Educational technology and the war on public education

March 22, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NINE. However, everyday scholarly activities are becoming increasingly folded into the logic of capital through, for instance, indentured study and debt, internationalisation, privatisation and outsourcing. As a result, the internal logic of the University is increasingly prescribed by the rule of money, which forecloses on the possibility of creating transformatory social relationships as against fetishised products and processes of valorisation.

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

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

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

Forking the University: legitimising deliberation in physical and virtual space

March 7, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

The theme of the place and politics of the Academic Commons crops up often in my writing and work. In particular I am taken with ideas of how and where academics and students as scholars can resist and then push back against the enclosure of the spaces and places for academic practice and critique. At DMU this has led to two inter-connected ideas: the virtual DMU Commons; and our new, physical Speaker’s Step in Magazine Square.

The Commons apes those other examples of virtual common-land, for instance at Lincoln, and CUNY, and BCU, and which our student DMU Commons Gardener is documenting here. Our Commons connects to a deeper history of protest, negation and refusal, and stories of custom-in-common that define a shared, collective identity, which I wrote about here. So our Commons is:

a shared place for the production of learning and research that is personally and socially transformative. Our DMU Commons will connect the social world of DMU to the resources, artefacts, networks and conversations that emerge from our thinking. The DMU Commons will nurture, stimulate and enhance respectful and generous learning conversations, within and beyond the University. It will help us to realise our ambitions through co-operation and our shared labours.

This connects to a second strand of thinking about hacking or forking the University, which is being developed nicely as a research project by Joss Winn at Lincoln, and which embeds ideas of craft and skill and tradition and production, and then links them to personal and social identity. I see this as a position from where the negation of ourselves as subjects inside the University might be fought. Moreover, it offers a way to connect with Christopher Newfield‘s desire for Re-Making the University in the face of austerity.

Thus, at DMU we might take the idea of craft and re-making or re-producing, in order to develop an idea of commonality around which we might also offer-up, create or carve out spaces for local/University developers, like the Leicester Linux Users’ Group, to engage with users, like the DMU Mashed group. This might then enable those new partnerships to use gizmos (Arduinos, Pis and drones) and sandboxes (part of a private cloud) to engage with real data (OpenAccess, OAuth and Big), in order to give a forked DMU community the opportunity to re-create/re-produce the University, and to solve problems inside enterprising, politicised, open spaces. In part this re-making depends upon the engagement of multiple and disparate groups in a set of shared problems, worked out in common or on a commons. Thus, the DMU Commons might become important as a place where research groups, developers, students, external friends of the University, alumni etc. might meet or see or review or hack or fork each other’s work.

However, we are now moving towards the idea that a DMU Commons might also need a physical place where ideas might be catalysed and problems identified and solutions debated. The need for a physical, communal spaces that also serve as ciphers for administrative or juridical or political groupings has a long tradition: from wapentakes/hundreds in English political administration; to the histories of general assemblies in, for example, student struggles; to workers’ councils; to the history of political reform meetings; and the recent histories of political struggles in Syntagma Square in Athens and Tahrir Square in Cairo. As spaces become enclosed the risk is that our opportunities for deliberation and free debate are stifled. The need is then for the courage to reassert in common our rights to deliberate in shared spaces.

At DMU we have begun to open-up just such a communal, deliberative space in Magazine Square, and we are reclaiming its use for the University-in-the-City. The space was first co-opted by Nick Clegg at the 2010 General Election and then, in response, by Ed Balls in 2011 in the run-up to the Leicester South by-election. Both Clegg and Balls stood at the same point on the same concrete podium, which serves as a seat in the Square, in order to make their election pitches. This is important precisely because it invested the square as a political space, but it is also important that the Square itself is centred on one of Leicester’s most historic spaces, by the Castle Magazine, Castle Park, St and Mary de Castro Church, and with a resonance through the University’s name to Simon de Montfort’s first Parliament.

It is also important that the seat, or step, sits very near to the the DMU/Leicester City Council boundary line. The demarcation is clearly marked by metal studs in the ground, and two brick square studs in the grass behind the speakers’ step. The deed lines for the land ownership are fascinating as they move along the front of DMU’s Hugh Aston Building and across the Magazine. This rudimentary sketch of the DMU/Leicester City Council Boundary shows this a little more clearly. Although the step wall where Clegg and Balls spoke technically belongs to Leicester City Council, there is no permission required given that speaking there will be an open public forum, taking place in an open public space. We are going to mark what we now refer to as Speaker’s Step with a plaque inscribed with Nelson Mandela’s quote that:

“Sometimes it falls upon a generation to be great, you can be that generation”.

We have already held Student Union hustings on the Step, and on Thursday 8 March, to coincide with the Queen’s visit to DMU, we are hosting a series of speed lectures, hopefully complete with heckles and interruptions and questions, which will further inscribe Speaker’s Step as a space where we might reconnect the University with the public and the City. The idea for these speed lectures is to discuss the idea of the University as a public good, and Executive Board members, academic staff and students will be deliberating issues that matter to them around: local governance; creativity; open education; the NHS; software design and the history of computation; why we need another inquiry into housing; management information, universities and £9k fees; language development and education for the multicultural learner; and the cultural importance of Margaret Atwood and Florence Nightingale. We hope that this will be the beginning of a recapturing of this public space by the staff and students of DMU, as a way to re-create and re-produce the University as a public good deeply connected to the politics and place of Leicester.

As important will be our attempt to catalyse the use of the space for hustings, meetings, general assemblies, rallies and so on, as a legitimate form of re-imagining the University-in-the-City. Legitimising ways and places in which people can colonise and develop ideas and problems, and hopefully then re-produce or hack or fork the University, in order to solve those problems is central to this project. It is in the legitimation and interconnection of our DMU Commons with our Speaker’s Step, and the wider University/City, that we begin this political process.

A note on the digital university and dislocated politics

February 17, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

In her latest post on the digital university, which focuses upon information literacy, Sheila MacNeill argues that “technological change in the production and consumption of information content” should “not allowed to obscure the importance of developing the educational, ethical and democratic dimension of the digital society”. Thus, information literacy “is portrayed in terms of improving the information behaviours required to access and search various information systems to extract and use information for social, economic and educational purposes.” What this means for our work or labour, and for the society that such work/labour reveals is not developed here beyond MacNeill’s identification of the key strands in UNESCO’s Alexandria Proclamation, which focus upon information for trade or as exchangeable commodity, and literacy for employment or democracy, which I assume is accepted, pre-defined forms of liberal democracy, as opposed to alternatives like communes or workers’ councils or general assemblies.

