Category Archives: Activism

a note on the subsumption of academic labour


Posted by hallymk1

I

I am becoming more interested in the transition or transformation of academic labour inside an increasingly neoliberal university, and the ways in which technology is used to quicken that transition and discipline that labour. In this I am reminded of the transitions outlined by Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts from the formal to the real subsumption of labour under capital. I am not arguing here that we are finally seeing the real subsumption of academic labour under capital, or that it hasn’t yet occurred. However, I am interested in how policy and practice, and in particular the politics and political realities of higher education are now disciplining academic labour, in order to amplify that subsumption and remove opposition to the rule of money. The realities of the quickened pace of the real subsumption of academic labour inside the university as business and higher education as corporate sector bear analysis.

II

In the formal subsumption of labour under capital, as noted in this libcom discussion:

  • the worker confronts the capitalist, who possesses money, as the proprietor of his own person and therefore of his own labour capacity, and as the seller of the temporary use of the latter;
  • both meet as commodity owners, as seller and buyer, and thus as formally free persons, between whom in fact no other relation exists than that of buyer and seller, no other politically or socially fixed relation of domination and subordination;
  • the objective conditions of his labour (raw material, instruments of labour and therefore also means of subsistence during labour) belong, completely or at least in part, not to him but to the buyer and consumer of his labour, therefore themselves confront him as capital;
  • the more completely these conditions of labour confront him as the property of another, the more completely is the relation of capital and wage labour present formally, hence the more complete the formal subsumption of labour under capital;
  • as yet there is no difference in the mode of production itself. The labour process continues exactly as it did before — from the technological point of view — only as a labour process now subordinated to capital;
  • there develops within the production process itself a relation of domination and subordination, in that the consumption of labour capacity is done by the capitalist, and is therefore supervised and directed by him;
  • there develops within the production process itself a greater continuity of labour.

With the real subsumption of labour under capital, as noted in the same libcom discussion:

  • changes take place in the technological process, the labour process, and at the same time there are changes in the relation of the worker to his own production and to capital;
  • ·         the development of the productive power of labour takes place, in that the productive forces of social labour are developed, and only at that point does the application of natural forces on a large scale, of science and of machinery, to direct production become possible;
  • therefore, there is change not only in the formal relation but in the labour process itself. On the one hand the capitalist mode of production — which now first appears as a mode of production sui generis [in its own right] — creates a change in the shape of material production;
  • this change in the material shape forms the basis for the development of the capital-relation, whose adequate shape therefore only corresponds to a particular level of development of the material forces of production;
  • the worker’s relation of dependence in production itself is thereby given a new shape. This is the first point to be emphasised. This heightening of the productivity of labour and the scale of production is in part a result of, and in part a basis for, the development of the capital-relation;
  • capitalist production now entirely strips off the form of production for subsistence, and becomes production for trade, in that neither the individual’s own consumption nor the immediate needs of a given circle of customers remain a barrier to production; now the only barrier is the magnitude of the capital itself;
  • on the other hand, where the whole of the product becomes a commodity (even where, as in agriculture, it partially re-enters production in natural form), all its elements leave the circulation and enter into the act of production as commodities;
  • for production to occur in a capitalist way, an ever-growing minimum of exchange value, of money — i.e. of constant capital and variable capital — is required to ensure that the labour necessary to obtain the product is the labour socially necessary, i.e. that the labour required for the production of a single commodity = the minimum amount of labour necessary under average conditions;
  • for objectified labour — money — to function as capital, it must be present in the hands of the individual capitalist in a certain minimum quantity;
  • the capitalist must be the owner or proprietor of means of production on a social scale;
  • it is precisely the productivity, and therefore the quantity of production, the numbers of the population and of the surplus population, created by this mode of production, that constantly calls forth new branches of industry, operating with the capital and labour that have been set free;
  • in these branches capital can once again work on a small scale and again pass through the various phases of development required until with the development of capitalist production labour is carried on a social scale in these new branches of industry as well.

With the real subsumption of labour under capital a complete revolution takes place in the mode of production itself, in the productivity of labour, and in the relation — within production — between the capitalist and the worker, as also in the social relation between them.

III

So we might think about the recalibration of academic labour inside the University against the following precepts of real subsumption, with some examples that need fleshing out.

