Tag Archives: politics

The University and the globalised learning landscape


Posted by hallymk1

In a post on Globalisation and the University, I picked up on William Robinson’s work on the mechanisms by which a transnational capitalist class, acting through a transnational state apparatus, and supported by a neoliberal political society, hatched from within national capitals. I made the point that it is impossible to understand the role of the University without developing a critique of its relationships to that transnational capitalist class, both in the ways that it is being restructured by political society and national state apparatuses across the global North, and crucially as an integral element in developing the hegemony of that transnational capitalist class throughout civil society. Effectively the University is shaped by the national policies that are catalysed for transnational capital, like privatisation, tax-exemption and indentured study. However, it also helps both to broaden the flexible, transnational capital accumulation from territories in the global South, and to deepen the mechanics of accumulation from previously socialised goods in the global North like healthcare and public education. These spaces are in-turn enclosed, folded into the circuits of globalised production, and then commodified for private consumption and gain.

A separate point that Robinson makes in his Theory of Global Capitalism surrounds the idea that technology, entrepreneuialism and innovation, despite their centrality to the processes of globalising production and consumption and to catalysing the flows of capital accumulation, are merely dependent variables in any social change. Capitalists and governments innovate and apply technologies and techniques because of the internal dynamics of the system of capitalism. These dynamics include competition, making the organic composition of capital as efficient as possible through squeezing labour, maintaining the increase in the rate of profit, and class struggle. Technologies are used inside capitalism to lower costs, to drive productivity, to discipline labour and to gain competitive advantage over other capitals/businesses/universities. Technological change is the result of social forces in struggle and the need to overcome the temporal and spatial barriers to accumulation.

In the transnational phase of capitalism then, technologies are used: to drive down labour rights across the globe; to polarise wealth and access to global income, as well as global, social mobility; to destroy the circulation time of commodities on a global scale; to escape the national (taxation) barriers to accumulation; to replace and rationalise human labour by labour-saving machines; to support the power of globally-mobile finance capital over labour; to coerce militarily those areas of the globe that act as a barrier to accumulation, for instance through the coercive use of drone technology; and to maintain the hegemonic power of a global elite, including the secular control of that elite over the consumption of media, politics, and social life in the global North. This secular control is based on the tenets of liberal democracy that are increasingly limited by the power of transnational capitalism over the objective material reality of life, and which is reinforced technologically and pedagogically. To argue for emancipation through technological innovation, least of all inside the University, is to fetishise technology and to misunderstand how technology is shaped by the clash of social forces and the desire of capital to escape the barriers imposed by labour.

Technological innovation goes hand-in-hand with strategies for capital accumulation and the explosion in proletarian work, unemployment and underemployment across the globe. Much of this immiseration remains hidden from those in the global North who perceive that capitalism and the market offers the only workable solution. This ignores the fact that, as an article on the Network of Global Corporate Control demonstrates, the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations

[identifies] a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy… a core of 1318 companies [representing] 20 per cent of global operating revenues and… the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms… representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues’… a “super-entity” of 147 even more tightly knit companies … controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth … Most were financial institutions.

In the face of these objective realities I wonder what we are to make of engagements like the Changing the Learning Landscape programme inside UK Higher Education, which aims at strategic change in the use of technology in order: to change students’ prospects and life chances; to promote systemic and institutional change; and to support collaboration and partnership-working. In particular, I am interested in the extent to which the agency of students, staff or institutions is constricted through the restructuring of the University as a competing business, and the use of technology inside that business for accumulation as opposed to emancipation. In the restructuring of the University inside globalised capitalism any such agency risks being reduced to a competition over the least precarious forms of employment. This is the living death that is capitalist work refocused upon the objective realities of labour arbitrage.

This then makes any analysis of the ways in which students and staff engage with technology much less about their subjective reality as visitors or residents, and much more about their objective, material reality as a producer or a consumer inside globalised, transnational production processes. Inside a view of the student/teacher as visitor/resident there is limited scope for dissent, pushing back or resistance to the proletarianisation of work. There is only acceptance of capital’s domination over the lifeworld of labour and a reduction of discourse to specific technologies or to the ability of individuals to maintain a boundary between work and personal life, a battle which autonomous Marxism’s critique of immaterial labour, cognitive capital and the social factory tells us that capital will win unless we find cracks to exploit or mechanisms for exodus from the processes of accumulation and proletarianisation.

Therefore, any focus on institutional change needs to critique the relationships that emerge between student and teacher as producer and consumer, inside the globalised, material realities of transnational capitalism. They form representatives of global labour as it is being restructured inside globalised production processes, and the University is a site of that restructuring in the name of transnational capital accumulation. In this way, I wonder whether critiques of the possibilities of digital literacy, with a focus on the identities of student/teacher as producer/consumer, might offer a better way of revealing the globalised relationships of student, teacher and University. It is an understanding of the globalised production/consumption axis that offers a more meaningful critique of the fetishised idea of the digital student than the model of visitor/resident which in fact risks further fetishising of students or student life or digital technologies, and cannot break from the logic of capitalist exploitation. Without a deeper political context, rooted in production/consumption and the dynamics of capitalism, visitor/resident can only ever serve the reproduction of exploitative and polarised social relationships.

I wonder then whether a focus on critique of the productive and consumption-led capabilities and attributes of digital literacy, which are themselves openly/transparently grounded in craft skills that are understood as situated inside capitalist re-production processes, might be a more useful crack for pushing back against capital. A digital literacy that reflects on practices that are situated in complex, virtual/physical space-time, might then enable an enriched understanding of the individual’s asymmetrical relationship to transnational capital. This relationship includes the objective reality of indentured study, the coercive nature of technologies in monitoring performance, the restructuring of study in the name of economy, and the looming global energy/climate crisis.

Each of these objective realities demands that we reconfigure our thinking about the relationships between student, teacher and University, in terms of production/consumption and the material reality of capitalism. It is here that the power of global capital over global labour might be resisted through a focus on ideas like student-as-producer, using globalised platforms like wikimedia or ds106, not as fetishised commodities, but as sites for solidarity actions that reinforce the ability of counter-hegemonic forces to work together against the processes of accumulation. It is inside-and-against ideas like student-as-producer that we might resist the real subsumption of learning and teaching agendas, and pedagogic innovation programmes, for the hegemonic power of elites.

One of the key issues then is the extent to which programmes like Changing the Learning Landscape can be used as a space to resist the co-option of pedagogy for neoliberal agendas related to employability, enterprise and recalibrating the macroeconomic context for growth. How can such programmes resist the fetishisation of both technologies and students? How can they push-back against the competitive dynamic for constant change and innovation, to focus on the ways in which the production processes inside the University can be revealed and co-opted for a different, socialised form of wealth? How might they enable a contributional, productive economy, which is deliberative, participatory and inclusive? How might they enable students/teachers to open-up the University as a site of political power and civil society to transparent critique?

