neary point out hacking, hacktivism and open source cultures have had some impact here, but the discussion of open educational resources has tended to reduce to commodification and an inability to critique academic labour inside cognitive capitalism.

The second issue is the reality of academic practices compromised inside the logic of profit maximisation. In this reality we find, for instance, mathematician’s railing about Elsevier’s business model (whilst at the same time recognising the logic of these business practices) but we hear silence on the issue of Blackboard’ engagement with the Pentagon, our re-selling of Apple as an educational technology in spite of its human/labour rights’ record (although we might comment on its foreclosure on developers), or the enclosure issues I raised previously in this post on the war on public education.

Yet, as Tony Hirst reminds us here, we have a history of examining and re-examining our complicity or otherwise in State-sponsored narratives of privatisation/enclosure/injustice. Hirst argues this point for data, but it applies for the politics of any academic field:

1) there may be stories to be told about the way other people have sourced and used their data. Were one report quotes data from another, treat it with as much suspicion as you would hearsay… Check with the source [sic.].

2) when developing your own data stories, keep really good tabs on where the data’s come from and be suspicious about it. If you can be, be open with republishing the data, or links to it.

This view is amplified through connection to the “hopes” of World Bank insider, Michael Trucano, when speaking of mobile learning, that:

in 2012 practical insights into what this mobility might mean for both educators and learners based on real life experiences will emerge in greater volume and depth, so that policymakers and planners can make more informed decisions about how to direct increasingly scarce resources in ways that are cost-effective and impactful.

And the point may then be that in our re-examination of our academic labour practices we need to be explicitly political. It is not good enough to accept the polyarchal limits of our work, as they are defined by money, marketisation and impact, but to fight for some other form of value that defines our social relationships. Stafford argued

that the institutional rational that defines the modern corporation is pathological, creating them so that they fundamentally cannot take account of any humane values, being motivated solely by the pursuit of profit.

This moves us beyond the disempowerment of special pleading or cries for different funding models. It is the recognition of the responsibility of academics to extend the terrain for struggle, so that we might reassess the production and distribution of our work, our cultures and our academic society, for something more humane. This might be in fighting for open access, or in taking part in the struggle for alternatives, or in publically debating University governance and financialisation, or in critquing the spaces for occupation. But it has to be about more than the poverty of efficiency, subsidy and impact.


For the communal university in the face of debt and polyarchy


Posted by hallymk1

I

The rule of money as the prime motive force in UK higher education after the White Paper of 2010 led Natalie Fenton to write that

“The brutal enforcement of market principles into every aspect of higher education is a direct attack on equality and the value of public education for all. It is a turn away from equality of opportunity and a rush towards students as units of revenue and departments as profit centres” (p. 110).

Fenton positions cash, value and the market as a set of objects within a clear ideological space, and then links this space to a process of separation and individuation of education. This ideological attack sits against what might be categorised as liberal, humanist values like equality of opportunity (or occasionally equality) that in turn chime with our collectivised hopes for a better type of capitalism; a better capitalism that mixes growth and employability, sustainability and living wages, fair pensions-for-all and development grants.

The brutality of the separation that underpins the UK Coalition Government’s educational austerity is revealed as the enclosure and asset-stripping of education as a process, and its dismantling into components from which rent or surplus value or profit can be extracted. These components might be measureable inputs like student feedback, or outputs like employability, the effects of which we have been desensitised to over a number of years through the strategic agendas of previous Labour Governments, or they might be sector-wide dislocations like de-regulation/privatisation through student number controls and changes to degree-awarding powers, or re-regulation over the role of HEFCE or the place of Key Information Sets. As a result Des Freedman, writing with Fenton, has argued that

“Universities are being encouraged to think and act like private providers and the White Paper is designed to facilitate a wholescale cultural shift in which all universities need to think of themselves now as part of a competitive marketplace.”

II

Richard Murphy argues that this cultural shift is predicated upon the rule of money, enabled through a “policy designed to provide the financial markets with a new form of collateralised debt obligation that they can trade now that mortgages are not available to meet the demand for such products.” Murphy argues that we are witnessing a clear attempt to break the intergenerational contract, which links social relationships and access to resources access to socialised goods like education, healthcare and pensions. In this view, by forging artificial scarcity of, or indentured access to, resources, we risk the marketisation of our common wealth, of goods held in common, at a point when socio-environmental dislocations demand a retreat from the treadmill logic of the market.