  • changes in the technological process, the labour process, and changes in the relation of the worker to his own production and to capital:
    • digital labour: “Digital technology is facilitating on-going efforts by employers to replace full-time, tenured positions with part-time, precarious employment”;
    • proletarianisation and internships: “Unpaid research posts represent the latest step in the ‘proletarianisation’ of the academy”;
    • proletarianisation of post-graduate practice: “HE institutions, faced with a funding crisis, are attacking the conditions established academics and PG employees alike”.
  • the productive forces of social labour are developed:
    • big data: “The data show us that there are some specific teaching practices which appear to promote higher levels of student achievement”;
    • learning analytics: “A [] needed transition is one that moves LA research and implementation from at-risk identification to an emphasis on learner success and optimization… Theoretically, LA has potential to dramatically impact the existing models of education and to generate new insights into what works and what does not work in teaching and learning. The results are potentially transformative to all levels of today’s education system”;
    • personalisation and work-based learning: “mainstream approaches to work-based learning are constructed under the human capital ideology without taking the lived experience of working people and race, class, gender relations into account”.
  • a change in the shape of material production:
    • course closures: “the university could now concentrate on offering the best possible experience to its main markets”;
    • the lean university: “The Lean University project will play a vital role in the University’s strategic development and shaping the way we work”.
  • production for trade
    • the international trade of higher education;
    • neoliberal education restructuring: “Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation. The roughly $2.5 trillion global market in education is a rich new arena for capital investment.”
  • This heightening of the productivity of labour and the scale of production
    • Pearson College;
    • privatization: “In what follows, I outline four strands of privatization as a formative alternative taxonomy: changing corporate form; marketization or ‘external privatization’; outsourcing; and joint ventures, or collaboration, with private capital.”.
  • the whole of the product becomes a commodity
    • student as consumer: “the Government’s proposals will improve their experience as students, expand their choices and make universities more accountable to students than ever before”;
    • the discipline of debt: “student debt, in its prevalence and amounts, constitutes a pedagogy, unlike the humanistic lesson that the university traditionally proclaims, of privatization and the market”;
    • agendas of choice: “Increased tuition fees mean students will be more selective in their choice of studies in Clearing 2012 due to concern over debt”.
  • an ever-growing minimum of exchange value, of money — i.e. of constant capital and variable capital — is required to ensure that the labour necessary to obtain the product is the labour socially necessary:
    • bond finance: “Universities currently borrow about £5bn, largely through bank finance. But they probably have the capacity to generate close to an additional £4bn to £4.5bn… Time and time again we hear back from investors that they would desperately love to get their hands on anything to do with the university sector and it is surprising that no one has gone to that market yet”;
    • Strategies for effective higher education fundraising.
  • the capitalist must be the owner or proprietor of means of production on a social scale.

IV

This latter point brings me to the politics of higher education and the ways in which political society advocates in the name of the real subsumption of academic labour to the dominant order. The political realities of Vice-Chancellors as CEOs of businesses for whom the reality is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall cannot be ignored. This places them in the context of networks of neoliberal, transnational advocacy networks. This political reality disciplines the actions that academic managers and administrators can take, either supported by the State or quiescent in the face of its power, and places them in opposition to those academics and students whose labour they need to recalibrate for the market.

As a result we see a range of political actions aimed at disciplining academics and students, including, but not limited to:

Similarly, this has given birth to a range of solidarity actions, communiqués, and free universities, that are not simply a recasting of higher education in liberal terms around the notion of economic libertarianism or cost-free learning (as pervades the MOOC debate). These are deeply political claims for higher learning, and a critique and reclaiming of the university against-and-beyond capitalism.

However, the accrual of executive power within universities acting as corporations and the use of technology as a mechanism for surveillance and performance management, means that the explicit subsumption of academic labour under the realities of competition, productivity, efficiency and profit is inevitable. In this process the realities of force and political will by those with power-to create a dominant order trump individual protests. Force married to political will then invades the cultural realities of civil society, so that no matter how we argue for education as a public good, it is subsumed under the rule of money.

In this process of ensuring that the capitalist is the owner or proprietor of means of production on a social scale, the politics are the thing. How might a counter-narrative be generated that connects academic labour to student protests and the broader work of protests against austerity? What is the role of academic trades unions in coalescing and amplifying protest so that pushing-back against recalibration becomes possible? Or in the face of the logic of discipline and coercion, and a political will amongst networks of legislators and academic managers for recalibration, is the scope for the university to be regenerated as a space of resistance and protest too limited? In fact, is some form of exodus the only option?


Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response


Posted by hallymk1

Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response

The Alpine Rendez-Vous

The Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is an established atypical scientific event focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events are promoted by TELEARC and EATEL associations. These took up the legacy of the FP6 NoE Kaleidoscope and Prolearn, and the FP7 NoE Stellar, which sustained them along past years. The goal of the Alpine Rendez-Vous is to bring together researchers from the different scientific communities doing research on Technology-Enhanced Learning, in a largely informal setting, away from their workplace routines. Although originating in Europe, the ARV is open to other continents’ researchers and proposals. ARV is structured as a set of independent parallel workshops located at the same time in the same place. Workshops may last two to three days each, half of the workshops taking place in the first part of the week and the other half in the second part, possibly with a “common day” in the middle. The Alpine Rendez-Vous of 2013 will take place from January 28th to February 1st, in Villard-de-Lans, a village in the middle of Vercors. Breaks and meals are organized in a way that promotes informal encounters between participants from the different workshops.

An informal group concerned about the relationships between TEL research and change, discontinuity and dislocation in the wider world have had a workshop proposal accepted and are now calling for proposals and participation.

Background

The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful over the last fifteen or twenty years in extending, enriching and even challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and within its institutions, and through them has engaged in turn with the institutions and professions of industry and government. These have however been largely inward-looking discourses best suited perhaps to a world characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges, disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.

Earlier discussions (eg purpos/ed, http://purposed.org.uk/  & e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components, including

  • economic and resource crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral and energy constraints;.
  • environmental and demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and transport
  • the crisis of accountability, expressed in the failure of traditional representative democracy systems especially in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the nation-state and its institutions
  • socio-technical disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and by the development of a data-rich culture;  the proliferation and complexity of digital divides;  the dependency of our educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching, study, and knowledge transfer
  • the dehumanisation crisis, expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the arts

and specifically, in relation to TEL;

  • TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalization and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?

TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates many of the ideals, problems and potential of both.  Education and technology permeate all of the perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible however that they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant on TEL. The TEL community is however currently poorly equipped either to resist the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to flourish despite their consequences tomorrow. The transition movement, the open movement and the occupy movement are all parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of the underlying malaise.

The Call

The proposed workshop will enrich conversations by bringing in new perspectives and will explore how the different communities can learn from each other, perhaps bringing about more open, participative and fluid models of education. It brings together researchers seeking to articulate these concerns and responses, and develop a shared understanding that will engage and inform the TEL community. It is timely, necessary and unique, and will contribute to a clearer and more worthwhile formulation of the Grand Challenges for TEL in the coming years.

One of the outputs of the workshop will be a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal; other options, such as an open access journal, a book or a website, are possible if there is a consensus.

Please submit an individual or collective two-page position paper, or propose a structured discussion or debate on the role and place of TEL in the light of our analysis. Contributions will be selected by the organisers on the basis of individual quality of the papers and the overall balance and coherence of the programme.

Deadline

Submission by 17 August 2012

Organisers

  1. Doug Belshaw, Researcher, Mozilla Foundation
  2. Helen Beetham, Consultant, JISC
  3. Hamish Cunningham, Professor, University of Sheffield
  4. Keri Facer, Professor, University of Bristol
  5. Richard Hall, Reader, De Montfort University
  6. Marcus Specht, Professor, Open University, Netherlands
  7. John Traxler, Professor, University of Wolverhampton, john.traxler@wlv.ac.uk (corresponding organiser)

On academic labour, and reclaiming academic time and space


Posted by hallymk1

On Friday 15 June, I attended a University of Nottingham, UCU-branch-sponsored symposium on the public university. These are my notes. 

Quiet down
(We are the dollars and cents and the pounds and pence)
(And the mark and the yen and yeah, we’re going to)
Why don’t you quiet down?
(Crack your little souls, we’re going to crack your little souls)

[Radiohead. 2001. Dollars and Cents.] 

What is the relationship between the idealised neoliberal subject and academic labour? How is academic labour being recalibrated as the idealised neoliberal subject? If we are in transition to the neoliberal university, what are the possibilities for academic labour?

The idealised neoliberal subject is legitimised around specific, commodified practices that are toxic to her subjectivity, in-part through the disciplinary and enclosing nature of those practices. The REF is an example of a process of judgement and ranking with which academics collude, and that forecloses and excludes, and that further enables academic solidarity to be ruptured and restructured. It is the processing and revelation of our otherness. It is the real subsumption of our academic subjectivity inside a commodified reality. It highlights lines of exclusion which teach us that our assimilation is the denial of our subjectivity, and that if we refuse or dissent then we are to be systematically judged. These positions, of engagement, refusal, denial and passivity, are deeply political.

As academics internalise certain logics, in taking money for R&D or implementing processes for monitoring students or in co-ordinating the REF or agitating over student satisfaction scores or in workload planning, it is important to recognise that acts of refusal or dissent mean that the business of new public management now grafted into the university cannot go back to normal. It is important to recognise the place of critical pedagogy in this process of dissent towards otherness or othering, and in developing subjectivity. It is in the messy realities of pedagogy and education as process that the speed of enclosure and capture might be reduced, and spaces for refusal opened up.

As a result of refusal we might reclaim the possibilities of care and caring inside the University. Academics care about their positions and their research and their students, and one outcome is that they and their practices are ripe for being parasitised by techniques and technologies of new public management, which seeks to extract surplus value through agendas that enhance productivity, efficiency, choice and outcomes. Academic time and energy can be co-opted for the development and implementation of such technologies and techniques precisely because academics care about their students and their work, and will dedicate their own time to those projects, beyond their formal working arrangements. This is the trap of the social factory, and it witnesses the constraints for academics of a life shackled to cognitive capitalism inside the fluid structures of higher education.

This issue is important for academics as individual universities adapt to the new normal of funding and regulation and governance models. The response of the government to the HE White Paper consultation demonstrated its political weakness; its inability to get primary legislation on the statute books relating to the privatised provision of HE. Privatisation of English higher education was slowed, although privatisation in English universities is speeding up. In this space which is fed by competing agendas at different speeds what might academics do to recover some agency? Might slow scholarship, which increases the circulation time for the commodities of cognition, be one possible focus for dissent and pushing back? What lessons might we learn from the Luddites’ coherent fight over time, temporality and speed in the annihilation of their livelihoods/lives/subjectivity?

These examples are important because the University is focused on the adaptive upgrading of academic jobs. Of re-stratifying academic labour under new forms of status, engineered by a technocracy that feeds inequality through access to research-allowances or teaching time or student numbers. This is painful because it is transitional. It is a transitional move towards the neoliberal university; a space that is a new site for the extraction of value; a space that is being restructured in the name of capital; a space that limits freedom-of-expression and academic autonomy where it conflicts with value creation. The stereotypical neoliberal university will be a bond-funded, joint venture, either hedged or speculated against, with the use of private equity via spin-off companies, with a need to maintain its global credit rating through reduced staff costs, where the interplay between its fees and ratings are interpreted through analytics, and where those interpretations are ways of disciplining academic labour and discrediting critical pedagogy in the name of pedagogies like constructivism that are co-opted for neoliberalism.

