Tag Archives: politics

On the University and revolution from within


Posted by hallymk1

On Sunday Kate Bowles tweeted that:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


On the secular crisis and a qualitative idea of the University


Posted by hallymk1

I was struck over the weekend by a friend’s statement that “I struggle to translate your critiques into the various education/technology contexts of the global South”. This is an issue that generally plagues those of us who work in higher education in the global North, and for whom the wider, global context is increasingly viewed through the prism of competition. Earlier this year, at the Alpine Rendez-Vous, a specific workshop tried to pull out some key questions for those working in the interstices between higher education and technology, in order to address some of these issues of private/public, quantitative/qualitative, development/global sustainability etc.. The workshop focused some thinking in the following areas.

  • Have we implicitly assumed that the western/European model of universities is necessarily the sole or best expression of a culture’s or a community’s higher learning and intellectual enquiry?
  • As western/European pedagogy, or rather the corporatised, globalised versions of it, now deploys powerful and universal digital technologies in the interests of profit-driven business models, should we look at empowering more local and culturally appropriate forms of understanding, knowing, learning and enquiring?
  • Is encapsulating the world’s higher learning in institutions increasingly modelled on one format and driven by the same narrow global drivers resilient and robust enough, diverse and flexible enough to enable different communities, cultures and individuals to flourish amongst the dislocation and disruption we portray as characterising the crises?
  • Our responses, for example personal learning environments or the digital literacies agenda, seem implicitly but unnecessarily framed within this western/European higher education discourse – can these be widened to empowered other communities and cultures entitled to the critical skills and participation necessary to flourish in a world of powerful digital technologies in the hands of alien governments, corporations and institutions?

Our increasing inability to view globalised higher education from any perspective other than that of competing nation states in a transnational system, and of universities as competing capitals inside that world-view, is highlighted by Matt Lingard’s report on the Universities UK event, Open and online learning: Making the most of Moocs and other models. Critically, Lingard highlights how MOOCs are being utilised to catalyse further marketisation of education in the global North with the on-line space being used less as a socially transformative experience, and more as a space for public/private partnership, in order to lever global labour arbitrage and strengthen the transnational power of specific corporations:

The world of MOOCs is full of partners. Universities are partnering with delivery & marketing platforms such as Coursera & Udacity. Companies such as Pearson are partnering with them to proctor in-person exams (eg find a test centre for your edX MOOC). The sponsors of the UUK event were Academic Partnerships & 2U. Slightly different services, but both working with universities to develop & deliver online courses. David Willetts hopes that MOOC & industry partnerships will develop & potentially help with the UK skills gap (such as computer science).

This increasingly competitive, efficiency-driven discourse focuses all activity on entrepreneurial activity with risk transferred from the State to the institution and the individual. The technology debate inside higher education, including MOOCs, falls within this paradigm and acts as a disciplinary brake on universities, just as the State’s marshaling against opposition to austerity acts as a disciplinary brake on individual or social protest. What is witnessed is increasingly a denial of socialised activity beyond that which is enclosed and commodified, be it the University’s attempt to escape its predefined role as competing capital, or the individual’s role as competing, indentured entrepreneur. As these roles prescribe an increasingly competitive identity for the student and the University, what chance is there for describing global alternatives that are not those of neoliberal institutions like the World Bank, the Education Sector Strategy 2020 of which declares:

Education is fundamental to development and growth. Access to education, which is a basic human right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, is also a strategic development investment. The human mind makes possible all other development achievements, from health advances and agricultural innovation to infrastructure construction and private sector growth. For developing countries to reap these benefits fully—both by learning from the stock of global ideas and through innovation—they need to unleash the potential of the human mind. And there is no better tool for doing so than education.

The rights of the child are tied to strategic development investment, which is likely to come from transnational corporations and States in the North, with an outcome a strengthening of those labour pools for privatised knowledge, innovation and enterprise. In part, this reflects Marx’s development in the Grundrisse of a theory of crisis related to overproduction in one arm of the system:

in a general crisis of overproduction the contradiction is not between the different kinds of productive capital, but between industrial and loan capital; between capital as it is directly involved in the production process and capital as it appears as money independently (relativement) outside that process.

As a crisis of overproduction emerges in educational commodities in the global North, technology becomes a fundamental strand of a strategy for commodity-dumping and value extraction from other arms of the globalised system. Thus, the World Bank notes:

Another set of changes is technological: incredible advances in information and communications technology (ICT) and other technologies are changing job profiles and skills demanded by labor markets, while also offering possibilities for accelerated learning and improved management of education systems.

Technology ties the interface between development and education to labour markets and capitalist work, rather than to solving issues of social production, sustainability or global leadership in a world that faces: economic stagnation, including the threats to national and corporate debt and liquidity of an end to the bull market in bonds, a dislocation between the real and shadow economies, and falling corporate revenues that impact the rate of profit; climate tipping points through increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the oceans and atmosphere; problems of access to liquid resources like oil with a potentially catastrophic focus on shale oil and gas; and problematic access to food staples through commodities trading.

