Call for contributions to a book on ‘Mass Intellectuality: The democratisation of higher education’

February 25, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

Through our work on the Social Science Centre, Joss Winn and I have been approached to produce a book which documents and critically analyses ‘alternative higher education’ projects in terms of their being critical responses to ‘intellectual leadership’ in mainstream higher education. The book is intended to be part of a series already agreed with Bloomsbury Academic Publishing that focuses on ‘intellectual leadership’. The series editors have encouraged us to develop a proposal for a book to be included in this new series. A brief statement about the series is:

‘Perspectives on Leadership in Higher Education’ is a research-level series comprising monographs and edited collections with an emphasis on authored books. The prime purpose of the series is to provide a forum for different and sometimes divergent perspectives on what intellectual leadership means within the context of higher education as it develops in the 21st century.

This is an invitation to attend a workshop where we aim to collectively design a book proposal that is submitted to Bloomsbury. As you can see below, we have drafted a proposal, which the series editors and their peer-reviewers have responded very positively to, but it has always been our intention to ultimately produce the book in a collaborative way with all its authors.

We hope that from the workshop, a revised proposal is produced with confirmed authors and chapter summaries, which we will then submit to Bloomsbury for final approval.

We are very optimistic that it will be accepted, but of course we are at liberty to submit the proposal elsewhere if Bloomsbury decide not to go ahead with it. Either way, we are confident of getting the book published.

Hopefully, the draft proposal below is largely self-explanatory. The chapters headings are only indicative in order to get us this far. We expect a fully revised proposal to come out of the workshop with input from all authors.

If you are interested in writing a chapter for the book, you are strongly encouraged to attend the workshop. We will be seeking international contributions to the book, but would like as many authors as possible to help design the book through attendance at this workshop.

We welcome anyone who is involved with and/or working on alternative higher education projects such as free universities, transnational collectives, occupied spaces, and co-operatives for higher education. We hope that this book will provide a lasting critical analysis of recent and existing efforts to develop alternatives to mainstream higher education in the UK and elsewhere. We expect it to encompass chapters which focus on all aspects of these initiatives including, for example, governance, pedagogy, institutional form, theory, disciplinary boundaries, subjectivities: ‘academic’, ‘teacher’, ‘student’, ‘researcher’, and the role and nature of research outside of mainstream universities.

The workshop will be held on Thursday 5th June in Leicester, UK. Exact details of time and place will be sent to participants nearer the date. If you would like to attend, please email Joss Winn prior to 10th May, with a brief abstract of your anticipated contribution. This will help us get a sense of direction prior to the workshop and organise it more effectively. If you are unable to attend the workshop but would like to contribute to the book, please tell us.

1. Book Title and Subtitle.

‘Mass Intellectuality: The democratisation of higher education’

2. Summary

Drawing on the activism of academics and students working in, against and beyond the neo-liberal university, this book brings together for the first time, both an analysis of the crisis of higher education and the alternative forms that are emerging from its ruins.

3. Description (marketing)

Higher education in the UK is in crisis. The idea of the public university is under assault, and both the future of the sector and its relationship to society are being gambled. Higher education is increasingly unaffordable, its historic institutions are becoming untenable, and their purpose is resolutely instrumental. What and who have led us to this crisis? What are the alternatives? To whom do we look for leadership in revealing those alternatives?

This book brings together critical analyses of the failures of ‘intellectual leadership’ in the University, and documents on-going efforts from around the world to create alternative models for organising higher education and the production of knowledge. Its authors offer their experience and views from inside and beyond the structures of mainstream higher education, in order to reflect critically on efforts to create really existing alternatives.

The authors argue that mass higher education in the UK is at the point where it no longer reflects the needs, capacities and long-term interests of society. An alternative role and purpose is required, based upon ‘mass intellectuality’ or the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge.

4. Key features

1. The book critiques the role of higher education and the University in developing solutions to global crises that are economic and socio-environmental. In this way it grounds an analysis of the idea that there is no alternative for higher education but to contribute to neoliberal agendas for economic growth and the marketisation of everyday life. The restrictions on the socio-cultural leadership inside the University are revealed.

2. The book describes and analyses several real, alternative forms of higher education that have emerged around the world since the ‘Great Recession’ in 2008. These alternatives emerged from worker-student occupations, from engagements in civil society, and from the co-operatives movement. These projects highlight a set of co-operative possibilities for demonstrating and negotiating new forms of political leadership related to higher learning that are against the neo-liberal university.

3. The book argues that the emergence of alternative forms of higher education, based on co-operative organising principles, points both to the failure of intellectual leadership inside the University and to the real possibility of democracy in learning and the production of knowledge. The place of ‘Mass Intellectuality’ as a form of distributed leadership that is beyond the limitations of intellectual leadership in the University will be critiqued, in order to frame social responses to the crisis.

5. Table of Contents

Chapters to be negotiated in a dedicated workshop for the book. However, examples indicative of actual content are as follows.

1. Introduction: Leadership and academic labour: the failure of intellectual leadership in Higher Education [Joss Winn and Richard Hall]

This chapter will introduce the book by offering a perspective on the different types of ‘intellectual leadership’ that exist within higher education i.e. the state, university management, and academic. It will establish a critical framework for understanding the role of each, focused upon their interrelationships, and the tensions and barriers that arise. The chapter aims to introduce and provide a review of the term ‘intellectual leadership’, and then offer a different way of conceiving it as a form of social relationship. In doing so, the authors will briefly question the role, purpose and idea of the university and ask what is it for, or rather, why is it being led? For what purpose? If there has been a failure of leadership, whom has it failed? The authors will then draw on other chapters in the book to offer further responses to these questions, which are themselves developed through the structure of the book: in; against; and beyond the university. We will review the aim of each section, how they are connected and why they point to the need for alternatives. We will address whether it is possible to define alternatives for higher education as a coherent project, and if so how can they be developed and what is the role of leadership in that process?