In fact, how might ideas like digital literacy and student-as-producer, technologies/platforms like wikimedia, and sites of struggle like the University, be opened-up pragmatically through programmes of work like Changing the Learning Landscape, to enable critique of the idea that the student/teacher as scholar might become an organic intellectual? How might they truly connect the University to the idea of the public good through a globalised learning landscape that is not enclosed but which is developed as a Commons through solidarity actions? In Robinson’s terms, how might an organisational critique based on ideas like student-as-producer be connected to a dissatisfaction in civil society with the objective, material reality of transnational capitalism? Grass-roots social movements, environmental crisis, global student occupations, global protests against austerity and the power of finance capital all make it increasingly difficult for ruling elites to maintain hegemony. Hence, in-part, the enforcement of indentured study and the reality of pedagogic cultures based on enterprise.

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 neither visitor nor resident, but whom 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.


On Globalisation and the University


Posted by hallymk1

I: on globalisation

In his Globalization: nine theses on our epoch, William Robinson argues that “activists and scholars have tended to underestimate the systemic nature of the changes involved in globalisation, which is redefining all the fundamental reference points of human society and social analysis, and requires a modification of all existing paradigms.” In the systemic changes that are driven by and which drive globalisation, we are increasingly witnessing a transnational conflict between capital and both an impoverished labour force in the global South, and a labour force that is being increasingly proletarianised in the global North. Robinson argues that this conflict is incubated through and exacerbated by technologically-mediated innovations in capitalist production processes that increasingly discipline labour. Disciplinary practices include: threats of outsourcing; using technology and efficiencies in production to drive down wages; enforcing changes to terms of employment; attrition or privatisation of social welfare; the use of technology to monitor work; and increasingly deflationary economic policies which attack standards of living for all-bar social elites. The ability of capital to discipline labour is critical because, as Simon Clarke has noted, as capitalism restructures itself, the conditions for the renewed production of surplus value is set by dominating and restructuring labour power and means of production, rather than by stimulating consumption.

For Robinson the mechanisms through which transnational capital is hatched out of national capitals in the global North is a central theme of globalisation. He sees a corollary in the capture by transnational elites of the state apparatus for control in the global North and the attempt to do so in the global South. He then argues in a discussion paper that in understanding the mechanics of capitalism in its neoliberal stage, and in shaping responses to it, it is critical to analyse how globalisation is “a qualitatively new transnational stage in the on-going evolution of world capitalism”. This echoes Ellen Meiksins Wood’s argument that

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

Here capital needs other economic systems, including public sector spaces, as soil and medium for accumulation, with new roles for nation states under the logic of competition, in policing order and law, and in setting a clear economic direction.

II: defining a new epoch

For Robinson, globalisation as a new epoch in the history of capitalism is made up of four key strands. These strands need to be applied to specific contexts, like the terrain of higher education and the impact of technology on it, in order that a meaningful critique can be generated.

  1. The first strand is the rise of truly transnational capital, pivoting around an integrated global production and financial system. Thus, we witness the growth of transnational, educational corporations like Pearson, and the involvement of the investment banking arms of Goldman Sachs, or of consultants like McKinsey, or of outsourcing corporations like Capita, in opening-up education, and the use of technologically-driven services to commoditise the space further. Through these integrated systems, education providers are tied into networks of defence, security, finance and policing activity, and processes of outsourcing and change management that are driven by the need to extract surplus value.
  2. The second strand is the coalescence of a new class group which Robinson describes as “the hegemonic fraction at a world level of global class structure”. This transnational capitalist class is grounded in global markets and circuits of accumulation. This differentiates it from the hegemonic fraction of the previous epoch of capitalism, which focused upon national markets and circuits of capital. Inside higher education we witness a cadre of public administrators, for example in the UK Department for Education, actively courting and working with global corporations and management consultants to implement social education policy.
  3. The third strand is the rise of “a transnational state apparatus”, which forms a loose coalition of institutions which is comprised of all super-national, transnational and international institutions, for example the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the North American Free Trade Association and so on. In those nation-states that are in crisis, like Greece, Italy, Spain and Ireland, the structures of the nation state are being transnationalised so that they relate to and underpin an emerging transnational structure. Education cannot escape this locus of control.
  4. The fourth strand is the appearance of “new forms of global inequality that cut across the old north-south and nation state lines that group new types of transnational social inequality”. In this, technologies are being used to help reconfigure institutions and capitalist relations of production, in order to generate new configurations of global power that operate transnationally, and access to technologies reinforces these systemic inequalities.

As Robinson argues, “[w]e need to understand these things”, if we are to analyse how our work inside the University is co-opted for the extraction of value by transnational elites, which operate inside-and-against national politico-jurisdictional boundaries through networks of corporations, think tanks, administrative institutions, private equity firms etc.. Simply thinking in terms of learner’s rights, or personalisation, or digital literacy, or critical pedagogy is meaningless without situating that [whatever] in the context of globalised capitalist relations of production.

This process of understanding might take our use of technology inside the University and relate it to the offensive undertaken by capital in its post-Fordist, neoliberal phase, where it breaks free of nation state constraints on accumulation, and especially the relationship between capital and labour that generated a social welfare and social democratic model of the second-half of the Twentieth Century. This model included the idea of the University as a public good, or as a publically/charitably-funded, governed and regulated good, which could respond to local or national need. However, it restricted the ability of capital to drive the rate of accumulation and profit at an appropriate level, and as such capital sought to restructure global production and consumption processes, in-part through technological innovation. As George Lambie has noted:

It is important to understand that it is not so much the geographical distribution of labour that is the problem for workers, but the global restructuring of the relationship between capital and labour… Labour is [now] a factor of production that, like all others, must be utilised in a manner that maximises profits.

Thus, we see a global break with the need to be responsive to any social democratic framework, in the face of a new, transnational model of accumulation that is dominated by finance capital.

Robinson argues that this new model has four critical outcomes.

First, “new capital-labor relations… based on a cheapening of labor, on the notion of flexible labor or deregulated and de-unionized labor, becomes now the general, worldwide model.” Thus, we witness hyper-exploitation inside factories in the global South that support the economies of the global North, alongside the disciplining of technologised and service-sector labour in the global North through threatened outsourcing or the commodification and leverage of core or developmental skills. Lambie has argued that:

If the post-war Keynesian consensus produced the Fordist worker, globalisation has resulted in a ‘Walmart-isation’ of labour, typified by part-time, non-unionised, depoliticised, disempowered and quiescent employees with few benefits, rights or opportunities to influence the conditions dictated by capital.

At issue here is the extent to which higher education in the global North underpins that on-going commodification process, either in new forms as it promotes innovations around personalisation and accreditation, like badges, digital literacy etc., or through its standard structures carried in distance learning, internationalisation strategies etc.. One might ask how such practices form a means of further restructuring a flexible, globalised regime of labour relations.