The issue of social production leads me back to the idea of the secular crisis, and Harry Cleaver’s work on reading capital politically. Cleaver’s first thesis on the secular crisis states that:

secular crisis means the continuing threat to the existence of capitalism posed by antagonistic forces and trends which are inherent in its social structure and which persist through short term fluctuations and major restructurings.

This systemic threat to the system is a function of the crisis inherent in capitalism’s need to maintain an increase in the rate of profit catalysed through revenues that can be levered from new markets, lower labour costs, or technological innovation. This tends however, to Cleaver’s second thesis, that of the crisis of the class relation:

The basic antagonistic forces which are inherent in the social structure of capitalism, which endure through the ups and downs of fluctuations and restructurings, which have been repeatedly internalized without ever losing their power of resurgence, are the negativity and creativity of the working class. The working class persistently threatens the survival of capitalism both because of its struggles against various aspects of the capitalist form of society and because it tends to drive beyond that social form through its own inventiveness. As opposed to all bourgeois ideologies of social contract, pluralism and democracy, Marxism has shown that working class anatagonism derives from capitalism being a social order based on domination, i.e., on the imposition of set of social rules through which, tendentially, all of life is organized. Class antagonism is thus insurpassable by capitalism within its own order because that antagonism is inseparable from the domination which defines the system.

In reflecting on the experiences of a competitive higher education in the global North and its role in the marketisation of everyday life in the global South, we might reflect on Cleaver’s use of the idea of systemic domination in the name of value, and his idea in Reading Capital Politically that we need to think about power and the use of a life constructed qualitatively rather than quantitatively.

The intensity of the struggle is dictated by the degree of power. When workers can organize sufficiently to directly appropriate wealth, they do so. At the same time, they struggle to obtain the kind of wealth they want — the work conditions, the leisure time activities, and the use-values. In this sense, too, the struggle is qualitative as well as quantitative.

In a globalised life that is restructured around the metrics of efficiency, value, enterprise, and where all life is enclosed and measured for-profit, are there alternative, qualitative descriptions of life that might enable alternatives to be developed? Are there alternative spaces that might be described qualitatively? One possibility lies in the idea of the commons and the praxis that emerges from commoning; a global idea of socialised solidarity that is exemplified in recent work on the wealth of the commons. This is a set of interconnected spaces that are social and negotiated, focused on a social dialogue between abundance and scarcity that enables democratic governance to shape life. As the epilogue to the wealth of the commons states:

To us, the evidence seems clear: people everywhere have a strong desire to escape the helplessness that institutions impose on them, overcome the cynicism that blots out optimism, and transcend the stalemates that stifle practical action. Another world is possible beyond market and state. This book chronicles some new ways forward – and the beginnings of an international commons movement.

It is inside this statement, and through a rediscovery of our global narratives of the commons and commoning that I might begin to reframe my work against the various education/technology contexts of the global South. Merely reframing it around solutions to the secular crisis of capitalism emerging in the global North does nothing for the development of a qualitatively different, resilient education. It is educational ideas and stories that are beyond the market and the state, which are social and co-operative that need to be described and nurtured. We might then begin to describe an alternative, qualitative future for the idea of the University in the face of the secular crisis.


On the University and a ‘revitalised public’


Posted by hallymk1

In his thin review of Andrew McGettigan’s ‘The Great University Gamble’, Nick Hillman argues that

As well as lacking historical awareness, the book has an odd take on current policymaking. McGettigan repeatedly asserts that the Coalition’s motives are concealed from view. The Government are proceeding ‘without presenting its plans or reasoning to the public.’ Opponents of the higher education reforms have been outmanoeuvred by politicians who call ‘snap votes’, ‘sneak passages’ into legislation and use ‘existing powers quietly’ (his italics).

This doesn’t stack up. The students who poured into central London in 2010 were not protesting at being kept in the dark about the Government’s intentions. The £9,000 tuition fee cap was announced in Parliament and later debated and voted on in both the Commons and the Lords. Other important elements of the student finance package, like the real interest rate, were in primary legislation that went through all the regular parliamentary stages. There has been a higher education white paper and an accompanying technical document as well as numerous public consultations on contentious issues, such as the regulation of alternative providers.

Two issues come to mind and both are rooted in the use of history by policymakers. First, the central point made by Hillman is that “important elements” were “in primary legislation” (my emphasis). They were in primary legislation; they were not in and of themselves primary legislation. This way of doing political business, by signalling a cultural shift through white papers, changes to VAT on shared services, technical consultations, changes to student number controls and core/margin allocations, sets a direction for marketization through tactical engagement. It is less about fighting the battle for ideas in public than it is about laying markers for marketization. One might argue that it is not about creating a deliberative space to discuss the realities of public or socialised education and what the University is for, but it is about cracking or fracturing what exists, in order to extract value from that system.