Murphy’s solution focuses upon corporate wealth rather than individual income, and ties education to the workings of a capitalist economy. He argues “that companies should pay an additional tax to provide university education for all those wishing to participate, and that they do so from payment of an additional corporate tax payable only by large companies in the UK”. This is, of course, a hope for a better or less rapacious capitalism, and one that might create a compact between private, shareholder wealth and public, stakeholder value. However, it doesn’t help us to escape from the internal logic of capitalism, which demands the expanding valorisation of value as its own life-blood. It has embedded within it the same need for growth, for the extraction of surplus-value, for the subsumption of labour under capital, for the commodification of everyday experience. It is not a full-stop in the face of the contradictions of capital.

Our inability to imagine any kind of existence, or any form of value as the mediation of our lives, beyond the logic of capital and the rule of money is being extended to the University and the student experience. In this the Times Higher Education reports that “A number of universities are at risk of a financial contagion crisis similar to that in the eurozone.” That this report comes from banking analysts demonstrates the power-shift emerging in educational policy and practice, furthering Murphy’s contention that the HE sector is seen as a vehicle for the expansion of finance capital and the use of risk as a tool for the extraction of value. The report highlights how this underpins increasing competition and marketisation of the education sector: “Stewart Ward, head of education sector at RBS Corporate and Institutional Banking, which currently directly lends about £1.25 billion to the sector, told Times Higher Education that in the past six months the spread in the price of borrowing for higher-ranked institutions and those lower down the league tables had widened.”

III

No longer are individual Universities embedded in a web of socialised goods, underpinned by a public policy that welcomes and nurtures an intergenerational or inter-institutional compact. No longer is this web bounded by negotiated practices and governed in the public interest. No longer is the health of the sector the main issue; the key concern now is the financial power of individual universities in a competitive environment. Thus, we see a second Times Higher report on the farrago at the University of Wales, which “was brought down by [quality issues in] validation, its money-making machine… [and] how others might be stopped from putting cash before quality.”

In this revealing of the rush to monetise higher education, the havoc being wrought on the sector leads to two comparisons, one related to football, the other to the failure of national politics. In both we see the subsumption of politics as descriptions of the forms of our everyday life, to outsourced, unaccountable economic power, and more specifically to transnational finance capital.

  1. The possibility that the HE sector may come to resemble the English football league post-1992 following the deal made to form the Premiership, which lead to: the league being ruled by the power of money (witness the power of BSkyB, the influx of transnational capital in the form of hedge funds and corporates in club governance); the ossification of success/competitiveness (witness the limited number of clubs capable of sustaining challenges for the League or for Cups); the growth of indebtedness and administration (in particular where clubs chase access to the Premiership/TV deals); and the need for special pleading for/activism by supporters (in terms of fan ownership, supporter democracy and the rising costs of attending games).
  2. That the HE sector may now become subject to the same transnational governance logic that places bankers in charge of national Governments in order to implement austerity packages and quieten the markets (witness the anti-democratic take-over of Greece in the name of the markets). As financial risk, collateralised debt obligations and individualised indenture enters HE, and the value of the sector to finance capital grows, why will politicians and banks leave management of the sector to academics?

We are then witnessing the very real possibility that academic practice and scholarship will be further kettled/enclosed and brutalised by the rule of money. The metaphor of kettling academic practice is important here because it focuses upon controlling, subduing and ultimately criminalising protest. It is about techniques and mechanisms for subjugation, and the discourses of debt, the rights of consumers and the market are key structures for ensuring subjugation.

IV

The question then becomes how to respond. However, responses tend to be unable to see beyond the politics of power that are revealed inside capitalism. Thus, we see clarion calls for a better capitalism, or for equality of opportunity or for equality, without a critique of our history of labour-in-capitalism from which these values emerge. As we are unable to take a systemic view of the crisis, we are unable to separate out how we define our humanist values from our need to create value as the primary form of social mediation within capitalism. Our values are predicated on liberal democracy, on tropes of equality or liberty, or on often ill-defined practices/qualities like respect or openness. Even inside the University, we are unable to think the unthinkable; to imagine a different form of life.