First section: inside the University

This section sets up the problems of intellectual leadership, historically, philosophically and politically. The co-editors suggest the following indicative areas, which will be defined at the workshop.

The failures of intellectual leadership: historical critique (including militarisation and financialisation)
The failures of intellectual leadership: philosophical critique
Intellectual leadership and limits of institutional structures: managerialism and corporatisation against academic freedom
Technology: enabling democracy or cybernetic control?
The recursive ‘logic’ of openness in higher education: Levelling the ivory tower?

Second section: against the University

This section documents responses to the first section, in the form of recent critical case studies from those working and studying within and outside the academy. The co-editors suggest the following indicative areas, which will be defined at the workshop.

Leaderless networks, education and power
Student intellectual leadership: models of student-academic and student-worker collaboration
Forms of co-operation: case studies of organisational democracy in education
Historical examples of leaderless organisation
Historical examples of resistance to intellectual leadership
Regional examples of alternatives: Latin America, etc. [unless UK-based]
A review of recent initiatives: Student as Producer, SSC, FUN, Free University Brighton, Liverpool, Ragged, P2PU, Brisbane, Edufactory, etc.

Third section: beyond the University

This section provides a critical analysis of the responses described in section two and draws out generalisable themes related to the purpose, organisation and production of higher education, in terms of the idea of Mass Intellectuality, relating it to leadership. The co-editors suggest the following indicative areas, which will be defined at the workshop.

Co-operative higher education. Conversion or new institution building?
Other models: Open Source ‘benevolent dictator’; heroic leader; radical collegiality, co-operatives
Critiques of horizontalism, P2P production, forms of co-operation, radical democracy, etc.
Beyond/problems with/critique of ‘Student as Producer’ (Lincoln)
General intellect, mass intellectuality: New forms of intellectuality
Higher and higher education: Utopian forms of higher education
Intellectual leadership and local communities
Public intellectuals and public education

Conclusion. The role of free universities: in, against and beyond [Joss Winn and Richard Hall].

The concluding chapter will aim to synthesis key points from the book into an over-arching critical, theoretical argument based upon evidence from the preceding chapters. We will question whether the examples of alternatives to intellectual leadership inside and beyond the university are effective and whether they are prefigurative of a fundamental change in the meaning, purpose and form of higher education. We will reflect on the concept of ‘mass intellectuality’, and attempt to develop this idea in light of our critique and preceding evidence. We will attempt to identify a coherent vision for alternatives to mainstream higher education and assess the role and form of ‘intellectual leadership’.

6. Chapter by chapter synopsis

This needs to be determined at our workshop, but the text below is indicative.

Section one collects chapters which discuss the historical, political-economic and technological trajectory of the modern university, with a particular critical focus on the ‘imaginary futures’ of post-war higher education in the UK and elsewhere. In the context of the current social and economic crises, the chapters lay out the failures of universities and their leaders to provide an on-going and effective challenge to neo-liberalism and question why.

Section two collects chapters which focus on recent and historical attempts by students and academics to resist, reinvent and revolutionise the university from within. Looking at UK and international examples, they examine the characteristics of these efforts and assess the effectiveness of critical forms of praxis aimed against what the university has become.

Section three collects chapters which reflect critically on recent student and academic activism that goes beyond the institutional form of the university to understand higher education as a form of social relations independent of mainstream disciplines and structures. They examine several inter-related and complementary forms of practice as well as reflecting critically on their own practice.

7. Indicative Submission date

Workshop to define content and structure in 5th June 2014
First draft of all chapters by October/November 2014.
Peer-review of chapters completed by February/March 2015.
Final draft chapters to co-editors by May/June 2015.
Manuscript delivered by September 2015.

Presentations on academic alienation, academic labour and academic activism

February 24, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

I have a number of presentations coming up that focus upon academic alienation, academic labour and academic activism. The connection between alienation and work, revealed in normative responses to the triple crunch of climate change, peak oil and austerity, leads me to question the ways in which academics enable the hegemonic reproduction of the University for value. I’ll be speaking about academic work/activism and the triple crunch here. However, the following abstract has been accepted for the Academic Identities conference 2014. I will be co-presenting with Joss Winn(from the University of Lincoln and the Social Science Centre).

A Contribution to the Critique of the Political Economy of Academic Labour.

In this paper we analyse ‘academic labour’ using categories developed by Marx in his critique of political economy. In doing so, we return to Marx’s mature writing to help understand the work of academics as productive living labour subsumed by the capitalist mode of production. In elaborating our own position, we are critical of two common approaches to the study of academic labour, especially as they emerge from inside analyses of virtual labour or digital work.

First, we are critical of efforts to define the nature of our work as ‘immaterial labour’ and argue that this category is an unhelpful and unnecessary diversion from the analytical power of Marx’s social theory and method. The discourse around ‘immaterial labour’ raised by the Autonomist or Operaismo tradition is thought-provoking, but ultimately adds little to a critical theory of commodity production as the basis of capitalist social relations. In fact they tend to overstate network-centrism and its concomitant disconnection from the hierarchical, globalised forces of production that shape our objective social reality.

Second, we are cautious of an approach which focuses on the digital content of academic labour to the neglect of both its form and the organising principles under which it is subsumed. Understandably, academics have a tendency to reify their own labour such that it becomes something that they struggle for, rather than against. However, repeatedly adopting this approach can only lead to a sense of helplessness. If, rather, we focus our critique on the form and organising principles of labour, we find that it shares the same general qualities whether it is academic or not. Thus, it is revealed as commodity-producing, with both concrete and abstract forms. By remaining focused on the form of labour, rather than its content, we can only critique it rather than reify it.

This then has implications for our understanding of the relationships between academics and virtual work, the ways in which technologies are used to organise academic labour digitally, and struggles to overcome such labour. It is our approach to conceive of ‘academic labour’ in both its concrete and abstract forms and in relation to a range of techniques and technologies. The purpose of this is to unite all workers in solidarity against labour, rather than against each other in a competitive labour market.

