Author: Joss Winn

Open Co-operatives (2)

In the first part of my notes on ‘open co-operatives’, I focused on Michel Bauwen’s most recent statement, Why We Need a New Kind of Open Cooperatives for the P2P Age. There, he outlines four recommendations for the creation of open co-ops, which are a new synthesis of values and practices of the global P2P, FLOSS and Free Culture movement, with the values, principles and practices of the historic, global co-operative movement. The recommendations are:

  1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good
  2. That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders
  3. That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of immaterial and material commons
  4. That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a global basis, even as they produce locally.

Earlier, I made notes on the first two points, suggesting that the co-operative movement indeed already addresses these in quite substantial ways. What appears to be especially novel about Michel’s proposal for ‘open co-ops’ is that the principle and practice of ‘common ownership’ is extended to the product of the co-operative as well as the means of production. This is novel from the point of view of traditional co-operatives, but taken for granted in the world of P2P, FLOSS and Free Culture. However, what that movement lacks is the innovation and experience in developing complementary organisational forms, which the co-operative movement has been working on for over 150 years.

What is also important to note, is that Bauwens regards all of this work on open co-ops, not as the ultimate objective, but as necessarily transitional to the practice of communism, as coined by Marx: ‘From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs’.

Here, I want to focus on Michel’s third recommendation, having just read a number of other articles that discuss the Peer Production ‘Copyfarleft’ License (PPL). More specifically, I consider part (a) of his third recommendation which is intended to address the creation of a self-sustaining immaterial commons. Part (b) of his recommendation, which is the creation of a self-sustaining material commons is not directly addressed here, although many of my comments will be relevant. I will return to this and his fourth recommendation at a later date.

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The Peer Production License (PPL) was created by Dmytri Kleiner. It is based on the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA v3.0 license and includes an additional restriction (point three below) to those that already exist in the CC license:

  1. Share-alike/Copyleft: This requires the consumer of the product to license their derivative product under the same terms as the originating product, such that the benefits of each creative work licensed under these terms perpetuate. This resists outright ‘free-loading’ and strategically develops a commons of social property, which is based on a general, indirect degree of reciprocity. This social property is not ‘public’ in terms of regulated by the state, nor individually or collectively ‘private’ as in joint-stock. It is created through what Pedersen (2010) neatly refers to as ‘reciprocity in perpetuity’.
  2. Non-commercial: The work cannot be used for commercial advantage or private monetary gain i.e. profit. This resists the exploitation of the commons for money, or put another way, it resists the expansion of the value-form of commodities into the money form while still being trapped in the value-form.
  3. Co-operative: This is an exception to the non-commercial clause above which states that commercial use can be made of the product by democratic, worker-owned organisations that distribute their profits among themselves e.g. co-operatives. This is to allow for and promote the use of the common property of co-operatives in their mutual interest of building a commons. It applies to the immaterial, non-rivalrous knowledge  products of the co-operatives. This is the novel addition to the original CC-BY-NC-SA license. It permits a restricted type of commercial use among co-ops while resisting the dissolution of the commons into the anti-social private sphere.
  4. The producers of the work should be acknowledged: This resists the dissolution of the property into the public domain and ensures that the originating producer(s) are respectfully credited for their contribution. It also adds a dimension of transparency and traceability as to the provenance of each contribution. This is important for a system, such as that proposed by Bauwens and Kleiner, which is based on any kind of reciprocity and equivalence, including that of money.

The PPL license has been discussed in four recent articles:

Miguel Said Vieira & Primavera De Filippi (2014) Between Copyleft and Copyfarleft: Advanced reciprocity for the commons.

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis (2014) From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism.

Vieira and De Filippi provide a good discussion of what the PPL offers, the reasoning behind the license, and its advantages and disadvantages. The main advantage, they say, is that the PPL offers a license that sits between standard copyleft (e.g. GPL) licenses and non-commercial copyleft licenses (e.g. CC-BY-NC-SA). 1 Kleiner’s intention in restricting commercial use of the commons property is to restrict its use to those organisations that do not exploit labour (in the technical sense of paying labour less than its actual value) and thereby resist the alienation of labour.

Kleiner is said to have referred (I can’t find a direct reference) to this as the ‘non-alienation clause’. The assumption here is that democratically controlled, worker-owned co-operatives overcome the alienation of wage labour because, in effect, they act as their own capitalist and do not draw a wage as such, but rather they draw from the surplus they collectively make. I have discussed this at length with reference to Jossa’s work on Labour Managed Firms (here, here). Most recently, Jossa has conceded that in fact such firms do not fully overcome alienation, a point that was clear to me from engaging with his earlier work, where I wrote:

“In the absence of the wage-relation i.e. the LMF, workers sell the products that they created and own, rather than sell their labour for a wage. It seems that for Jossa, the key to the capitalist firm and therefore the ‘anti-capitalist’ LMF, turns on how property relations are organised. For Jossa, freedom from capitalism is equated with owning the means of production and from that “decisive” moment, a transition from the capitalist mode of production to the socialist mode of production occurs (Jossa, 2012b:405). For Jossa, once property relations are re-organised in favour of the worker, such that the wage can be abolished, labour is no longer a commodity and its value is no longer measured in abstract labour time because “work becomes abstract when it is done in exchange for wages.” (Jossa, 2012a: 836)”

The problem with Jossa and with the idea of a ‘non-alienation clause’ is that it overlooks or misunderstands the nature of alienation. As I have said before, “What Jossa seems to overlook is that ‘value’, not the wage, mediates labour in a capitalist society.”

In a Preface to Capital, Marx referred to the commodity as the “economic cell-form” from which everything else in capitalist society can and should be examined. According to Marx, in Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 1, a commodity is characterised by having a use-value and an exchange-value. The use-value is the product or service’s utility and the exchange value is its value, or rather the exchange value is the the realisation of the commodity’s value. The value of a commodity is expressed in its exchange value.

Marx said that an understanding of political economy (i.e. capitalism) “pivots” on the understanding of the dual character of labour, as it is expressed in the dual character of the commodity. That is, the use value of the commodity is an expression of the concrete character of labour and the exchange value (value) is the expression of the abstract character of labour. By ‘abstract labour’, Marx was defining the way that value is determined not by the amount of concrete labour that someone put into the production of the commodity, measured by clock time (this was the common view of political economists at that time), but by the homogeneous mass of labour as it exists at any one time as a social whole. This qualitative and commensurable character of labour is quantified, not by clock time, but by ‘socially necessary labour time’, or

“the labour time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society.” (Marx, Capital)

Marx’s discovery was not simply that labour is useful and can be exchanged like any other commodity, but that its character is “expressed” or “contained” in the form of other commodities. What is expressed is that labour in capitalism takes on the form of being both concrete, physiological labour and at the same time abstract, social, homogeneous labour. It is the abstract character of labour that is the source of social wealth in capitalism (i.e. value) and points to a commensurable way of measuring the value of commodities and therefore the wealth of capitalist societies.

What Jossa and perhaps other advocates of worker co-operatives overlook is that in order to understand the social form of wealth in capitalist societies (i.e. ‘value’ ultimately expressed in money), we have to, according to Marx at least, understand the true nature of the commodity as an expression of a particular, historically specific, form of labour which is socially divided by the imposition of private property and other coercive forces; it becomes mediated by value in the form of money, which allows access to that property. Labour should not simply be understood as concrete, physiological labour, but simultaneously as the abstract, social mass of global labour that now extends to most societies across the world. Likewise, the measure of the value of that labour and therefore the commodities it produces, is also characterised by a dynamic, globally determined measure of the social labour time necessary to produce all commodities. In practice, this means that if a person can produce a widget in the Far East in less time than a person in Europe, that efficiency will find its way into determining, through competitive markets, the overall productivity of those widgets and impact on the value of the commodity and therefore the value of the labour in Europe. In this way, as Marx argued, increasing productivity decreases the value of a commodity and pushes down the value and social necessity of labour, rendering an increasing population superfluous to capital’s needs (i.e. under- and unemployment).

As I have argued before,

“In dismissing abstract labour as something overcome in the wage-less Labour Managed Firm, Jossa remains trapped by an economistic understanding of social relations and therefore trapped by value. The same can be said for the worker co-operative form in general. It is a transitional organisational form that moves away from attributes of capitalist labour (towards ownership of the means of production, a democratic division of surplus), but does not in itself overcome the determination of value imposed by the competition of the market.

Freedom is not the emancipation of labour, as in Jossa’s argument, but rather the emancipation from the twofold character of labour, a point also made by Postone, Neary, the Krisis group and others.”

On account of all this, I agree with Meretz‘s excellent critique of copyfarleft, where he concludes:

“Despite all his radical rhetoric, Dmytri Kleiner doesn’t want to touch the basic principles of commodity production. All he wants is a slightly more equal distribution of wealth based on commodity production. This has been the goal of many people, a lot of people have tried to realise it, and despite so many defeats many people still want it. They will not succeed. It is simply not sufficient to achieve workers’ control over the means of production if they go on being used in the same mode of operating. Production is not a neutral issue, seemingly adaptable for different purposes at will, but the production by separate private labour is necessarily commodity production, where social mediation only occurs post facto through the comparison of values – with all the consequences of this – from the market to ecological disaster.”

This is a common critique by Marxists of the potential of worker co-operatives. Effectively, they ‘degenerate’ into capitalist firms (see Egan, 1990) because they are forced to participate in a competitive marketplace alongside traditional capitalist firms. They are accused of focusing too much on the democratic ownership and control of property, while ignoring the fundamental character of the capitalist mode of production. I understand this and agree that it is almost certain to happen. However, does this mean that democratically controlled producer co-operatives are in fact a dead end? I don’t think so and from Bauwen’s text on open co-operatives and other articles I have read, his insistence that P2P and open co-ops are to be understood as ‘transitional’ forms of production and property ownership, suggests that he is also aware of this, but at the same time is concerned with what can be done in today’s historical, material conditions.