In attempting a more meaningful critique we might seek to locate the University inside the emerging critiques of polyarchy and network governance. Polyarchy is an attempt to define an elitist form of democracy that would be manageable in a modern society. It focuses upon normalising what can be fought for politically, in terms of: organisational contestation through free and fair elections; the right to participate and contest offices; and the right to freedom of speech and to form organisations. This forms a set of universal, transhistorical norms. It is simply not acceptable to argue for other forms of value or organisation without appearing to be a terrorist, communist, dissident or agitator. Within the structures of polyarchy it no longer becomes possible to address the structural dominance of elites within capitalism, or its limited procedural definition of democracy inside capitalism. Compounding this political enclosure is the control of the parameters of discussions about values or value-relationships like democracy and equality, or power and class, or as George Caffentzis argues over the morality of student loan debt refusal.

Key here then is to understand how the University supports the ways in which neoliberal capitalism intentionally designs, promotes and manages forms of democracy and governance that complement its material objectives, limit participation and power-sharing, and support coercion. Thus we might question how the rhetoric of student-as-consumer enables the market to penetrate the sector, in order to open its resources up to the dominant or hegemonic order, and to manufacture consent for its practices. Manufacturing this consent depends upon coercion of the political cadre of organisational leaders. However, it is critical that once economic and productive power has been extended into, for instance, the educational space, that domination extends to the political, social and class-based relations in that space, through the implementation of ideological control throughout the mechanisms/institutions and cultures of civil society. We are simply not allowed to step beyond the controlling logic of the rights of consumers.

Part of the response might be shaped by a critique of network politics and power inside counter-hierarchies. Gramsci, whilst accepting the base-superstructure relationships of Second International Marxism, saw these relationships as a fluid interplay of forces in which different power and political configurations were possible, and where new hegemonies could emerge from the interplay between political and civil society. Developing these new counter-hegemonies or alternative spaces both for organising civil society and for imaging new forms of value, depended not upon the market or the rights of consumers, but on human consciousness and human relationships.

Thus, any focus on networks as decentralised political spaces, or as participative, democratic alternatives has to be placed inside and against a critique of power and political economy. Those networks are themselves not the response to crises of political society, riven as they are with issues of power, social capital and hierarchy. What they offer is a new set of spaces for the construction of revolutionary potential, especially where they are underpinned by a communication commons that resists the reincorporation or normalisation of communicative action and dissent by capital. It might be argued that this is a key element to the occupy movement, that it incorporates diverse educational spaces for testing the truisms of civil society, and for re-imagining the world that is against and possibly beyond capital. This is not to reify what is offered as free on the web but which is circumscribed and embedded within capitalist social relations and which therefore offers no transformatory potential.

In recovering the possibility of overcoming socio-environmental dislocations, new forms of resistance that are against polyarchy and precription in education are needed. In the past we might have imagined these emerging from incubation inside the University. The obsession with free content, revealed in the clamour for openness or open or free, distracts us from the revolutionary need for general assemblies as democratic potentialities within education, for militant research strategies and for undertaking educational activity in public. Now we might have to imagine new forms of University life inside the Commune, where we can reveal the transnational nature of the attack on our educational lives, which uses procedural control over values like democracy and equality in order to kettle our existence and extend the rule of money. The question then is how to turn that Communal University into meaningful counter-hegemonic practice that can resist, push back against and overturn the rule of money.


Some notes on resistance to the crisis and hegemony


Posted by hallymk1

In the last month I have attended some pretty amazing events. This was capped this week with a presentation at the Home Affairs Select Committee and seeing Jesse Jackson get his honorary doctorate. However, it began with my attending two of John Holloway’s three lectures in Leeds on the rule of money, and then attending a seminar given by DMU’s Jonathan Davies that critiqued network governance. (The introduction to Jonathan’s new book is available free.)

Each of these events has made me question the crisis, my place in it, and our response to it both within and beyond the University. Along this same front, I note two recent posts by @thirduniversity on lessons learned from facing the crisis and on radical alternatives, a piece by Aaron Peters on oppositional networks and the State, and a powerful cri de coeur by Vinay Gupta on our complicity in the end of days.

However, what I want to capture below is what I take from a series of engagements by academic activists who have faced and continue to face the symptoms of a systemic crisis of capitalism. This is a systemic crisis that sees those in power attempting to recapitalise the value embedded in our social goods and our shared social wealth, like free education. The systemic nature of the crisis forces us to consider alternatives, counter-hegemonies and the power we need to refuse or negate or push against or break. It then forces us to consider whether networks and decentralisation are possible; whether we might be able to define and implement a new form of value; and what the actions we take in occupation might enable us to do, in the face of power.