The debts and covenants that emerge from the new public management of funding the University are both pedagogic and disciplinary. As debt to income ratios rise, and as investment-grade bonds are demanded in an increasingly volatile higher education market, where there are doubts about the ability of certain students or groups of students to repay loans, or where there are doubts about the economic viability of certain programmes-of-study, the control of social or human capital becomes imperative. As the attrition on wages, offset in part through increased debt/credit levels, continues, and as value is further extracted from social goods, the individuated value of education becomes a site of struggle. The fee regime and its enclosure of possible futures beyond the rate of profit forms a disciplinary technique. It is in this space that we might argue for the public university: how do universities benefit our public? How should a public university be regulated or funded or owned?

In answering those questions we might try to analyse the neoliberal logics of:

  • new public management (risk-management, internal competition between cost centres, efficiency drives through the use of private corporations that are embedded inside universities etc.);

  • comparative competitiveness (internationalisation agendas, franchising, R&D outcomes, employing magnet academics, responses to the WTO and GATS); and

  • competitive comparison (rankings and indices).

In these logics we see flows of finance and human capital, and universities themselves are revealed as competitive capitals. Through them we illuminate ways in which academic labour might disrupt the cycles and circuits of those capitals. In part this comes as they react to the marketisation of HE and the privatisation of universities, which in turn co-opts temporality and scale to lever performance-management, and through it acceptance or shame. Yet any disruption needs to be developed at a range of scales because capital is parasitic on the university: in think-tanks; through technology and related services; in corporate social responsibility agendas that are educational; in credit ratings agencies; in private equity and financing; in regional and national regulation. In each of these spaces there are different mechanisms through which capital recalibrates the University for value creation, profit and further accumulation.

As education becomes a positional, individuated, competitive good, and as the stakes for individuals rise, we might ask whether we can develop strong answers to the strong questions that are being asked about the purpose of the University. Can we develop alternative narratives based on societal goods? Can we look to Chile or Quebec for some possible alternatives to these practices? Can we analyse how BPP/Apollo, or Pearson or Kaplan or McGraw Hill are leveraging their own market capitalisation to crack the university? Can we analyse how those corporations are using their established infrastructures and content to extract data/analytics about behaviours that might then be commodified as services for students? Is it possible to reconfigure universities under a general public license or as a co-operative form? Or can this only be achieved beyond the university?

In this process, time is important. Capital seeks to annihilate the space between commodities and consumers by reducing the time it takes to produce and/or circulate goods. As bond-funded initiatives, or private equity leveraged against future loan incomes, are based on 30/40 year life-cycles, there is a demand to reduce volatility and risk, and variations in behaviour, and to control time. So capital wishes to fund programmes that enhance the ability of students to get jobs and pay down their debts, or institutions that can innovate in order to pay down their debts and covenants. Time and variations in behaviour are a risk, especially where they relate to asset illiquidity. Thus the state wishes to control resource allocation and budgeting, in order that it can reduce volatility/risk/defaults, and thereby create a set of spaces in which capital can grow.

In this process temporality is important. Internationalisation, rankings, social mobility are all agendas that tend towards offshoring or the virtualisation of the University. They are parasitical of local needs, feeding off spaces rather than learning with them. They prioritise jobs and mobility away from certain spaces, above justice and access. They do little to reclaim a University’s local identity. They are levers for catalysing the market mechanism that systematises competition, and which detaches academic elites from temporal space. They are transnational and have the same damaging effects on local priorities as transitional financial elites. At issue is how might academics fight for their local, temporal space? Or inside-and-against the university, is there no alternative?

Thus, as public universities are realigned with the values of the market, which sees an aggregation of individuals providing all necessary regulation, funding and governance, we might ask how can more dialogical and collective forms of higher learning be fought for? What might we do in our militant research strategies and in public to strengthen democratic engagement and critiques of new public management? Do we stay and fight for the academic project inside the university, to forge something that is beyond? Do we argue for new forms of governance and funding and regulation in the name of the public? How do we provide strong answers that push back against the violent recalibration of university life and academic labour, and which might reclaim academic time and space?

You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

[Schlitz, D. 1978. The Gambler.]


Educational technology and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I’m presenting at the University of Lincoln’s Centre for Educational Research and Development conference on Thursday June 7. I’ll be speaking about Educational technology and the war on public education. My slides are on my slideshare. There is a fuller blog post on the war on public education is here and on militarisation is here. Part of the argument about alienation/commodification is made in this paper published in triple-C.

I will ask these questions.

  1. How do technologies contribute to the alienation of academics from their labour inside the university?
  2. What might be learned from occupations/work-ins in other geographies or at other times or in other sectors or under other capitals? How did techniques or technologies affect those actions?
  3. What forms of academic labour are legitimised and how does technology affect that legitimation?
  4. With a focus on technologies for militarisation and techniques for control, how is academic labour co-opted?
  5. How and where might academics push back, in order to abolish alienated labour?