Second, there is “a dramatic round of extensive and intensive expansion of capitalism itself”, so that there is no outside of the system of value-extraction, enclosure and accumulation. This includes states that held out against full integration in the circuits of capital, like China, and pressure on revolutionary states such as Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba and Angola. Thus, we see the current vogue for universities in the global North to commodity-dump cheap educational products through MOOCs or distance learning, or to extract high-level skills through internationalisation strategies, or to enable capital to reproduce its structures through educational “outreach” in the global South. A recent Bain Consulting report on A world awash with money noted:

By using distance-learning technologies to “export” higher education, leading universities in the advanced economies can accelerate the training of the home-grown specialists the emerging-market economies will need. And by “importing” the talent of engineers, managers, physicians and other highly skilled professionals from companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging markets will not need to wait a generation before their own education systems can produce the skilled workforce they require.

However, we also see the intensive expansion of capitalism through aggressive privatisation of the previously public spheres like education. This also means that we are increasingly witnessing the conversion of the cognitive capital produced inside the University, like the human genome or services based on learning analytics or drone research, into accumulation and the commodity-form, driven by intellectual property rights. Thus, the University is used to enable the geographic spread of transnational capitalism, but it also enables capital’s circuits to be deepened through the commodification of intellectual life inside new terrains.

Third, a global legal and regulatory structure is created in order to facilitate the emerging global circuits of accumulation. Thus, not only does the World Trade Organization catalyse multilateral, bilateral, and global free trade agreements, but the IMF and the World Bank are recast in order to underwrite and catalyse structural adjustment on a global stage. This is critical because under austerity policies, the global market has a declining ability to absorb global economic output, which then stresses the system through under-consumption/over-accumulation. With no massive public works and limited focus on war as a means for the State to absorb surplus value, we witness a focus on redistributing wealth through quantitative easing and privatisation from the poor to the wealthy. One might also view the underwriting of student loans as a new, derivative-driven bubble, the role of universities in on-line strategies that include MOOCs, and the engagement of private providers in the global educational space, as mechanisms for meeting the production/consumption gap in output.

Fourth is the “neo-liberal structural adjustment programs which seek to create the conditions for the free operations of the emerging transnational capital across borders and within each country, so that capital, particularly emerging transnational capital, is unhindered by both state borders and by regulations within states.” As I argue elsewhere

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

Thus, in the range of global educational initiatives, that encompass MOOCs, global digital literacy, cloud-based innovations and outsourcing, internationalisation strategies, data mining, mobile learning etc., the key is to understand how technology-driven innovations relate to the globally-hegemonic fraction of transnational, finance capital. This is critical because these innovations are not outside the circuits or cycles of globally mobile capital. Thus, these innovations further reduce the technical constraints or barriers to the reproduction of capital and its valorisation/accumulation processes, just as they revolutionise the transportation, interaction, production and consumption of individuals with (intellectual or cognitive) commodities/products.

III: a new epoch as crisis

These outcomes are clearly linked to the on-going crisis of capitalism in its neoliberal phase, and are connected to over-production and the falling rate of profit, which in-turn catalyses a desperate rush for new markets. Simon Clarke has argued that over-production occurs because capital drives beyond its natural limits, leading to a crisis of disproportionality in the production process made worse by credit bubbles and commerce, so that it becomes a general crisis of overproduction. Thus, the greater the mass of surplus value to be released as commodities, the more frantic is the search for new markets, and the more vulnerable is accumulation to disruption when it confronts the limits of profitability, for instance in falling demand. We might also witness this in the production/consumption of higher education as credit-fuelled study and in the recalibration of universities as businesses that underwrite a Government’s Industrial Strategy. This in-turn risks a crisis of disproportionality/profits in the circuits of educational provision.

In these processes of transnational valorisation/accumulation, Robinson argues that:

the network nature and structure of the global economy, organized as subcontracting and outsourcing chains which are quite endless, which cross national borders and so forth and also as a network structure in the sense that a network is where a segment can attach to a network, and by that attachment, it is connected to all kinds of other elements and other forms of organizations it would not be networked to literally and then it can detach and reattach itself to other networks. It’s more like a global spider web, except again that you have power being centralized, exercised through decentralized networks but concentrated.

This is again important in assessing both the role of the University in structuring those networks, but also in revealing how technologies are used to amplify the mechanisms through which the University can be further enmeshed in the circuits of capital. A corollary of this is seen in the recalibration of the relationships between academic management and academic labour through financialisation, debt and indentured study, the idea of student-as-global-consumer, and the use of technology to discipline working practices. It is impossible to assess this process properly without thinking through the relationships between the University and transnational finance capital, and the idea that the University is being increasingly subjected to pressure for structural adjustment. This, in turn, includes the ways in which what Robinson calls “the transnational state” sets primary and secondary policy that creates the conditions for globalised capital accumulation. In the UK this includes the Coalition’s restructuring of secondary education curricula, the momentum for performance management of teachers, the removal of VAT exemption for shared services, raising the cap on student fees, using student number controls and core/marginal provision to drive change, and co-hosting educational technology symposia with corporations like Goldman Sachs.

Thus, the State is now a key instrument of the global capitalist system in creating an environment in which capital can reproduce itself and in widening and deepening the interests of global capital over national capital and national labour forces or the unemployed. Education and the place of the University has to be seen in light of this globalised social polarisation and social reproduction, and the increasing levels of global inequality that follow in its wake, which includes falling living standards and the extension of precarious working and living conditions in the face of austerity in the global North. As Robinson cautions us

[This is]not a crisis for the capitalist system unless those that are starving to death or those that don’t quite know how they will be able to survive actually resist those conditions… If half or two-thirds of humanity just quietly starved to death, there wouldn’t be a crisis of the system, only for those people starving. But since they are resisting, it is a systemic crisis.

Thus, Robinson notes that we increasingly face “a crisis of legitimacy in the sense that states are facing legitimization crises everywhere–that’s the famous crisis of governability.” The view that market mechanisms are the sole arbiter of social relationships and that efficiency in the name of the accumulation of capital are our only ways of constructing a meaningful life-world, is increasingly under attack. Witness the students in Occupation at Sussex University stating that:

Perhaps most importantly the decision to bring private providers into the education sector reflects a larger ideological push by this and previous governments to marketise education as a consumer good. For management at Sussex this is certainly a continuation of departmental teaching and university-wide job cuts over the past 5 years under the guise of “deficit-cutting”. We stand firmly against the segregation of our campuses along producer/consumer lines and reject this false dichotomy. Moreover, we reject the way in which outsourcing further segregates different members of the campus community, whose job statuses, though necessarily complementary in practice, become suddenly dissociated financially and institutionally, leading to a complete breakdown of the social cohesion intrinsic to any healthy and normally functioning organisation. We wholly reject the undemocratic and unaccountable structures and procedures which this management has procured in order to force its agenda on members of the Sussex campus community. We reassert that Education is a public good that is and should remain free of perverse market incentives in every aspect of its provision.

IV: capital’s response to the crisis and Robinson’s Nine Theses

It is useful to state Robinson’s Nine Theses, as an analytical tool for framing what might be done to resist transnational capital.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ninth, stated in highly simplified terms, much of the left world-wide is split between two camps.