We can see this in a more recent exchange between Meretz and Bauwens regarding the Peer Production License. Meretz published a critique of the PPL, in which I think he rightly critiques the notion of ‘reciprocity’ as required by the PPL and Copyfarleft. 2 As I noted above, the value of a commodity is expressed or realised by its exchange value. Marx discussed at length what is meant by exchange value and what is occurring in the act of exchange in capitalism. He referred to this as the ‘value form‘ and with great dialectical rigour, began by discussing it in its ‘simple form’ and then ‘expanded form’, then ‘general form’ and final as the ‘money form’. In effect, he begins by discussing value most abstractly and gradually develops his theory to find its expression in the concrete form of money.

At the heart of the value form (i.e. that which socially characterises value in capitalism), is the idea of equivalence achieved through the exchange of commodities. The value of one or more commodities enters into a relationship with one or more other commodities, whereby each is simultaneously relative and equivalent to the other. The value of one commodity is achieved in its confrontation with another. Meretz understand all of this well and rightly argues that the PPL limits reciprocity while the GPL promotes it. The term ‘reciprocity’ is used by Bauwens and Kostakis to describe a fair exchange between people. Therefore, what makes an exchange under the PPL license reciprocal requires a qualitative understanding of the contribution being made and a quantitative measure of that contribution. This is exactly what, according to Marx, capitalism has achieved in its organising principle of wage labour and private property mediated through the money form. Abstract labour is the qualitative ‘substance’, measured by socially necessary labour time. For Bauwens and Kostakis, it appears that among open co-operatives, this form of exchange is replaced by a more direct form of negotiation:

“the PPL/Commons-based reciprocity licenses would indeed limit the non-reciprocity for for-profit entities, however they would not demand equivalent exchange but only some form of negotiated reciprocity.”

In their paper on the PPL, Vieira and De Filippi attempt to tackle this issue by proposing an alternative or complementary license which better defines the reciprocal contribution required, suggesting that “only those who contribute to the commons are entitled to commercially exploit them – but only to a similar or equivalent extent (i.e. they can take only as much as they have given to the commons).” They then go on to propose a non-circulating “peer-currency” system of tokens. They argue that their additional reciprocity clause “introduces an expectation of ‘advance reciprocity’… because every entity has to contribute beforehand in order to obtain tokens and thus make commercial uses of the commons.” The result of this, they suggest, is that “large corporations such as Google or Facebook will only be able to use their work to the extent that they contribute back to the commons – either by producing and contributing for the commons in order to obtain credits, or by paying the proper licensing fees.”

To be honest, I don’t know what to make of this. On the face of it, it seems absurd to me since we already have a token system intended to ensure equivalent reciprocity: Money. I also can’t see how it changes anything in terms of the large corporations benefiting more from the work of smaller producers since a large corporation can afford to make their like-for-like contribution quite easily, whereas it would be very difficult for a small worker co-op to match the contribution of the large corporation – reciprocity extends both ways. Anyway, putting that aside, a system of non-circulating tokens is something that Marx suggested might be necessary in the transition towards full communism, as he recognised that during this transitional state, people would still expect to receive an equal amount back in return for their labour:

“Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society — after the deductions have been made — exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.

Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption.

But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form”

When Bauwens and Kostakis state, “A commons-based reciprocity license would simply ask for reciprocity”, I think they are underestimating the difficulty of achieving this in practice. Not only that, but the GPL and other Copyleft licenses have taken us beyond the point of requiring reciprocity. Further on in their article, critically discussing the GPL, they refer to

“what anthropologists call ‘general reciprocity’, that is at the collective level, a minimum of contributions is needed to sustain the system. Nevertheless there is absolutely no requirement for direct reciprocity. The reciprocity is between the individual and the system as a whole.”

My view, and I think it is Meretz’s too, is that this is actually a very positive thing, which from an understanding of the value-form, moves us away from the imposition of equivalence on all aspects of social life. Yet, against the GPL, Bauwens and Kostakis are arguing for a more “direct” form of reciprocity which would be enforced by the PPL.

As I said in my first set of notes on open co-ops: Reciprocity is the logic of (imposed) scarcity. Non-reciprocity is the logic of abundance. Although Meretz goes on to define a distinction between ‘positive reciprocity’ and ‘negative reciprocity’, I don’t think this is helpful. The aim should be to altogether overcome the compulsion of reciprocity, which is the logic of poverty, protected by law.

“In modern society, where the conditions of life are private property, needs are separated from capacities. A state of abundance would alter this. Needs and capacities would come together, and close off the space between them. In modern society, this space is filled by the dense structures of private property-political order and the law of labour: in a state of abundance they would have no place. If the productive capacities already deployed were oriented towards need, necessary labour would be reduced to a minimum, so that nothing would stand between men and what they need to live. Money and the law of labour would lose their force, and, as its foundations crumbled, the political state would wither away. The state of abundance is not a Utopian vision but the real possibility of conditions already in existence.” (Kay and Mott 1982)

Yet, again I am reminded of Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he recognises that the material premises have to be in place and apparent to the majority of individuals in society in order for the logic of the former social conditions to be abandoned:

“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

The GPL is a license that recognises the premise of abundance in the immaterial social realm, where the notion of “each to each” can exist in practice. Although still an expression of liberal capitalist jurisdiction, it is an expedient means towards developing and demonstrating the premises for communism. My view is that for the immaterial commons, the GPL remains adequate to the task of growing that commons – criticisms of it being non-reciprocal are confusing reciprocity with equivalence, which is one of the reasons we should be against reciprocity altogether.

The ‘communistic’ nature of the GPL has been discussed at length by Jakob Rigi, who also bases his argument on the theoretical and methodological foundations developed by Marx. In his response, he states:

“I commend Bauwens & Kostakis for their activist approach and their good intentions to develop an alternative to capitalism and establish an ethical economy. Unfortunately, however, their approach not only fails to achieve these goals, but perpetuates capitalism.” (2014: 393)

He argues that Bauwen and Kostakis’ desire (as expressed in the PPL) to retain the essential categories of capital (e.g. surplus value, profit) only perpetuates capitalism. Rigi goes into great detail in his discussion about how co-operatives are trapped by the logic of capitalism and must at some point degenerate, die, or overcome the necessity of commodity production. On this, he agrees with Meretz:

“To sum up the cooperative is implicated in the capitalist mechanism of exploitation either as an exploited or exploiting party in the both processes of the formation of values and that of the production prices of the commodities they produce. A single commodity is a social interface (relation) in a double sense. On the one hand as a value bearing entity it is an interface between all labour that produces that type of commodity. And on the other, as a price bearing entity it is an interface between all constituent elements of the total social capital, i.e. the capitalist economy as a whole. No magic of cooperation can change these realities. The only way for cooperatives to break with the logic of capital is to break with the market, i.e. not to produce commodities.” (Rigi 2014: 395)

Rigi provides a good discussion on the parasitic nature of rent, arguing that knowledge products, e.g. software, literally have no value, and that along with interest on capital, rent should be part of the total abolition of capitalism. He agrees that “the idea of peer-producing cooperatives as a platform for launching peer-production is appealing. But these cooperatives’ main direction should be to work against the market and money and break with them.” (397)

In principle, I agree, but Rigi’s critique remains adhered to a traditional view of worker struggle against capital and overlooks the implications of his own explanation of the labour theory of value. He begins his critique of Meretz’s rejoinder to Bauwens and Kostakis by stating:

“I agree with most of Meretz’s criticism of Bauwens & Kostakis. However, I find two problems in his rejoinder. His distinction between exchange and reciprocity is not helpful. Second, he does not grasp the GPL’s communist nature and its revolutionary-transformative historical potentials..” (398)

Likewise, I agree with most of Meretz’s criticisms, too, but as with Meretz, a problem remains with Rigi’s understanding of reciprocity in terms of capitalist exchange, too.

“Of course, Meretz is correct that the GPL as a license is a contract, a juridical form, a social rule and not immediately reciprocity. But this contract stipulates a universal reciprocity, and in this sense it is communistic. Communism is nothing but universal reciprocity… Communism is nothing but realization of individual potentials through voluntary participation in social production and making the product available to all members of society regardless of their contributions.” (398-9)

To develop his argument around reciprocity and exchange, Rigi draws on the work of Marshall Sahlins (1974). He states that Sahlins’ study of ‘Stone Age Economics’ distinguished between three different types of reciprocity: “negative (commodity exchange), balanced (gift exchange) and general reciprocity.” Bauwens and Kostakis regard the GPL license as promoting ‘general reciprocity’, where “there is no logic of equivalence, you give without expecting to receive something back directly.” (Rigi 2014: 398) Rigi argues that the GPL does not fit any of Sahlins’ forms of reciprocity because,

“the giver always receives back something larger (the whole im- proved software = the sum of all contributions) of what s/he gives (her/his contribution). On the other hand the receiver is not obliged to contribute, i.e. s/he receives the sum of all contributions without being obliged to contribute as long as s/he does not publish the derivative. We may call this a communist form of reciprocity.” (398)

Just as Meretz wants to distinguish between positive and negative forms of reciprocity, Rigi is also unable to abandon the idea and creates another sub-category of reciprocity, too. As I stated above, it is my view that, according to Marx’s labour theory of value, communism is the overcoming and negation of the conditions that require reciprocity (i.e. scarcity and poverty) and that “each according to each” describes a social world where no concern for reciprocity remains.