This begins then to re-inscribe the polyarchic limits to our discussion of the digital and the digital university. I have previously noted that polyarchy

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

So whilst MacNeill and Johnston’s conceptual matrix highlight’s digital participation, it does not move to a critique of what participation is/might be, beyond the limits imposed by western, liberal democracy and the role of the University in that model. That role is framed by business-as-usual, employability, economic growth and the politics of austerity. Thus, it is noted that “Digital participation, in this context, can be seen as a fundamental part of any knowledge economy or information based democracy and therefore has substantial implications for educators. Digital participation needs to be optimized to ensure continued economic growth in parallel with the development of an informed, literate citizenship.” The boundaries of this enclosed debate over digital literacy or information literacy or the knowledge economy or the information society are further revealed in Lawrie Phipps‘ post about White and Le Cornu’s Visitor and Resident’s model, which is limited to enabling institutions “to understand [how] these staff behaviours, perceptions and motivations can help identify which technologies or artefacts can be deployed most effectively to support different types of staff”. There is no space here for a wider digital politics or critique of digital literacy/identity/university.

Our limited perspectives of the digital world inside the University, and what the University is for (business-as-usual because there is no alternative) amplifies the view that academia is locked into problem-solving theory, which is aimed at supporting, interacting with, and adjusting the dominant order. This leads us to the artificial organisation and construction of knowledge, which in turn closes off a revelation of how society works and alienates. It depoliticises and avoids, and it disempowers us in our attempts to transform the world, through a critique of how we experience our life, and how we accept the elite’s interpretive myths/their hegemony over us.

If we are to develop a meaningful engagement with digital/information literacy, connected to models of digital participation and the digital University, we need a critique of the established ideological or intellectual frameworks that enclose this debate. We need a critique of their legitimacy within/beyond higher education. This critique forms a set of political acts, which are also open to critique but which do not simply accept the strictures of neoliberal political economy. Our critiques of what digital participation is/might be within higher education are historically situated, and connected to capitalist work as our living history and our lived experiences.

The work sketched out in models like MacNeill’s/Johnson’s and White/Le Cornu’s becomes important where it offers a possible interface with the world beyond the University, the world in which the University is networked or digitised. Thus, critiques of these models offer ways to connect the work of the academy to the dislocated realities of the world beyond it, which are not simply about employability. Thus, the development of relationships that support participation in re-creating the world needs to connect our digital habitus to the altered realities of global politics, in terms of either the coercive policies of governments or the reaction of Anonymous or occupations or revolts to those policies.

Thus we might usefully re-connect/situate our models of the digital university/digital participation within a world that is:

networked and kicking off everywhere in response to the austerity politics that frame our education;
networked and using technologies to argue for the destruction of the liberal world that our models of digital practice seem to argue for;
networked and riven with brutality that our homogeneous models of practice risk avoiding, including indecent underground activity;
networked and rife with overt examples of inhumanity, including racism, sexism and homophobia;
networked and monitored as governments seeks to coerce their citizenry, the very same citizenry that we hope will help fill-out our models of practice;
networked and using digital technologies in direct action against the State in support of “democracy”;
networked and dominated by corporations and transnational global elites, whose very business practices that are handed down to us in global proclamations also enslave us; and
networked and in conflict with itself, with education as a key site of that conflict.

In the face of this mass of events against extant models of citizen participation inside western, liberal democracy, I wonder whether we can connect our discussion of the digital university to a deeper, radicalised political critique.

Addendum

There is a point to be made about the individal and the social here. So much of our discourse is about individuals/individualisation that is developed using limited, liberal education terms like personalisation and differentiation. As we talk about individual literacies and participation we tend to neglect the social construction and situation of these things. In fact, we tend to neglect the relational aspects of ourselves. In focusing on the personal or the individual, at the expense of our associations, we risk doing the market’s work for it. We commodify ourselves as wage-slaves who need to develop a competitive edge. Because there is no alternative. If there is one thing that Marx reveals to us it is to remember the social/associational/co-operative. This is why I become more interested in long-term co-operative endeavours that offer the possibility that we might re-frame our relationships using technology. And here I am not sure that I am looking at MOOCs or badges. I think I am looking at #ds106. Not as a fetishised solution. But as a shared sense of the possible and a shared set of relationships in which power might be outed/critiqued/contested, that has implications for participation (as labour-in-and-beyond capitalism) and learning/education/the university beyond the market and enabled, in-part, digitally.

Presentations about the assault on public education

February 8, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

Title: Educational technology and the war on public education

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

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

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

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

Title: In, Against and Beyond the Neoliberal University

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

On Elsevier and the academic project

February 7, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A note on academic activism, hyper-neoliberalism and the problem of power and consent

February 2, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

In her seminar on “Diagnosing the contemporary: prolific activism, hyper-neoliberalism and the problem of power and consent”, Janet Newman drew on her research into feminist critiques of the ideology and practices of neoliberalism, in order to challenge the realities of academic activism. I have blogged before about academic activism, in particular connected to the mass of protests that form a politics of events against austerity and the possibilities of exodus, and the types of radical spaces that the University might open up. However, Newman’s work demonstrated how, within the overarching re-formation of capital under neoliberal doctrine, it is the similarities across disparate positions that are in-and-against that re-formation, which offer spaces and possibilities to move beyond them.

In Holloway’s terms Newman’s work on critique and criticality from the perspective of gender politics is one of those cracks in the productive relations defined by capitalism, which itself needs to be connected to other stories or cracks that reveal the everyday and historical injustices of the politics of austerity and our polyarchic state apparatus. One of Newman’s key points was how to create spaces and places through which mappings between community activist and academic positions could emerge, and thereby lead to new analyses and actions. These spaces are crucial because they enable communities, or networks, or society to test what Stuart Price calls “truth claims in a story world”, like the idea that there is no alternative.

So, Newman highlighted a conceptual analysis of positions based on the experiences of women who have brought personal and political commitments into their working lives, in particular since the New Labour project. Her work highlighted the following themes/issues/possibilities that emerged on the boundaries between academic/activist positions.

Mechanisms through which both academics and activists can confront power.
Ways in which critical engagements, including knowledge work, could be developed.
Spaces for close encounters with those who act as/for monitoring power (ostensibly based around financial power and efficiency).
Revealing the mechanisms and strategies through which activist/minority/dissenting discourses are appropriated/incorporated by those in power, as a form of undoing. In this way radical or marginalised positions are neutralised in the process of co-option or are de-legitimised or even erased.
The need for an on-going focus on relational positions or relationships, rather than transactions between groups or communities or individuals.