Thus, the globalised terrain upon which universities now exist as competing capitals, forces them to:

  • become efficient in service-provision, for example through outsourcing, privatisation or cloud-based services;
  • respond to indentured/debt-fuelled student life and expectations, linked to personalisation, employability, bring your own device;
  • compete internationally either through traditional mechanisms like overseas campus provision, or through virtual, technocratic innovation;
  • drive mobility and flexibility as a means of leveraging surplus value from employees;
  • engage with high-risk, financialised growth strategies, for example medium/high yield bonds;
  • connect to the research and development imperatives of globalised capital for securing new terrains for accumulation, including data mining and learning analytics, or drone-based/makerspace-type research;
  • drive the reskilling of global labour as a commodified workforce through employability strategies that are underwritten by concepts like badges and digital literacy; and
  • connect to the politico-jurisdictional imperatives of globalised capital by suppressing academic dissent, or investing in security/policing functions.

This is important because as Robinson’s analysis enables us to see, the University is enclosed by the realities of transnational capital, through which we witness the complete commodification of social life based around segmented structures and hierarchies. Here, the relations of the capitalist economy structure all spheres of life, and a set of mutually-reinforcing social, economic and political institutions and cultural and ideological norms fuse with and facilitate a new period of capitalist accumulation. The cultural/ideological component here is set in-part through education and technology, and is based upon consumerism and cut-throat individualism rather than collective well-being. Through the focus on mobility, flexibility and employability, and the recalibration of student life through debt, collective action is confronted and marginalised by a focus on personal aspiration. As a result, the University becomes a node in a global productive structure with a concentration of services, knowledge, finance and technology in the global North and of productive labour in the global South. As Robinson notes, “The dominant global culture penetrates, perverts and reshapes cultural institutions, group identities and mass consciousness.”

As I noted elsewhere in discussing academic exodus, pace John Holloway, 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:

The argument against this is that the constitutional view isolates the [University] from its social environment: it attributes to the [University] an autonomy of action that it just does not have. 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.

Thus, we need to see the University as a business recalibrated inside the structural power of fully mobile transnational capital. This is disciplinary and based upon dense networks of supranational institutions and relationships, alongside the co-option of national jurisdictions for: fiscal and monetary policies that enable macro-economic stability; creating an infrastructure for global economic activity; and social control. For Robinson, capital needs state power rather than the nation state, which acting as the neoliberal state becomes an agent for wringing concessions from global labour.

V: what is to be done?

Critiquing the role of transnational corporations in controlling assets and trade, and in driving speculation and speculative bubbles that threaten livelihoods and lives, is critical in understanding how economic power drives political action. Witness this report from Bain Consulting on A world awash in money. 

As fluid as the movement of capital has become thanks to information technology and high-speed communications, the barriers that impede its flow to and among the capital-hungry developing markets will remain formidable. Investors will continue to favor the advanced markets, which are well endowed with the “trust architecture”—strong property rights protections, reliable legal systems and institutional depth—that owners of capital value.

Under the conditions outlined above the content of university life is driven by the realities of globalisation that form a socio-cultural space that reinforces disempowerment, in spite of rhetoric about learner’s rights, social justice or mobility, or economic equality. What is worse is that the University risks becoming a node in the permanent structural violence that is visited against the majority of the world’s poor, ostensibly in the global South. Internationalisation strategies, MOOCs, intellectual property and patent law, structural adjustment, exporting mobile learning, all become circuits through which capital is accumulated from the South. This is continually restructured through corporate management, the store of capital in spaces that service tax havens for the North, and the location of centres of technology and finance in the North. However, the threat of a new international division of labour is also realised as the immiseration of the middle classes in the North as they are indentured or threatened with outsourcing, and as their futures are asset-stripped and accumulated by transnational elites.

Robinson argues that the left has two responses. These are: first, the neo-Keynesian approach that seeks rapprochement with capital, based on social democracy and redistributive justice, in order to make it work ethically; second, those who see capitalism as inherently wicked and to be rejected/resisted without working through a coherent socialist alternative to the transnational phase of capitalism. In developing a set of possible alternatives that move beyond these positions, he argues that:

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

Thus, it is possible to see cracks in the contradictions of global capitalism, and to develop popular alternatives, like the range of social centres, or co-operative alternatives, or occupations that form oppositional moments to specific issues, but these need viable socio-economic alternatives to sustain them. This is a form of Gramscian mass intellectuality, whereby counter-hegemonic positions are developed and nurtured through solidarity actions. These counter-hegemonic positions need to be grounded in a political economy that reflects a socialised, rather than privatised globalisation; a globalisation from below that both demands global solidarity actions and is based on participatory practices, like general assemblies or associational democracy.

Robinson offers the possibility that alternatives might include: “some type of global Keynesianism, a global redistributive project, a global reform capitalism”; “global fascism” as a reactionary political project focused on coercion, and the militarisation and the masculinisation of popular culture and of social relations; or “a global collapse of civilization, a degeneration of civilization. And again, we’ve seen such outcomes throughout history when no social force can stabilize a particular system, when a civilization cannot resolve its internal contradictions”. More hopefully, he argues for “a global 21st century socialism” infused democratically, with examples that emerge from the co-operative movement in South America, in Venezuela and Cuba.

Critical in the development of a viable alternative is Robinson’s idea that “we always make our own collective history and so the future is never predetermined.” Thus, Ellen Meiksins Wood states:

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

Crucially then, there is a role for those who labour inside the University in revealing the systemic nature of globalised capital in co-opting all of human existence for profit-maximisation, growth strategies, and accumulation. Moreover, there is an imperative for connecting critique to the mechanisms through which capitalism in its neoliberal phase increasingly consumes and destroys humanity and nature. As Lambie argues, revealing these mechanisms highlights how the family, community and workplace are eroded, and how social welfare is damaged, leading to precarious or vulnerable futures. Thus, the connection of academic critique to the mechanisms through which austerity reproduces and extends the power of transnational elites may reveal the true class position of global labour, including those who regard themselves as the educated middle class. In this, the development of solidarity actions grounded in mass intellectuality is critical.

From inside the University, those solidarity actions might be focused upon developing critiques of the following.

  1. The global processes of labour 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..
  4. How universities focus their research and development on social need that is defined locally rather than amplifying global transnational value extraction.
  5. Shining a light on models of accumulation that are riven with new forms of imperialism, and capital flows from the global South to the securitised, debt-driven global North.
  6. Developing mechanisms for understanding how the tensions that are revealed in the high levels of debt-to-GDP on both national and global scales might be resolved, or how alternative value forms and social relationships beyond a currency that is underpinned by oil might be developed.

Key is describing and deliberating the relationships between the University and specific social forces that might be used to catalyse a new political consciousness. At issue is how the University and academic labour might resist co-option on a global scale, in order to support those social forces that might fight for a different form of valorisation and for policies that are based on social need as the central development strategy of the State.