For the University and against a neoliberal curriculum


Posted by hallymk1

In her keynote at Discourse, Power and Resistance ’12, Rosemary Deem highlighted the isomorphism that is occurring within and across universities in the United Kingdom as the ideology of marketisation is insinuated into the practices and policies that shape the higher education environment. This is not a new process, but the pace with which it is now being rolled-out is a dislocation or shock that enables change to be enforced through uncertainty. This is one of the ways in which capital uses systemic crises to renew itself. This quickened process is made visible in: the re-catagorisation of Universities as businesses in the HRMC regulations on taxation; the Coalition Government’s use of VAT regulations to open-up a space for marketisation through shared services; and by enabling for-profit providers to obtain the same VAT exemption on educational services as not for-profits. Andrew McGettigan has highlighted how this enables private providers, which are able to ‘leverage’ private equity, to steal a march on the rest of the sector, which as it is not for-profit cannot access such funds, and this leaves those institutions at the whims of private, philanthropic donations, or needing to chase increasingly limited and limiting (research) funding. These sources of money, often sought from those with a specific ideological position to further, then disciplines what the University is able to research or produce or critique. In Christopher Newfield‘s terms this process is yet another example of ‘state-subsidised privatisation’. It is a form of enclosure enacted as a discourse veiled inside the logic of democratic capitalism.

[NOTE: please see Andrew McGettigan’s comment below for an elucidation of his position.]

Deem also focused on the role of private equity companies and hedge funds in opening-up what is perceived of as being a public space for the market. This process is complex and related to the ways in which some educational functions prove profitable and can be privatised, like vocational training that can be provided at low cost using part-time or precariously employed (post-graduate) lecturers or courses that can be delivered via distance or work-based learning. These map onto leveraged or marginal or menial skills that are developed inside the knowledge economy. Those activities that require much higher infrastructural investment, and which are of marginal profitability in the market but which have a higher social utility, like medicine, can be left to the State to fund. Post-education, these proprietary skills can be harnessed for profit, for instance through the privatisation of healthcare. This whole process of marketisation forms a system of enclosure, or in David Harvey’s terms of accumulation by dispossession. It is a way in which rents can be extracted from individuals and institutions, in the form of services or fees that are contracted for and which might include technological services or actual courses of study. The latter are increasingly to be paid for from indentures/loans that inscribe education as an individualised good, rather than from general taxation that views educational spaces as a social good.

This process is exacerbated because the State, acting as regulator rather than funder, is regulating for the market and for enterprise, and not for the society of people. This is part of a neoliberal discourse in which the practices and activities of higher education are folded inside the subsumption of all of social life inside the dynamic of competition. Here the State is proactive in acting as midwife to the re-birth of public assets as market-oriented commodities. This idea of neoliberalism as a discourse is especially important in Stephen J. Ball’s work on Global Education Inc.. Ball traces the development of neoliberalism very deliberately as a discourse designed to promote shared libertarian, market-oriented entrepreneurialism that in-turn fosters a new nexus betweeen capital and the State, in order to re-shape all of society inside its hegemonic, totalising logic. In part, Ball sees this as facilitated by networks of power and affinity, that enable the re-production of ‘geographies of social relationships’ that are in the name of money, profit, choice and unregulated markets. These networks form shifting assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power. Moreover, they are transnational activist networks consisting of academics and think tanks, policy-makers and administrators, finance capital and private equity funds, media corporations and publishers, philanthropists/hedge-funds interested in corporate social responsibility etc., which aim at regulating the state for enterprise and the market.

Importantly, this forms a neoliberal curriculum. The use of the word curriculum is hugely important in the roll-back of the State and the roll-out of the neoliberal agenda. Not only does it refer to a course of action that moulds individuals into persons, but it also anchors that discourse educationally. Thus, the focus is on creating uncertainties in the spaces in which the State operates, telling common-sense stories about the value of private enterprise in ‘leveraging’ both performance and cost reduction, and in connecting those stories to a meta-narrative of there is no alternative. In turn these meta-narratives reinforce World Bank and IMF orthodoxies related to structural readjustment, freedom and choice. Thus, the networks of interconnected actors and corporations, acting as transnational advocacy networks, then reinforce these dominant positions through their: activities; conferences; prizes; media attention; control of funding; research programmes and outcomes; evidence-based approaches to data-laundering; regulation etc.. Ball describes the reality of several networks that reinforce hegemonic power, and which connect academics to education providers and research groups, and interconnects them with technology firms, as well as to finance capital and think tanks, in particular in opening-up the Indian education system for marketisation. Ball highlights how academics based in the UK, like James Tooley and Sugatra Mitra (who has keynoted about his hole in the wall project recently, for example for the Association for Learning Technology) operate inside neoliberal networks that amplify the complex geographies of neoliberalism, which are made influential and powerful by money, policy advocacy, relationships, and action on the ground.

At issue then is how to create counter-hegemonic networks, policy and relationships, that might develop counter-hegemonic positions. What alternative actions might be taken to reinforce the idea that there is an alternative value position that can be take, both socially and in relation to higher education? In this, Deem argued for the role of academics acting as public intellectuals. Interestingly she also highlighted how ahead of the 2014 REF, the social sciences panel defined impact in wide-ranging terms, including public benefit. This is important because research impact is a crucial site of struggle in the commodification of the University and its subsumption under the logic of capitalist expansion. The ways in which academics might go into occupation of terms like impact, in order to redefine its use against that prescribed by the regulatory logic of the State or transnational advocacy networks, is important in moving beyond the use of the term simply as the impression of academic activity. Impact as impression objectifies activity and relationships and people’s subject positions through behavioural demands. What can be measured is part of a neoliberal discourse related to efficiency and consumption.