On the domination of time and the liberation of a pedagogical alliance

February 23, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Academics and socially necessary labour time.

In the University, abstract time dominates: the 50-minute hour; the four-week turnaround for feedback on work; being always-on through tethered technologies; the production of journal articles and books; the production and circulation of learning materials; the production and circulation of assessments and feedback; the exchange of ideas as commodities; the governance of production and circulation by intellectual property, patent and copyright law. A value-chain that is real and virtual, and governed by abstract time whilst its temporalities are regulated by the cultural space/time of student-as-consumer.

Abstract time dominates the life of the University as academic labour is really subsumed and recalibrated by capital. As the products of academic labour are re-constituted as commodities, academic labour is disciplined by impact, performance management and internalising league tables and satisfaction scores. The focus becomes less the concrete labour that produces a journal article or a podcast or a report, but the value that can be extracted from those products as they are exchanged through research funding or knowledge transfer or the fees that accompany student retention, and then realised through the accumulation of wealth.

Thus, we see the embodiment of the abstract labour of the academic in the new commodities that form the backbone of a new process of exchange and value creation/extraction. Time is central in this process. The concrete labour which is employed in the process of making a book or an on-line course does not create value, but the time it takes to write the book or course is alienated from the academic as s/he faces the demands of producing them in a competitive environment. This concrete academic labour may have a use for someone, as peer-review or piece of research or whatever, but as the University is subsumed under the dynamics of the market and as its products are required for exchange, that labour becomes an abstracted measure of value. This is an environment where value emerges based on the average time actually required across society, given generally available technological and organisational development, to produce the specific commodity. This average, this socially-necessary labour time, is abstract labour dominated by exchange in the market. Through exchange and competition, any differences in the concrete labour embodied in the book or the online course are averaged out.

As Postone (1993) writes in Time Labour and Social Domination:

As a category of the totality, socially necessary labor time expresses a quasi-objective social necessity with which the producers are confronted. It is the temporal dimension of the abstract domination that characterizes the structures of alienated social relations in capitalism. The social totality constituted by labor as an objective general mediation has a temporal character, wherein time becomes necessity (p. 191).

Thus, the University enmeshed in the market becomes a source of value and also seeks out value from new markets. The attrition on the average time it takes academic labour to produce, circulate or exchange commodities damages the sociability and solidarity of the academic’s wider communities with whom s/he is now in competition. Thus, the socially necessary labour time of academic production increasingly dominates the life of the academic and the student. This domination is made worse for the academic as the University is subsumed under value accumulation, because the academic means of production are necessarily revolutionised through technological and organisational change. This leads to speed-up, impact, always-on, performance management, in order that the productivity of the academic in one day or one month or one year can be measured against her peers through the socially-necessary labour time that determines what her productivity should be. In a competitive market, if that four-week turnaround time is three weeks elsewhere the academic labour rights will be threatened. This measure intensifies and dominates her work.

TWO. Academic subordination to abstract time.

As the University is marketised and academic labour is made productive of value, as Wendling notes (p. 196), abstract time permeates and mediates social relations. Quantifying the time taken to produce, circulate and exchange becomes a form of domination because humanity is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between teacher and student is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between author and peer-reviewer is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between administrator and teaching team is subordinate to capitalist time. The relationship between Vice-Chancellor and outsourcing partners is subordinate to capitalist time. The social relationships of the University are alienated through their subordination to capitalist time. Productivity; time not task; efficiency not humanity.

Here, the individual academic’s work is made social, and lives or dies through profit and loss. The space/time of academic life is recalibrated through exchange and profit and loss. The space/time of academic life is recalibrated through the production, circulation and consumption of the commodity form. The space/time of academic life is recalibrated through the specific historical dynamic of capitalism.

E.P. Thompson recognised this in terms of work-discipline and labour, and the ways in which the systemic domination of the measured time to produce, circulate and exchange products ‘influence[d] the inward apprehension of time of working people?’ (p. 57) As time became increasingly alienated, Thompson argued that our humanity also became alienated from us because our ‘task-orientation’ was subsumed under the clock. Here the production of human necessities and the costs of social reproduction became subordinate to the production of value, and clearly demarcated as something separate from capitalist work. Moreover, “work” and “life” become increasingly demarcated, so that “passing the time of day” becomes objectionable and a waste of the capitalist’s time. As Thompson argues, ‘In mature capitalist society all time must be consumed, marketed, put to use; it is offensive for the labour force merely to “pass the time”.’ (pp. 90-1)

THREE. Time is our everything.

Marx argued this at length in the Grundrisse, and began to develop an analysis of the interrelationships between time in the circuit of production and time in the circulation of commodities, and capital’s drive to control time by reducing socially necessary labour time through technology and organisational developments, by maximising the time available for surplus labour, and by reducing circulation time, in order to turn capital over more quickly.