What follows is deliberately presented as a set of notes. What they will add up to will take some time.

  1. These are days of rage. This rage is ours and it looks two ways: firstly to dignified hope; secondly to undignified destruction. There is a question of how we can intervene for hope.
  2. We rage, and we are outraged, and we need courage, because globally we are under attack. The attack is on what it takes for us to have a means to live. Or it is on our very means of existence. The attack is revolutionary. We must not forget the revolutionary strength of conservatism.
  3. At our core must be the act of saying “no!” But this takes courage. It takes courage to say I do not accept your imposition and enclosure of my world.
  4. This is a systemic attack, and in this it looks more clearly than ever that the system is against us. However, in the act of raging we must not end up with destructive personalisation, or fetishisation of the individual or of neoliberalism, or of a label, as evil personified. It is not enough to be personal. We must be beyond that; to attack the systemic social domination/determination of our lives.
  5. There is power in our non-violence. We must not reproduce their symmetries of hate and demonization and vilification. Engaging their logic leaves us hopeless. We must work to dismantle the system of oppression, to be active in participating in its destruction.
  6. Real democracy now! We must refuse to trust our leaders. We must reclaim the world as ours. We must assume our responsibilities through assemblies not parliaments, and for a better society. In the communes and assemblies that are a part of the struggle for a world turned upside down, and against an institutionalised world. We need a breaking of this reality.
  7. Economic democracy is meaningless in the face of private property and money. We must unmask the real enemy, money.
  8. Money is the attack. It is the system’s assault. The dynamic of money is on the tip of the tongue of the movement; is on the tip of the tongue of the occupation. Pushing beyond this, and giving voice to it demands theoretical reflection.
  9. Money is the commodity that stands abstracted in the face of democracy. It flows away from democracy in Greece, and exists in a state of antagonism to the idea and reality of real democracy now.

10. Money is the gateway; it is our cognitive dissonance; it is our (un)reality; it is our process of exclusion that denies our access to the products of our own creativity. Money seems identical to reality, but it is an assault on our humanity. Austerity is an assault on our possibility.

11. Money is a historic form of aggression; of relationships; of social bonds; of cohesion. The fact of money and the dynamic of money are terrible.

12. It takes courage to say “no!” To bring this to the tips of our tongues. To highlight how we are shackled.

13. We are shackled by money as a social bond against human activity. It is the imposition of faster, of exclusion, of alienation, of constricted social labour. Money is designed to constrict and constrain and control aberrant behaviour. And so, our existence is monetised, and the rule of money is increasingly, aggressively policed.

14. We are proud to be the crisis of capital. Of money. To be against their credo of bombing or killing those who do not submit, or of accumulating by their dispossession.

15. It is possible therefore to see in the movements of anger of 2011, how dignity is starting to unite against money. Against this historical nightmare. Against the imposition of alienated or abstracted labour. And for the emancipation of our activity and of our creativity against capital.

16. We use money and not capital for the freshness and obviousness of its language; and because it is on the tip of the tongue as we regard our banks; and because it leads us down well-worn paths of bonds and bondage. And because it offers us new ways of relating in the theme of anti-capitalism.

17. We must recognise how issues of state and society and religion and gender are critical. But that they take us only so far and no further. The crisis unfurls in a way that has a resonance beyond the state, to a point where money is god.

18. What is to be done in moving the discussion beyond the tip of the tongue? We must look for cracks and challenge as we can and where we can, and to see this as a historical process.

19. We must struggle against labour. But we must struggle against labour-in-capitalism. And we must struggle against the rhythm of capitalist domination. And this takes courage. And it is not progressive. For progress is a symptom of capitalist history. The most exciting left is not progressive, It is Luddite and indigenous and conservative and it is able to voice “no!” It is humanising and dignified.

20. We might remember that collective or social debt has a power that individual debt does not. That in acting together we might act for something better.

21. Thus, we might think of our spaces and protests as social, and integrated, and creative. And through them we might reveal the brutalising infrastructure of the State, through its apparatus of debt, surveillance, exception, baton rounds etc.. Revealing this in public is powerful; what is observed and shared is vital. We must reveal the process of ideology; the legitimation of exception; the idea and reality of a radical alternative or free university that is against the walls of money and its mechanisms of control.