This final point seems to me critical in the approach of the occupy movement, or the flowering of oppositional, free education movements. It connects deeply to the edufactory collective’s tripartite strategy for opposing the restrictions and enclosure of academic practices imposed by neoliberal educational policy, namely: for a new educational politics based on the general assembly; for militant research strategies; and for activity in public. Newman also revealed a similar position in calling for a new constituency of activist academic positions that can hold politicians to account. She argued for: making our collective work visible; for engaging in public conversations; and for generative labour, or doing new things. This, for her, was a move to connect critique and criticality to our everyday practices.

I am left, therefore, with a deepening sense of the strands/cracks of continuity across stories. Moreover, there is the revelation that these strands/cracks are enabling us to recognise the ideological impact of austerity and neoliberal dogma on the possibility that we might become subjects in our own lives. There is the possibility that in the spaces opened up in occupation, we might form counter-narratives or counter-hegemonic positions. The stakes in this discussion are high: not only do we face socio-environmental crises, but the coercive state is being revealed on a daily basis, in the attacks on welfare, the militarisation of the police, in increasing authoritarianism around the Olympic Games etc..

However, we see in opposition to coercion more than simply hope; we see courage being revealed and the possibility that subject positions might be recuperated and that new spaces/places might be opened up across civil society. Richard Murphy reminds us of this in his work on the courageous state; and we are reminded of this courage in the worker/student actions of Tent City University, and the Space Project, and students at UC Berkeley, and Occupy Oakland, and student protests in Santiago, and Turin, and Dhaka, and at University College London, and Kent State University, and Manila, as well as in Venture Communes, and beyond. This mapping of political, scholarly, historical activism enables us to discuss what might be recuperated by us against the incorporation of dissent inside the dominant narrative. Moreover, this discussion enables us to keep each other’s narratives alive in the face of coercive power, and more importantly enables the legitimisation of our alternative narratives in the face of the de-politicisation imposed inside polyarchy.

So we might then ask how do we escalate dissent beyond the individual cracks shown by our own narratives? How do we join our dissenting narratives, our hopes for alternative possibilities, into something new? How do our local positions scale, so that the coercive power of the state can be critiqued and alternatives debated? And what is the role of academics as activists in that critique? In part, I think, this is a process of finding the courage to move beyond hope. To accept that there is no hope for/from a better capitalism, and that we need the courage to debate and try something new. This is what I take from a re-reading of the zero percent and the call to occupy everything, in the search for an alternative that is not simply in-and-against capital, but that wishes to move beyond it.

Against dispossession: a note on visitors, residents and proletarianised education

January 25, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

The threat of the increasing proletarianisation of our lives under austerity politics is increasingly invoked and folded into the debate over how we structure our social relations. Proletarianisation is an outcome of the materialist nature of our productive relations in an economy based on the commodity form, and where the drive to extract value from those relations is based on increased efficiency and productivity. Labour-power is the vital source of value creation, and one that is constantly being reinterpreted and threatened through its interplay with technique or technology. In its current form, the commodity economy, where labour-power is a commodity brought under the control of capital, all aspects of life are inside the imperative to extract value. In this social factory, our leisure time, our domestic life, our socialised goods held in common, our public/private spaces and places, are all bound by the realities of commodification.

In this commodification we experience a sense of loss because our labour is alienated from us, and is handed to capital, in return for the means of subsistence, or ways in which we can renew ourselves so that we can return to work/sell our labour in the market-place. Marx argues that under the logic of capitalism, labour:

Is then only the semblance of an activity, only a forced activity, imposed upon me only by an external and accidental necessity and not by an internal and determined necessity… My labour, therefore, is manifested as the objective, sensuous, perceptible, and indubitable expression of my self-loss and my powerlessness.

The argument is that under austerity politics, where access to socialised safety-nets or benefits is closed off, where there is an attack on common goods like pensions and education, and where policy discourse is limited to the Scylla and Charybdis of “there is no alternative” and of ”doing more with less”, we might ask how are we to obtain the means of subsistence? Whilst this is a world of precarity, both for labour and capital, and is one in which the politics of the production of our lives is central to our survival, it is also a world that Werner Bonefeld notes is reduced to an existence as labour-under-capitalism, so that our spaces, places, identities, and relationships are all means of extracting value or hoarding wealth. Bonefeld argues:

What does the fight against cuts entail? It is a struggle against the reduction of life time to labour time. The fight against cuts is in fact a fight for a life. For the dependent masses, wages and welfare benefits are the means with which to obtain the means of subsistence.

On Tsianos and Papadopoulos’ terms, austerity/precarity is the duality resulting from a crisis in our social systems when they are faced by the realities of what has been termed immaterial labour, or ”the power dynamics of living labour in post-Fordist societies”. In apolitical terms this is focused upon network governance, or cognitive capital, or the knowledge economy. However, once framed in terms ofpolitical economy we begin to address issues of a life-world “incorporated into non-labour time, [where] the exploitation of workforce happens beyond the boundaries of work, it is distributed across the whole time and space of life”.

Coercion is one central element by which this reduction of life time to labour time is maintained, and socio-technical solutions are a means by which order can be enforced through monitoring productivity or activity, alongside its use in developing the power of cultural norms and manipulation. However, Bonefeld argues that turning points are revealed as the crisis is renewed, in policy or in practice. Thus, it may be possible to move away from uncritical demands for the politics of jobs and wages, which in themselves merely reaffirm the alienating and corrosive relationships that catalysed austerity in the first place, towards questions of the production and distribution of value within global societies. So we might ask why the development of the productive forces at the disposal of society have become too powerful for this society, bringing financial disorder and requiring austerity to maintain it?

Žižek has further developed this articulation of the mechanics of precarity that underpin austerity, and the looming threat of proletarianisation that is etched into our social fabric. Thus, he re-states the classical, disciplining threat posed by surplus labour to those in work:

The category of the unemployed has thus expanded to encompass vast ranges of people, from the temporarily unemployed, the no longer employable and permanently unemployed, to the inhabitants of ghettos and slums (all those often dismissed by Marx himself as ‘lumpen-proletarians’), and finally to the whole populations and states excluded from the global capitalist process, like the blank spaces on ancient maps.