Both Meretz and Rigi understand the centrality of the mode of production in capitalism, over and above the mode of distribution. Both authors understand Marx’s labour theory of value, too. Yet both critics of the PPL and open co-operatives, fall back on a critique of exchange and distribution, rather than fully engaging in a critique of production.

Why is it so difficult for us to abandon the idea of reciprocity in a future society of abundance? Sahlins’ ‘negative’, ‘balanced’ and ‘general’ forms of reciprocity are each conditioned by specific, historical modes of production and their subsequent social customs. It is impossible to determine the precise nature of communist, or post-capitalist society but according to Marx, we can say that ‘post-capitalism’ points to a society where value has been abolished as the form of social wealth.

What does it mean to abolish value? It means that the ‘value form’ (the exchange of relative and equivalent use-values) no longer mediates our social relations as it does today and this means that our social relations are no longer determined by the ‘commodity form’ (the necessity to produce use-values primarily for exchange-value). And because the commodity form is nothing more than the expression of the dual character of labour (concrete and abstract labour), we find that the abolition of value is in fact the abolition of labour, or rather capitalism’s dual form of labour. Since it is absurd to suggest that any future society would abolish the physiological requirement of usefully expending energy, the abolition of labour is not the abolition of concrete useful labour, but the abolition of the abstract, social, homogeneous form of labour brought about due to the division of labour and its corresponding institution of private property. With this uniquely capitalist qualitative form of labour abolished, so would its measure (and therefore the measure of value) of ‘socially necessary labour time’ be overcome, too. In moving towards such a society, labour, according to Marx, would transition gradually from being indirect as it is now, mediated by exchange, to being ‘direct labour’, characterised not by reciprocity, but by the custom of “each according from their ability to each according to their own.” Such a social custom is not the product of the creation of a new form of exchange, but rather a new mode of production based on freely associated concrete labour. Freedom then, is freedom from abstract labour measured by socially necessary labour time (i.e. freedom from value). That ‘freedom’ from abstract (wage) labour is currently being objectively imposed on the under and unemployed. The challenge for the open co-operative movement is to create a new, sustainable form of social wealth, built upon the general social knowledge developed through the capitalist mode of production, such that we might be fortunate enough to abandon the capitalist social factory altogether.

Elsewhere (and here), I have highlighted the importance of Peter Hudis’ recent work in understanding Marx’s views on post-capitalism. I think it is especially valuable in thinking about the issues I have discussed around ‘open co-operatives’ not least because his work recognises both the necessity of abolishing value, but also the importance of worker co-operatives as a means to achieve that aim.

Hudis, quoting Marx, notes that in the transition to post-capitalism “social relations become ‘transparent in their simplicity’ once the labourers put an end to alienated labour and the dictatorship of abstract time.”

“Marx is not suggesting that all facets of life become transparent in the lower phase of socialism or communism; indeed, he never suggests this about conditions in a higher phase either. He is addressing something much more specific: namely, the transparent nature of the exchange between labor time and products of labor. This relation can never be transparent so long as there is value production; it becomes transparent only once indirectly social labour is replaced by directly social labour.” (209-10)

Direct labour then, is a transparent process instead of the opaque process of indirect, value-creating, alienated capitalist labour. The conditions for this form of labour do not simply come about by wishing for them or even demanding them, but are the outcome of historical conditions of production, as Hudis explains:

“Marx does not, of course, limit his horizon to the initial phase of socialism or communism. He discusses it as part of understanding what is needed in order to bring to realization the more expansive social relations of a higher phase. Marx conceives of this phase as the passing beyond of natural necessity—not in the sense that labor as such would come to an end, but rather that society would no longer be governed by the necessity for material production and reproduction. This higher phase, however, can only come into being as a result of a whole series of complex and involved historical developments, which include the abolition of the “the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and thereby also the antithesis between mental and physical labor.” It is impossible to achieve this, he reminds us, in the absence of highly developed productive forces. Marx never conceived it as possible for a society to pass to ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ while remaining imprisoned in conditions of social and technological backwardness. And yet it is not the productive forces that create the new society: it is, instead, live men and women.” (210)

Direct labour is made possible by the human development of productive forces that provide the requisite conditions of abundance so that the conditions of material and therefore social necessity are surpassed and we are no longer subordinated to the necessity of the division of labour in order to achieve such levels of productivity and abundance. Capitalism has achieved the current levels of productivity and abundance precisely through co-operation, which Marx called the the “fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production.”

“When numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes, they are said to co-operate, or to work in co-operation… Co-operation ever constitutes the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production.” (Marx, Capital Vol.1, Ch. 13)

We should be mindful that ‘co-operation’ is fundamental to the capitalist mode of production in that it represents the socialisation of labour that has been divided and alienated from its product. In their earlier work, Marx and Engels explicitly argued for the abolition of the division of labour. For example:

“We have already shown above that the abolition of a state of affairs in which relations become independent of individuals, in which individuality is subservient to chance and the personal relations of individuals are subordinated to general class relations, etc.—that the abolition of this state of affairs is determined in the final analysis by the abolition of division of labour. We have also shown that the abolition of division of labour is determined by the development of intercourse and productive forces to such a degree of universality that private property and division of labour become fetters on them. We have further shown that private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives. We have shown that at the present time individuals must abolish private property, because the productive forces and forms of intercourse have developed so far that, under the domination of private property, they have become destructive forces, and because the contradiction between the classes has reached its extreme limit. Finally, we have shown that the abolition of private property and of the division of labour is itself the association of individuals on the basis created by modern productive forces and world intercourse.” (More examples here)

So, to return to my question above: Why is it that even Marxists, who have a grasp of the labour theory of value, end up arguing for new forms of distribution to supersede the existing form?

The essential work of Historian, Moishe Postone, provides an answer:

“I attempted, through a close reading of the most fundamental categories of Marx’s critique of political economy, to grasp the most basic features of capitalism – those that characterize the core of the social formation through its various historical configurations. On that basis I argued that traditional Marxism took basic features of liberal capitalism – the market and private ownership of the means of production – to be the most fundamental features of capitalism in general. Relatedly, it regarded the category of labor as the standpoint from which capitalism was criticized. Capitalism became identified with the bourgeoisie; socialism with the proletariat.

According to my interpretation, however, far from being the standpoint of the critique of capitalism, labor in capitalism constitutes the central object of Marx’s critique and is at the heart of Marx’s core categories of commodity and capital. I argued that, at the heart of the social formation is a historically specific form of social mediation constituted by labor – namely, value. This form of mediation (which is also a form of wealth) is at the same time a historically specific form of domination that can be expressed through, but is not identical with, class domination. It is abstract, without any specific locus, and is also temporally dynamic. This form of domination, which appears as external necessity, rather than as social, generates both the mode of producing in capitalism as well as its intrinsically dynamic character. It is, of course, impossible to even begin to go into the complexity of the issues involved, but several important implications are that industrial production, which historically comes into being under capitalism, does not represent the foundation of socialism, but is intrinsically capitalist; that the problem with growth in capitalism is not only that it is crisis-ridden, but that its very form of growth itself is problematic; that the existence of the bourgeois class is not the ultimate defining feature of capitalism and that state capitalism (briefly described by Marx as early as 1844) can and has existed; finally, that the proletariat is the class whose existence defines capitalism , and that the overcoming of capitalism involves the abolition, not the glorification, of proletarian labor.

Traditional Marxism had already become anachronistic in a variety of ways in the 20th century. It was unable to provide a fundamental critique of the forms of state capitalism referred to as “actually existing socialism.” Moreover, its understanding of emancipation appeared increasingly anachronistic, viewed from the constituted aspirations, needs, and motivating impulses that became expressed in the last third of 20th century by the so-called “new social movements.” Whereas traditional Marxism tended to affirm proletarian labor and, hence, the structure of labor that developed historically, as a dimension of capital’s development, the new social movements expressed a critique of that structure of labor, if at times in an underdeveloped and inchoate form. I argue that Marx’s analysis is one that points beyond the existing structure of labor.”

I realise that by this point I have departed from a direct response to Michel Bauwens’ statement on open co-operatives, but in doing so, I have begun to respond to his critics (with whom I share many views), and to the implications of Bauwen’s proposed project. Although the implications of the abolition of labour and the subsequent abolition of private property and capital itself may seem like a pipe-dream, it is also a necessity. Marx does offer a rigorous and compelling theory for why it must be undertaken and to a lesser extent how it can occur. His work was by no means complete and it requires constant re-evaluation in light of our own historical conditions, but as Postone remarks, that re-evaluation also requires an engagement with the fundamental categories of capitalism in order to grasp its basic features.

Postone argues that industrial production is intrinsic to capitalism, which suggests that post-capitalism will be characterised by a post-industrial form of production. P2P production could be, as Bauwen’s argues, a “proto-mode of production” for a future society, and producer co-operatives of freely associated labour could be its organisational form. Postone and Hudis‘ respective re-evaluations of Marx’s work, as well as others such as Kurz and Trenkle, offer compelling critiques of our existing mode of production, not from the standpoint of labour but as critiques of labour itself.