in addition to the labour time realized in production, the circulation time of capital enters in as a moment of value creation — of productive labour time itself. While labour time appears as value-positing activity, this circulation time of capital appears as the time of devaluation. The difference shows itself simply in this: if the totality of the labour time commanded by capital is set at its maximum, say infinity, so that necessary labour time forms an infinitely small part and surplus labour time an infinitely large part of this [infinity], then this would be the maximum realization of capital, and this is the tendency towards which it strives. On the other side, if the circulation time of capital were = 0, if the various stages of its transformation proceeded as rapidly in reality as in the mind, then that would likewise be the maximum of the factor by which the production process could be repeated, i.e. the number of capital realization processes in a given period of time. The repetition of the production process would be restricted only by the amount of time which it lasts, the amount of time which elapses during the transformation of raw material into product. Circulation time is therefore not a positive value-creating element; if it were = to 0, then value-creation would be at its maximum. But if either surplus labour time or necessary labour time = 0, i.e. if necessary labour time absorbed all time, or if production could proceed altogether without labour, then neither value, nor capital, nor value-creation would exist. Circulation time therefore determines value only in so far as it appears as a natural barrier to the realization of labour time. It is therefore in fact a deduction from surplus labour time, i.e. an increase of necessary labour time. It is clear that necessary labour time has to be paid for, whether the circulation process proceeds slowly or quickly. E.g. in trades where specific workers are required, who can, however, only be employed for a part of the year because the products are, say, saleable only in a given season, [in those trades] the workers would have to be paid for the entire year, i.e. surplus labour time is decreased in exact proportion to the reduction in their possibilities of employment during a given period of time, but still they must be paid in one way or another. (For example in the form that their wages for 4 months suffice to maintain them for a year.) If capital could utilize them for 12 months, it would pay them no higher, and would have gained that much surplus labour. Circulation time thus appears as a barrier to the productivity of labour = an increase in necessary labour time = a decrease in surplus labour time = a decrease in surplus value = an obstruction, a barrier to the self-realization process [Selbstverwertungsprozess] of capital. Thus, while capital must on one side strive to tear down every spatial barrier to intercourse, i.e. to exchange, and conquer the whole earth for its market, it strives on the other side to annihilate this space with time, i.e. to reduce to a minimum the time spent in motion from one place to another. The more developed the capital, therefore, the more extensive the market over which it circulates, which forms the spatial orbit of its circulation, the more does it strive simultaneously for an even greater extension of the market and for greater annihilation of space by time… There appears here the universalizing tendency of capital, which distinguishes it from all previous stages of production

These contradictions, of the need for labour from which to extract a surplus and to add value to the production process, and the need to destroy the costs of labour, and to conquer geography and temporality for exchange, in order to open-up geography and temporality for the market, are also seen in Capital’s need for control. For Harvey, “time–space compression” to refer to the way the acceleration of economic activities leads to the destruction of spatial barriers and distances. In particular, Harvey argues that new technologies and organisational forms, like high frequency trading, containerisation and so on, underpin expansion. Here, either the time or the distance that separates production from exchange and profit is destroyed. Universities driving the expansion of global markets through outsourcing, internationalisation strategies, on-line delivery and so on, reinforce the subsumption of academic labour inside the disciplinary dictates of control. This is the time-space compression of the lifeworld of the academic and the student, rationalised through a technologised curriculum, and governed by value-for-money, the limits of time-bound pedagogies, and the costs of the production and consumption of academic commodities.

This focus on the control of space/time, in order to maximise the instantaneous accumulation of wealth connects to the cybernetic hypothesis. It was the search for control and minimising the risks to accumulation that led Tiqqun to argue:

A system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect: there is a degradation of its energy to the extent that it undergoes exchanges, in the same way as information degrades as it is circulated around. This is what Clausius called entropy. Entropy, considered as a natural law, is the cybernetician’s Hell. It explains the decomposition of life, disequilibrium in economy, the dissolution of social bonds, decadence… Initially, speculatively, cybernetics claimed that it had thus opened up a common ground on which it would be possible to carry out the unification of the natural and human sciences (p. 14).

This entropy was a function of crisis inside a global system of value creation, extraction and accumulation that suffered from disequilibrium and uneven growth, as well as bubbles, booms and busts.

The crises of capitalism, as Marx saw them, always came from a de-articulation between the time of conquest and the time of reproduction. The function of cybernetics is to avoid crises by ensuring the coordination between Capital’s “front side” and “rear side.” Its development is an endogenous response to the problem posed to capitalism — how to develop without fatal disequilibrium arising (p. 21).

Thus, the technologies for control were defined “to maximize the volume of commodity flows by minimizing the events, obstacles, and accidents that would slow them down.” (p. 22) This is increasingly true of the University where flows of management information like psychometric test outcomes and workload data, performance metrics like retention and progression data, and enriched use of technologies to manage research and teaching, attempt to reduce all academic activities to flows that take place in real-time, through structures that are always-on, with feedback and inputs that are “just in time”. As a result the University, like any other capitalist business, attempts to abolish time. Technologies and techniques are designed to accelerate production, to remove labour-related barriers, and to destroy the friction of circulation time.

FOUR. Academic proletarianisation and free time.

One result of this is the dissonance for the academic between the cognitive skills, practices and knowledge that are high value, and the increasing routinisation of academic labour. In particular, Marx argued in Capital, Volume One that machinery and techniques were used to dominate the labourer through proletarianisation.

The shortening of the hours of labour creates, to begin with, the subjective conditions for the condensation of labour, by enabling the workman to exert more strength in a given time. So soon as that shortening becomes compulsory, machinery becomes in the hands of capital the objective means, systematically employed for squeezing out more labour in a given time. This is effected in two ways: by increasing the speed of the machinery, and by giving the workman more machinery to tend. Improved construction of the machinery is necessary, partly because without it greater pressure cannot be put on the workman, and partly because the shortened hours of labour force the capitalist to exercise the strictest watch over the cost of production.

Where labour rights and the reduction in the hours of working are enforced this leads to increased capital intensity as the capitalist seeks to “convert every improvement in machinery into a more perfect means of exhausting the workman”. As Jehu argues this intensification and exhaustion form a process of domination of the body of the labourer and the time for the production of value. Value emerges from more time that is productive through the overcoming of entropy, and yet capital needs the destruction of time. Thus

in labor theory, reduction of hours of labor not only accelerates the development of the productive forces, with this development of the productive forces successive reductions of labor becomes becomes necessary: it “must soon lead to a state of things in which a reduction of the hours of labour will again be inevitable.”

Which is to say, reducing hours of labor first and foremost accelerates the demise of capitalism and wage slavery — freeing up disposable time for the great majority of society.