It is against becoming part of this forgotten or vilified mass of humanity that we are coerced into accepting that “there is no alternative”; or that if we occupy then it is for some trans-historical alternative under capitalism. Pace Bonefeld, Žižek argues that much of the occupy movement and rebellions against austerity measures “are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to proletarians.” They are an attempt to maintain a lifestyle, or at least to sketch a space where the violation of that lifestyle by austerity politics might be minimised.

This is a central argument progressed by Schwartz in his deconstruction of the occupy movement and its 99 percent motif. Schwartz argues that our traditional identity politics, now morphed into the “them and us” narrative of the 99 percent, merely enables capital to reinscribe itself as the dominating reality of our lives. However, by acceding to the neoliberal ideology of austerity, we are culpable in describing and renewing its boundaries.

The 99%, acts as the loyal opposition within the capitalist society. It cannot even formulate a critique of the system let alone start a revolution. Incapable of understanding itself as a diverse collection of relations, it mistakes itself for a group of individuals bound together by a desire for reform. The least radical common denominator unites the 99%. Such a low level of consciousness is an immutable feature of mass movements within the contemporary biopolitical fabric, one perhaps more pronounced in mass movements inspired by marketing professionals with day jobs that rely on the demographic logic at the heart of biopoltical governance.

They behave as if the spectacle were determined by the production alternative images and narratives, rather than by sets of economic relations. Predictably, their tactics and goals reflect the assumption that groups of individuals rather than sets of relations determine economies. In short they live as if trapped in a reflection on the surface of death’s mirror.

Instead Schwartz calls for a negation of the space and place of capital as reinforced through the cries of the 99 percent for a fair capitalism, or for tax justice, or for more humane labour rights, or for an end to fracking, or for rights for aboriginal groups, inside a system that corrodes. Instead he calls for “0% movements” that in-turn disrupt the dominant logic of capital, and its imposition of precarious subsistence:

Their force increases along lines of affiance and separation based on concrete relations with others. Affiance and separation are anything but the growth associated with the 99%’s demographic counting. The constitutive disorganization and anarchistic fragmentation of 0% resistance has taught those involved that being too small to fail sometimes releases more power than being too big to fail. The lone warrior, the cell, the gang, the alliance that can shut down all the ports along a coast, the commune capable of occupying a whole city, collective sabotage, mass default: all of these 0% movements gain effectiveness from internal and external friendships and conflicts.

Schwartz locates transformation in these spaces inside the totality of capital, as a totalising negation of the real subsumption of our life time to labour time. The logic of zero percent is to move to the cracks that are formed in the circuits and cycles of capital, and away from a reproduction of its domination over our social lives, however humane the hopes for that reproduction may be. This logic of zero percent is for abolition rather than reinscription; it is for the negation of objectified identities as labour-in-capitalism, and for our ability to become subjects in our own life time.

One impact of this debate is on the politics of subject/object, and the possibility that subjectivities might emerge under capitalism. A second is on the place of technology or technique in defining oppositional spaces and connections, inside and across societies. For Žižek one place in which these two elements become entwined and are revealed is in the “privatisation of the general intellect”. He argues that the knowledge created, reproduced, reinforced and shared socially, and generalised at the level of society, which in-turn underpins our life experiences, is being privatised through the use of technology, so that we are witnessing “the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge.”

This view connects the rent extracted from software licenses, to the extraction of value through patents generated from the opening of public data to private corporations, to the selling of personal data from adwords for profit-maximisation, to the clampdown on file-sharing and perceived piracy, to the enclosure of commonly-held goods or spaces through primary legislation. It incorporates our immaterial labour, created inside/outside work, within a commodity economy. Throughout these possibilities of en-closure and internet regulation, a rentier class is demarcating its power-over the productive forces of labour.

These foreclosures and enclosures are met, in part, by socially-constructed, ideological struggles over place, using technology to contest privatised control over what is/was held in common, or regarded as a commons. Much of this goes relatively unreported, but forms a vital set of skirmishes in the struggle for open digital space through which a politics of production, re-production and distribution can be affirmed. This affirmation is central to our ability to engage in a politics of zero percent, in order that we are able to imagine collectively a world beyond austerity and beyond the crisis of capital that it reveals.

These digital struggles for space are mirrored in, and map onto the real-world. Rachel Drummond eloquently highlights how austerity politics is being used to kettle, privatise and extract rent from previously socialised places, using tools/technologies of coercion. She states that the logic of public policy is based on long histories in which the accumulation of value and capital has been enabled through the dispossession of people from spaces. This has catalysed the subsequent enforced or coerced proletarianisation of a disposed population, by those in power. Thus, commodification, coercion and control are:

emblematic of a broad and diffuse logic of enclosure (privatizing and limiting access to space) that permeates the ongoing project of ‘regeneration’ in London and the UK. It is this that lies in the background of seemingly discrete issues such as long prison sentences for student protesters, evictions of ‘rioters’ and Traveller communities and the development of the London Olympic site. Just as the state seeks out new ways to criminalise and repress public protest, a new series of strategies and justifications to dispossess the people of any property and housing owned publicly or held in common continues apace. Yet what may be particularly novel in recent years is the specific ways these two strategies of enclosure have intersected with one another: repression and dispossession are increasingly employed together to produce a cleansed entrepreneurial city.

This bears repeating because it reinforces a new politics of place, facilitated by socio-technical tools: “repression and dispossession are increasingly employed together to produce a cleansed entrepreneurial city.” And so we witness techniques and technologies: for outsourcing our social relationships or abstracting them to control of private property and money, for increasing separation and individuation; for labelling individuals through ASBOs and the creation of dispersal zones; for criminalising squatting and occupation; for brutalising space through kettles; and for maintaining hierachies. All whilst we reinforce assertions as narratives of networked democracy.

What’s more, whether in concrete or digital spaces “Collective punishment (via eviction) opens the door to a new strategy of ‘dispossession by criminalisation’”. Whether you are subject to a dispersal order or are convicted of illegal file-sharing, our power to engage in activities using tools in a range of spaces is highly politicised and controlled. This is enforced both as those spaces are commodified and as our activity in them is reconstructed as labour time, in order to enable the extraction of value. For Drummond, this focus on dispossession of space connects to an idea of revolt in the face of the dispossession of a viable, social future, beyond the logic of austerity or the spectre of proletarianisation. She states:

It is perhaps within these twin fronts of dispossession on the one hand and repressive policing on the other, that we might view the recent explosion of occupations, despite all of their contradictions, as one appropriate form of resistance. For here we arrive at a tactic which seeks to transform the privately enclosed and the repressively policed space into something public and open to all.