As the University becomes an overt site of capitalist accumulation, and as a result a site for entrepreneurial investment, the occupation of regulatory terms or regulations forms one concrete way in which resistance and refusal might be catalysed. There are two important points that flow from this kind of activity. The first is that the University remains a site of the production of mass intellectuality, where knowledge claims can be legitimised and critiqued. However, as a neoliberal discourse increasingly kettles the academic process and practices, it takes courage to act against the prevailing, hegemonic narrative. The cost of resistance is high and it is important therefore that academics act communally to shine a critical light on the activities of the state in regulating the University for the market. This requires that the increasing number of communal activities, like radical education projects/free universities outside the University and protests or refusals inside the University, are joined in solidarity.

The second point is about leadership. It is increasingly less certain that institutional leaders, Vice-Chancellors or Vice-Principals, will challenge the dominant narratives of the State, in terms of the marketisation of higher education. Acting as CEOs the logic is that they will attempt to compete rather than co-operate. Thus, in the UK, University leadership was quiet over the threats of violence made by the State against students who protest, and we witnessed banning orders being sought against protest on campus, PhD students being suspended for protesting via poetry, and elected student representatives being removed from University committees for protesting. This enactment of the University as an enclosed space for dissent is a logical outcome emerging from the rhetoric of competition. Earlier this year I wrote about the communal university, and noted that the marketisation of the sector reminded me of the establishment of the English Football Premier League in 1992, as a marketised space in which clubs were businesses and where the social health of the league as a whole was less important that that of the individual clubs acting as businesses. In this set of spaces, the public, or supporters, were of secondary, instrumentalist importance to the structural need to inscribe clubs as institutions inside the market.

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).

In this process of enclosure, we might ask whether our academic leaders will be able to work communally or co-operatively to roll-back the neoliberal discourse that commodifies all of our social life inside the market, and which kettles free debate about what is legitimate. We might ask then what is the role of the academic as activist in developing alternative discourses that argue for a re-humanisation of educational life and activity.

One of those roles is to develop analyses of the transnational advocacy networks that influence the spaces in which we operate, and through those networks to reveal how the neoliberal discourse is played out in our society. So we might ask: how do the technologies we procure, and the procurement practices we use inside the University, and the people we ask to keynote our conferences, and the evidence-based research we enable to be used for advocacy, and the money that we take for research, and the learning/teaching and employability strategies that we agree and implement, and the definitions of impact/sustainability that we agree and use, re-inscribe both the power of a neoliberal discourse and transnational networks of power? Is it possible for scholarly communities of academics and students, working in society, to act in public against this discourse? Where do we identify communal spaces for solidarity and courage? Taking action that is against polyarchic, univeralised norms might enable a counter-hegemonic set of alternatives to be debated or created that support an alternative way of doing. The flip-side is that we do nothing as the whole of our lives and our sociability is subsumed under the abstracted rule of money.


Presentations about the assault on public education


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


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


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.

  1. Mechanisms through which both academics and activists can confront power.
  2. Ways in which critical engagements, including knowledge work, could be developed.
  3. Spaces for close encounters with those who act as/for monitoring power (ostensibly based around financial power and efficiency).
  4. 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.
  5. 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.


Educational technology, hacktivism and the war on public education


Posted by hallymk1

I

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.

II

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:

  1. 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’.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

IV

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

V

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”.


Some notes on resistance to the crisis and hegemony


Posted by hallymk1

In the last month I have attended some pretty amazing events. This was capped this week with a presentation at the Home Affairs Select Committee and seeing Jesse Jackson get his honorary doctorate. However, it began with my attending two of John Holloway’s three lectures in Leeds on the rule of money, and then attending a seminar given by DMU’s Jonathan Davies that critiqued network governance. (The introduction to Jonathan’s new book is available free.)

Each of these events has made me question the crisis, my place in it, and our response to it both within and beyond the University. Along this same front, I note two recent posts by @thirduniversity on lessons learned from facing the crisis and on radical alternatives, a piece by Aaron Peters on oppositional networks and the State, and a powerful cri de coeur by Vinay Gupta on our complicity in the end of days.

However, what I want to capture below is what I take from a series of engagements by academic activists who have faced and continue to face the symptoms of a systemic crisis of capitalism. This is a systemic crisis that sees those in power attempting to recapitalise the value embedded in our social goods and our shared social wealth, like free education. The systemic nature of the crisis forces us to consider alternatives, counter-hegemonies and the power we need to refuse or negate or push against or break. It then forces us to consider whether networks and decentralisation are possible; whether we might be able to define and implement a new form of value; and what the actions we take in occupation might enable us to do, in the face of power.

What follows is deliberately presented as a set of notes. What they will add up to will take some time.