The successful creation of a post-capitalist society will require a thoroughly global perspective, rather than a retreat into localism and guild-like modes of production and it will build on the achievements of capitalism as a highly productive, though devastating historical mode of production. The latter sections of Rigi’s paper provide a sketch of what this might look like and one point is key: “These cooperatives must be revolutionary, second, they must break with the market as much as they can.” This insistence that co-operatives and its members are political activists accords with Kasmir’s study of Mondragon, the world’s largest co-operative. It’s failings as a co-operative, she argues, is because of its disconnect with working-class objectives, such that workers “do not consider the firms theirs in any meaningful way.” Kasmir (1996) argues that one of the lessons we can learn from Mondragon is that of the “importance of politics, the necessary role of organization, and the continuing value of syndicates and unions for transforming the workplace.” (199-200) Members of a worker co-operative  must regularly question how their mutual work forms a critical, social project. “If workplace democracy is to be genuine, it seems that it must be premised on activism.” (199)

In my view, the combination of  knowledge and experience from within the international P2P movement and that of the international co-operative movement, under the banner of ‘open co-operativism’ is a very positive move and Bauwens work (as well as Kleiner and others) is important for initiating this and providing us with something to respond to and collectively develop, in both theoretical and practical ways.

Open Co-operatives (1)

In the last few months, there’s been an emerging discussion around the idea of ‘open co-operatives’ as a new model of co-operatives, alongside the existing models of worker, multi-stakeholder, consumer and housing co-operatives. Notably, Ed Mayo, Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, predicted that 2014 will see the emergence of ‘open co-operatives’. The basic idea is that the P2P and co-operative movements have much to learn and gain by being combined as a constituted form of democratic  production and distribution of the commons.

Earlier this week, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation published a short statement arguing for Why We Need a New Kind of Open Cooperatives for the P2P Age. I have exchanged a couple of emails with Michel in response to the document and wanted to write up my thoughts so far here. [the mailing list archive is closed to non-members, otherwise I would quote Michel more extensively below].

I am very much in favour of bringing the P2P movement and the Co-operative movement together to learn from each other and even create a new, additional model of co-operative that exists alongside other co-operative models. When setting up the Co-operative Universities mailing list, I suggested early on that we consider how the P2P and Co-op movements could focus on education together. That was a year ago and although a number of us have been working regularly on the idea of co-operative higher education, I have not followed up on my initial proposal that we seek to combine P2P and Co-ops, when thinking about higher education. I know that my friend, Richard Hall, has also recognised the need to think this through more urgently, too.

At the moment, because of an article I am writing, I am thinking about how a convergence of P2P and co-operativism could develop the idea and practice of ‘open education’, something I return to, critically, now and again (here, here, here, here).

My main issue with open education is that it largely relies on the existing system of education to support it, through the creation of OERs and publishing of Open Access research. The sustainability of each of these is still being worked out. The P2PU is an exception, I think, where an organisation has been developed to research and provide open education by co-ordinating volunteers, though I don’t know how autonomous or democratic it is (that’s not to suggest it is not democratic or autonomous, I genuinely don’t know). In my view, the co-operative movement has been tackling this issue for over 150 yrs: how to create open, democratic, autonomous, social institutions with eduction as a core principle; and how to institute ‘common ownership’ in a legal and social sense.

In this latter sense, a co-operative for free, public, higher education that I am involved in called the Social Science Centre, could be considered a form of open education in the way that I have in mind. It is constituted on co-operative values and principles; common ownership is written into the constitution; we share our work widely and it is free and open to anyone who wants to be involved. We share the product of our work and the assets of the co-operative are ‘social’ or ‘common’ in the sense that no individual member owns them and that should we dissolve, they will be passed on to a similar cause. It is small, experimental and its assets amount to very little, but in terms of its social form, we are trying to achieve open education as I would like to see it developed, beyond the desire to widen participation.

*

Michel Bauwen’s statement on open co-operatives for the ‘P2P Age’ outlines four recommendations, which he elaborates on in his document:

  1. That coops need to be statutorily (internally) oriented towards the common good
  2. That coops need to have governance models including all stakeholders
  3. That coops need to actively co-produce the creation of immaterial and material commons
  4. That coops need to be organized socially and politically on a global basis, even as they produce locally.

In principle, I agree with each of these, although as I have pointed out to Michel in our email exchange, much of this already exists in the co-operative movement (with one major exception) and the extent that the detail is worked through depends on the degree to which this is seen as a transition to something else, or the objective itself. I think that Michel sees this as a transitional step. Good.

1. ‘Common Ownership’ as defined in the UK satisfies the first point, I think. Pages 656-663 of this article discuss why. Basically, in the UK, the Industrial Common Ownership Act (1976), later reinforced by the Companies Act 2006, legally defines a form of social property called ‘common ownership’ that, should a member of a co-operative leave, they cannot take a share with them (since they don’t ‘own’ any shares), and should the co-operative dissolve for whatever reason, the members as a collective, cannot divide the assets among themselves but must, rather, pass those assets on to an organisation constituted in the same way. In effect, there are no ‘owners’ of the co-operative, only ‘members’, who act as Stewards for a later generation. I have discussed this at more length from p.27 of my recent conference paper on the ‘co-operative university’.

Co-operatives UK’s worker co-op model includes this provision. Radical Routes require this of all co-operatives that they fund.

Therefore, I think the statement in Bauwen’s document: “they work for their own members, not the common good” is wrong in many cases, although I recognise there are plenty of coops that operate on an individual equity model, such as Mondragon.

The really radical decision that an ‘open co-operative’ as Bauwen has defined it would take, is that in some or even many situations, the product of the co-operative, and not just its assets, would also, from the point of production, form part of the commons, too. This is achieved through the use of an open license, following the precedent of the open source, P2P and free culture movement. It aims to promote sharing between individuals and like-minded co-operatives, with the exception that “for-profit companies that do not contributes to the commons have to pay for the use of the license.” In his email, Michel clarified this by saying that “what I proposed to be common is both the immaterial output and the material means, but not the rival products.” That is, the ‘rival‘ products continue to be sold (unless a different form of exchange is agreed with the consumer), but the non-rival, immaterial products as well as the means of production (the co-operative’s assets), are constituted as a commons through a combination of legislation (in the UK at least) and license agreements.

The Industrial Common Ownership Act does not require the co-operative to openly license their product, but is only concerned with the co-operative’s capital, not its output. This is the really distinctive and challenging feature of ‘open co-operatives’, especially for those that aim to produce material goods, rather than immaterial goods or non-rivalrous goods. With the provision that we acknowledge the material foundations of the immaterial social world, we know that a commons can exist for immaterial products (FLOSS) and we know that a commons can exist for the means of production (‘Common Ownership’), but can it be extended to rivalrous goods?

For clarity, here is Michel’s own words from the email:

i) no artificial scarcity, so the knowledge, code and design are indeed commons

ii) but the rival products can be sold on the market (of course, other methods would be possible within a cooperative network)

iii) what is new, and it comes from dmytri kleiner, is the idea to also try to create ‘material commons’ that transcend the ownership by only the owners of the coop, but is an attempt to create more powerful global material commons; I am myself not sure of all the exact details of how the latter would work (see http://p2pfoundation.net/Venture_Communism)

2. On the next point in his article, Michel proposes a model whereby all people who come in contact with the co-op are recognised as members in some way. Currently, the ‘multi-stakeholder’ model aims to accommodate this type of co-operative, where producers, consumers and service users, are involved in the democratic governance of the co-operative. I have recently learned about a version of this called ‘Solidarity Co-operatives’ in Quebec, which in my mind is a more appealing way of describing the model.

My concern with recognising the various stakeholders involved is that it reinforces the roles of capitalist society, rather than abolishing them. If there are producers and consumers, then there is a division of labour and, according to Marx and Engels at least, the result of the division of labour is private property. They are one and the same thing (I also discuss this in my conference paper above). Again, Michel sees the Solidarity model as a transitional one, rather than the end objective. Good, although we should be careful about confusing fundamental compromises with the idea of a strategic, transitional move. Co-operatives have been blamed for their ‘degeneration’ into capitalist forms before (see Egan’s paper) and it remains a serious risk.

In his email, he gave the example of a doctor and patient each of whom have clear roles as stakeholders in a health co-operative. For me, the example of doctor and patient is interesting as, perhaps more than any other social relationship, it assumes that the needs of the patient and the capacity/ability of the doctor is non-reciprocal. If ever there was a relationship that was unequal in a positive sense, it is that of caring for someone.

It seems to me that the open licenses and governance structures of the ‘open coop’ are intended to create a substitute to the social role of money, in the sense that they create a different form and measure of reciprocal equivalence (money being the universal equivalence today). This seems like a good transitional step towards social relations which are not required to be based on any universal form of equivalence (i.e. From each according to their ability to each according to their needs: positive, non-reciprocity).

Time and again, we assume that a radical politics should aim for equality and reciprocity, yet this is the logic of capital and its expression in money. For Marx, full communism (which is not to be confused with the state capitalism of China, Soviet Union, etc.), was “from each to each”, recognising the natural differences between people and their respective needs and abilities. As Marx said in his Critique of the Gotha Programme,

“But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal… In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

I recognise that we are far from a society where the principle of “equal right” has been overcome. Marx saw this as a feature of capitalism, one which will gradually be stigmatized and regarded as incompatible with the increasingly abundant productive forces of society.

“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

If we isolate the way that free and open source software is produced and distributed today, I think that we can see a prefigurative form of this future society, where it seems absurd to many people that we should require a reciprocal relationship between the producer of software and the consumer – in fact these two roles are to some extent abolished in thriving open source communities. What is required – and I think this is what Michel and the P2P Foundation are attempting to do, is generalise this positive form of non-reciprocity – from each to each –  beyond the confines of the digital, immaterial social world.

To put it simply: Reciprocity is the logic of (imposed) scarcity. Non-reciprocity is the logic of abundance.

I will address points three and four of Michel’s proposal in another post soon, when I’ve had a chance to look at the specific P2P licenses and Venture Communism in detail. Comments here are very welcome.