Against a bill of rights and principles for learning in the digital age


Posted by hallymk1

It is interesting that the drive to MOOC-ify both the forms of (higher) education and the idea of pedagogy, has quickly forked to the idea of a Bill of Rights for Learners. Downes has already noted that “if you ask me it’s pretty top-down and manipulative”. I know that in this brave new world, we are all defined as learners, but I find it intriguing that there is the idea of a Bill of Rights for learners that is not written by learners, in the traditional sense. It is written by people that I would define as educators with more/different social and cultural capital than, say, the 18-year old historians that I have had the privilege to work with. Thus, the preamble notes that this is produced by those who are “passionate about serving today’s students”; this is education-as-service industry, which leaves it ripe for co-option by those with an agenda of student-as-customer or consumer, rather than as co-producer. I also find it intriguing that there is an open invitation to help redraft/improve this Bill of Rights on the P2P site. I’m wondering how that will engage with those institutional learners across the globe, rather than engage specific groups in technologically-rich countries/educational settings.

Anyway, the draft made me think about the following issues.

  1. For whom does this declaration speak? Whom does it give power? Whom does it give a voice? Who is silenced and why?
  2. There is a specific presumption about what globalisation means. How a group of educators from the Global North are drafting/writing a Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age, witha cursory mention of globalisation and no focus on politics or disenfranchisement in the global South or even inside countries in the North. The idea that access is ubiquitous is developed alongside a depoliticised notion that equality of opportunity is enough, when inside the iniquities of an education system designed around capitalist work, this is never enough. A starting point might be the work of Glen Rikowski on the relationships between education, training and capitalism.
  3. How techno-determinism drives a view of constant, specific innovation, of emancipation achieved through access to capitalist work (embedded in the draft), and the underpinning idea of education for individual entrepreneurialism. The draft is almost solely focused on the flowering of the individual and how that has historically been denied institutionally through outmoded educational practices (whatever they are). In this way it resonates with the neoliberal ideal of the production of the entrepreneurial subject, separated or atomised out but given equality of opportunity to access the technological tools and debt-driven opportunities that signal the possibility of entering that productive process. Technology is merely an enabler or reinforcer of those possibilities, and yet here it is reified so that the ideals claimed for leaning are subsumed under its “potentially awe-inspiring opportunity”.
  4. How the focus on the learner, rather than communities of scholarly practice, is almost a disciplinary tool. For who can deny that empowering the learner is the aim of education? Who would dare say that #learnersrights should not drive this agenda? Yet this risks becoming a form of tyranny that dispossesses the voices of those who commit their lifetime to educating. Whither dissent when this is claimed as a unifying bill of rights for learners? Moreover, it risks separating out learners and teachers, for instance as opposed to the Social Science Centre’s focus on teachers and students as scholars as a community of shared educational practice and inquiry. The teacher appears forgotten in this Bill of Rights other than having responsibilities, of which the learner appears to have none, for s/he has only #learnersrights.
  5. Downes makes the point that History is forgotten in the Bill of Rights, that he authored a ‘Cyberspace Charter of Rights‘ in 1999. Before that we have: communiqués from occupied California that featured student/teacher manifestos for education and society; a whole history of redefining education as a social and socialised good back to 1968 and of redefining the relationships between education, educational forms and society; a raft of work on critical pedagogy as transformational, democratic praxis which emerges from the work of bell hooks, Henry Giroux and others; and the outpouring of what “learners” demand from education in the face of the discipline of austerity. Any Bill of Rights needs to understand its historical moment. At issue is whether this one does in any way that isn’t deterministic and presentist.
  6. The Bill cannot escape the structuring logic of capitalism. Work, value, money, the place and role of employers, and affordability are written throughout its DNA, and yet these come loaded with issues of power and politics that are at best hidden from view in the document. In this way its claims for emancipation are tied to problem-solving the worst excesses of capitalism, through affordable access, or transparency of data-mining and privacy, licensing laws and commodifying personal data etc. It is also interesting that financial transparency appears ahead of pedagogical transparency, and that money/work is a critical factor throughout. Where is the politics? Where is the power? Is financial transparency and the meaningful payment of educators really a defining moment of emancipatory education? Really?
  7. There is no mention of the implications and impact of crises of austerity, climate change, and liquid fuel availability here. All that is offered is “there is no alternative”. How does this Bill of Rights helps learners, teachers, or society manage disruption and become resilient in the face of crisis? How does it enable us to solve problems communally, beyond being the individual becoming fit-for-work?

The Bill of Rights reminded me that in being “inside”, we are able to be/define “against” and move “beyond”; to define meaningful alteratives. I take that as the important outcome of this Bill.

Thus, the Bill of Rights reminded me ofthe University of Utopia’s anti-curricula and the Third University’s precepts for alternative teacher training.

Addendum

Kate Bowles over on Music for Deckchairs has written the most eloquent critique of the original draft, based upon her view that the idea and forms of higher education are worth fighting for, and that democratic accountability isn’t just the province of the open web.

For me, there are two gaps. The first is a failure to understand or include what it takes for public education institutions to operate within the legislative constraints that are the ultimate protection for student rights, including student diversity. These can’t just be upturned because we want to, and to be honest, I don’t want to. There’s a whole lot wrong with higher education, but at some point we have to say that the work of making it possible is serious, complicated and driven by people who really mind about equity.

The second is a failure to recognise that it’s going to take a whole lot more than a motherhood statement to deal with the emerging problem of missionary zeal in North American higher education circles. I am really so tired of hearing that MOOCs will parachute in global superstar professors to save the world’s unserved populations.

In a separate comment, she made the point that “More and more it looks like offloading cheap copies in markets where we think proper educational credentials won’t really matter anyway.” Back in January 2010 I tried to make a case that educational institutions, publishers, tech-firms etc. operating inside global capitalism were using HE internationalisation agendas to open-up global markets for cheap commodities/for commodity dumping, both in order to overcome under-consumption in domestic markets and to maintain an increase in the rate of profit. With domestic demand falling for traditional, institutional HE places, especially for UK Russell Sector universities, the move to offshore/outsource and open-up new markets becomes paramount. With DBIS amongst others recalibrating the form of the traditional university as a business this is the logic of the structuring dynamics of capitalism applied to education and it flows through capital’s circuits into the spaces in which MOOCs/tech innovations operate. This is exactly why any Bill of Rights has to start with a deep critique of political economy and education’s place inside that structure.

So my final word for the moment has to be about the way in which this current debate has opened-up a debate about internationalisation, power, technology for entrepreneurialism etc.. What I would hope we can address is the extent to which declarations or bills of rights are a form of cultural hegemony or enculturation that reveal the ways in which civil society is restructured in the name of the individual rather than in the name of society. It is interesting that the original Draft contained no mention of “politics”, one of “society” and four of “community”/”communities”. The key is to address that restructuring process and the ways in which power-to make the world is co-opted by others power-over the spaces in which we operate. As Kate Bowles notes:

Reading the coverage that this has been given, here’s what I keep coming back to: the inestimable Henry Jenkins (just to show that I don’t have a problem with Americans), in his Border Crossings: Cultural Workers and The Politics of Education:

Visions always belong to someone, and to the degree that they translate into curricula and pedagogical practices, they not only denote a struggle over forms of political authority and orders of representation, but also weigh heavily in regulating the moral identities, collective voices and the futures of others.