  1. These are days of rage. This rage is ours and it looks two ways: firstly to dignified hope; secondly to undignified destruction. There is a question of how we can intervene for hope.
  2. We rage, and we are outraged, and we need courage, because globally we are under attack. The attack is on what it takes for us to have a means to live. Or it is on our very means of existence. The attack is revolutionary. We must not forget the revolutionary strength of conservatism.
  3. At our core must be the act of saying “no!” But this takes courage. It takes courage to say I do not accept your imposition and enclosure of my world.
  4. This is a systemic attack, and in this it looks more clearly than ever that the system is against us. However, in the act of raging we must not end up with destructive personalisation, or fetishisation of the individual or of neoliberalism, or of a label, as evil personified. It is not enough to be personal. We must be beyond that; to attack the systemic social domination/determination of our lives.
  5. There is power in our non-violence. We must not reproduce their symmetries of hate and demonization and vilification. Engaging their logic leaves us hopeless. We must work to dismantle the system of oppression, to be active in participating in its destruction.
  6. Real democracy now! We must refuse to trust our leaders. We must reclaim the world as ours. We must assume our responsibilities through assemblies not parliaments, and for a better society. In the communes and assemblies that are a part of the struggle for a world turned upside down, and against an institutionalised world. We need a breaking of this reality.
  7. Economic democracy is meaningless in the face of private property and money. We must unmask the real enemy, money.
  8. Money is the attack. It is the system’s assault. The dynamic of money is on the tip of the tongue of the movement; is on the tip of the tongue of the occupation. Pushing beyond this, and giving voice to it demands theoretical reflection.
  9. Money is the commodity that stands abstracted in the face of democracy. It flows away from democracy in Greece, and exists in a state of antagonism to the idea and reality of real democracy now.

10. Money is the gateway; it is our cognitive dissonance; it is our (un)reality; it is our process of exclusion that denies our access to the products of our own creativity. Money seems identical to reality, but it is an assault on our humanity. Austerity is an assault on our possibility.

11. Money is a historic form of aggression; of relationships; of social bonds; of cohesion. The fact of money and the dynamic of money are terrible.

12. It takes courage to say “no!” To bring this to the tips of our tongues. To highlight how we are shackled.

13. We are shackled by money as a social bond against human activity. It is the imposition of faster, of exclusion, of alienation, of constricted social labour. Money is designed to constrict and constrain and control aberrant behaviour. And so, our existence is monetised, and the rule of money is increasingly, aggressively policed.

14. We are proud to be the crisis of capital. Of money. To be against their credo of bombing or killing those who do not submit, or of accumulating by their dispossession.

15. It is possible therefore to see in the movements of anger of 2011, how dignity is starting to unite against money. Against this historical nightmare. Against the imposition of alienated or abstracted labour. And for the emancipation of our activity and of our creativity against capital.

16. We use money and not capital for the freshness and obviousness of its language; and because it is on the tip of the tongue as we regard our banks; and because it leads us down well-worn paths of bonds and bondage. And because it offers us new ways of relating in the theme of anti-capitalism.

17. We must recognise how issues of state and society and religion and gender are critical. But that they take us only so far and no further. The crisis unfurls in a way that has a resonance beyond the state, to a point where money is god.

18. What is to be done in moving the discussion beyond the tip of the tongue? We must look for cracks and challenge as we can and where we can, and to see this as a historical process.

19. We must struggle against labour. But we must struggle against labour-in-capitalism. And we must struggle against the rhythm of capitalist domination. And this takes courage. And it is not progressive. For progress is a symptom of capitalist history. The most exciting left is not progressive, It is Luddite and indigenous and conservative and it is able to voice “no!” It is humanising and dignified.

20. We might remember that collective or social debt has a power that individual debt does not. That in acting together we might act for something better.

21. Thus, we might think of our spaces and protests as social, and integrated, and creative. And through them we might reveal the brutalising infrastructure of the State, through its apparatus of debt, surveillance, exception, baton rounds etc.. Revealing this in public is powerful; what is observed and shared is vital. We must reveal the process of ideology; the legitimation of exception; the idea and reality of a radical alternative or free university that is against the walls of money and its mechanisms of control.

22. We must communise. The beginning is near. But we must be determined.

23. The force of our determination is revealed in the force of our “no!” Our “no!” to their logic of death. This turns the world upside down, and reclaims it. It repudiates the history of a process without a subject. This reclaiming is a dignified process of asserting our subjectivity.

24. But we must move from refusal, and “no!” to push back the rule of money. We must restrict its area of sovereignty, and socialise against profit as the primary criterion of our world. For our lives are too important to monetise.

25. The State complements the rule of money. The State is not an alternative form of social cohesion. It is the revelation of a particular form of the capitalist social relation. Soviet Russia was oppressive and inefficient and exclusionary. It was not against the rule of money. We cannot rely on the State to deliver us [c.f. The Co-ordinating Committee for Water and Life, in Bolivia].

26. Our labour is shaped by money as a social bond; our labour is abstracted; it has no meaning beyond money; its central thrust is labour, harder, faster, for money. The State cannot push back the rule of money.

27. We must break the rule of money. We must communise. We need an alternative form of value; and of social cohesion. We need social self-determination as a verb, as an act of doing, as a process.

28. Movements of indigenous people give us hope, as they rise to support a communal way of living (c.f. Rossport in Ireland). They show new paths that might open up; that might be co-operative and mutual. That show different relationships between nature and people.

29. We must look for the interstices as ways of repudiating the system. In this moment of experimentation our uncertainty requires courage. As people are pushed into communities of mutual support we can begin to break the rule of money.