The Co-operative University: Labour, property and pedagogy

My paper for the conference, Governing Academic Life is available for download and I welcome comments here or via email. Thank you.

Abstract

We are witnessing an “assault” on universities (Bailey and Freedman, 2011) and the future of higher education and its institutions is being “gambled.” (McGettigan, 2013) For many years now, we have been warned that our institutions are in “ruins” (Readings, 1997). We campaign for the “public university” (Holmwood, 2011) but in the knowledge that we work for private corporations, where academic labour is increasingly subject to the regulation of performative technologies (Ball, 2003) and where the means of knowledge production is being consolidated under the control of an executive. We want the cops off our campus but lack a form of institutional governance that gives teachers and students a right to the university. (Bhandar, 2013)

Outside the university, there is an institutional form that attempts to address issues of ownership and control over the means of production and constitute a radical form of democracy among those involved. Worker co-operatives are a form of ‘producer co- operative’ constituted on the values of autonomy, democracy, equality, equity and solidarity. In most cases the assets (the ‘means of production’) of the co-operative are held under ‘common ownership’, a social form of property that goes beyond the distinction between private and public.

I begin this paper by discussing the recent work of academics and activists to identify the advantages and issues relating to co-operative forms of higher education. I then focus in particular on the ‘worker co-operative’ organisational form and discuss its applicability and suitability to the governance of and practices within higher educational institutions. Finally, I align the values and principles of worker co-ops with the critical pedagogic theory of ‘Student as Producer’.

Co-operative labour attacks the groundwork of capital

Below is a section from Marx, written around the same time that Capital Volume 1 was published (1866/7). It is a useful reminder of Marx’s own activism at a time when he was also writing the most remarkable theoretical work, too.

It is awkwardly titled: ‘The Different Questions‘, written for the International Workingmen’s Association, as ‘Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council’. It’s a short document that touches on a number of things: The importance of gathering reports and statistics about the international struggle between labour and capital; limiting (reducing) working hours; ensuring that child labour (aged 9yrs onwards) is combined with education; the role of Trade Unions, which should be to act “against the system of wage slavery itself” rather than get caught up in local issues; taxation (“No modification of the form of taxation can produce any important change in the relations of labour and capital.”); the army; and co-operative labour:

“Co-operative labour

It is the business of the International Working Men’s Association to combine and generalise the spontaneous movements of the working classes, but not to dictate or impose any doctrinary system whatever. The Congress should, therefore, proclaim no special system of co-operation, but limit itself to the enunciation of a few general principles.

(a) We acknowledge the co-operative movement as one of the transforming forces of the present society based upon class antagonism. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.

(b) Restricted, however, to the dwarfish forms into which individual wages slaves can elaborate it by their private efforts, the co-operative system will never transform capitalist society. to convert social production into one large and harmonious system of free and co-operative labour, general social changes are wanted, changes of the general conditions of society, never to be realised save by the transfer of the organised forces of society, viz., the state power, from capitalists and landlords to the producers themselves.

(c) We recommend to the working men to embark in co-operative production rather than in co-operative stores. The latter touch but the surface of the present economical system, the former attacks its groundwork.

(d) We recommend to all co-operative societies to convert one part of their joint income into a fund for propagating their principles by example as well as by precept, in other words, by promoting the establishment by teaching and preaching.

(e) In order to prevent co-operative societies from degenerating into ordinary middle-class joint stock companies (societes par actions), all workmen employed, whether shareholders or not, ought to share alike. As a mere temporary expedient, we are willing to allow shareholders a low rate of interest.”

Mass Intellectuality

A couple of people have questioned our use of the term ‘mass intellectuality’ for the title of our proposed book: ‘Mass Intellectuality: the democratisation of higher education‘. It’s a term that comes from Autonomous Marxism, based on Marx’s notion of the ‘general intellect’. Richard and I intend to introduce and discuss the term in our introduction to the book.

Here’s what Paolo Virno had to say about it:

“Mass intellectuality is the composite group of Postfordist living labour, not merely of some particularly qualified third sector: it is the depository of cognitive competences that cannot be objectified in machinery. Mass intellectuality is the prominent form in which the general intellect is manifest today. The scientific erudition of the individual labourer is not under question here. Rather, all the more generic attitudes of the mind gain primary status as productive resources; these are the faculty of language, the disposition to learn, memory, the power of abstraction and relation and the tendency towards self-reflexivity. General intellect needs to be understood literally as intellect in general: the faculty and power to think, rather than the works produced by thought – a book, an algebra formula etc. In order to represent the relationship between general intellect and living labour in Postfordism we need to refer to the act through which every speaker draws on the inexhaustible potential of language to execute contingent and unrepeatable statements. Like the intellect and memory, language is the most common and least ‘specialised’ conceivable given. A good example of mass intellectuality is the speaker, not the scientist. Mass intellectuality has nothing to do with a new ‘labour aristocracy’; it is actually its exact opposite.”

Source: ‘General intellect‘ by Paolo Virno

On the ‘abolition of labour’

First, from Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, pp.292-3

“The labor process itself is the life of the proletariat. Abolition of the negative ordering of labor, alienated labor as Marx terms it, is hence at the same time the abolition of the proletariat.

The abolition of the proletariat also amounts to the abolition of labor as such. Marx makes this an express formulation when he speaks of the achievement of revolution. Classes are to be abolished ‘by the abolition of private property and of labor itself.’ Elsewhere, Marx says the same thing: ‘The communistic revolution is directed against the preceding mode of activity, does away with labor.’ And again, ‘the question is not the liberation but the abolition of labor.’ The question is not the liberation of labor because labor has already been made ‘free’; free labor is the achievement of capitalist society. Communism can cure the ‘ills’ of the bourgeois and the distress of the proletarian only ‘by removing their cause, namely, “labor.”

These amazing formulations in Marx’s earliest writings all contain the Hegelian term Aufhebung, so that abolition also carries the meaning that a content is restored to its true form. Marx, however, envisioned the future mode of labor to be so different from the prevailing one that he hesitated to use the same term ‘labor’ to designate alike the material process of capitalist and of communist society. He uses the term ‘labor’ to mean what capitalism actually understands by it in the last analysis, that activity which creates surplus value in commodity production, or, which ‘produces capital.’ Other kinds of activity are not ‘productive labor’ and hence are not labor in the proper sense. Labor thus means that free and universal development is denied the individual who labors, and it is clear that in this state of affairs the liberation of the individual is at once the negation of labor.

An ‘association of free individuals’ to Marx is a society wherein the material process of production no longer determines the entire pattern of human life. Marx’s idea of a rational society implies an order in which it is not the universality of labor but the universal satisfaction of all individual potentialities that constitutes the principle of social organization. He contemplates a society that gives to each not according to his work but his needs. Mankind becomes free only when the material perpetuation of life is a function of the abilities and happiness of associated individuals.”

Marcuse is mainly drawing from Marx and Engel’s The German Ideology, where they discuss in detail the relationship between the division of labour, private property and its necessary overcoming as the historical task of the proletariat. For example:

“In all previous revolutions the mode of activity always remained unchanged and it was only a question of a different distribution of this activity, a new distribution of labour to other persons, whilst the communist revolution is directed against the hitherto existing mode of activity, does away with labour, and abolishes the rule of all classes with the classes themselves, because it is carried through by the class which no longer counts as a class in society, which is not recognised as a class, and is in itself the expression of the dissolution of all classes, nationalities, etc., within present society;” (MECW Vol. 5 p. 52)

“The separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a common battle against another class; in other respects they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. On the other hand, the class in its turn assumes an independent existence as against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of life predetermined, and have their position in life and hence their personal development assigned to them by their class, thus becoming subsumed under it. This is the same phenomenon as the subjection of the separate individuals to the division of labour and can only be removed by the abolition of private property and of labour itself. We have already indicated several times that this subsuming of individuals under the class brings with it their subjection to all kinds of ideas, etc.” (ibid, 77)

“The transformation, through the division of labour, of personal powers (relations) into material powers, cannot be dispelled by dismissing the general idea of it from one’s mind, but can only be abolished by the individuals again subjecting these material powers to themselves and abolishing the division of labour. This is not possible without the community. Only within the community has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; hence personal freedom becomes possible only within the community. In the previous substitutes for the community, in the state, etc., personal freedom has existed only for the individuals who developed under the conditions of the ruling class, and only insofar as they were individuals of this class. The illusory community in which individuals have up till now combined always took on an independent existence in relation to them, and since it was the combination of one class over against another, it was at the same time for the oppressed class not only a completely illusory community, but a new fetter as well. In the real community the individuals obtain their freedom in and through their association.” (ibid 77-78)

“Thus, while the fugitive serfs only wished to have full scope to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labour, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, have to abolish the hitherto prevailing condition of their existence (which has, moreover, been that of all society up to then), namely, labour. Thus they find themselves directly opposed to the form in which, hitherto, the individuals, of which society consists, have given themselves collective expression, that is, the state; in order, therefore, to assert themselves as individuals, they must overthrow the state.” (ibid 80)

“Only at this [post-revolutionary] stage does self-activity coincide with material life, which corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting-off of all natural limitations. The transformation of labour into self-activity corresponds to the transformation of the previously limited intercourse into the intercourse of individuals as such. With the appropriation of the total productive forces by the united individuals, private property comes to an end. Whilst previously in history a particular condition always appeared as accidental, now the isolation of individuals and each person’s particular way of gaining his livelihood have them- selves become accidental.” (ibid 88)

