Authoritarian neoliberalism, the alienation of academic labour and Walsall FC

Over at the architectural education podcast (Arch Ed Podcast) there is a conversation between me and James Benedict Brown about the state of higher education, with a little bit of jibber-jabber about Walsall FC.

In a connected development, I will be developing some of my thinking about HE in a forthcoming British Educational Research Association symposium, Debating theories of neoliberalism: New perspectives and framings in education research. The flyer can be downloaded here. My abstract is appended below.


Authoritarian neoliberalism and the alienation of academic labour

As one response to the secular crisis of capitalism, higher education is being proletarianised. Its academics and students, increasingly encumbered by precarious employment, debt, and new levels of performance management, are shorn of autonomy beyond the sale of their labour-power. This talk takes a Marxist political economic analysis of the implications of this lack of autonomy, in terms of the conception of subsumption (Hall and Bowles 2016; Marx 1867/2004). Movement towards real subsumption, revealed in financialisation and marketization, enables us to reconsider the utility of neoliberalism as a theoretical framework for analysing the re-engineering of the governance of higher education and the re-production of academic labour in the name of value (Clarke 2005; Davies 2014). In particular, this reflects upon ideas of authoritarian neoliberalism in the coercive orchestration of social relations in the name of markets (Bruff 2014). This reflection discusses the imposition of architectures of subsumption through which academic labour becomes a source of both overwork and anxiety. In analysing these connections it is possible to situate abstract, alienated academic labour alongside its psychological impacts, including anxiety and feelings of hopelessness (Hall 2018). The talk closes by examining whether narratives of solidarity, in particular from marginalised voices, might help academics and students to analyse and then move beyond their alienated labour (Johnson 2017). This frames such solidarity in terms of mass intellectuality, or socially-useful knowledge work, as a potential moment for overcoming alienation (Dinerstein 2015).

References

Bruff, I. (2014). The Rise of Authoritarian Neoliberalism. Rethinking Marxism: A Journal of Economics, Culture & Society 26(1), 113-29. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/08935696.2013.843250

Clarke, S. (2005). The Neoliberal Theory of Society. In Saad-Filho, A., and Johnston, D. (eds), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press, pp. 50-59.

Davies, W. (2014). The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. London: SAGE.

Dinerstein, A. (2015). The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Hall, R. (2018). On the alienation of academic labour and the possibilities for mass intellectuality. tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique, 16(1), 97-113. Available: http://bit.ly/2EisheS

Hall, R. and Bowles, K. (2016). Re-engineering higher education: the subsumption of academic labour and the exploitation of anxiety. Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor 28, 30-47. Available: http://bit.ly/2dQMx8X

Johnson, P. (2018). Feminism as Critique in a Neoliberal Age: Debating Nancy Fraser. Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory 19(1), 1-17. Available: https://doi.org/10.1080/14409917.2017.1376937

Marx, K. (1867/2004). Capital, Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.

 


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