III

One terrain in which the struggle against dispossession has played out is that of immaterial labour. This encompasses both intellectual labour, like the production of ideas, computer programs, mash-ups, visualisations, patents and so on, and affective labour, or work that is carried out inside the social factory and which commodifes affect or prepares intellectual labourers for productive labour. For Žižek, immaterial labour is seen by its proponents like Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato and Virno, as

hegemonic in the sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in 19th-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic: it imposes itself not through force of numbers but by playing the key, emblematic structural role. What emerges is a vast new domain called the ‘common’: shared knowledge and new forms of communication and co-operation. The products of immaterial production aren’t objects but new social or interpersonal relations; immaterial production is bio-political, the production of social life.

This production of social life through the fusion or overlay of digital and concrete space is important because it reveals the ways in which the Commons, or digital communes are threatened with enclosure and commodification. One emergent field of contestation within this is then the possible subjectivity of the individual inside the network, the community or the society, and the reality of their objectivity in the face of the realities of power and hierarchy. In discussing the production of social life, the politics of place and space are central, and are amplified by the ways in which tools reveal and reinforce coercive practices. Networks and networked spaces are ideologically-framed and not trans-historical. They exist as spaces inside capitalism, framed by precarious or immaterial labour, and they reveal power.

It is in relation to this debate on immaterial labour, proletarianisation and dispossession that I wish to view models of action or identity inside/alongside digital networks. This is important because debates over educational models like White and Le Cornu’s Visitors and Residents reveal the deep, social interconnections of people, place and purpose inside capitalism, and the risks of transhistorical analysis. They also reinforce the importance of Marx’s note that:

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.

For White and Le Cornu, making some sense of a digital life is framed by the individual in place, and her/his ability subsequently to transform their existence. Thus, they argue:

social media platforms facilitate the construction, by the individual, of complex social networks not constrained by physical geography. These are critical shifts in the use of the internet which we suggest are transforming the nature of relationships, citizenship and learning.

It is this notion of transformation that demands a political critique precisely because the emergent duality of visitor/resident is socially constructed within capitalism, and reveals the logic of immaterial labour, framed by precarity and dispossession. Witness the description of Residents.

Residents: Residents see the Web primarily as a network of individuals or clusters of individuals who in turn generate content. Value online is assessed in terms of relationships as well as knowledge. Residents do not make a clear distinction between concepts of content and of persona. A blog post is as much an expression of identity as it is a discussion of particular ideas. The fact that Wikipedia has been authored collectively is not a concern, what is important is how relevant the information they find is to their particular needs.

The creation and extraction of value from relationships, networks and affects is central to the creation of productive relations and productive [value producing] labour. Inside a commodity economy people enter into direct production relations [capital/labour/rentier] as owners of things [commodities, property, cognitive capital, social capital, labour-power], and these things acquire specific social characteristics [they define our social relationships]. In Marx’s terms we see the emergence of “material relations between persons and social relations between things”, and so the commodification of our life time comes to define our existence. Moreover, this existence appears as the result of long socio-historical repetition/activity, which becomes enculturated and re-inscribed in the range of spaces/networks/communities where capitalist social relations dominate.

Thus, in the life time of identities that emerge from the fusion of concrete and digital spaces and networks, it is the ways in which the logic of labour time can be refused or negated that matters if we are to talk of transformation. In worlds where the emergence of modelled identities can be farmed or where affects can be accumulated, educators might work against transhistorical narratives that claim emancipatory possibilities beyond the daily realities of political economy. As a result, educational models like visitor/resident become important where they are historically-grounded, and where they offer the possibility that temporal critiques related to the life time of individuals, described on a continuum of forms, developed inside places/networks/hierarchies, and using tools that are shaped by digital media and education, might be socialised.

And yet, as Drummond notes, our socialised identities forged in collective places/spaces are under attack. This attack frames White and Le Cornu’s argument that the “social dimension of computing has brought about a paradigm shift in many individuals’ experience of computer use as well as influenced their attitude and motivation towards the use and purpose of connected digital technologies”, and that in this connectivity, place is a pivotal field. In making sense of these possibilities we need a critique of place, related to issues of power and dispossession, and the social relationships that flow from our labour time, or our work-inside-capital. As the authors note, contextualisation is key if the metaphor of place is “to occupy centre stage in any discussion about how people interact with each other and with content when both are electronically mediated, and be linked to the metaphor of tool.” It might be argued that this context is historically-defined as labour-in-capital, for place anchors commodification, dispossession and coercion.

Without such a contextualisation of the place of education inside the sets of exploitative and corrosive relationships and spaces articulated as capitalism, our models of digital practices and our discussions of digital literacy, will merely reinscribe new forms of proletarianisation, through monitoring, control, efficiency, productivity and mundane work. This, as Bonefeld acknowledged, is the subsumption of our life time to labour time. It is about the extraction of surplus value from the range of places in which we exist, and that are increasingly privatised and commodified, or copyrighted and licensed/rented back to us, or enclosed and kettled, or monitored and taken-down, and in which we are expected to use tools/technologies that we are forced to rent. Whether we visit these spaces or are resident in them, the precarity of immaterial labour, revealed through the dispossessions, privations and privatisations of austerity, frames our existence. How is a transformatory existence possible without such a recognition?

We might usefully reframe our engagements with our digitised life time, through what Dmytri Kleiner calls venture communism, in which we

create our own institutions, our own alternative structures that move beyond the meagre choices offered by bourgeois society and prefigure the future society we are fighting for.

And that is right, that is also the main form of political struggle that Venture Communism proposes and explores mechanisms of realizing. Thus, the most important direct loss is not political influence, but rather mutual capital. Our capacity for investing in alternative structures comes from a single source: The amount of wealth that we, as workers, can consistently divert from consumption.

We transform our society as we build the means satisfy our needs outside the financial cycles of capitalism. When we take demand away from forms of consumption that reproduce capital and further concentrate wealth, and instead satisfy the needs and desires of our communities by other means. When we produce and share according to our mutual needs and desires, and not according to the logic of profit capture.

The desire then is to frame models/spaces/activities that exist for different value forms beyond money/capital, and that act against the coercive practices that enforce spatial dispossession in the name of austerity. This is a connection beyond the dichotemy of 99%/1% , for a politics of zero percent or the collective commons. It is for an exodus from the daily realities of venture capital. Here then educators and technicians might reframe their work politically, and recognise the ideologies that underpin their engagement with place and identity. Educators might then ask how digital literacies or models like visitor/resident are meaningful in the face of the on-going privatisation of our digital spaces/places? How do these digital practices recognise and reinforce the realities of commodity capitalism that in-turn reinscribe an objective existence? How might those practices/models be re-shaped mutually or co-operatively for alternative structures or value forms? How might they lead to a subjectivity beyond proletarianised work or a prescribed readiness for efficiency or productivity or the control/monitoring of others? How might they be co-opted to build the means to satisfy our needs outside the financial cycles of capitalism?