Therefore in any resistance to Capital’s domination, the recovery of time is pivotal. This is the case because value is measured through social time, which Capital tries to destroy through the co-option of science, co-operation and social commerce, in order to reduce necessary labour time and to attempt to liberate the creation of wealth from labour. Yet Capital measures all value by labour time and the extraction of surplus labour. This is the critical antagonism: “Capitalism is doomed, in sum, because it demands — at the same time — more labor and less labor.” (Tiqqun, p. 37) Thus, for Tiqqun

the new revolutionary subject would reappropriate its “creativity,” or its “imagination,” which had been confiscated by labor relations, and would make non-labor time into a new source of self and collective emancipation. (pp. 37-8)

Wendling also highlights that Marx saw the possibility for liberation in a reclaiming of wealth as ‘disposable time’ (Grundrisse, p. 708). Disposable time, rather than time that is owned by the capitalist and alienated from the worker, is the key to social emancipation. Around free-time, available for social reproduction, education and liberating the general intellect, forms a political battleground. Moreover, it becomes a battleground for social use and wealth, rather than the production for exchange and value. As Wendling notes:

in the communist future, which is not subject to the calculus of value, time must diminish in importance. When we extrapolate Marx’s visions of free time, therefore, we must not only envision the lengthening of the disposable hours the worker marks between short stints of productive labor. We must instead imagine a modern life freed from time, or at least modern life freed from time’s abstract and alienating dominations. (p. 199)

FIVE. Free time and the academic/student relationship

Giroux argues that

Civic engagement seems irrelevant and public values are rendered invisible, if not overtly disparaged, in light of the growing power of multinational corporations to privatize public space and time as it disconnects power from issues of equity, social justice and civic responsibility. Political exhaustion and impoverished intellectual visions are fed by the widely popular assumption that there are no alternatives to the present state of affairs.

This is as true for the two critical relationships of academic and student and academic and public. These relationships offer the possibility of intimacy, care, acceptance and liberation, but inside an increasingly commodified academic process they risk being destroyed by an abstraction. For many academics this is what the duality of student-as-consumer and student-as-producer collapses into: the reality of a concrete relationship, or the abstraction of a process of learning. This process is increasingly enclosed by time-bound teaching sessions or impact/satisfaction metrics and money, which is a form of structural domination over people. This then threatens the idea that epistemological liberation might be underpinned by dialogue and struggle that emerge from a concrete pedagogical alliance rather than an abstract process.

Such an alliance pushes back against the idea that academic/student/public might be locked inside a commodified, abstract, time-bound process that is based on the exchange of money, time, expertise, skills, feedback, peer-review, rather than being rooted in a humane relationship that has a use and that is based on solidarity and sharing. As Giroux continues this is about liberating time from its structural domination over us:

The formative cultures, institutions and modes of critical agency necessary for a vibrant democracy do not exist in a culture in which knowledge is fragmented, power concentrated in few hands and time is reduced to a deprivation for large segments of the public – one consequence of which is the endless struggle by many Americans simply to try to survive at the level of everyday life. The colonizing of time, space and power suggests taking back people’s time in an era when the majority must work more than ever to make ends meet. There is no democracy in a country in which for most people time is a deprivation rather than a luxury. Time is crippled when it is trapped within an endless need to fight to merely survive in order to have enough to eat, have access to decent health care, day care and a social wage. The struggle over time is inextricably linked to a struggle over space, institutions, public spheres, the public good, power, the future and the nature of politics itself.

In Marx’s terms, this struggle demands the analysis of the position of the labour of the academic inside the market, as it is subsumed for the creation and accumulation of value, rather than for its public use/good. Such labour is useful but it is increasingly incorporated inside a social universe whose gravity is value. The increasing value of academic labour enabled through its marketisation and enabling its further exchange begins to dominate the processes of academic production. It dominates working practices, academic relationships, the technologies and intensity of academic labour on a social scale. Thus, as the academic labour of the teacher and the student is restructured by strategies for value creation and accumulation, it has to behave like any other form of labour. It has to satisfy a specific social need and be measured in terms of the totality of academic labour. It is measured and disciplined by socially necessary labour time.

This process of liberation of time for use rather than exchange is the solidarity that might be developed, not be fetishising academic labour, but from seeing it in terms of public and social labour, dominated by time-space compression. Marx noted in Capital, Volume One that:

From this moment on, the labour of the individual producer acquires a twofold social character. On the other hand, it can satisfy the manifold needs of the individual producer himself only in so far as every particular kind of useful private labour can be exchanged with, i.e. counts as the equal of, every other kind of useful private labour. Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labour can be arrived at only if we abstract from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common, that of being the expenditure of human labour-power, of human labour in the abstract. (p. 166)

This argument of commonality and of the solidarity that emerges from global exploitation points towards the potential that labour has to be socially useful and thereby liberated as a common treasury. This is about liberation from the domination of abstract time and the recovery of Thompson’s task-oriented life. This is about refusing, inPostone’s (1993, p. 202) terms, the conception of time that is “uniform, continuous, homogenous… [and] empty of events”. In this view, useful labour emerges through tasks and events that reproduce society against-and-beyond value production. They are a form of sociability that do not occur within time, but instead structure and determine that time (Postone, p. 201).

Potentially then, this is bell hooks’ self-actualisation: a capacity to live more fully and deeply. This is a capacity to integrate intellectual and emotional life through a society that is against value and for humane values. This is a humane capacity that is also the capability to liberate time for use and solidarity, rather than exchange. Here, academic life is not driven by a commodity-valuation based on the domination of abstract time. Academic life is governed by time that is useful for social reproduction. It is not about impact metrics or performance management or turnaround times or workload management. It is based on personal and social relations that dissolve the barriers between work and life, and which enable the teacher and the student to form a pedagogical alliance for the collective, socially-negotiated overcoming of capital’s power-over learning, teaching and the curriculum. This concrete alliance, revealed inside-and-against abstract time, is the beginning and end of our pedagogical fight for free time; a concrete struggle against abstract processes for value creation and accumulation; our concrete potential to be and to become.

some notes on academic co-option and exodus

February 12, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

ONE. This is an age of enclosure; of mine and not yours; of indentured study; of an entrepreneurial life beholden to capitalist work; of a subservience to exchange value; of alienation in the face of money. In the face of the rule of money.