The great Higher Education prediction league 2013


Posted by hallymk1

I was asked to provide a prediction for HE policy in 2013. Then nothing happened. So I thought I’d post my predictions here. This is what I wrote…

“I know nothing about policy. All I know is activism as a kind of non-policy; as the negation of policy.

“So all I can offer you is a list of not-policy predictions, of things that I wish would happen in 2013 that would not form policy. It is a list of solidarity-driven hopes that are underpinned by courage. Perhaps they coalesce as an informal policy of developing collective, solidarity struggles.

“Please note that I learn so much from people involved in developing and implementing policy, and I am not for an instant arguing that policy wonks are not courageous. Anyway…

  • VCs and UUK demonstrate leadership in fighting the Coalition’s HE agenda;
  • academics push back against private equity and the financialisation of the sector;
  • academics develop a concerted campaign against REF2014 and go into occupation of “impact”;
  • academics and students demonstrate solidarity with global anti-austerity movements as a means of re-politicising university life;
  • those engaged in educational technology push back against their active involvement in the privatisation of individual universities and the sector;
  • Million+, in association with collectives like edufactory, is recognised as a voice of resistance;
  • commentators stop chasing the next MOOC-like innovation and recognise that their chase is in the name of the rate of profit [and that the chase dehumanises];
  • academics and students critique the ways in which big data is used to monitor and surveil;
  • we re-evaluate the relationships between academia and the military, for instance in drone-related research;
  • academics and students fight for a publically-funded, regulated and governed higher education sector.”

On the structural adjustment of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

Inside Higher Education reports that:

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

Moreover:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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


On the entrepreneurial university and the social factory


Posted by hallymk1

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

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

Marx writes that

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


Posted by hallymk1

I

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

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

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

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

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

II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV

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

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

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

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

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


Education and enclosure: the lessons of historical agency


Posted by hallymk1

Yesterday, Brian Lamb tweeted that:

“I inexplicably find debates on CC-NC fascinating now… But I need a clearer sense on what “enclosure” means in practice, not just theory.”

The educational technology field is rife with emergent discussions of the connections between the idea of the Commons and that of enclosure, and the place of commodities or resources inside them. Thus, we see it in responses to the debates on MOOCs and open badges, in the alleged power of networks and network governance, in deterministic work that alleges the emancipatory potential of technology in-and-beyond the classroom, and in the relationships between habitus and hegemony that are revealed in work on the nature of soft/hard power and social media. The ideas of enclosure and Commons in educational discourse tend to reveal a set of deeper, more ideological positions that pivot around either emancipation, consent and freedom as witnessed in the open nature of the Commons, or the coercive, commercially-focused and closed-off world of enclosed, proprietary software and environments. This is a deeply political terrain.

I have previously written about the metaphor of the Commons and its relationship to enclosure as it is revealed through educational technology, taking on-board Nick Dyer-Witheford’s communist critique of the crisis of capital being reinforced through ‘a circulation of the Commons’ in which mass intellectuality or alternative forms of value can be developed and exchanged against the profit motive. Here the ideas of free and commoditisation are important. However, I have also written about the impact of such circulations and value-forms on individuals, in particular using the visitor/resident model as a pivot for an understanding of the complex relationships between the individual, specific (virtual/real) space, and technology. The interplay between the individual and the spaces in which she exists reflects the dominant forms/structures of the social relationships of the time. I picked this up in reflecting on the realities of eighteenth-century political history and how they might help us to understand the idea of a technological Commons.  In addressing the “practice” of actually existing enclosure in eighteenth-century politics, I wanted to address three questions that seem pertinent to education and technology.

  1. Against the neoliberal constraint on what can legitimately be fought for, how do we tell stories that reclaim our common history and our social relationships? How do we protect the richness of the technological ecosystems that help us to do this work?
  2. In the rush for technology-as-progress, can we identify how that progress is shaped in our stories of struggle? How do we recognise struggle in our use of technology?
  3. How do we struggle-in-common against the enclosure of our networked public spaces? How do we develop a politics of digital literacy? How do we develop a political digital literacy?

This idea of stories of struggles over the form and content of our social relationships is then important both historically and in terms of understanding how and why technology in education is co-opted. In this I was and still am attempting to reconnect my earliest research on property, the common and political power in Augustan Yorkshire, electoral mechanics, and profiling actual voters, to the idea of the Commons and enclosure in education. What do the actual historical struggles over the Commons and enclosure tell us about how we might view autonomy and agency in the present? Revisiting these historical struggles helps me to identify struggles-in-common over access to resources, be that physical land/cultural rights or immaterial spaces/rights held privately or in common.

In addressing Brian’s point about the actual practices and structures that are related to resources, the first question I posed above made me think less about enclosure and more about the complexities of individual agency and the structures that bind/coerce it or that enable it through consent. In terms of the use of technology in education I am forced to consider how we might uncover: what agency might actually confer on an individual or association or network; the structures of social relationships or the rules that bind individuals as agents; and the co-option or subversion of available techniques and technologies. By contrasting the structural critiques of enclosure/Commons with the realities of actually existing political action, it might be able to work through what it means to apply a CC-NC license, or to engage in a MOOC, or to create an open badge, or to scale-up learning analytics, or to build a personal learning network, or whatever. The purpose of this is to signal some mechanisms through which those engaged in curriculum innovation or educational technology might begin to re-frame how they might work practically with the ideas of enclosure/Commons, as they interact with the reality of personal and political agency, using one historical interpretation as a means.

So I just want to make five points about understanding historical practices as they actually existed, in relation to individual agency inside the structures of the Commons/enclosures. N.B. a useful historical starting point is E.P. Thompson’s Customs in Common, and Neeson’s excellent book on Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700-1820.

FIRST: property and power in the real/virtual spaces inside which we actually operate.

Inside early modern capitalism landholding gave power, just as it does under late-modern capitalism. In the eighteenth century it was a mark of status, and the right to vote was generally based on land-as-property. The over-riding view of those men who voted for county or shire MPs has been that they voted by right of forty shillings worth of land held in fee simple, after taxes and local charges were accounted for, but that leases for lives, rent-charges, mortgages and annuities, and certain offices like clerical benefices were also a means of enfranchisement. These men were viewed as the bedrock of the county community precisely because of the eighteenth-century elevation of property to a sublime position within society. A share in the land of the county would show a higher political consciousness and entail a recognition of the importance of property and liberty. However, recent investigations have shown that one cannot make assumptions about who the voters were, or the nature of their right to vote. For a fuller understanding of the basis of political action in the early eighteenth century, there is a need to reconstruct the lives of individuals and communities. One might say the same about networks, the Commons and enclosure in educational spaces. The fundamental issue is about how one can develop an understanding of deeper, socio-political structures that inform our debates over agency, participation, association and motivation in education. What presuppositions about property and liberty are folded into our assumptions about MOOCs, networked Commons or proprietary software?