Tablets, blackouts, students and universities

January 18, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

I’ve written about mobiles before, and you can read that stuff here.

I’ve written about tech-determinism before, in particular in a post here.

The issues I am trying to reflect on are part of a critique of technology inside capitalist work, and the socio-environmental symptoms of its excesses, which in turn impact our world. And these excesses are our excesses, insofar as we might find the power or agency to act differently. As a result, these are issues that do not go away, because they are tied to the historically-defined and reinforced reality of our use of technology under capitalism. In this reality, our procurement and deployment of technologies implicates us in the proletarianisation of our lives, and in the monitoring of our experiences, and through discourses of profit and value and efficiency and productivity, and in the exploitation of other humans, and in the re-focusing of our work around money, and in the enclosure of our world for profit. Although we tell ourselves hopeful stories of how technology enables the possibility of redemption and enfranchisement and empowerment and “the student experience”. Because we can tolerate/justify almost anything in the name of “the student experience”.

And maybe technology can help us to be these hopeful things; but we cannot do these things without the recognition of the political content of our work with technology. And we cannot create these hopeful things without the recognition that the spaces in which we place and use technologies are highly politicised, and irrevocably ideological. The content of our discussions, over which tablet, or which virtual learning environment, or our mobile learning strategy, or our approach to the implementation of open content/data or social media, or whatever, is important. It is part of the lifeblood of our Universities. But it is also deeply political; for this content reinforces power and our existing social relationships; unless we have the courage to think and talk and act otherwise.

Which brings me to the things that have crossed my path this week and which have made me wonder, what is to be done?

The first thing. There has been and continues to be a vigorous discussion on the Association for Learning Technology members’ email-list about the utility of tablets, and specifically the iPad in higher education. The discussion has been very specifically tied to academic work within the University, and linked to both the student experience and what might be termed academic value, as is indirectly revealed through ideas of flexible learning and efficiency gains and productivity. Although one correspondent focused upon strategies for encouraging the democratisation and free accessibility of content across communities, rather than engaging with closed, proprietary software, the debate has been de-political (and therefore highly political, for this is the ideology of network democracy and participation that is central to neoliberal dogma and the cry of “there is no alternative”).

The second thing. There was a report from Business Insider about the employment conditions of employees working for companies who make Apple’s products, in particular in China. And there was also a transcript from This American Life, which reveals some of the evidence that underpins the former report, about the abuse of labour and human rights. And we are implicated in these abuses, and I wonder if our silence can ever be redeemed through our focus on the student experience?

The third thing. The blackout over SOPA and the fight for a free-and-open internet, has led to two interesting status updates in my Facebook newsfeed (even I’m fallible). The first from a student:

“Stupid wikipedia…It’s not even a British law. I know why your doing it, even agree to an extent but urgh!”

The second from someone who works in education and technology and strategy and planning:

“Ask yourself – why isn’t facebook blacked out?”

And this has made me think about those very items of content that are so dear to our hearts, like which tablet, or which virtual learning environment, or our mobile learning strategy, or our approach to the implementation of open content/data or social media. And it has made me think about the power of corporations within capitalism, and their desire for the separation, commodification and enclosure of our experiences. And how technology and network theory always brushes up against the market, and the power relations that are revealed though it.

And this has made me think about what is to be done? How might our use of technology inside the University be connected to the political struggles outside? How might we refashion our discussions away from the comfort of the UK student experience, in order to situate that experience globally – and I do not mean in terms of opening-up that experience for/to a global market. Instead I mean opening-up that space to a critique of that market. So how do we work on University procurement practices? How do we collectively lobby technology firms over human and labour rights? How do we engage students in a discussion of the open web? How do we enable them to discuss the labour and human rights, and the liquid resources and energy and carbon, which are embedded in our technologies?

Because it strikes me that we might usefully utilise technology, in order to reveal the reality of our labour-in-capitalism or our capitalist work, and to discuss possible alternatives. But we need to situate the discussion of the content of our technological lives politically. And as we do this, our alternatives might be a statement of “no! I will not be complicit in this activity”. And it might involve a deletion of accounts on social networks, or the equivalent of a strike through our refusal to use specific learning management systems or proprietary software/hardware that is implicated in human/labour rights abuses, or services that give away personal data to Governments. Or it might be finding the courage to raise these issues institutionally, or across the sector, or in public meetings. And it might be a way of pushing back against the enclosure of our lives for profit, by going into occupation of virtual learning and teaching spaces. Or by fleeing those enclosed worlds and setting-up rival spaces, using open software, as a way to define a new set of social relationships and new forms of value against money.

And in this we might redeem a part of ourselves; and we might do this socially and co-operatively; against our separation from each other; as we refuse to outsource our politics and our technologies and our relationships and our identities and our privacy and our data to corporations that have corporate interests at heart. In so doing I wonder whether we might also meaningfully describe what a University experience is for and what a student experience might be.

Educational technology, hacktivism and the war on public education

January 11, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

In 2006, John Denham, Labour MP and former cabinet minister, argued in the Chartist that

All public services have to be based on a diversity of independent providers who compete for business in a market governed by Consumer choice. All across Whitehall, any policy option now has to be dressed up as “choice”, “diversity”, and “contestablity”. These are the hallmarks of the “new model public service”.

This morning Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, widened the space through which public or socialised goods could be enclosed, marketised and commodified within education as a new model public service, as he scoped a space for technology in education that was primarily economic, de-politicised and privatised.

Gove’s focus was laid bare from the very outset o his speech at BETT. He began not by championing teaching or teachers or the education sector, but “by congratulating all the companies in this Hall. British companies are world-leaders in the field of educational technology…” This is central for Gove as a member of the UK Coalition Government, precisely because that Government is closing down all public discourse that threatens or questions private profit maximisation or the extraction of value by corporations from our previously accrued social goods. Progress is to be realised by the privatisation and marketisation of public assets, and education is a pivotal terrain for making concrete and securing this neoliberal agenda. Thus, the only discourse that gains public space is framed by employment, labour (or capitalist work), commerce, industry and economics. This is now central to our educational culture. There is no place and no space for a critique of state subsidies for private gain or the politics of our education system, or how our education might enable other, dissenting or marginalised possibilities to be deliberated.