“The modern state, the rule of the bourgeoisie, is based on freedom of labour. The idea that along with freedom of religion, state, thought, etc., and hence “occasionally” “also” “perhaps” with freedom of labour, not I become free, but only one of my enslavers—this idea was borrowed by Saint Max himself, many times, though in a very distorted form, from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. Freedom of labour is free competition of the workers among themselves. Saint Max is very unfortunate in political economy as in all other spheres. Labour is free in all civilised countries; it is not a matter of freeing labour but of abolishing it.” (ibid 205)

“It follows from what was said above against Feuerbach that previous revolutions within the framework of division of labour were bound to lead to new political institutions; it likewise follows that the communist revolution, which removes the division of labour, ultimately abolishes political institutions ; and, finally, it follows also that the communist revolution will be guided not by the “social institutions of inventive socially-gifted persons”, but by the productive forces.” (ibid 380)

“We have already shown above that the abolition of a state of affairs in which relations become independent of individuals, in which individuality is subservient to chance and the personal relations of individuals are subordinated to general class relations, etc.—that the abolition of this state of affairs is determined in the final analysis by the abolition of division of labour. We have also shown that the abolition of division of labour is determined by the development of intercourse and productive forces to such a degree of universality that private property and division of labour become fetters on them. We have further shown that private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals, precisely because the existing form of intercourse and the existing productive forces are all-embracing and only individuals that are developing in an all-round fashion can appropriate them, i.e., can turn them into free manifestations of their lives. We have shown that at the present time individuals must abolish private property, because the productive forces and forms of intercourse have developed so far that, under the domination of private property, they have become destructive forces, and because the contradiction between the classes has reached its extreme limit. Finally, we have shown that the abolition of private property and of the division of labour is itself the association of individuals on the basis created by modern productive forces and world intercourse.” (ibid 438-9)

From an interview with Moishe Postone, whose basic argument has been reformulated in his numerous publications, and is nicely encapsulated here:

“My reformulation of the central categories of Marx’s critique of political economy was influenced in part by the massive global historical transformations since 1973. Retrospectively, from the vantage point of the early 21st century, we can see more clearly that capitalism has existed in a number of different historical configurations – for example, 19th century liberal capitalism, 20th century state-centric “Fordist” capitalism and, now, neo-liberal global capitalism. This indicates that capitalism’s history cannot be adequately grasped as a linear development. It also, more importantly, indicates very strongly that capitalism’s most basic features cannot be identified completely with any of its more specific historical configurations.

I attempted, through a close reading of the most fundamental categories of Marx’s critique of political economy, to grasp the most basic features of capitalism – those that characterize the core of the social formation through its various historical configurations. On that basis I argued that traditional Marxism took basic features of liberal capitalism – the market and private ownership of the means of production – to be the most fundamental features of capitalism in general. Relatedly, it regarded the category of labor as the standpoint from which capitalism was criticized. Capitalism became identified with the bourgeoisie; socialism with the proletariat.

According to my interpretation, however, far from being the standpoint of the critique of capitalism, labor in capitalism constitutes the central object of Marx’s critique and is at the heart of Marx’s core categories of commodity and capital. I argued that, at the heart of the social formation is a historically specific form of social mediation constituted by labor – namely, value. This form of mediation (which is also a form of wealth) is at the same time a historically specific form of domination that can be expressed through, but is not identical with, class domination. It is abstract, without any specific locus, and is also temporally dynamic. This form of domination, which appears as external necessity, rather than as social, generates both the mode of producing in capitalism as well as its intrinsically dynamic character. It is, of course, impossible to even begin to go into the complexity of the issues involved, but several important implications are that industrial production, which historically comes into being under capitalism, does not represent the foundation of socialism, but is intrinsically capitalist; that the problem with growth in capitalism is not only that it is crisis-ridden, but that its very form of growth itself is problematic; that the existence of the bourgeois class is not the ultimate defining feature of capitalism and that state capitalism (briefly described by Marx as early as 1844) can and has existed; finally, that the proletariat is the class whose existence defines capitalism , and that the overcoming of capitalism involves the abolition, not the glorification, of proletarian labor.

Traditional Marxism had already become anachronistic in a variety of ways in the 20th century. It was unable to provide a fundamental critique of the forms of state capitalism referred to as “actually existing socialism.” Moreover, its understanding of emancipation appeared increasingly anachronistic, viewed from the constituted aspirations, needs, and motivating impulses that became expressed in the last third of 20th century by the so-called “new social movements.” Whereas traditional Marxism tended to affirm proletarian labor and, hence, the structure of labor that developed historically, as a dimension of capital’s development, the new social movements expressed a critique of that structure of labor, if at times in an underdeveloped and inchoate form. I argue that Marx’s analysis is one that points beyond the existing structure of labor.”

The university as a hackerspace (‘Friction’ conference)

A paper for ‘Friction: An interdisciplinary conference on technology & resistance‘, University of Nottingham, Thursday 8th May & Friday 9th May.

In a paper published last year, I argued for a different way of understanding the emergence of hacker culture. (Winn 2013) In doing so, I outlined an account of ‘the university’ as an institution that provided the material and subsequent intellectual conditions that early hackers were drawn to and in which they worked.

The key point I tried to make was that hacking was originally a form of academic labour that emerged out of the intensification and valorisation of scientific research within the institutional context of the university. The reproduction of hacking as a form of academic labour took place over many decades as academics and their institutions shifted from an ideal of unproductive, communal science to a more productive, entrepreneurial approach to the production of knowledge.

As such, I view hacking as a peculiar, historically situated form of labour that arose out of friction in the academy: vocation vs. profession; teaching vs. research; basic vs. applied research; research vs. development; private vs. public; war vs. peace; institutional autonomy vs. state dependence; scientific communalism vs. intellectual property; individualism vs. co-operation.

A question I have for you today is whether hacking in the university is still a possibility? Can a university contain (i.e. intellectually, politically, practically) a hackerspace? Can a university be a hackerspace? If so, what does it look like? How would it work? I am trying to work through these questions at the moment with colleagues at the University of Lincoln. The name I have given to this emerging project is ‘The university as a hackerspace’ and it has grown out of an existing pedagogical and political project called ‘Student as Producer.’ 1 It is also one of four agreed areas of work in a new ‘digital education’ strategy at Lincoln. 2

More broadly, our project asks “how do we reproduce the university as a critical, social project?”

STUDENT AS PRODUCER

Student as Producer is the University of Lincoln’s teaching and learning strategy and is in part derived from the work of avant-garde Marxists like Lev Vygotsky, and Walter Benjamin, who gave a lecture in 1934 known as ‘The Author as Producer’. Benjamin was concerned with the relationship between authors and their readers and how to actively intervene in “the living context of social relations” so as to create progressive social transformation:

“[For]… the author who has reflected deeply on the conditions of present day production … His work will never be merely work on products but always, at the same time, work on the means of production. In other words his products must have, over and above their character as works, an organising function.” (Benjamin 2005: 777)

Student as Producer was also an HEA-funded project that we completed recently, led by my colleague Prof. Mike Neary, who was the Dean of Teaching and Learning from 2007-14. Last year, the QAA commended the university for Student as Producer. Mike Neary and another colleague, Sam Williams, came to talk about Student as Producer here at the University of Nottingham just a couple of weeks ago and I’m told it was very well received.

Student as Producer at Lincoln is a university-wide initiative, which aims to construct a productive and progressive pedagogical framework through a re-engineering of the relationship between research and teaching and a reappraisal of the relationship between academics and students. Research-engaged teaching and learning is now “an institutional priority at the University of Lincoln, making it the dominant paradigm for all aspects of curriculum design and delivery, and the central pedagogical principle that informs other aspects of the University’s strategic planning.” (HEA 2010)

In an early book chapter setting out the rationale for Student as Producer, Mike and I argued that:

“The idea of student as producer encourages the development of collaborative relations between student and academic for the production of knowledge. However, if this idea is to connect to the project of refashioning in fundamental ways the nature of the university, then further attention needs to be paid to the framework by which the student as producer contributes towards mass intellectuality. This requires academics and students to do more than simply redesign their curricula, but go further and redesign the organizing principle, (i.e. private property and wage labour), through which academic knowledge is currently being produced.” (Neary & Winn, 2009, 137)

Central to Student as Producer is an attempt to reconfigure the dysfunctional relationship between teaching and research in higher education and a conviction that this can be best achieved by rethinking the relationship between student and academic.

The argument for Student as Producer has been developed through a number of publications 3 which assert that students can and should be producers of their social world by being collaborators in the processes of research, teaching and learning. Student as Producer has a radically democratic agenda, valuing critique, speculative thinking, openness and a form of learning that aims to transform the social context so that students become the subjects rather than objects of history – individuals who make history and personify knowledge. Student as Producer is not simply a project to transform and improve the ‘student experience’ but aspires to a paradigm shift in how knowledge is produced, where the traditional student and teacher roles are ‘interrupted’ through close collaboration, recognizing that both teachers and students have much to learn from each other. Student as Producer aims to ensure that theory and practice are understood as praxis, what Paulo Freire referred to as a process of “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it.” (Freire 2000, 51).

A critical, social and historical understanding of the university and the roles of researcher, teacher and student inform these aspirations and objectives. They draw on radical moments in the history of the university as well as looking forward to possibilities of what the university can become. I think that one such radical moment could be the “software wars” that Richard Stallman has described when he tried desperately to hold together his “commune” in the “Garden of Eden” that was the AI Lab in MIT during the late 1970s. That moment was the genesis of the Free Software movement and the creation of the GPL license, and a time when hacking formally ‘escaped’ the confines of the university. 4

Student as Producer recognizes that the higher education sector is in a state of crisis, which is reflective of a more general social crisis. At a time when the higher education sector is being privatized and students are expected to assume the role of consumer, Student as Producer aims to provide students with a more critical, more historically and socially informed, experience of university life which extends beyond their formal studies to engage with the role of the university, and therefore their own role, in society. Pedagogically, this is through the idea of ‘excess’ where students are anticipated to become more than just student-consumers during their course of research and study (Neary & Hagyard, 2010). The idea of ‘excess’ is suggestive of a state of abundance (Kay and Mott, 1982), of conditions of non-reciprocity: “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.” You will have experienced moments of such abundance and non-reciprocity in your own lives: with your lovers, your children, and in the culture of sharing on the web.