22. We must communise. The beginning is near. But we must be determined.

23. The force of our determination is revealed in the force of our “no!” Our “no!” to their logic of death. This turns the world upside down, and reclaims it. It repudiates the history of a process without a subject. This reclaiming is a dignified process of asserting our subjectivity.

24. But we must move from refusal, and “no!” to push back the rule of money. We must restrict its area of sovereignty, and socialise against profit as the primary criterion of our world. For our lives are too important to monetise.

25. The State complements the rule of money. The State is not an alternative form of social cohesion. It is the revelation of a particular form of the capitalist social relation. Soviet Russia was oppressive and inefficient and exclusionary. It was not against the rule of money. We cannot rely on the State to deliver us [c.f. The Co-ordinating Committee for Water and Life, in Bolivia].

26. Our labour is shaped by money as a social bond; our labour is abstracted; it has no meaning beyond money; its central thrust is labour, harder, faster, for money. The State cannot push back the rule of money.

27. We must break the rule of money. We must communise. We need an alternative form of value; and of social cohesion. We need social self-determination as a verb, as an act of doing, as a process.

28. Movements of indigenous people give us hope, as they rise to support a communal way of living (c.f. Rossport in Ireland). They show new paths that might open up; that might be co-operative and mutual. That show different relationships between nature and people.

29. We must look for the interstices as ways of repudiating the system. In this moment of experimentation our uncertainty requires courage. As people are pushed into communities of mutual support we can begin to break the rule of money.

30. As we see how they monetise our relationships we see the crisis in our ways of living. We see that our lives do not work. They are not resilient. We need alternative networks. Perhaps Greece, and Detroit and Argentina in 2001 offer alternatives. Of neighbourhood councils and barter and recovering factories and movements of unemployed workers and in community spaces and gardens [c.f. “no house without electricity”].

31. Fighting for the right to work is a disaster. We need to say good riddance to capital and labour-in-capital. We need to construct other ways of living, doing and solidarity.

32. But we must do this whilst understanding the dynamic of the movement of the world as labour-in-capital. As money. As the indentured servitude of students; as the wholesale destruction of a peasantry. No-one controls this social dynamic. Not banks. Not states. Who can say “stop!”? But we must be courageous for we have to passively confront trained force. It is no good confronting trained force with untrained force. We must not reproduce their world; their power-over others. The logic of the symmetrical struggle is a history of power and parties. We must integrate into neighbourhoods and find place. We must help people to affirm: “we are ordinary people and we are rebels”.

33. We must highlight how we share similarities and connections. We must legitimise our struggle where we can and reveal truth claims in a story world that teeters on the brink of fascism, and through which there is an aggressive transfer of assets. We must associate.

34. But what does this mean for networks and governance? Whither alternatives in network democracy? Networks are instruments of power. We hear claims that networks are better; that they are trust based and multiple; that we live in an age when networks are qualitatively hegemonic (after Hardt and Negri). This is the transformation thesis of network governance.

35. And so Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 138) deconstruct the metaphor of the network (the network governance milieu) as: decentring states, capitals and classes; against zombie categories (c.f. Beck); underpinning the risk society and individuation; part of a logic of flows rather than structures; the age of the combinard (Lash on reflexive modernisation); and a migration from homophily to heterophily (c.f. Graham Thompson, 2005 on ethical virtues, trust and networks).

36. However, the structural issues have not gone away in an allegedly post-scarcity world (Janet Newman, 2004 on emergent orthodoxy struggles). The policy landscape moves from counter-hegemonic populism to a post-hegemony third-way, and from network resistance to network participation, and to fetishised informational capitalism. Thus the network becomes a liberal feel good concept, through which ideology is sedimented and concretised and reinscribed. At issue then is the issue of network co-governance, as an ambiguous, complex, turbulent set of tropes.

37. The issues with networks are historical; they are based on hierarchy; on closed or captured power; of institutionalised, discursive inequalities; of distrust. There is no evidence for the rise of governance networks, or that governance networks are transformational. Hard-power, coercion and strong incentives overcome limited soft-power (c.f. Gerry Stoker, 2011).