Maybe this is a function of there is no alternative, and the realpolitik of Coalition Government. However, it also reminds me of the policy-making of that disenfranchised wing of the Tory party, under both the Whig Junto Administration of the reign of William III and then Harley’s Administrations under Queen Anne, which sought to ‘Tack’ controversial legislation to finance bills so that they would not receive the scrutiny they deserved in Parliament. A second outcome was that the risk in removing the tacked legislation was that the finance bill, required for the functioning of the State, and especially the State at war for Empire, would fail. The key example was in 1704-05 when High Church (Tory) zealots in the Commons tried to force the third Occasional Conformity bill past the (Whig-controlled and more tolerant) Lords by tacking it to the Land Tax bill. This was seen to be factious and constitutionally dubious and followed a similar attempt in 1702, a bluff which the Lords threatened to call. (See Geoffrey Holmes’ magisterial British Politics in the Age of Anne.)

At issue here is the way in which policy, strategy and realpolitik stack-up in the face of a public space that is being cracked open and increasingly commodified. As McGettigan highlights elsewhere, the financial and governing complexities of that space, the meanings of public and private, and what we wish to be publically-funded, regulated and governed each need critique. This is where history comes in for the second time, and we might do well to reflect on Martin Daunton’s analysis of how the current financial crisis fixes on historical power and the humanity of History within policymaking:

What does history teach us? We need to understand the circumstances in which institutions were created, so that we are aware of their problems adapting to new circumstances. We need to understand the assumptions of different countries that are rooted in national histories. We also need to recognise how politicians and commentators are using and abusing history for their own purposes. And we need to understand that policymaking… cannot be reduced to neat theories and mathematical formulae.

Such a critical appraisal of the present, made in terms of the past, anchors the view that actual academic practices are socio-historically-situated, and operate at a range of scales within society. This socio-historical perception of the academic sits asymmetrically in relationship to what Stephen Ball defines as neoliberal transnational activist networks. These networks emerge as assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power through shared ideologies and resource interdependencies. They consist of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers, and so on, which aim at regulating the state for enterprise and the market. One such mechanism is private think-tanks, which utilise academically-funded research outputs or practices, and which support the incorporation of “important elements” “in primary legislation”, based upon: their belief in market economics as the key mechanism for overcoming scarcity, distributing abundance and overcoming disruption; their focus on policy and high politics; and their focus on the University as the point of departure for the privatisation of knowledge creation.

Critically, this then becomes a space inside-and-against which consent for the politics of marketization and restructuring can be manufactured. Witness the Future of the Higher Education Curriculum conference, which argues that:

As funding structures for higher education change, with universities now funded by student loans, it is imperative that universities deliver optimum teaching and learning and design their curricula to ensure student attraction and retention

In this process, the UK Coalition Government’s HE strategy threatens both to silence academics as independent, critical actors and to enclose such practices through: the removal of state subsidies; the individuation of educational experiences and risk in the name of entrepreneurialism; and the commodification of learning. We might then consider in this process of restructuring the role of our history, both in policymaking and in the idea of the public. As John Tosh argues for the historian so is true for academics more generally in the face of our current modus operandi for policymaking:

For historians themselves, good citizenship consists in contributing their expertise to the national conversation: exposing politically slanted myth, placing our concerns in more extended narratives, testing the limits of analogy, and above all showing how familiarity with the past can open the door to a broader sense of the possibilities in the present. That should be our contribution to a ‘revitalised public’.


The University and the secular crisis


Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Such a revolutionary subjectivity is entwined with the need to develop

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

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


The University and the rule of money


Posted by hallymk1

In a post from September 2011 on academic activism, boundary-less toil and exodus, I amend a quote from John Holloway to argue that “academics need to consider their participatory traditions and positions, and how they actively contribute to the dissolution of their expertise as a commodity, in order to support other socially-constructed forms of production”. The amended Holloway quote is as follows.

In reality, what the [University] does is limited and shaped by the fact that it exists as just one node in a web of social relations. Crucially, this web of social relations centres on the way in which work is organised. The fact that work is organised on a capitalist basis means that what the [University] does and can do is limited and shaped by the need to maintain the system of capitalist organisation of which it is a part. Concretely, this means that any [University] that takes significant action directed against the interests of capital will find that an economic crisis will result and that capital will flee from the [University] territory.

I then go on to argue that:

Whether or not we agree with Holloway’s point about the state’s implications in the maintenance of a capitalist order, we have seen capital’s increasing control over higher education in the United Kingdom through the Coalition Government’s shock doctrine. The ideological, political drive towards, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing means that the University has little room for manoeuvre in resisting the enclosing logic of competition and in arguing for a socialised role for higher education. This means that the internal logic of the University is prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships.

