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Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university Professor Richard Hall @hallymk1 [email protected] richard-hall.org Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, 4 September 2014
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Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

Nov 16, 2014

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Education

Richard Hall

Slides for my presentation at the CAPPE, Neoliberalism and Everyday Life conference on 4 September 2014 http://arts.brighton.ac.uk/research/cappe/conferences/conferences/annual-conference-neoliberalism-and-everyday-life
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Page 1: Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

Professor Richard Hall

@hallymk1 [email protected]

Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, 4 September 2014

Page 2: Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

1. Technology reveals an entrepreneurial reconfiguring of the idea of the University.

2. Technology is a crack through which we might analyse the interests that drive value production and accumulation, and their relation to power.

3. What is to be done? A re-imagination based on mass intellectuality and open co-operativism.

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It took both time and experience before the workpeople learned to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.

Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 554.

Technology discloses man’s mode of dealing with Nature, the process of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations, and of the mental conceptions that flow from them.

Marx, K. 2004. Capital Volume 1, p. 493.

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Value emerges as a form of sociability (as capital) from the unity of three circuits. It is formed of moments of the circulation of money, of production, and of commodities. The self-expansion of value is “the determining purpose, as the compelling motive.”

Marx, K. 1885. Capital, Volume 2, Chapter 4.

Accumulated value, and the power that flows from it, means that other forms of human or humane value in the production of commodities are marginalised.

Jappe, A. 2014. Towards a History of the Critique of Value. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. 25(2): 11

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Technology and education: an export/industrial strategy

Across the higher education system, institutions are using technology in innovative ways.

Yet conventional universities no longer hold all the cards on how the higher education market develops.

Although MOOCs are still at a relatively early stage, they are evolving fast and may have the potential to tackle some particular challenges – such as an apparent mismatch between the supply and demand for high-level computer skills.

Willetts, D. 2013. Robbins Revisited: Bigger and Better Higher Education. London: Social Market Foundation, p. 69. http://bit.ly/1mhl2By

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If we want a model of more inclusive growth, where more people earn more – at the top of the hourglass, then we need a higher education system that helps to build better jobs and equips people with the skills for high skilled, high value-added, non-routine jobs.

It reminded me of something blunter that Paul Hofheinz, President of the Lisbon Council said to me...: “if we want to live better than others, then we will have to be better than others.”

So our goal is bold and simple: to build a bigger knowledge economy

Byrne, L. 2014. Robbins Rebooted: How We Earn Our Way in the Second Machine Age. London: Social Market Foundation, pp. 27, 29.

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Page 8: Technology and co-operative practice against the neoliberal university

Lord Young, adviser to the Prime Minister on small business and enterprise: http://bit.ly/1l5iY3Z

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Entrepreneurial activity enacted through new combinations of technologies and practices to inject novelty into the circuits of capitalism.

Entrepreneurship operates through counter-acting norms and can never be stabilised.

Competitive success rooted in a new productive environment that accommodates power: first in expanding the time-scale for returns; second in expanding the arena for competition.

Vision and desire (poker) trump scientific calculation, and drive innovation and co-operation.

Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp. 52-3.

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Technology and education: a transnational framework

Education markets are one facet of the neoliberal strategy to manage the structural crisis of capitalism by opening the public sector to capital accumulation.

Lipman, P. 2009: http://bit.ly/qDl6sV

Digitization is reducing labor content of services and products in an unprecedented way, thus fundamentally changing the way remuneration is allocated across labor and capital.... Mature economies will suffer most as they don't have the population growth to increase autonomous demand nor powerful enough labor unions or political parties to (re-)allocate gains in what continues to be a global economy.

Gartner. 2013. Gartner Reveals Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2014 and Beyond. http://gtnr.it/17RLm2v

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CB Insights. 2014. Ed Tech Sees Early Stage Deals Getting Bigger. http://bit.ly/1niJ96s

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transnational activist networks/associations of capitals

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At Pearson, when we ask ourselves how we can help to achieve that goal of doubling the amount of really high value learning [at no extra total cost], we think about four things:

being more global; being more mobile; thinking holistically; being absolutely obsessed with learning outcomes

“building an ever-wider range of bigger and more complex standalone products and services to participating in more open, interoperable educational ‘ecosystems’, centered around learners”

monetisation at scale; more data; demographic/intergenerational shifts

Pearson’s Five Trillion Dollar Question: http://bit.ly/1iaRaMp

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Bain and Company (2012): rents/commodification; labour arbitrage; investment and profits.

• seize opportunities to use exportable services to increase revenues and profits [MOOCs]

• upgrade low-tech products into premium consumer goods and services [curriculum; learning analytics]

• services bound by physical geography made portable [mobile]

• leading universities in the advanced economies can accelerate the training of home-grown specialists in emerging economies

• by importing the talent of highly-skilled professionals from companies in developed markets, businesses in the emerging markets will not need to wait a generation for their own education systems to produce a skilled workforce

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The interrelationship between profitability and investment.

Technological innovations as responses to:• lower levels of profitability;• increasing global consumption; and• making previously marginal sectors of the economy

explicitly productive.

Technological innovation:• a way of leveraging the ratio of the total surplus-value

produced in society to the total capital invested;• a redistribution of surplus value from businesses that

produce commodities or services like universities to those that market them or that lend money to make academic labour productive;

• revolutionising the means of production.

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it is impossible to understand the role of the University without developing a critique of its relationships to a transnational capitalist class

pace Robinson, W.I. 2004. A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World. Johns Hopkins UP.