For Gove, the imperative behind linking markets and technology is key because “with each new gadget, each huge leap forward, technology has expanded into new intellectual and commercial fields.” More importantly and ominously, Gove re-framed the Coalition’s attack on education as a social good, originally signalled in HE through the Browne Review and in primary/secondary education through its White Paper, by folding into it the progressive, reductionist logic of technology. He argued:

Almost every field of employment now depends on technology. From radio, to television, computers and the internet, each new technological advance has changed our world and changed us too. But there is one notable exception. Education has barely changed. Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. Millions have left school over the past decade without even the basics they need for a decent job. And the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of technological change.

So there we are. Technology is revolutionary. Technology enables progress. Technology enables growth. But our schools and our teachers have failed our children as workers. And as a result millions of students lack basic skills. And we risk economic stagnation as a result.

And yet as Christopher Newfield argues in his work the new proletarianisation, it is difficult to sustain this positivist view argument for the generalised, emancipatory potential of technological skills, because under capitalism technologies are used to promote consumption, production gains or to increase the rate of profit. The logic of their use and deployment is for productivity gains, or for workplace monitoring and surveillance and management and stratification, or to catalyse the creation of value by opening up/harnessing new markets, or by stimulating innovations that further valorise capital. Thus, Newfield highlights three different types of knowledge or skill:

Type C is ‘commodity skills’, which are ‘readily obtained’ and whose possessors are interchangeable. This category includes most ‘pink collar’ work that involves skills like ‘typing and a cheerful phone manner’.
Type B is ‘leveraged skills’, which require advanced education and which offer clear added value to the firm that hires such skill, and yet which are possessed by many firms. Computer programmers or network administrators are examples of essential employees who worked long and hard to acquire their knowledge, and yet who are relatively numerous. Ironically, they may have entered the field because it was large: its size may have signalled to them when they were picked a major in college–and to their stability-minded parents–something like ‘the high-tech economy will always need computer support specialists’. Yes, but not any particular computer support specialist, and not at a very high wage.
Type A consists of ‘proprietary skills’, defined as ‘the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business’. The knowledge manager must nurture and cultivate only the skills that directly contribute to the firm’s propriety knowledge, and stamp out (or radically cheapen) the first kind of knowledge worker, whose skills are interchangeable commodities. Only the star producers–those who create proprietary knowledge–enable the firm to seek rents, and only they are to be retained, supported, cultivated, and lavishly paid.

Yet Gove’s speech re-enforces one of the entrenched myths of educational technology discourses in that it alleges the democratic-yet-neutral tendencies of technology, where all have the opportunity to profit from becoming the Type A workers that Newfield analyses. In Gove’s view, technology, coupled to re-skilling teachers and defining a new ICT curriculum for business, will enable economic equality of opportunity. However, in discussing Education and Inequality, Sean Reardon, argues for the United States that:

It is well known that economic inequality has been growing in the U.S. since the 1970s. Less well known, however, is the fact that inequality in educational success has also been growing. The difference in average academic skills between high and low-income students is now 30–40 percent larger than it was 30 years ago.

So family background has become increasingly determinative of educational success, and educational success, in turn, has become increasingly determinative of economic success. The American dream has moved farther out of reach for lower-income children.

What has caused this rise in educational inequality? Contrary to popular rhetoric, our schools are not worse than they used to be. The average nine-year-old today has math skills equivalent to those of the average eleven-year-old 30 years ago. Nor have test scores or college completion rates for students from low-income families declined; they simply haven’t risen nearly as fast as those of high-income students. Although there are striking inequalities in the quality of schools available to children from low- and high-income families, these inequalities do not appear larger than in the past. Furthermore, if schools were responsible for widening educational inequality, we would expect that test-score gap to widen as students progress through school. But this does not happen. The test-score gap between eighth-grade students from high- and low-income families is no larger than the school-readiness gap among kindergarteners. The roots of widening educational inequality appear to lie in early childhood, not in schools.

Reardon argues that “Stagnant incomes have left the poor and working-class without the resources to give their children the improved educational opportunities and supports that the children of the rich enjoy.” Marx saw this when he wrote that “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.” Moreover, this disengagement with the politics and reality of poverty and class, means that we prioritise “the [perceived] affordances of educational technology” (participation, horizontal organisational structures, opportunity etc.) over-and-above the implications of increasing proletarianisation in the service-sector and the routinisation of work that is based on outcomes and technologically-mediated prefomance, and which is reinforced by the reduction of social mobility under capitalism. As Paul Mason highlights, this is amplified through the idea of the disenfranchised graduate loaded with debt and with no future.

III

Pace Gove, some commentators have tried to re-shape the discussion about digital skills or literacy or computer science, to which his speech contributed. Josie Fraser, in her post Computer Science is not Digital Literacy argues “for ways in which young people can become active in creating and critically engaging with technology [as citizens]”. Pat Parslow’s post on Digital Literacies, schools and the Guardian argues prosaically for users as “confident explorers of the ‘digital space’, able to learn new systems without attending courses (or at least, without having to attend too many).” However, the dominant space for a discussion of digital literacy or an ICT curriculum is economic and not social. The recent Guardian article Pupils need to understand computers, not just how to use them, notes that

Michael Gove, has “sat up and listened”, says Ian Livingstone, one of the founders of the gaming company Games Workshop. He co-authored an influential report for the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts on the future of the UK gaming industry, which concluded that it was losing its edge on the rest of the world.

In this drive for “edge”, education is subsumed under the dictates of profitability, competitiveness and the commodity form. There can be no other way. And this logic is further revealed in the Coding for kids campaign, which has no politics in its statement of intent. The campaign was catalysed by an e-petition to the UK Government, which was justified in Emma Mulqueeny’s, Teach our kids to code e-petition, through the assertion that digital technology, the reproduction of our social world and economic growth are connected:

It is not yet awesomely cool to be able to build digital tools that shape the way the rest of us operate in our worlds, both social and work-based. Not in the UK anyway. And I could see this having a profound effect on our worldwide digital economy and reputation in the very near future

Mulqueeny goes on to celebrate Rushkoff’s assertion that “the difference between being able to code and not being able to code, is like being the driver or the passenger”, further demonstrating how technology is used to define what is contested within the positivist and progressive claims about its affordances for economic agency. In this case, coding skills, rather than their subsumption under the deeper structures of capitalist society that disenfranchise the many, are at issue. Thus, we never get to a deliberation of whether coding and hacking and open source might be used as a means of re-imagining our world.