SECOND: mobility and motivation.

One of the problems with analysing the structures of and relationships between Commons/enclosure and agency relates to the geography of specific spaces. In analysing historical behaviours, there is a need to implement methodologies that integrate multiple, nominal data-sources, so that the relationships between the static and mobile members of a population can be addressed. Historically, in looking at the Commons there has been a tendency to introduce a bias in favour of those who were relatively immobile and whose behaviour it has therefore been easier to trace. This also creates a tendency to look at agency as emerging from a particular place or its immediate hinterland, and this ignores the possibility of a more divergent set of influences on an individual and her actions in enclosed or common spaces. The same may be true of educational networks or Commons or enclosures, and the spaces from which mass intellectuality might emerge. The complexities of landholding and mobility highlight the parameters of our knowing about power and social capital. The more one knows and comes to understand about individuals in the past, the less confidence one can have in generalisations based upon aggregate analyses of behaviour. Just because both John and Jane Doe act in a specific way, does not mean that their underlying motivations and agency are the same. Context-situated approaches indicate the worth of longitudinal studies, which highlight the complexities of peoples’ lives and how we might take a more holistic approach to understanding behaviours that are more nuanced.

THIRD: the complexity of space and time, and the depth of social relationships.

Divergent socio-economic influences were important in analysing political action in the eighteenth century because an individual voter might own freehold land against which he voted, but he might also be a tenant of an individual or a manorial court, or a local corporation. Eighteenth century tenures were often mixed and taken up from several sources, usually in order to create a larger, more unified block of land that itself gave a large measure of political autonomy. How individuals operated in specific spaces, and then accrued their social/economic capital into a measure of political power was/is subject to no simple, deterministic rules about the Commons or networks. The primary sources for understanding eighteenth century voting behaviour were poll books or canvass sources that could be linked. However, these still remain relatively skeletal, containing few nominal data. Only by locating specific voters in time and space can the electoral historian move beyond essentially unhelpful interpretations based on aggregate analyses. This second process addresses these issues by forging a methodology which can help examine politics at a local level. The historian needs to be able to recreate particular communities, to divine the types of forces which were impacting upon the electorate. Many voters were ductile and dependent, factors brought into sharper focus by the politics of their locale. However, the fact that such distinct contexts existed inside regions indicates the complexity of pressures which impacted upon the electorate. In many areas local elites were not a separate group, they were tied into a deeper nexus of community obligation. The key to our understanding of the relationships between structural forms and individuals in any context lies in reconstructing the depth of such ties.

FOURTH: the relationships between Common/enclosed space and time.

The relationships between common land, which was managed under specific rules for specific communities and the rights over which were defended earnestly, and between freehold land, or leasehold land that was rented, were complex. This also then suggests that we might wish to look at the inter-relationships between the networked Commons and enclosed or proprietary software/networks, and institutional networks, in a more nuanced way. Historically, the proximity of freehold land to major townships stimulated a demand for such land in those areas, as a sink for capital. Whether the rents and revenue produced by landownership helped to alleviate the problems of trade/economic fluctuations is unclear. However, for instance in the textile towns of the West Riding of Yorkshire, many clothiers saw the ownership of freehold land as important, and this indicates that these were independent men of relatively substantial means. One might ask then how is social capital or power developed and applied differentially inside and across open or closed networks, and who has the power to define how open or enclosed those networks and their resources (thinking of CC-NC) might become?

FIFTH: on power and autonomy.

Many of the voters in Hanoverian elections either owned, rented, and/or held-in-common substantial assemblages of land. Moreover, if any voters rented they were often wealthy and influential enough to act independently of their landlord. Very few men were compelled to poll as their landlords did. That so many owned their land, and that landownership was so fractured, made political control awkward. It simply was not possible for local landowners to brow-beat such men to the polls. This is not to say that some voters were not compliant out of ideological or socio-economic need. There is also a point to be made about the fact that politics was nothing without a clash of interests from those with status over political capital. However, the relationship between the politicians and a large subset of the electorate was fragile and conditional. Once the politicians drew the battle lines they were involved in a wider nexus of responsibilities. With this in mind it is hardly surprising that politicians had to expend so much energy and money to gain an election. A lack of awareness about the rights of the electors and local customs could hamstring a campaign just as it can our view of them. It was these local socio-economic and socio-cultural factors that emancipated individual voting communities, and which moderated the voters’ choices at the polls. In making sense of the Commons/enclosure inside education, it may be that local socio-economies and local customs/social relationships need to be related to the political structures/technologies that coerce, co-opt or give consent to specific forms of action.

Brian’s comment that “I inexplicably find debates on CC-NC fascinating now… But I need a clearer sense on what “enclosure” means in practice, not just theory”, is important then for two reasons. First, the content of our educational practices (CC-NC or whatever) reveals the complex structures of coercion and consent inside which we ask our students and staff to operate. Second, understanding other stories of coercion and consent, located inside-and-against the dichotomy of Commons/enclosure might offer us alternative ways to crack and push-back against the increasing privatisation of education.


some questions on academic identity and the crisis


Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

Ten points on the 2012 UCISA Survey on Technology-Enhanced Learning


Posted by hallymk1

Economic forecast soothe our dereliction

Words of euthanasia, apathy of sick routine

Carried away with useless advertising dreams

Blinding children, life as autonotomes

Manic Street Preachers. 1992. Natwest-Barclays-Midlands-Lloyds.

The 2012 UCISA survey on TEL leaves me with some matters arising from its sector-wide description of the implementation of technology in higher education.

NOTE: I am grateful for the work of UCISA and especially Richard Walker, Julie Voce and Jebar Ahmed in pulling these data together. We need these kinds of surveys, in order to help us to shape a politics of educational technology.

ONE. The Background to the survey states:

UCISA is aware that a number of issues relating to VLEs are having a significant impact on Computing/Information Services. They also represent cultural challenges for both academic staff and students in how they engage with their learning and teaching. Issues relate to choosing a VLE, its implementation, technical support and a whole range of support, training and pedagogic issues relating to its use.

This made me think about the poverty of our collective critique of machinery, technology or techniques in higher education; the one space where such a critique should develop. In Capital, Volume 1, as he developed his argument about how machines recalibrate both work and the relationships between capital and labour, Marx wrote:

Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.

TWO. The maturity of our understanding of technologies in the curriculum is increasing. Witness the reduction in staff confidence in the use of technologies as a barrier to change. So why does the sector insist, generally, on using the term TEL, which places technology before learning? Is this because it is easier to discuss technology or techniques that then connect to abstracted educational currencies like participation, retention, progression, which are in turn forms of separation, rather than to address the real subsumption of those technologies under a more humane, critical pedagogy? At present it feels like higher education is being calibrated as an educational space in which learning is formally subsumed under the need for technologically- or technique-driven value. The idea of separation is important here, in terms of: individual rather than collective or co-operative staff skills/literacies/strategies; supporting individual students and their engagement and participation on-line/in the classroom; individuated assessment and accreditation regimes supported by individuated analytics and surveillance, in the name of employability. In this the idea that individual students/academics might becomes in excess of themselves in a collective space is lost.