‘An age of crisis, such as the present, is an age of rage. It is an age of frustrated expectations, frustrated hopes, frustrated life. We want to study at the university, but it is too expensive and there are no grants. We need good health care, but we do not have the money to pay for it. We need homes, we can see homes standing empty, but they are not for us. Or quite simply, for the millions and millions of people in the world who are starving: we want to eat: we can see that the food is there, that there is plenty of food for everyone in the world, but something stands between us and the food – money, or rather the fact that we don’t have enough of it.’

‘That does not mean that we do not want money, necessarily. Money is the form that wealth takes in this society, and as the producers of that wealth, we all want to participate in it. In the present society, no matter how austerely we may (or may not) like to live, we need money to live and to realise our projects. So yes, we want more money, for ourselves, for the universities, for schools and hospitals, for gardens and parks, for projects that point towards a different world, and so on. But we do not want a world that is ruled by money, we do not want a world in which the richness that we produce takes the form of money, we do not want a world in which money is the dominant form of social cohesion, the medium through which our social relations are established.’

John Holloway, Rage Against the Rule of Money.

TWO. The University is succumbing to violence. It is a space for the reproduction of systemic violence. From “you have no voice”, to “your voice is delegitimized”. The University is militarised through its research, and the money that conditions it. Students want cops off campus, but University managers conditioned by debt and money need the discipline of the kettle and the courtroom. This is the normalised violence of coercion or control or marginalisation of students; or the militarisation of the physical spaces of our campuses; or the direct co-option of our own/our students’ immaterial labour in making stuff for the military. For the public good.

‘More than 50 universities have received funding from the UK’s national laboratory for nuclear weapons since 2010’

‘In a statement the EPSRC said: “AWE (Atomic Weapons Establishment) has unique research capabilities and assets and is a highly valued partner to EPSRC, contributing significantly to the UK’s overall research endeavour.”

‘It added: “EPSRC is party to both the concordat to support research integrity published by Universities UK in 2012 and to the Research Council UK policy and guidelines on the governance of good research conduct. We, of course, expect all the research we fund to be conducted in line with these policies and know that our partners share our commitment to such standards.”’

‘Cranfield said it had supported the UK defence community through its research since its formation as the College of Aeronautics in 1946. “We are proud that this work has helped protect the men and women of the Armed Services who put their lives at risk daily on behalf of our nation and to have contributed, in part, to the post-conflict reconstruction of nations around the world,” a spokesman said.’

Holly Else, University links to nuclear weapons maker ‘worth £8 million a year’.

THREE. Academics are increasingly co-opted for the maintenance of dominant positions. Co-opted for value. Alienated through the subsumption of their labour-power, and the products of their labour, from any notion of the public good. Reinforcing normative, deterministic myths of inefficiency; myths of the failing of the public; myths of the efficiency of the private; the reality that all of life must be for exchange rather than for use-value. A working life stratified in league tables, and project grants, and impact statements, and the internalised monitoring of work. A working life of performativity; of private knows best; of speed over thought; of consumerism; of the market. A meaningful, critical academic life annihilated by speed and time.

‘It may have been three years coming but the Government now fully accepts the importance of ICT for learning and that it’s not enough to simply leave it all to schools. That was the message from education secretary Michael Gove MP and skills minister Matthew Hancock MP at the first meeting of the Educational Technology Action Group yesterday (February 4).

‘Group chair Professor Stephen Heppell said: “We were given an unequivocal steer by our ministers to be bold and ambitious; to clear away impediments and to be world leading. They reminded us that technology could and should help make learning fun. It was a wonderful brief to be given, from the heart, and we will be open and inclusive in achieving what was asked of us – an action group, not a faffing around group!”

‘Michael Gove’s message to the new group was that he and his team had reflected on their former position of getting out of the way of the education front line. The public sector was not as tech-savvy as consumers and they felt that government had a convening and leadership role to play so that the right conditions were cultivated for education. They recognised the disruptive potential of technology and were committed to supporting teachers in leveraging the best out out [sic.] of technology to improve their effectiveness and professionalism.’

Merlin John, Etag ICT policy group told ‘be bold and ambitious’

FOUR. The University is broken. It is conditioned by neoliberal politics through the tenets of growth, financialisation and securitisation. Its twin contributions to society take the form of debt and privatisation. At issue is which knowledges and practices can be liberated from the University before it is too late. And the role of academics in that liberation.

‘The activist academic seeks a balance between the pursuit of individual rights and broader social justice. Not exactly an original idea. Many have pointed out that we live in a world defined by a proliferation of individual human rights and the neoliberal revival of early savage capitalism, which everywhere seeks to destroy the gains in social justice achieved in the 20^th century. The expansion of “individual” human rights in the U.S. is accompanied by the decrease in social justice, i.e. increase in inequality, within the US, within other nations, and between nations, as well as the destruction of public education and health. Social justice succumbs while individual rights are increasingly enshrined in law. It seems that the larger the scope of legally-adopted human rights, the more the decrease in social justice worldwide. The struggles against both individual and collective wellbeing should be inseparable in theory and practice.’

Raúl Fernández, Nine Reflections for Academic Activists

FIVE. Against the rule of money; a rule of normalised violence; a rule underscored by the co-option of academic labour; a rule that is breaking the University; what is to be done?

‘The notion of exodus is important here, as a form of dissent , revolt or rebellion against capital’s exploitation of the entirety of social life… this connected web of social relations also offers a crack through which we might oppose the domination of capital over our existence. In Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that an association of the multitude, of interconnected oppositional groups that are able to share stories of oppression or austerity or hope or history using a variety of events and spaces, offers the opportunity for multiple protagonists to push for more democratic deployment of global resources. Virno goes further to argue that the very automation that capital develops in order to discipline and control labour makes possible an exodus from the society of capitalist work through the radical redisposal of the surplus time that arises as an outcome of that automation, alongside the ways in which different groups can interconnect in that surplus time. Academics then have an important role in critiquing the potentialities for an exodus away from the society of capitalist work.’