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1. Networks of power and affinity, that enable the re-production of ‘geographies of social relationships’.

2. Networks form shifting assemblages of activity and relationships that reinforce hegemonic power.

3. Transnational activist networks consisting of:i. academics and think tanks;ii. policy-makers and administrators;iii. finance capital and private equity funds;iv. media corporations and publishers;v. philanthropists/hedge-funds interested in

corporate social responsibility etc..aim to regulate the state for enterprise and the market.

Ball, S. 2012. Global Education Inc. London: Routledge.

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1. Technological change is the result of social forces in struggle and the need to overcome the temporal and spatial barriers to accumulation

2. Secular control: the power of transnational capitalism over the objective material reality of life, and which is reinforced technologically and pedagogically

3. To argue for emancipation through technological innovation is to fetishise technology and to misunderstand how technology is shaped by the clash of social forces and the desire of capital to escape the barriers imposed by labour

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How might the notion of political decision-making or action be harnessed in ways that broaden the horizon of political possibility?

Does this lead to stagnation or reconfiguration? Do planning, debt and data subsume the future to incentivised utility-maximisation?

Individual agency and collective institutions need to be criticized and invented simultaneously, to overcome neoliberal narratives.

Davies, W. 2014. The Limits of Neoliberalism. London: Sage, pp. 195-201.

Counter-hegemony or entrepreneurial concordat?

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Mass Intellectuality and Open Co-operativism

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the accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital [machinery].

Marx, K. 1993. Grundrisse. London: Penguin.

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Public liberation of knowledge, practices and skills

As intellectual workers we refuse the fetishised concept of the knowledge society and engage in teaching, learning and research only in so far as we can re-appropriate the knowledge that has been stolen from the workers that have produced this way of knowing (i.e. Abundance).

In the society of abundance the university as an institutional form is dissolved, and becomes a social form or knowledge at the level of society (i.e. The General Intellect). It is only on this basis that we can knowingly address the global emergencies with which we are all confronted.

The University of Utopia. 2014. Anti-Curriculum: A course of action. http://bit.ly/1qgEq8C

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Where might technology be co-opted to enable this liberation?

the possibility of struggle and emancipation lies in the autonomous organisations that exist within and between both the factory and the community

with a focus on the forms of labour and the exertion of “working class power… at the level of the social factory, politically recomposing the division between factory and community.”

Cleaver, H. 1979. Reading Capital Politically, University of Texas Press: Austin, TX, p. 161. http://bit.ly/Y3w2Pf

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1. A false idea of material abundance (growth, accumulation, debt).

2. A false idea of immaterial scarcity (Trans-Pacific Partnership, Transatlantic Trade and Investments Partnership).

3. The pseudo-abundance that destroys the biosphere, and the contrived scarcity that keeps innovation artificially scarce.

we need a global alliance between the new “open” movements, the ecological movements, and the traditional social justice and emancipatory movements, in order to create a “grand alliance of the commons.”

Bauwens, M. & Iacomella, F. 2013. Peer-to-Peer Economy and New Civilization Centered Around the Sustenance of the Commons.

http://bit.ly/Rolqqb

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Technology and collective, public work

Collective work is one of the cements of autonomy, whose fruits usually spill into hospitals, clinics, primary and secondary education, in strengthening the municipalities and the good government juntas. Not much that has been constructed would be possible without the collective work, of men, women, boys, girls and the elderly.

Zibechi, R. 2013. Autonomous Zapatista Education: The Little Schools of Below. http://bit.ly/19XfrAF

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‘a little more of a politicised relation to truth in affairs of education, knowledge and academic practice’

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Open co-operativism and ‘possibilities for associational networks’:

• democratic governance and regulation of transnational worker co-operatives

• connect to the circuits of p2p production and distribution

• pedagogic moments reflect the open, democratic, autonomous, social focus of co-operatives

• a framework for the common ownership of products, assets and commodities

• reclamation of public environments for the globalised, socialised dissemination of knowledge (e.g. copyfarleft)

• connecting a global set of educational commons rooted in critical pedagogy

• conversion, dissolution or creation: transitional and pedagogic

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to trigger and coordinate a global participatory process and immediate national application for the change of productive matrix towards a society of open and common knowledge in Ecuador

resulting in 10 base documents for legislation and state policies (synchronized with the organic social code for the knowledge economy) as well as useful for the production networks of knowledge that already exist in Ecuador.

The conceptual, philosophical and economic process and the historical and socio-cognitive context framework, the organizational principles governing the process, collaborative and communicative digital tools and advance planning of the whole process.

FLOK Society. 2014. General Framework Document to implement the Ecuadorian National Plan for Good Living (2009). http://bit.ly/1pYHW7w

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Inside the University, can educational technology be (ref)used politically to recompose the realities of global struggles for emancipation, rather than for value?

Is there a co-operative crack through which “mass intellectuality” might be liberated or emerge?

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Affinities on The New Cooperativism: http://bit.ly/187iT8R

De Peuter and Dyer Witheford on Commoning: http://bit.ly/Ve2cE9

Draft report on the contribution of cooperatives to overcoming the crisis: http://bit.ly/1gyzDtk

Lebowitz on Co-Management in Venezuela: http://bit.ly/1awBnOF

Winn on open co-operativism: http://bit.ly/1ufM9TO

Bauwens on open co-operativism: http://bit.ly/1pgXWMZ

Hall on open co-operativism: http://bit.ly/1qgxPuK

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LicensingThis presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons, Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license

See:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/