30. As we see how they monetise our relationships we see the crisis in our ways of living. We see that our lives do not work. They are not resilient. We need alternative networks. Perhaps Greece, and Detroit and Argentina in 2001 offer alternatives. Of neighbourhood councils and barter and recovering factories and movements of unemployed workers and in community spaces and gardens [c.f. “no house without electricity”].

31. Fighting for the right to work is a disaster. We need to say good riddance to capital and labour-in-capital. We need to construct other ways of living, doing and solidarity.

32. But we must do this whilst understanding the dynamic of the movement of the world as labour-in-capital. As money. As the indentured servitude of students; as the wholesale destruction of a peasantry. No-one controls this social dynamic. Not banks. Not states. Who can say “stop!”? But we must be courageous for we have to passively confront trained force. It is no good confronting trained force with untrained force. We must not reproduce their world; their power-over others. The logic of the symmetrical struggle is a history of power and parties. We must integrate into neighbourhoods and find place. We must help people to affirm: “we are ordinary people and we are rebels”.

33. We must highlight how we share similarities and connections. We must legitimise our struggle where we can and reveal truth claims in a story world that teeters on the brink of fascism, and through which there is an aggressive transfer of assets. We must associate.

34. But what does this mean for networks and governance? Whither alternatives in network democracy? Networks are instruments of power. We hear claims that networks are better; that they are trust based and multiple; that we live in an age when networks are qualitatively hegemonic (after Hardt and Negri). This is the transformation thesis of network governance.

35. And so Boltanski and Chiapello (2005, p. 138) deconstruct the metaphor of the network (the network governance milieu) as: decentring states, capitals and classes; against zombie categories (c.f. Beck); underpinning the risk society and individuation; part of a logic of flows rather than structures; the age of the combinard (Lash on reflexive modernisation); and a migration from homophily to heterophily (c.f. Graham Thompson, 2005 on ethical virtues, trust and networks).

36. However, the structural issues have not gone away in an allegedly post-scarcity world (Janet Newman, 2004 on emergent orthodoxy struggles). The policy landscape moves from counter-hegemonic populism to a post-hegemony third-way, and from network resistance to network participation, and to fetishised informational capitalism. Thus the network becomes a liberal feel good concept, through which ideology is sedimented and concretised and reinscribed. At issue then is the issue of network co-governance, as an ambiguous, complex, turbulent set of tropes.

37. The issues with networks are historical; they are based on hierarchy; on closed or captured power; of institutionalised, discursive inequalities; of distrust. There is no evidence for the rise of governance networks, or that governance networks are transformational. Hard-power, coercion and strong incentives overcome limited soft-power (c.f. Gerry Stoker, 2011).

38. Immanent materiality and the coercive function of the state (either soft or hard) overcome consensus. And so we see, in Gramscian terms, “hegemony armoured by coercion”. Governance is immanent domination and material coercion/discipline.

39. Despite globalisation, states are coercive and competitive; structure and contradiction still underpin our materiality; class as a social relation is very real; network governance confuses conjuncture with epoch. The argument that there has somehow been a change is undermined by the continuity apparent in the totality and its crises.

40. The State therefore exists as a political society. Its hegemony is still based on deep social leadership exercised by a governing bloc that has clear political/economic goals, and a clear intellectual/moral unity. The State delivers a passive revolution. It keeps the structures of our lives the same by changing them – this is the logic of the dialectic of rupture/restoration. The Integral State delivers hegemony armoured by coercion.

41. Governance through the integral state frames a precarious hegemony, based on the State as social reproduction, on a trajectory of domination and material coercion that is an immanent condition of social stability within iniquitous and unstable political economies.

42. The Governance genome consists of command, conflict, trust, contract. Contracts are enforceable. The fallacy of liberalism is that it is not underpinned by force. Even in networks.

43. Thus neoliberalism reinscribes capitalism beyond the market, in the language of networks and connectivity and rhizomes. And network governance becomes a neoliberal strategy for remaking civil society. This visionary, regulative, risk-managing, trust-based ideal of neoliberalism celebrates connectivity and the passive revolution as a hegemonic, strategic project.

44. A system of heterophilus, network governance is incompatible with this stage of capitalism. It is a vague premonition of a possible post-capitalism. It is a future possibility that is mistaken for reality. Our reality is one of the commodity form protected by the immanent threat of violence. In this hostile environment, which attacks trust, how can resistance thrive in networks? How can network governance be benchmarked historically?

45. Heterophily is rare in governance networks, which implies that distrust will trump trust. When connectionist dispositions fail because they are inauthentic, there follows an incremental reconfiguration of the integral state, so that hegemony maintains domination. Distrust is a healthy fact of our human condition, and underpins resistance. Trust does not make a complex society productive (Cook, Hardin and Levey) and under neoliberalism and austerity we see a decline in trust-based relationships in our revealed social attitudes to those in need.

46. We do not live in conditions favourable to an emergent world of heterogeneous networks. Crises stress them and demonstrate their lack of ontological purpose. Although they can offer configurational critique, networks are not able to dissolve the integral state. We need to consider concentrated resistance to match their concentrated power. These are the realities of market dynamics.

47. Is network governance a normative project or an explanatory tool?

48. This is not to say that we refuse an engagement with networks. They form spaces for resistance, exodus, autonomy, everyday making, outsider resistance etc., but they are also sites of coercive counter-power and concentrated, counter-hegemonic resistance.