Our aim is that through this ‘pedagogy of excess’, the organising principle of university life is redressed, creating a teaching, learning and research environment which promotes the values of experimentation, openness and creativity, engenders equity at the level of academic and student labour and thereby offers an opportunity to reconstruct the student as producer and academic as collaborator. In an anticipated environment where knowledge is free (as in ‘freedom’, if not as in ‘beer’), the roles of the educator and the institution necessarily change. The educator is no longer a delivery vehicle and the institution becomes a landscape for the production and construction of a mass intellect in commons, a porous, networked space of abundance, offering an experience that is in excess of what students might find elsewhere.

In our 2009 book chapter, we specifically drew on the activities of the Free Culture movement as an exemplary model for how the disconnect between research and teaching and the work of academics and students, might be overcome and reorganized around a different conception of work and property, ideas central to the meaning of ‘openness’ or, rather, an ‘academic commons’.

LNCD IS NOT A CENTRAL DEVELOPMENT GROUP

One of the reasons I have come to think about ‘the university as a hackerspace’ is due to what I regard as a failure of my earlier work. It depends on how you regard ‘failure’ – we learned a lot, attracted lots of research funding, and the work was interesting and seemed to interest other people – but it didn’t fully have the effect on the institution that I was hoping for. Between 2009 and 2013, I ran ten grant-funded projects, each of which focused on the theme of ‘openness’ or as I prefer, the ‘academic commons’. This work was consolidated under a group that we called LNCD. LNCD is a recursive acronym and stands for ‘LNCD is Not a Central Development Group’. 5 It was intended to be an open, inclusive group run according to the principles of Student as Producer and open to students and staff from across the university.

With the LNCD group, I acknowledged that the origins of much of our work was in the hacker culture that grew out of MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and University of California, Berkeley in the 1970 and 1980s; the academic culture that developed much of the key technology of today’s Internet.” (Winn and Lockwood 2013) I think that the Free Culture movement in general owes much to its academic origins and can be understood as an exemplar alternative organizing principle that is proliferating in universities in the form of open, networked collaborative initiatives such as Open Access and Open Educational Resources. (Neary and Winn 2009)

“When understood from this point of view, LNCD, as a Student as Producer initiative, is attempting to develop a culture for staff and students based on the key academic values that motivated the early academic hacker culture: autonomy, the sharing of knowledge and creative output, transparency through peer-review, and peer-recognition based on merit.” (Winn and Lockwood 2013)

During this period, we also ran a national student hackathon called DevXS when 180 students from around the country came to Lincoln for two days to “challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education.” 6 I’ve written about some of the projects and the hackathon elsewhere (Winn 2012; Winn and Lockwood 2013).

I was always mindful that LNCD should contribute towards the greater strategic priority of Student as Producer. It would do this by helping re-configure the nature of teaching and learning in higher education by encouraging students to become part of the academic project of the University and collaborators with academics in the production of knowledge and meaning. To recall Benjamin’s lecture: for me, LNCD was an attempt to “reflect deeply on the conditions of present day production” in higher education, and “at the same time, work on the means of [knowledge] production” with students and other members of staff.

AN ANTI-DISCIPLINARY RESEARCH DEGREE

The problem with LNCD is that we became regarded as just another research group and did not become the ‘skunkworks’ group for the institution that I hope we would. When JISC, the funder of our projects, ceased to advertise funding calls, there was nothing to fall back on. I was pretty burnt out by that point, too.

As an alternative to what I tried to do through LNCD, we are now working towards the validation in 2015 of a new post-graduate research degree, provisionally titled ‘The university as a hackerspace’. My hope is that as an academic programme with students, it will be more reflective of, and tightly integrated into, the core function and purpose of the university: research-based teaching and learning. I hope this will make it more sustainable and that staff will understand its objectives better than they did LNCD.

It is intended to be Lincoln’s first cross-university, ‘anti-disciplinary’ academic programme. It is intended to act as a focal point for teaching, learning, research and development of new technologies and technology culture. It is not intended to be a degree about ‘educational technology’, but rather a creative, critical research programme that seeks to understand and contribute to the role of technology in education through its wider role in society and culture.

The idea for this Master’s level research programme, is influenced by the rapidly emerging ‘makerspaces’ 7 and ‘hackerspaces’. 8 The programme will seek to learn from, emulate and contribute to what we see happening in hacker/maker/DIY culture: e.g. ‘fablabs’, 9 ‘hacklabs’, 10 and ‘open science’. 11 Research and development outputs from the programme are expected to formally feed back and inform the way that the university invests in, supports and promotes the use of technology for education and research. In this way, the research programme is intended to act, in part, as a ‘skunkworks’ 12 group for the whole institution.

The programme will combine inter-disciplinary research and development, teaching, learning and enterprise, but recognises that those activities are evolving and that hackers, makers and entrepreneurs are developing an alternative educational model that is replacing these functions of the university: the opportunities for learning, collaboration, reputation building/accreditation and access to cheap hardware and software for prototyping ideas, can and are taking place outside universities. However, university culture remains a place where the ‘hacker ethic’ (i.e. collaboration, sharing, respect for good ideas, meritocracy, autonomy, curiosity, fixing things, anti-technological determinism, peer review, perpetual learning, etc.) remains relevant and respected and resources are widespread. (Levy 1984; Himanen 2001)

The degree will be a flexible, research-based, postgraduate programme that is truly interdisciplinary and always experimental in its form and content: A space for learning, critique and innovation, engaging academics and students in the sciences, arts, media and humanities to think deeply about the way technology is used for research, teaching, learning and the wider social good. The programme will create a supportive space for students with different disciplinary backgrounds and interests to work together under the mentorship of university staff. The programme will recognise that both staff and students have much to learn from each other.

QUESTIONS NEEDING ANSWERS

We’re still in the early stages of thinking this through and as you can imagine, it’s throwing up a number of questions.

  • Can a university contain (intellectually, politically, practically) a hackerspace?
  • Are the two organisational and educational forms compatible?
  • Who owns an ‘antidisciplinary’ programme?
  • Who benefits from it? How?
  • Why would a student enrol?
  • How can we involve the local community?
  • What is the final award?
  • How are contributions (staff time, Schools’ facilities) acknowledged?
  • How is the degree structured?
  • How many students are required to make this work (i.e. what is the critical size of the ‘collective’)
  • What are the administrative constraints and regulatory obligations?

I welcome comments on what we are trying to do and whether you think it is feasible or even desirable. If you know of similar efforts elsewhere, please share them. Thank you.

FURTHER READING

Special Issue of Journal of Peer Production

http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/

Hackerspaces: The Beginning (book)

http://blog.hackerspaces.org/2011/08/31/hackerspaces-the-beginning-the-book/

Benjamin, Walter (2005) Walter Benjamin: 1931-1934 v. 2, Pt. 2: Selected Writings, Harvard University Press.

Friere, Paulo (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed, London: Continuum.

HEA (2010) Student as Producer: Research Engaged Teaching and Learning-An Institutional Strategy http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/projects/detail/ntfs/ntfsprojects_Lincoln10

Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Vintage.

Kay, Geoffrey and Mott, James (1982) Political Order and the Law of Labour. The MacMillan Press, London.

Levy, Steven.1984. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin Books.

Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London, pp. 192-210.

Neary, M. and Hagyard, A. (2010) ‘PedagogyofExcess: AnAlternativePoliticalEconomyofStudentLife’. In: The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, Routledge, Abingdon, 209-224.

Schrock, Andrew Richard (2014) “Education in Disguise”: Culture of a Hacker and Maker Space http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0js1n1qg

Winn, Joss (2012) Hacking the university. Lincoln’s approach to openness. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/topics/opentechnologies/openeducation/lincoln-university-summary.aspx

Winn, Joss and Lockwood, Dean (2013) Student as Producer is hacking the university. In: Rethinking pedagogy for a digital age . Routledge.

Winn, Joss (2013) Hacking in the university: contesting the valorisation of academic labour. Triple C : Communication, Capitalism and Critique, 11 (2). pp. 486-503.

Fragments of the working day

As I write, the fourth wall is crumbling.  I am sitting in my office towards the end of a winter’s day. I hear pigeons nesting outside my window, see my bookshelves reflected in the darkness of the glass.

Today, I write to you as an academic from within an institution – ‘the university’ – which is being actively re-conceived, re-engineered and re-defined and likewise, to be an ‘academic’, a ‘lecturer’, a ‘scholar’, a ‘researcher’, a ‘teacher’, is subjectively different, even compared to just five years ago.

—

I am an academic. I sit, I read, I experiment, I design, I build, I think, I write, I stand, I teach, I listen. I am an academic. I create teaching resources, I run projects, I write grant applications, I attend conferences, I publish articles and books. I attend meetings, I create modules. I am an academic. I tutor, I mentor, I support, I liaise, I network, I sustain, I lead, I contribute, I develop, I consult, I plan, I organise, I strategise, I collaborate,  I co-ordinate, I supervise, I manage, I negotiate, I champion, I influence, I evaluate, I appraise, I examine, I mark, I accredit. I am a teacher, a researcher, a scholar, an entrepreneur. I am an academic.