I have been reminded of this by Steve Smith’s acceptance of the politics of austerity and his focus on the rule of money in defining a UK higher education that is predicated on competition and marketisation. This reminds me that the leadership we might crave for an alternative form of higher education that is against student-as-consumer and the extraction of value from previously socialised goods like education, is highly unlikely to come from University Vice-Chancellors. GurminderBhambra provides a salutary reminder of that fact in her comment piece on the Sussex privatisation protests, and the disciplinary reaction of University leaders to peaceful campus protest. It is worth re-visiting the demands and calls for dialogue of those involved in that protest, in order to reflect on the courage it takes to stand-up for collective forms of higher education in a set of spaces that are being increasingly enclosed and commodified, and against the cultural space that is increasingly described by business leaders like Smith.

So the question of how to address the realpolitik of neoliberalism, becomes what is to be done in the face of the politics of austerity? What alternatives are possible in the face of the insistent mantras of the rule of money, other than, as Andrew McGettigan does so ably, to follow the money and to show what we risk losing as we enclose and commodify the historic value of a higher education that was constructed socially? In light of the leadership revealed in Smith’s comment piece I return to my posting from earlier this week on memory, profitability, disruption and socialised alternatives:

At issue are the ways in which knowledge and forms of knowing that are created inside the University, MOOC, disruptive-wherever can be liberated or repatriated for global knowing, and against enclosure and commodification. What forms of knowledge, what skills and practices, what ways of knowing, what mechanisms for analysing global problems, can be emancipated and used to define alternative, socialised value forms? To where can they be liberated or repatriated so that they can be used against-and-beyond their private accumulation for profit? How and where do we ignite critical, political pedagogic practices that enable the democratic production and consumption of knowledge and knowing? These are the questions that ought to frame the idea of (disruptions to) higher education, and its contributions to our collective responses to global crises.

In contesting the enclosure and commodification of the university and higher education there is a need to connect the work of protests like those at Sussex, to the work of trades unions, and to alternative spaces like the Campaign for the Public University and to live projects like the Social Science Centre. Possibilities for refusal and for pushing back on issues of both institutional governance and operation are critical. As McGettigan argues, we need to think about the public funding, regulation and governance of institutions and the sector, and to make connections to other educational spaces like the Workers Educational Association and the Co-operatives movement. However, we also need to consider whether a more activist, public and social role for academics is necessary in the face of the restructuring of universities as competing capitals. We might, then, consider how and where students and teachers can dissolve the symbolic power of the University into the actual, existing reality of protest, in order to structure a process of meaningful social transformation? At issue is the autonomy of the University in helping to define such an alternative when its world is increasingly shaped by the polyarchic constraints of money/commodity and market-based consumption.


On memory, profitability, disruption and socialised alternatives


Posted by hallymk1

On memory: In scoping the policy space inside which Australian Higher Education is being restructured, Kate Bowles argues for recognising the complexity of higher education in all its forms, and for finding spaces to contest the neoliberal mantra of efficiency. She argues that:

[academics] now need to speak up in precise and evidence-based ways about the opportunity cost of applying the Efficiency Dividend to something as complex and socially diverse as Australian higher education.

This is an important point that asks us to recognise and articulate the complexity of our socialised memory. How might we describe the pedagogic projects that form and are formed by our lives? What is needed is a historical analysis of the socialised nature of higher education and the socialised nature of the kinds of learning and knowing that take place inside its forms, as they are defined spatially and temporally. This socialisation is deliberately set against the individuated, commodified, entrepreneurial and venture capital-driven responses that currently infect our discussion of possible, alternative forms of higher education. David Kernohan exemplifies this need for a historical analysis when he argues against the simplistic reduction of the discussion of (massive and open) on-line education to its co-option by elites in the present. He recognises the relationships between historical memory, socialised value, and institutions as social spaces for generating and sharing knowing or knowledge:

Work needs to be done. But I am unable to agree that the answer lies in trying to subvert what already exists, because there is already an entire industry that has been trying to do that for 20 years, and they have already succeeded in destroying a lot of what was great about the old system. When we see academic conditions fall again and again, when we see new PhDs earning less than they would tending bar, when we see learners treated like numbers, we know that it could be better because in living memory it has been better. Maybe it is our memories we need to share with you.

On profitability: In defining and sharing the value of remembering, the mechanisms through which MOOCs or whatever-disruptive-innovations have been subsumed under or erased by “the missions of the elite colleges and universities [that t]hey were designed to undermine” (as Stephen Downes has argued), is less important than recognising that they represent one mechanism through which capital is seeking to restore its systemic profitability. Their relationship to universities as competing, global capitals, and inside the systemic drive to release new masses of surplus value that can underpin new forms of accumulation from new markets needs to be understood.

To argue for or against “the deeply subversive intent and design of the original MOOCs” is a secondary issue facing higher education. The deeper set of questions revolves around the real subsumption of the forms of higher education by transnational finance capital, in order to restore profitability in the face of global, structural crisis. Michael Roberts notes that “investment depends on profit – and profit depends on the exploitation of labour power and its appropriation by capital”. Thus, the relationships between venture capitalists, universities and colleges, and on-line providers, need to be seen systemically in terms of capital’s overcoming of the barriers to profitability. This is especially the case inside the current historical crisis of capital where new barriers to accumulation have been reached. In order to set the processes for capital accumulation in-train once more, a new mass of surplus value needs to be released and there is an increasingly desperate search for new markets. Much of the current discussion about MOOCs and the relationships between formal and informal educational providers are enclosed by the reality of overcoming disruptions to established, systemic patterns of accumulation and profitability. These disruptions are forcing the value incorporated inside previously socialised spaces like higher education into the open, where it can be re-enclosed and commodified.