38. Immanent materiality and the coercive function of the state (either soft or hard) overcome consensus. And so we see, in Gramscian terms, “hegemony armoured by coercion”. Governance is immanent domination and material coercion/discipline.

39. Despite globalisation, states are coercive and competitive; structure and contradiction still underpin our materiality; class as a social relation is very real; network governance confuses conjuncture with epoch. The argument that there has somehow been a change is undermined by the continuity apparent in the totality and its crises.

40. The State therefore exists as a political society. Its hegemony is still based on deep social leadership exercised by a governing bloc that has clear political/economic goals, and a clear intellectual/moral unity. The State delivers a passive revolution. It keeps the structures of our lives the same by changing them – this is the logic of the dialectic of rupture/restoration. The Integral State delivers hegemony armoured by coercion.

41. Governance through the integral state frames a precarious hegemony, based on the State as social reproduction, on a trajectory of domination and material coercion that is an immanent condition of social stability within iniquitous and unstable political economies.

42. The Governance genome consists of command, conflict, trust, contract. Contracts are enforceable. The fallacy of liberalism is that it is not underpinned by force. Even in networks.

43. Thus neoliberalism reinscribes capitalism beyond the market, in the language of networks and connectivity and rhizomes. And network governance becomes a neoliberal strategy for remaking civil society. This visionary, regulative, risk-managing, trust-based ideal of neoliberalism celebrates connectivity and the passive revolution as a hegemonic, strategic project.

44. A system of heterophilus, network governance is incompatible with this stage of capitalism. It is a vague premonition of a possible post-capitalism. It is a future possibility that is mistaken for reality. Our reality is one of the commodity form protected by the immanent threat of violence. In this hostile environment, which attacks trust, how can resistance thrive in networks? How can network governance be benchmarked historically?

45. Heterophily is rare in governance networks, which implies that distrust will trump trust. When connectionist dispositions fail because they are inauthentic, there follows an incremental reconfiguration of the integral state, so that hegemony maintains domination. Distrust is a healthy fact of our human condition, and underpins resistance. Trust does not make a complex society productive (Cook, Hardin and Levey) and under neoliberalism and austerity we see a decline in trust-based relationships in our revealed social attitudes to those in need.

46. We do not live in conditions favourable to an emergent world of heterogeneous networks. Crises stress them and demonstrate their lack of ontological purpose. Although they can offer configurational critique, networks are not able to dissolve the integral state. We need to consider concentrated resistance to match their concentrated power. These are the realities of market dynamics.

47. Is network governance a normative project or an explanatory tool?

48. This is not to say that we refuse an engagement with networks. They form spaces for resistance, exodus, autonomy, everyday making, outsider resistance etc., but they are also sites of coercive counter-power and concentrated, counter-hegemonic resistance.


The University as deliberative space


Posted by hallymk1

These are my notes from today’s Home Affairs Select Committee conference on the Roots to Violent Radicalisation, held at De Montfort University. The highlight of the day was attending the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s award of an honorary doctorate. Along with receiving my National Teaching Fellowship, this was the highlight of my academic career to-date.

  1. The University is a crucial site for discussion, in which the balance of civil liberties and security issues might be deliberated as it is formed inside austerity politics.
  2. In response to the spread of the state of exception into the space of the University, occupations remind us of the courage that we share in debating what is legitimate, who is marginalised, and why power is wielded.
  3. The University is reproduced inside a broader, global set of relationships and political contexts, and this set both enables/disables the use of labels and interpretations about people and practices. This labelling comes in the wake of power, and affects who is scrutinised and which technologies are used to coerce and prevent, and for whom do we impose exceptional circumstances. Through critique we might work to push back against the University’s role in this reproduction of states of exception, and to re-politicise the forms of our University life, against meaningless, enclosed and universal narratives of justice and democracy.
  4. The University develops meaning as it enables working and living in public. The work of the University must be public, knowable and fair, and it must be care full. How we demonstrate our care is a crucial question. As we answer it, we might consider how we enable our students’ dreams to outlive our fears, and how we collectively develop the courage to keep trying.
  5. We might usefully consider the Realpolitik of University life. Inside capital and in the face of the rule of law what is the role of the University? How does the University help us to critique whose word is law? How does the University help us to understand what we are willing to bear in the name of freedom?
  6. The University becomes more resilient through the politicisation of its form as well as in the production of its content. This resilience emerges both from the University’s relationships with the range of communities in which it is embedded and that themselves broaden its engagement, and by its deliberate refusal to outsource its duty of care (for instance to the police).
  7. The University helps us to be against force and enclosure. It is a space that offers a critique of systemic, structural disenfranchisement. It is a space for deliberating rather than judging. It is a space for developing an avowedly political response to the collective punishment meted out as austerity and marketisation.
  8. The University is a space to recognise, critique and engage with the radical rejection of the processes of financialisation, precarity, poverty, war and demonisation of the other, which dominate our mainstream discourse. Where this work is done in public we are able to develop alternatives to the question of “who sets the climate for our world?”
  9. Those of us who work in Universities might usefully ask, “in the face of radical repression, what did you do?” The University is a site for the shelter and encouragement of active, non-violent resistance to radical injustice, which gives us hope that we might become free from the expansion of fear in our society.