The polyarchic parameters of this discourse are re-produced by Gove at BETT, as he attempts to constrict what we can discuss in terms of technology-in-education, reinterpreted by some as “digital literacies”. What we can discuss legitimately is kettled and cordoned and enclosed by economics and not politics. This notion of what it is legitimate to discuss is critical, and Gove uses it to further the mythology of a neutral, positivist technological paradigm being fused under education. He argued that

technology will bring more autonomy to each of us here in this room. This is a huge opportunity. But it’s also a responsibility. [So] We want to focus on training teachers. Universities, businesses and others will have the opportunity to devise new courses and exams. In particular, we want to see universities and businesses create new high quality Computer Science GCSEs, and develop curricula encouraging schools to make use of the brilliant Computer Science content available on the web.

This amounts to a form of what Christopher Newfield (in a separate blog-post) call “subsidy capitalism”, which “means that the public, directly or indirectly, does not participate in the investment, research, and development decisions that remake society year in and year out. It hands over resources and all decision rights at the same time.” Gove’s focus on business defining the curriculum/teacher training mirrors Newfield’s point that:

There is a profound cultural limitation at work here: American leaders see the agencies responsible for social benefits as categorically less insightful than the financially self-interested private sector, even though the latter are focused entirely on their own advantage. As it is now, the future emerges in erratic bursts from the secret development operations at companies like Google (e.g. this radio report on the sudden appearance over Silicon Valley of The Cloud). We are having an increasingly difficult time imagining a collective future that emerges from common activity.

Thus, for Gove there is a lack of a meaningful commentary about poverty or equality and their relationship to educational attainment and wealth, and no focus on the educational research that highlights the links between class and educational outcomes. This sets a direction of travel for public policy that disables our ability to imagine a collective future, and is further reduced by Gove’s eulogising of a few, self-made men like Zuckerberg and Schmidt, without a meaningful discussion of these cultural leaders’ approach to the production of our common wealth or social goods.

The risks of this approach and the domination of corporate power over our digital lives, and our digitalised spaces and time, has been analysed by Cory Doctorow, in Lockdown, The coming war on general-purpose computing. Doctorow highlights how the information economy is realised through the subsumption of our everyday engagement with technology and digitised content under private property and copyright law. Thus, our activity is reduced to “a tedious enumeration of every permutation of things people do with information—and what might be charged for each.” The result of this commodification of our virtual lives is a need to “control how people use their computers and the files we transfer to them.”

This is the world onto which Gove’s speech about educational technology, teacher training, the ICT curriculum and the value of student’s as workers, needs to be mapped. In this world, states Doctorow, the following practices occur and are contested.

Human rights activists have raised alarms over U-EFI, the new PC bootloader, which restricts your computer so it only runs “signed” operating systems, noting that repressive governments will likely withhold signatures from operating systems unless they allow for covert surveillance operations.
Sony loaded covert rootkit installers on 6 million audio CDs, which secretly executed programs that watched for attempts to read the sound files on CDs and terminated them. It also hid the rootkit’s existence by causing the computer operating system’s kernel to lie about which processes were running, and which files were present on the drive.
Nintendo’s 3DS opportunistically updates its firmware, and does an integrity check to make sure that you haven’t altered the old firmware in any way. If it detects signs of tampering, it turns itself into a brick.
On the network side SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans innocuous tools such as DNSSec—a security suite that authenticates domain name information— because they might be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. It blocks Tor, an online anonymity tool sponsored by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and used by dissidents in oppressive regimes, because it can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures.
The Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too!

What is clear here is the contested and deeply politicised terrain on which the use and development of educational technology is played out. Yet, it is missing from the Coalition Government’s education agenda. In fact, their explicit attempt to reduce this discourse to economic utility, and to ignore the impact of poverty and economic inequality, and to forget or marginalise the political structures and organisation that is impacted by and revealed through technology, demonstrates further that this educational space is now open for enclosure under private property, and for further subsidy capitalism.

The crack in this revealed assault on education as a public good is Gove’s final statements connecting “an open-source curriculum” and “Disapplying [sic.] the ICT programme of study”. Gove talks here about freedom, and enabling teachers “to cover truly innovative, specialist and challenging topics.” This might be seen as an attempt by capital or corporations to enter, control and enclose what has previously been seen as open source or as the terrain previously set-out and negotiated by hacktivists. However, it does open up a space for educational technologists working with programmers and educationalists to challenge the dominant logic of how we construct and re-produce our educational worlds as commonly-defined, social goods. This does not disavow coding for kids, or digital literacies, or the reproduction of teacher training. It just doesn’t do it simply for corporations or for profit maximisation. And where it is for those ends, that realisation must be critiqued and deliberated both inside and beyond the formal curriculum.

For we exist in a world that faces socio-environmental crises, and which is in the midst of a global crisis of capitalism. It is simply not good enough that our discourse as educators is focused upon employability or economic growth. The agenda for our development of digital literacies, or for an ICT curriculum, or for redesigning our teacher training, lies beyond the demands of transnational finance capital or of commerce or of industry, as realised by the state-under-capitalism, for marketised skills. Testing and deliberating global solutions demands an engagement with politics, and with politics as they are revealed through technology. Overcoming global problems demands that we do not simply outsource solutions, but that we use and engage with technology co-operatively and socially, in order to consider whether the society we have built and re-produce is indeed the one we need.

In this those engaged in the operationalisation of technology-in-education might consider their activist stance. Is Gove’s industrialised, economically-driven and enclosed world really the best we can hope for or create? Given those advances in bio-engineering, in microcomputing, in shared services etc. that he advances, is it really all we can do to hope for the further commodification of our existence, and the production of an educational experience that is shackled to that end? If the answer is yes then we are all impoverished. The crisis demands that we consider how the actions we take and the technologies we deploy contribute to poverty and the stratification of society; how they contribute to state subsidized capitalism and proletarianised work; how they re-produce inequality; and how they disable us from acting co-operatively in society. But we might also consider how to re-engage our actions and the technologies we deploy asymmetrically; to refuse and push-back against marketisation, to realise the possibilities of the hacker ethic, and to use technology to describe more social forms of value.

If Gove wants “an open-source curriculum”, then we should give him “activism 101”, “protest 101” and “hacktivism 101”.

For the communal university in the face of debt and polyarchy

January 5, 2012
Posted by hallymk1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Richard Hall's Space

#freepalestine #endtheoccupation

Tag Archives: politics