Thus, in order to generate a meaningful response to the pleas of Bowles and Kernohan for pushing back against the drive for efficiency and for generating alternatives, it is no use framing those alternatives inside-and-against a view of the elite University vs allegedly disruptive, on-line innovations. As Dumenil and Levy, quoted in Basu and Vasudevan, note the point is to understand the place of public higher education inside the systemic realities of capitalism’s drive to re-establish profitability and accumulation using a variety of mechanisms, like indentured study, defining universities as business, outsourcing, efficiency dividends, MOOCs etc.:

the rate of expansion of a capitalist economy is limited by the general rate of profit that it can generate. The intuition is straightforward. Expansion of a capitalist economy is the accumulation of capital; accumulation, in its turn, rests on capitalizing surplus value, i.e., generating and realizing surplus value. Since profit is a form of expression of surplus value, it follows that the rate of profit governs the rate of expansion of the system. On the demand side it has an impact on the inducement to investment; on the supply side, it determines the financing of investment. There is also in addition a link between profitability and stability.

In dishing the Keynesian analysis of austerity and spending Roberts has some salient context for this discussion. He argues that the key in responding to the current crisis of capitalism is to understand the relationships between: government activity; socialisation in the form of spending on public works, education or health; and production/consumption processes that underpin profitability. Roberts states that spending

on education and health (human capital)… may help to raise the productivity of labour over time, but it won’t help profitability. If it goes mainly into government investment in infrastructure, it may boost profitability for those capitalist sectors getting the contracts, but if it is paid for by higher taxes on profits, there is no gain overall. And even if it is financed by taxes on wages or cuts in other spending it will only raise overall profitability if it goes into sectors with a lower ratio of capital to labour.

In terms of the UK economy he notes that “Productivity in productive sectors of the economy is stagnant and investment has collapsed. Holders of capital are accumulating cash, sending it abroad or buying financial assets.” Those financial assets include student debts and institutional bond issues, and he might also add that Capital is looking at ways of cracking open the value contained in public education through labour arbitrage, outsourcing and privatisation, for private accumulation.

On disruption: The disruptive nature of MOOCs or whatever on-line innovation has to be seen inside-and-against the current crisis of capitalism, and the ways in which they exemplify the tensions between the social character of production and the private character of appropriation inside the system. As highlighted by Marx in the Grundrisse, these innovations are ways in which capital restructures production to overcome the barriers imposed by the working class:

[Capital] by its nature drives beyond every spatial barrier… the creation of the physical conditions of exchange – of the means of communication and transport – the annihilation of space by time – becomes an extraordinary necessity for it. [pp. 524-5]

Thus, the current discussion about MOOCs or the meaning of higher education or the idea of the University or whatever needs to be framed inside-and-against higher education as a revolutionary means for releasing surplus value and for restoring profitability to the broader system, by overcoming barriers to production and consumption. As Marx and Engels note in the Communist Manifesto, this demands revolutionary practice by the bourgeoisie as a global hegemon.

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind. The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. [p. 13.]

It is, therefore, critical that we see the debate about higher education, efficiency drives, disruptive innovations or whatever, in terms of systemic profitability. As Roberts notes:

A Marxist analysis, in my opinion, recognises that the underlying cause of the crisis in the first place is to be found in the failure of capitalist production to generate enough profit. Then, until capitalism can destroy enough old or “dead” capital (employees, old technology and unprofitable weaker capitalist enterprises) to restore profitability and start the whole thing again, it will languish. In this long depression I reckon this may well require another big slump.

On socialised alternatives: Roberts believes that the alternative is “to end the capitalist mode of production and replace it with democratically controlled, planned social production.” Thus, in responding to Bowles and Kernohan it is no use decrying the subsumption of disruptive innovation inside institutional realities. This is simply a form of false consciousness. At issue are the ways in which knowledge and forms of knowing that are created inside the University, MOOC, disruptive-wherever can be liberated or repatriated for global knowing, and against enclosure and commodification. What forms of knowledge, what skills and practices, what ways of knowing, what mechanisms for analysing global problems, can be emancipated and used to define alternative, socialised value forms? To where can they be liberated or repatriated so that they can be used against-and-beyond their private accumulation for profit? How and where do we ignite critical, political pedagogic practices that enable the democratic production and consumption of knowledge and knowing? These are the questions that ought to frame the idea of (disruptions to) higher education, and its contributions to our collective responses to global crises.