For the University as radicalised space


Posted by hallymk1

On Tuesday 13 December De Montfort University will be hosting the Roots of Violent Radicalisation Conference, which has been organised by the Parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee. I will be speaking in the workshop on how Universities can best counter violent radicalisation. I will make the following four points.

  1. The University has a radical, historical tradition that is politicised, and which enables both deliberation about and the legitimisation of alternative positions. Importantly, these positions might be realised inside the University.
  2. Most radicalism is not violent, but seeks to refuse, negate and push back against marginalisation and de-legitimisation, through tactics of deliberation, denial or disobedience.
  3. Current University tactics against protest mirror the state of exception imposed by the State, and that this reinforces marginalisation and de-legitimisation. Thus, strategies for coercion are being imposed and are kettling scholarly debate.
  4. The University should fight to recover itself as a space for general assembly and deliberation, and that this work should be done in public, in order to engage with the roots to violent radicalisation.

Point one: the radical University tradition. There is a distinct and vibrant strand of radicalism, as opposed to violent radicalisation, that infuses the historic idea of the University. This strand connects Newman’s declaration that the University was a site for the “collision of mind with mind”; to Humboldt’s view that “Education of the individual must everywhere be as free as possible, taking the least possible account of civic circumstances. Man educated in that way must then join the State and, as it were, test the Constitution of the State against his individuality”; and to the student activism of the 1960s and 1970s that led the historian EP Thompson to declare a hypothesis that was against:

“a university [that] had become so intimately enmeshed with the upper reaches of consumer capitalist society that [its administration] are actively twisting the purposes and procedures of the university away from those normally accepted in British universities, and thus threatening its integrity as a self-governing academic institution; and that the students, feeling neglected and manipulated in this context, and feeling also – although at first less clearly – that intellectual values are at stake, should be impelled to action.”

And this strand of radicalism connects many other examples of political, scholarly, historical activism: in Oakland; and Santiago; and Turin; and Dhaka; and University College London; and Kent State University; and Manila; and beyond.

Point two: marginalisation and radicalisation on campus. This radicalism is fed, in-part, by marginalisation; by an existence that is de-legitimised beyond the abstraction of money, and where putting students at the heart of the system reveals only the intellectual poverty of a life lived as a consumer, wrapped in the ideological rhetoric of choice, private property, debt and marketisation. This rhetoric then forms the background to the enclosure and removal of historically-accrued, socially-defined goods like free education and healthcare. Thus austerity is exposed as the State’s action against our shared future.

And in response to this marginalisation we see students in a range of contexts taking non-violent direct action that questions the State’s actions and reveals the coercive machinery of its power. Much of this work of protest is done in public spaces through marches and occupations, and Judith Butler has argued the importance of these radicalised, public movements:

“When bodies gather as they do to express their indignation and to enact their plural existence in public space, they are also making broader demands. They are demanding to be recognized and to be valued; they are exercising a right to appear and to exercise freedom; they are calling for a livable life [sic.]. These values are presupposed by particular demands, but they also demand a more fundamental restructuring of our socio-economic and political order.”

This point reflects the politicisation of both the form and the content of our institutions, and a process of indignation or radicalisation. As the activist Pierce Penniless argues:

“We are living in an extraordinarily hot political moment, in which people’s politics are changing rapidly – and in which systemic popular dissent is more visible than it has been for a long time. That it is systemic is most interesting: for all the reductive slogans about bankers and their bonuses, the political conversation that emerges in the camp is far more about systemic change than some peculiar bad bankers.”