Richard Hall, on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus

On students, teachers and the pedagogical alliance

February 9, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

We look for an idea that is beyond student-as-consumer, and we witness a reinforcement of a deterministic, manifest destiny of the student who bears the risk for her higher education. We witness statements that divide student and teacher: “we continue to use technology to reinforce 19th century teaching practice to meet out-dated assessment models.” We witness statements that tie information and employability to metrics and risk, through choice and accountability. We witness statements made about the rule of money in the creation of a market that will lever teaching excellence: “Without radical changes to how universities were financed however it was going to be difficult to change their behaviour. Now there is an opportunity to use our funding changes to push a real cultural change back towards teaching.” We witness statements made that reduce education to value: “Without high educational attainment, the UK will not maintain its wealth, quality of life and status in the world. A highly educated population is essential to Britain’s success in the global knowledge economy.”

Education defined by price; defined as value; defined for value. Relationships framed by price; defined as value; defined for value. Educational relationships framed by the ability of the student to manage her own risk: in finding £9,000 per annum to pay for access to her education; in managing her transition into higher education; in accessing and corralling sufficient resources to ensure progression across years; in enclosing and commodifying sufficient emotional and cultural and social capital to be employable. To become an entrepreneur in the face of the growth delusion of the UK economy, and the global assault on labour and the sociology of moderation that some would have us believe is opportunity, or skills for jobs as yet not invented, or the natural order.

Capitalist work as the natural order. The only alternative being there is no alternative.

And in this what is lost is the critical relationship between the student and the teacher. What is the complicity of the teacher in the entrepreneurial reinvention of the student? What is the definition of the pedagogy and of the curriculum worth in the face of the entrepreneurial reinvention of the student? What is the purpose of the teacher in the face of the risk- and compliance-based culture of higher education? What is the value of the teacher’s academic labour inside a marketised higher education? Where the social relationship between student and teacher is commodified around outcomes, performance, managerialism and risk, is there an alternative to a culture of performativity?

Where is the space to debate the alternative? We don’t witness this in the current UCU industrial action based on pay. We rarely witness this in the campaigns that claim to defend the British University. We are left, as Andrew McGettigan notes, with financialisation as the key determinant of the student-teacher relation.

Consumerism produces a new ‘teaching’ vector: customer-manager-ombudsman-regulator. It displaces traditional academic relations: it is essentially deprofessionalising. It cannot be emphasised enough that, no matter how many regulatory bodies, quangos and paper-trail hounds clog up the sector, the bottom line is that universities have degree awarding powers because they demonstrate (or are meant to) a ‘self-critical community’ of academics and scholars who safeguard standards.

As the pressures of the rule of money are exerted we wonder, what is to be done? Do we buy the idea that the University, governed by vice-chancellors as chief executives, and students as carriers of units of debt, and credit ratings agencies, and private providers operating with impunity inside its walls, and the realities of insurers of risk and bond markets, is lost? Do we cave to the idea that as a globally-competing business, the relationship between student and teacher is lost to the market, or as Neary and Hagyard argued to we re-radicalise the curriculum, and our relationships inside it?

In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of student as consumer, the links between teaching and research need to be radicalised to include an alternative political economy of the student experience. This radicalisation can be achieved by connecting academics and students to their own radical political history, and by pointing out ways in which this radical political history can be brought back to life by developing progressive relationship between academics and students inside and outside of the curriculum.

And this echoes and amplifies the radical, critical, pedagogical work of bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress, that

to educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin (p. 13).

This is spiritual, because it is about the person, in the form of the teacher and in the form of the student. It is about having soul and spirit and connecting to the soul and the spirit. It is not about connecting through the base abstraction of money. Thus, she continues:

that means that teachers must be actively involved committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. (p. 15)

This is the testing of reality through the organising principles and values of the curriculum, in a way that Freire acknowledged in Pedagogy of the Oppressed:

[T]he more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it. This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side. (p. 39)

Transformation is liberation because it is deeply and politically personal and rooted in solidarity. It is not about the entrepreneurial internalisation of the risk of failure, it is framed by spaces inside-and-through which it is possible to challenge one’s perception of one’s place in the world with others. Thus, Freire maintains that this is about education and the politics of place, linked to identity, without which “there can be no real struggle.” In turn this is rooted in questioning and praxis: “For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (p. 72)

Here the role of the teacher is not as liberator, but as member of a solidarity economy through which pedagogy is not done to the unfortunate student as a form of emulation, but is defined and produced by the student. For Freire, “The oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for their redemption”. (p. 54) Elsewhere Freire noted that “The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” (p. 181)

This connects deeply to the idea that the teacher might hold the same liberation role, born out of solidarity, as the therapist who is able to effectively support the emancipation of her client as a human being. As Wampold has argued for psychotherapy, relationships that emerge from trust, care and love rooted in empathy tend to have an impact on recovery/liberation.

Putting aside the debate about whether some treatments are more effective than others, it is clear that if there are differences among treatments, the differences are quite small (Wampold, 2001, 2007, 2010). Thus, we are left with the question: If the differences among treatments are nonexistent or are very small, are there other factors that do have an influence on the effects of psychotherapy? The answer is yes—the therapist who is providing the psychotherapy is critically important. In clinical trials as well as in practice, some therapists consistently achieve better outcomes than others, regardless of the treatment approach used (Wampold, 2006).