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


Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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


Against a defensive lamentation for the University


Posted by hallymk1

I

In a recent critique of workfare, Aaron Peters connects its objective reality to the response of lamentation given by the TUC and the organised left. This response represents a refusal to use the very means by which capital is restructuring social production as a weapon against it. It represents a refusal by the left to do more than defend capitalist work or fight for less damaging working conditions. It represents the inability of the left to resist and push-back against capitalist work, in order to recover and reimagine the social content of labour. The response has been one of protecting rights related to work; not of defining rights beyond work. For Peters, this is also true of those more energetic struggles that are beyond marches for the alternative or for a future that works. Thus, the activism of the student movement, the pensions campaign and anti-Workfare campaigners has “undoubtedly been embedded within a defensive approach that has come to characterize anti-austerity struggles throughout the OECD.” This focuses upon minimising harm [fees], revealing perceived bad behaviour [tax avoidance], and legitimising certain forms of protest [occupation].

Critically, Peters then asks the following.

Responses such as the 2010 student movement and the backlash against workfare should have been fully expected. As welfare states and labour markets throughout the OECD are restructured over coming decade(s) in response to the Long Recession, defensive claims, objectives and strategies will almost inevitably be the basis from which action, successful or otherwise, will be catalysed. Is it sufficient to merely attempt to defend those post-war gains that have already been steadily eroded for three decades?

Is all we can hope for defence? Is all that we can legitimise, including higher education, defined by increasingly precarious capitalist work? Martin McQuillan enables us to connect this defensive pattern of behaviour to the ways in which students have been increasingly victimised by the State if they behave against a pre-defined role as indentured consumers of an education market. In commenting on the prosecution of students involved in protests, McQuillan notes:

what is clear from these trials, of which Meadows and King were the last to come to court, is that there has been a systematic attempt to prosecute young people with no criminal records, under the serious charge of violent disorder (carrying a sentence of up to five years) in the heightened venue of Crown courts, and at great expense, despite a lack of supporting evidence or likelihood of conviction. Excessive sentences have been dealt out for minor offences and the lives of many have been made miserable or even ruined by this pattern of victimisation. This has been done to send a message to the students of Britain not to protest against the new fees regime or any other related issue of intergenerational inequality.

Here defensive behaviours become normalised, because if you are to be disciplined by the State when you protest the increase in fees, the removal of Educational Maintenance Allowance, or the outsourcing of University services, from where will you find the courage to question the shackling of education inside neoliberal political structures? From where will you find the courage to develop and argue for alternatives? From where will you find the courage to debate alternatives that are against transnational capital’s hegemony over our existence?

II

Against this lack of agency, Peters then reminds us to imagine “What can be done, when nothing can be done?” He situates any analysis of this question against lamentation and despair and argues that we need to see policy and practice inside the everyday, material and ideological realities of austerity politics.

Workfare is a policy tool to recompose the UK labour market. However it is also clear that within workfare programs there is a kernel of truth which is neglected within the analysis of social democrats and those on the centre-left. It is unequivocally motivated by political spite and class hostility. More importantly however we must also understand it as a policy response to changed conditions of production (which themselves are a response to the as yet unsolved and merely deferred crisis of the mid-1970s) which will not disappear and will only continue to intensify.

We might substitute [the student fee regime] or [the marketization of higher education] for [workfare], and Peters is right in identifying that this is a process of restructuring for the accumulation of wealth will only continue to intensify. This is why purely defensive operations, carried out inside an increasingly globalised terrain, will continue to fail.

For McQuillan this means that academics need to find the courage to act in solidarity with young people because the history of higher education offers a critique of spaces for dissent, refusal and pushing back. The history of higher education offers-up a deeply politicised terrain inside-and-against which social change can be critiqued and alternatives developed. The immanence of marketization means that agency is co-opted inside new forms of social production and consumption, and subsumes the material identities of both the student and the academic inside the processes that reproduce historically-situated, capitalist inequality. For McQuillan, there are deep interconnections of historical agency, transformative values and solidarity, which need to be remembered by those who work inside the University.

the history of student protest has been overwhelmingly one of support for progressive causes: opposition to the Vietnam War and the campus shutdowns following the shooting of Kent State University students by the Ohio National Guard in May 1970; the French General Strike of May 1968; the Athens Polytechnic protest in 1973 that helped bring down Greece’s military junta; the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989; and the student marches against the Iranian regime in 1999 and 2009. In recent years, students in Chile and Quebec have successfully opposed government reforms of higher education as part of a wider set of concerns about inequality.

Historically, students have been agents of political change, placing the transformative educational values of the university at the heart of global society and culture. When students are told to think of themselves as consumers, they are being asked to exchange their political agency for acquiescence in a system that perpetuates inequality. We speak blithely of “student choice”, “student satisfaction” and the “student experience” in a rush to engineer a value-for-money relationship with fee-paying customers. When this generation of young people expresses dissatisfaction with that experience as its only choice, it is subject to the full weight of the law.