Point three: the coercive University in a state of exception. In a reprise of historic activism, we see students marching and subsequently being kettled or maced or receiving official letters from the Police ahead of future demo’s or being threatened with baton rounds; we see students using the historically-situated tactic of occupation, in order to protest their opposition through general assemblies and teach-ins, and being classed as terrorists or extremists, and having services denied to them. Or we witness our educational leaders as supine or quiescent in the face of the brutalisation of our young people by the State. Their silence is deafening.

And now we see the Universities of Sheffield and Birmingham and Royal Holloway (University of London) in the UK seeking or obtaining High Court injunctions banning any form of protest on their property. Against this criminalisation and de-legitimisation of dissent and the creation of a state of exception on campus, Liberty have argued that “The right to protest is a cornerstone of our democracy and this aggressive move hardly sits well with our best British traditions of academic dissent… Universities should be places where ideas and opinions can be explored [my emphasis].” And the written evidence submitted by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies to the Parliamentary Inquiry on the Roots of Violent Radicalisation echoes this point:

“Universities play a key role in challenging prevalent ‘wisdom’ as well as debating and researching controversial topics. The ‘values-led’ approach to the revised strategy risks harming legitimate grievances being aired on campuses and could have a significant damage on intellectual debate and research as well as the international reputation of British universities.”

Thus, these English Universities’ attempt to criminalise the politicisation of the form of the University. They attempt to de-politicise its form whilst its content is being politicised through its marketisation. The inscription of a hidden curriculum of debt and consumption within campus-life is coupled to the de-legitimation of any counter-argument that confronts or refuses or pushes back against their power over where scholars might assemble and what they might discuss. We surely have better strategies than marginalisation and overt coercion with which to accommodate difference?

Point four: reclaiming or re-legitimising Universities as radical spaces. Against the neoliberal constraint on what can legitimately be fought for, University communities might consider how they share stories that reclaim the breadth of their common histories and social relationships. This process might usefully be developed using open technological systems. This is important because universities have much to contribute to a public discussion of how cultures protect the richness of their ecosystems, which in turn helps us to describe alternative worlds, and to accept that much of our present is shaped by historical struggles that are valuable precisely because they are political. Thus, we learn not to accept dominant narratives as given, or neutral, or beyond our collective wisdom to re-define in a legitimate manner. And our non-acceptance is not seen as radicalisation.

Which brings us to an engagement with and understanding of violent radicalisation. Universities, in terms of both their management and the communities of scholars that management is meant to facilitate, need to engage with issues of marginalisation, legitimacy and power, and to do this democratically and in public. It is not enough to de-legitimise all protest as extreme unless it conforms to proscribed norms, in prescribed spaces that are too often private. As the historian John Tosh has argued, differences need to be deliberated:

“Few things would make for a more mature understanding of current affairs than an awareness that the relevant historical perspectives are themselves the subject of debate – particularly if those controversies bear on the present. It then becomes possible to think outside the box – to challenge the spurious authority of single-track thinking.”

In this process we uncover what is legitimate, and we reveal what we collectively are willing to bear in the name of freedom. What we are willing to bear has to be negotiated communally, through a process that re-legitimises the politics of both the form and the content of the University. This demands trust and consent rather than coercion, a discussion that is more vital to the idea of the University in a world that faces not just economic austerity but socio-environmental crisis. For it may be that we risk enduring a semi-permanent state of exception if we do not find the courage to deliberate the reality of our world. EP Thompson recognised this courage emanating from a radicalised student collective, and saw in it a glimpse of redemption beyond economic growth:

 “We have been luckier than any of us had the right to deserve in the quality of our students. They took the initiative. They asked the right questions. They began to understand the answers. They stood firm against rhetoric, against threats, against the special pleading of those with large interests to lose. They have – by now in scores – put their academic careers at risk. It is they who have reasserted the idea of a university. They may well need help.”

This was echoed forty years later by the Federation of Student Islamic Societies when they argued that we need to open-up the debate against and beyond the permanence of exceptional circumstances, in order that “The autonomy of universities as places of free speech and expression should be preserved.” It is in this struggle that the University as a community of scholars should fight to recover both its history and its self-realisation as a public space for the discussion of legitimacy, marginalisation and power.