Whilst Wampold highlights 14 qualities of effective therapists, the following seem especially pertinent in reflecting on Freire, hooks and Neary and Hagyard’s pedagogic radicalisation of the student/teacher relationship:

Clients [students] of effective therapists [teachers] feel understood, trust the therapist [teacher], and believe the therapist [teacher] can help him or her. The therapist [teacher] creates these conditions in the first moments of the interaction through verbal and importantly non-verbal behavior. In the initial contacts, clients [students] are very sensitive to cues of acceptance, understanding, and expertise. Although these conditions are necessary throughout therapy [the curriculum], they are most critical in the initial interaction to ensure engagement in the therapeutic [pedagogic] process.

Effective therapists [teachers] are able to form a working alliance with a broad range of clients [students]. The working alliance involves the therapeutic [pedagogic] bond, but also importantly agreement about the task of goals of therapy [learning]. The working alliance is described as collaborative, purposeful work on the part of the client [student] and the therapist [teacher]. The effective therapist [teacher] builds on the client’s [student’s] initial trust and belief to form this alliance and the alliance becomes solidly established early in therapy [teaching].

Moreover, this approach is reinforced in some analyses of the interrelationships between the client’s theory of change and therapist variables in psychoanalysis. Here what emerges is the critical “interplay between therapist variables (the person of the therapist) and the client’s theory of change. When these two vital factors meet, something new is created. It is crucial that the therapist becomes aware of, and manages, the effect of therapist variables on the alliance.” Just as the client’s theory of change in therapy co-evolves with the therapist through dialogue, meaningful pedagogic engagements are deeply political in that they involve the co-evolution of the spaces inside-and-against which the student and the teacher negotiate the liberation of the former from the latter’s power over her, alongside the understanding that the student has over the structural domination that de-limits her power to create her world.

Critically, this does not involve a uniform creation of the client/therapist or student/teacher model. That model might be revealed as advocacy or directive or designing or co-operative. They are individually framed and defined, and are grounded in phenomenological difference. As Robinson notes:

Research further suggests the most important aspect of therapy that involves the therapist is the therapeutic alliance. According to Assay and Lambert (1999), the therapeutic alliance accounts for 30 per cent of outcome variance. For Wampold (2001), the alliance accounts for more than half of the 13 per cent attributed to therapeutic factors, rather than client and extra-therapeutic factors. Put another way, the alliance accounts for seven times as much outcome variation as the model or technique being used by the therapist.

Thus, what is clear in the therapeutic situation, is understanding how the specific therapist meets the client’s theory of change, as it is revealed in the therapeutic alliance, precisely because: “each therapeutic encounter is a one-off encounter between a unique client with their unique theory of change, and a unique therapist with their unique response.” Here, for Robinson, two types of questions emerge in the therapeutic alliance: “They will ask ‘what part does my client’s theory expect me to play?’ They will then ask ‘Is this a part I have the skills to play and am capable of playing, and is it a part that ethically I am willing to play?’” In critical pedagogic terms teachers might also ask: “what part does student’s epistemological theory expect me to play in her learning? Is this a part that I have the skills to play and am capable of playing, and is it a part that ethically I am willing to play?

From a willingness to ask these questions emerges a social dialogue around: power and roles in organising a curriculum for liberation; the expertise, skills and knowledge to be shared; the practices to be uncovered, trialled and tested. This feels like the solidarity of connection that is beyond the rule of money. Pace Robinson, we might continue thus: “The client [student] comes to therapy [learn] with their presenting [pedagogical] problem(s), their solutions, their internal and external resources and, arising out of all of this, their own unique theory of change. The many variables that contribute to ‘me’ as a therapist [teacher] then come into play as I endeavour to meet the challenge to connect with this person and their theory.” At issue is then finding a dialogic solution that is constantly negotiated by student and teacher, which accommodates the student’s epistemological and ontological view of the world inside a pedagogical alliance. Such an alliance addresses what the student considers important and relevant, and helps the student frame a pedagogy that can support her action in the world. This needs to take place both inside and outside the classroom, in order to reflect what the student needs from the curriculum.

The question is whether educators have the will to struggle for a pedagogical alliance that is based upon the collective, socially-negotiated overcoming of power-over learning, teaching and the curriculum. Do they have the will to struggle for the humanistic connections between students and teachers, or will the abstracted power of money dominate and de-legitimise? How might a critical pedagogy enable self-actualisation and the genesis of the soul of the student through a pedagogical alliance?

Notes on hegemony and counter-narratives

February 6, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Transnational activist networks for privatisation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO. Networks of transnational hegemonic power.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE. Hegemonic power needs hegemonic narratives

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

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

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

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

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

FOUR. Transnational organisational principles to confront transnational capital

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIVE. On the organisation of counter-narratives

Antonio Gramsci. Workers’ Democracy.

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

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

DMU’s UCU teach-in

February 5, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

The workshop will discuss:

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

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

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

Canada’s New University Solidarity Co-operative.

Discover Society on the political economy of higher education.

Novara media articles on education.

Open Democracy student/worker Occupy Communiques.

radical philosophy articles on education.

Remaking the University on the privatisation of US higher education.

The Social Science Centre, Lincoln UK.

Zerohedge on student loan debt.

The 3Cosas campaign.

DMU Policy Commission: Young people and employment

February 4, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

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

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

References

Jonathan and I have pulled together some references.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Economics Foundation (2010). 21 hours.

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

Social enterprise at the University of Northampton.

UK Commission for Employment and Skills.

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

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

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

Work Foundation website on youth and employment.

Zerohedge on the student debt bubble.

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

some notes on academic labour and the autonomy of Capital

January 8, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

ONE. Autonomy for whom? Autonomy from what?

William I. Robinson has argued that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO. The fallacy of academic freedom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE. Academic labour and the autonomy of Capital

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

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

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

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

Some notes on academic labour and fronts of struggle

January 7, 2014
Posted by hallymk1

ONE. The State will not save the public University

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

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

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

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

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

TWO. The University disciplined globally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE. For association

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOUR. Precarity and the living death of capitalist work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIVE. Academic labour and fronts of struggle

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

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

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

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