Universities wish away dissent, questioning and criticism at their peril. Without them, universities would merely be adjuncts to the corporate global economy: and no professor wants to be an adjunct. To remain silent about miscarriages of justice in the sentencing of student protesters would be a betrayal of this present generation, but so would an insistence on their systemic designation as indebted, passive consumers of educational products. As long as we have social inequality, it will be in the purview of young people to protest against it; as long as we have inequality, universities will be necessary agents for social change. Student protest has a future: the values that inform it are the values of the university per se. Those responsible for our universities should not be first in line in attempts to silence it.

Peters forces us to relocate this image of the student/academic/State relationship against the realities of capitalist work as they are shaped by changes to the organic composition of capital. These changes are created through automation, the network, precarious, deskilled and free labour, cybernetics, entrepreneurialism, securitisation and so on, and are enforced by the State through its militarisation. Thus, Peters argues:

If the input of human labour is increasingly insignificant in the production and distribution of goods and services – something with which I entirely concur – and wages represent increasingly smaller amounts of capital allocation within production then who precisely is going to buy these products and with what wages? How will people subsist under capitalism without jobs? It is this issue that is perhaps most elided by the entire political class – the Labour Party and the TUC as much their supposed ideological counterpoints the Conservative Party and the CBI. The future must *work* and by default therefore its moral invocations must stem from the dignity of labour.

A point I take from this is that austerity means that counter-hegemonies cannot be found inside traditional political structures that have been sustained through the dynamics of capitalism. Peters highlights the importance of recognising and outing the power of specific historical moments, and uses the example of workfare as the moment to argue for the possibility of a guaranteed social wage and the potential decoupling of the wage from work, in order to develop mechanisms for the transformation of society. This is not about saving capitalism. It is not about saving the TUC. It is not about the dignity of capitalist work or full employment.

III

It is also not about defending the University. The focus on specific historical moments in which the production process is restructured, in order that the material realities of the accumulation process can be laid bare, ought to force academics to re-evaluate their roles in the redefinition of the University and of higher education. Yet this is not what is revealed inside organisations like the Campaign for the Defence of the British University. The CDBU risks fetishizing the University, in its argument that:

Higher Education in the UK is experiencing a raft of reforms that are fundamentally reshaping what universities are, how they are governed and their ability to undertake their core task: the production of knowledge in all its guises. CDBU holds that these reforms are premised on two linked shifts associated with the marketization of higher education:

§  the instrumentalisation of knowledge and its production (though mechanisms that seek to determine what the outcome of research will be)

§  the privatisation of public educational assets (eg. in which costs and benefits of education accrue to the individual who can afford it rather than to the whole community)

This amounts to what might be thought of as an enclosure of the epistemic commons. The CDBU firmly believes that the work undertaken in higher education institutions should be connected to other sectors of the economy. But the processes that underpin all education and knowledge are necessarily unpredictable and open-ended. So the universities that support those processes must be maintained as autonomous institutions to protect them.

Inside the CBDU’s aims for rarefied and protected intellectual activity, for protected agency that stands against the hegemonic realities of transnational capital that is restructuring the spaces that exist for that agency, and for the subsumption of intellectual activity inside precarious and entrepreneurial work, lamentation is palpable. There is no recognition that so much groundwork has been laid inside student occupations, the occupy movement, the global protests against austerity, and in alternative educational spaces like the Social Science Centre. The CDBU reads like it only ever wishes to be inside, and that being against-and-beyond the University as it is co-opted for the process of accumulation, is impossible. Against this stands the lack of any political economic critique and any way of reinterpreting the objective realities of austerity as it is being played out inside-and-against the very idea of the University. In particular, the CDBU’s cry that we should work

To ensure that British universities continue to transmit and reinterpret the world’s cultural and intellectual inheritance, to encourage international exchange and to engage in the independent thought and criticism necessary for the flourishing of any democratic society

demonstrates the epistemological limits of an association that wishes to defend, and has no mechanisms for pushing-back. There is only the University for hegemony here; there is no scope for a counter-hegemonic project that might take marketization and use it against the politics of austerity that only promise dehumanised, capitalist work.

IV

I am reminded that it is the globalisation of the struggle that matters now. Not on the canvass of a defensive, elegiac, educational lamentation for a paradise lost, but based on the historical, objective realities through which transnational finance capital is restructuring production through policy and technological practice. This means standing against the defence of the University as an organisation that is reinscribed inside those processes for accumulation, so that we can move beyond those dynamics. The historical student movements that McQuillan writes about, and the current protests including that at Sussex, offer us a perspective that is beyond defense and which might enable us to define meaningful alternatives that work for the transformation of society.