THREE. The Executive Summary flags the key institutional concern as finance with “the Browne review heralding the new economic climate and budgetary challenges”. It is possible that these are simply new economic norms, as neoliberalism recalibrates the university as a space for-profit. However, the Summary then argues for the following imperatives in the use of TEL, emerging from the HEFCE Online Learning Taskforce report:

student choice in the deregulated market place, with student expectations driving an improved level of service provision by higher education institutions, particularly through the use of technologies to support application and course selection procedures. The 2012 Survey sought to capture progress in these areas too, particularly the growth in online services offering more flexible opportunities for learning, such as through the development of mobile learning provision.

This is a deeply political statement, reflecting: the drive towards new public management in education linked to choice agendas; the fetishisation of student expectations and the hegemony of student-as-consumer (c.f. page 15 and reported student petitions/feedback that act as encouragement/pressure); the use of technology for work-based and distance learning; and the development of flexibility in educational provision as a means of replicating inside higher education those precarious working patterns that shape the landscape of capitalist labour. The report does not or cannot critique the extant political economy and structural constraints of the use of technology inside a neoliberal university sector. It can only reflect the perceived needs of the sector in responding to the rule of money, so that analysis/description pivots around money and efficiency. This is our collective loss refracted through the survey.

FOUR. The report states that “The key change since 2010 has been the emergence of corporate strategies.” This is interesting given the lifting of the fee cap to £9,000, and the ways in which discourses of competition and efficiency drive techno-determinism. Witness this Guardian article in which it is argued that “The use of innovative technology in higher education will ensure the UK remains a leader in world-class teaching, education and research”, and this Educause article that links the consumerization of technology, education and work. However, also witness this legal briefing on the relationship between universities and students-as-consumers, in which it states “Education institutions which are utilising e-learning, e-commerce and information technology to provide innovative ways for students to participate will have to be aware of the methods they employ in the provision of education products online and digitally in order that they can comply with the new [EU Consumer Protection] law.” Corporate strategies as a driver for TEL is correlated to the rush from universities to align themselves with MOOCs like Coursera and their engagement with overseas markets, and the business needs of those universities to maintain an increase in the rate of profit. In this, technology as a lever for competition and efficiency is central, so corporate engagement becomes normalised.

FIVE. In spite of this corporate agenda, and the threat/opportunity of MOOCs, the Executive Summary argues that “fully online courses have decreased as a proportion of TEL activity over the years and remain a niche area of activity.” Are (some) universities being redesigned around, firstly an external space that is defined by partnerships or collaborations or governing networks that are themselves geared towards extracting rents from global markets, and secondly, niche activities that are delivered in hybrid form inside the university? The first factor responds to governmental agendas for export-driven demand. The second is articulated in the focus on NSS scores and the survey return (page 13) that states “Another key development from the 2010 Survey is the rise up the rankings of creating/improving competitive advantage as a driver… with Russell Group universities returning the highest mean score of the mission groups for this factor.” This is underwritten by the idea of the student-as-consumer and business efficiency, with technology as a lever for competitive change.

SIX. Hosting/outsourcing: the Executive Summary argues that “The establishment of outsourced support for TEL services remains quite limited though across the sector.” I wrote about this here. It is part of a structural readjustment policy that disciplines (non-academic) labour and diverts income in the form of rents to corporations. As for the uncritical idea that it is green, read this or this or this.

SEVEN. “Mobile technologies top the list of challenges which institutions face, followed by staff development, legal/policy issues and e-assessment. Staff development, strategies/policies and support staff are seen as the primary remedies – echoing similar responses to the 2010 Survey.” Which reminds me that it is easier to distance the self from the reality of austerity and to engage with technological innovation inside neoliberal higher education for the student-as-consumer, than it is to imagine new forms of sociability or socially-defined value that might be against/beyond the university as it is geared for value-extraction and the reproduction of capitalist social relations. Which leads me to…

EIGHT. A/the critical statement in the while report emerges on page 6. At issue is “how the sector can maximise the value of its strategic investment in learning technologies.” Hence the scope of the survey appears to be fiscally-driven or focused on value as it relates to “new trends in TEL service delivery and provision” that are budgetary, about outsourcing, about institutional collaboration in delivering TEL services, about mobile services, about reviews of institutional VLE provision, and finally about the impact of TEL tools on the student learning experience and pedagogic practice. As Ruth Rikowski argues, this is important because:

‘value’ is the essential ingredient upon which all forms of capitalism rest, and furthermore, that today value is being extracted from knowledge, particularly in the industrialised world. Once the human race becomes more conscious of this, it can then endeavour to create a better, kinder, fairer social and economic system that does not depend on the extraction of value from and exploitation of human labour.

NINE. The survey notes that “Pearson’s eCollege was not returned in the results” in the questions on commercial platform uptake. The role of for-profits like Pearson, interrogated in the USA by Diane Ravitch, in the UK by Andrew McGettigan and me, now takes us beyond arguments about which VLE vendor a university “partners” with. It now becomes a question of whether universities can withstand the structural readjustment imposed by the levelling of the fiscal terrain through secondary legislation related to shared services and VAT exemption or research and innovation funds, alongside the demands for efficiencies in service-provision allegedly provided by for-profits, and the ability of corporates with massive stock market capitalisation to open-up the sector further. This is where the feedback in the survey about competition, especially from the Russell Sector, is the warning cry. Technology here represents the canary in the mine. The next survey will need to be less about Pearson’s specific eCollege and more about the impact of marketisation on the fabric of higher education and the idea of the University. The detail of how corporations like Pearson are able to lever profit and rent from universities, or to subsume those very universities inside their governance structures will be at issue. At this point the question might turn to how technology might be used to push back, by fighting against outsourcing or for locally-hosted open source, or how it supports an exodus away from what the university has become.

TEN. Impact is raised as a question 3.21. In April I argued that attempts to reclaim impact are important because

research [and pedagogic] impact is [are] a crucial site of struggle in the commodification of the University and its subsumption under the logic of capitalist expansion. The ways in which academics might go into occupation of terms like impact, in order to redefine its use against that prescribed by the regulatory logic of the State or transnational advocacy networks, is important in moving beyond the use of the term simply as the impression of academic activity. Impact as impression objectifies activity and relationships and people’s subject positions through behavioural demands. What can be measured is part of a neoliberal discourse related to efficiency and consumption.

This final point is crystallised because the UCISA report argues that “the evaluation of pedagogic practices is less well established across the sector than impact evaluation on the student experience”. The question then is how do we move beyond the ideological restrictions of technology shackled inside the claims made for the student experience, to re-frame that experience collectively and for new forms of impact that serve as a critique of the profit motive? Politicising the claims we make and the surveys we undertake might be one point of departure.