As I write elsewhere:

The challenge is to take these social struggles that exist inside-and-against the University and infuse them politically, using globalised technologies, in order to open-up a counter-hegemonic space or global commons. It is only through the politicising of academic (student/teacher) labour through solidarity actions that truly transformational change that addresses social need and marginalisation beyond the market can be realised. Universities are critical sites in the globalisation of this struggle, as is the student/teacher as producer/consumer of material relations that are beyond the subjective. It is through the technological mobilisation of these social forces that the legitimacy of the transnational capitalist class might be challenged, in order that global production might be redirected sustainably for the majority of the world’s population that are… impoverished and pauperised, as opposed to being for the minority of high-income, high-status groups in the global North. This means developing models that replace the restructuring and reorganisation of global society for capital accumulation, including the realisation of pedagogic models and ideas of public education that maintain (counter-)hegemony.


Open and closed: inside-and-against polyarchy


Posted by hallymk1

“Openness is today a powerful cult, a religion with its own dogmas.” So writes Evgeny Morozov, who goes on to state that:

This fascination with “openness” stems mostly from the success of open-source software, publicly accessible computer code that anyone is welcome to improve. But lately it has been applied to everything from politics to philanthropy… For many institutions, “open” has become the new “green.” And in the same way that companies will “greenwash” their initiatives by invoking eco-friendly window dressing to hide less-palatable practices, there has also emerged a term to describe similar efforts to read “openness” into situations and environments where it doesn’t exist: “openwashing.” Alas, “openwashing,” as catchy as it sounds, only questions the authenticity of “open” initiatives; it doesn’t tell us what kinds of “openness,” if any, are worth pursuing. We must differentiate the many different types of “open.”

It is Morozov’s focus on the politics of openness that resonates:

Of course, it’s important to involve citizens in solving problems. But who gets to decide which “particular problem” citizens tackle in the first place? And how does one delineate the contours of this “problem”? In open-source software, such decisions are often made by managers and clients. But in democratic politics, citizens both steer the ship (with some delegation) and do the rowing. In open-source politics, all they do is row.

This is important in light of Söderberg‘s First Monday article on Copyleft vs Copyright, which also highlights issues of power.

Companies like Netscape are attracted to free software, Open Source proponents exclaim, for the innovative capacity of the community. Another way to put it, lost to would-be Open Source revolutionaries, is that companies seek to slash labour costs. If companies are allowed to tap the unpaid, innovative labour of the community, inhouse and waged labour will be pushed out by the market imperative to cut down on personnel expenses. Inevitably, the employment and wage situation for software programmers, the livelihood of many in the free software community, will be dumped. The dangers of not making a critical analysis could not be demonstrated more clearly.

Which reminds me that a year ago I wrote for the communal university in the face of debt and polyarchy, and its strikes me that our fetishisation of open and openness, from the UK Government’s current open source fad to Western educators’ focus on MOOCs, form part of a set of solutions that are focused on creating structures for the accumulation of finance and cognitive capital, which are themselves predicated on polyarchic governance principles. The focus on open and openness has to be seen in light of austerity politics and the current political economic crisis; it is predicated on cycles of production/consumption and barriers to the accumulation of value. Moreover, their co-option by venture/finance capital operating inside private providers/using educational technology start-ups, restrict any meaningful discussion of open education as emancipatory. It is simply reduced to normative or deterministic ends, like employability or learning for work. If we learn anything from the IPPR avalanche report it is that open is a function of work. Thus, if they are to mean anything, open and openness have to be rehabilitated politically in the face of the circuits of intellectual and finance capital.

Ideas surrounding the communal university seem more prescient in light of Morozov’s claim that

a victory for “openness” might also signify defeat for democratic politics, ambitious policy reform and much else. Perhaps we should impose a moratorium on the very word “open.” Just imagine the possibilities this could open up!

For Söderberg the argument is clearly historical and material:

Conflicts are likely to evolve around the control, accessibility, and flow of profit allowed by the license especially as companies try to maximise the distance between the free labour pools engaged in any project while narrowing the conditions of use of the result

However, the distinguishing and most promising feature of free software is that it has mushroomed spontaneously and entirely outside of previous capital structures of production. It has built a parallel economy that outperforms the market economy. This can be taken as an indication of how the productive forces are undermining established relations of production.

So I repeat myself here at length.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This means developing critiques of the ways in which transhistorical norms like open, or transhistorical values like openness, are subsumed under the imperatives of growth and the mechanisms for the accumulation of value. As Söderberg notes:

The productivity of social labour power impels corporations to subjugate the activity of communities. But here rouses a contradiction to capital, on one hand it prospers from the technologically skilled, unpaid, social labour of users; on the other hand it must suppress the knowledge power of those users to protect the intellectual property regime. To have it both ways, capital can only rely on its hegemonic force.

Without a critique of open or openness as historically-situated forms that normalise what can be fought for politically, the movements to which we ascribe, and which we claim as open, will simply be co-opted for consent inside austerity politics.


for the social content of academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

I: on social domination

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

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

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

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

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

II: on labour arbitrage and the assault on academic labour

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

creating value for their students (p. 5)

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

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

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

ensuring education for employability?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III: redeeming academic labour

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

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

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

Over at Music for Deckchairs, Kate Bowles has argued:

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

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

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

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

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

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