This is my work. This is my labour. This is how academic labour appears to us.

—

It is midday and I have been sat working on my article for four hours – mainly re-reading, editing and looking up references. Many academics write at home, away from the distractions of the campus, but I do not have the physical space at home for my books or for a separate room to work quietly and so I have to carve out time during the working day to read, think and write. I do work at home on a daily basis, reading and writing emails before breakfast or after dinner, responding to support requests from students and colleagues for software that I maintain, highlighting passages from journal papers I am reading, reviewing others’ work, but it is a more passive form of work, subject to our domestic routines.

—

I’ve just finished reading a memoir by the Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami, where he writes about the great physical and mental effort that is takes to be a writer, requiring discipline to sit for several hours each day and write in a concentrated way. In his essay on ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, the Sociologist, C. Wright Mills also writes about the discipline and effort required to craft a good piece of academic writing; the importance of “developing self-reflective habits”, of “systematic reflection” and the keeping of ordered notebooks. Note-taking in this way helps “build up the habit of writing. You cannot ‘keep your hand in’ if you do not write something at least every week.”

In a doctoral seminar I attended recently, we discussed C. Wright Mills’ essay and it occurred to me that all my notebooks and my files are here, on this blog, in public. There is barely anything else I can point to. Everything open to peer review.

An average set of notes here is 1296 words. 111,996 words in total. 97,020 words in the last 12 months. More elsewhere.

—

I write from 8am until 2pm. I forget to stand. I forget to drink. At night, my body aches.

Academic labour, students as consumers and the value form

Engels: “the philistine is not accustomed to this sort of abstract thought and certainly will not cudgel his brains for the sake of the form of value.” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 1987, vol. 42, p.381)

Marx: “As to the development of the value-form I have and have not followed your advice, in order to behave dialectically in this respect as well; i.e. I have: 1. written an appendix in which I present the same thing as simply and pedagogically as possible, and 2. followed your advice and divided each step in the development into §§, etc. with separate headings. …Here not merely philistines are concerned but youth eager for knowledge, etc. Besides, the matter is too decisive for the whole book.” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, 1987, vol. 42, p.385)

In a car factory, each worker labours alongside each other, combining their labour power with the means of production, in a social, cooperative, productive whole. The product of their labour (cars) is exchanged for money, a universal commodity owned by the consumer.

On a trawler ship, each worker labours alongside each other, combining their labour power with the means of production, in a social, cooperative, productive whole. The product of their labour (fish) is exchanged for money, a universal commodity owned by the consumer.

In a university, each worker labours alongside each other, combining their labour power with the means of production, in a social, cooperative, productive whole. The product of their labour (knowledge) is exchanged for money, but also consumed for the reproduction of both the teacher’s and student’s labour power commodity. Research, teaching and learning is at once a productive and reproductive process that engages the consumer (student) in the process of production. As such, the student also produces knowledge that engages the consumer (academic) in the process of production. The exchange between academic and student takes place alongside the productive process, on its opposite pole.

When knowledge is produced as a commodity, labour-power is also re-produced as a commodity. As bearers of the labour-power commodity, what is the social relationship between academic and student when knowledge is produced?

In what follows, I have taken Marx’s “pedagogical” appendix to the first German edition of Capital and used it to theorise the reproduction of knowledge and academic and student labour power. In Marx’s original text, he uses the two groups of: ‘commodity A’ / linen / weaving, and: ‘commodity B’ / a coat / tailoring as his standard points of reference throughout. In the work below, I have replaced them respectively with: “commodity A” / “academic labour power” / “teaching”, and: “commodity B” / “student labour power” / “learning”. It is my argument that we can use Marx’s theory and method of the value form in exactly the same way to analyse knowledge production in a university.

As such, you should understand that all sentence length quotes below are likely to have been modified so as to illustrate this point while, I believe, not undermining Marx’s original explication. I encourage you to study Marx’s original text.

What I hope this exercise offers is a more substantive, critical examination of the actual social relations of higher education than our work on Student as Producer has so far offered. As a critique of those social relations, Neary’s work on Student as Producer has most recently developed a critique of its own productivist foundations but it has not, in my view, adequately revealed the political economy of higher education. My notes below are an attempt drill deeper into the circuit of value production in the university at the centre of which is the social, co-operative labour of academics and students. In doing do, I believe that Neary’s and also Moten and Harney’s argument for the ‘student as producer’ can be more rigorously grounded. Through Marx’s dialectical method of rising from the abstract to the concrete, we find that the ‘logic’ of teaching and learning in higher education is itself an expression of the value form of capital.

1. What is a commodity?

The commodity form is two-fold: use value and value. Use value is the form of the commodity’s “tangible, sensible form of existence”;  the “natural form” of the commodity. Opposed to this is the value form of the commodity, which is its “social form”. Linen and coats are commodities. They both have a utility and they are both exchanged for other commodities (e.g. money) resulting in the production of value.

The primary commodity that an individual owns is their labour power. 1 Like linen and coats and any other commodity, labour power is a commodity with a use value and a value that is realised in exchange.

2. Whose labour power commodity?

A typical university brings together thousands of individuals’ labour power, each of which have different use values categorised by various contracts (e.g. lecturer, catering assistant, IT officer, professor, undergraduate students, post-graduate student, research assistant).

A lecturer is only designated a ‘lecturer’ by their contract with the university and they are paid a wage (value in the form of money) in exchange for their labour power which itself has a use value that must meet the expectations of that contract. The use value of their labour is combined with the means of production (prior knowledge, facilities, technologies, etc.) to create surplus value (profit).

A student is only designated a ‘student’ by their contract with the university and tuition fees are paid (value in the form of money from the individual, their family, through loans, or through general taxation) in exchange for participation in the labour process of knowledge production i.e. research, teaching and learning, and its accreditation. 2

Although the student brings their money commodity to the university in exchange for teaching, assessment, accreditation, etc. they also bring the use value of their own labour power and exchange it as a commodity when they consume the use value of their teachers’ labour. Although there is no direct exchange of money in the classroom (that is taken care of elsewhere), the exchange of teacher and student labour power as a commodity does take on the characteristics of the value form i.e. its social form, as we will see below.

“Consider the following questions: Where is the site of production in the classroom? What is produced? Who pro­duces, who consumes, who circulates? Any answer appears to confuse not only the point of production but also the bearers of labor power by generalizing production through consumption and circulation. The pro­fessor produces the lecture but tries to realize its value in the quality of the questions he receives after. The students consume the lecture but generate questions. The professor circulates already produced knowledge that he has consumed for his lecture notes. The students produce knowl­edge on exams and circulate the knowledge of the professor through these exams. The professor consumes the knowledge of the student on the midterm exam in order to produce a new exam at year’s end. At no point is any producer not simultaneously a consumer, and at no point is production not subject to the immediacy of circulation. Most important, if value is being realized in any of this circulation, then it is being real­ized in all of this circulation. The argument could thus be made that both professor and student (not to mention the absent labor of the graduate tutor) are coworkers in the production of knowledge, and that all are involved realizing the value of this work” (Moten and Harney, 1998: 167)

Each classroom discussion, each exam paper, each essay, is simultaneously a moment of production and consumption for the academic and for the student. Both are producers and both are consumers of each other’s (intellectual) labour power and its (knowledge) product. Both bring their physical and intellectual labour power to the university so as to produce knowledge and exchange it and produce it and exchange it and so on. I am reminded of Marx’s notes in his manuscripts: 3

“Production, then, is also immediately consumption, consumption is also immediately production. Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption; it creates the latter’s material; without it, consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subject for whom they are products. The product only obtains its ‘last finish’ in consumption.”

What differentiates the labour power commodity of the academic and the student is its perceived social quality at the moment of exchange. In this context, the labour power of the academic is usually perceived to be of ‘higher’ quality than the labour power of the student as determined by their respective experience and accreditation. Both are the possessors of the  same ‘labour power’ commodity but they are, at that time, of different qualities, which can determine the quantities being exchanged. In this respect, academic labour power differs from student labour power. They are different, apparently unequal types of the ‘labour power’ commodity. They are not naturally different – each is indeed labour power, the potential to perform labour of a particular kind – but they are socially deemed as different commodities.

As well as these ‘simple’ exchanges of the use value of labour power between academic and student in the classroom, in tutorials, marking essays and exams, etc., money in the form of tuition fees, wages and surplus value/profit circulates, too, expressing a different appearance of the simple exchange relation. As Marx did, we can analyse production and consumption in the university in its simple, expanded, general and money forms. What is unusual about this analysis here is that I am referring to labour power as something exchanged between teacher and student, apart from the university/employer/wage/tuition fee exchange. This is possible because of the universal character of the money form, which is present at all times in the teaching and learning context, but remains largely unacknowledged in the classroom.

3. How is the value of a commodity expressed?

How does the value of the academic and student labour power commodity “acquire a form of appearance of its own”?

“Through the relation of different commodities” of different qualities: academic and student labour power. Our analysis starts from their simplest configuration:

3.1 Simple value form

Marx said that “the secret of the entire value form must be hidden in this simple value form.”

The “two poles of the expression of value”: are relative value form and equivalent form.

In the simple form, two commodities simultaneously play two different roles. Commodity A is the commodity “which expresses its value in the body of a commodity different from it”, commodity B.

Commodity B “serves as the material in which value is expressed. The one commodity plays an active and the other a passive role.”

“Now we say of the academic labour power commodity (commodity A) which expresses its value in another commodity: its value is represented as relative value, or is in the relative value-form. As opposed to this, we say of commodity B, here student labour power, which serves as the material of the expression of value: it functions as equivalent to the first commodity or is in the equivalent form.”

The two forms are “inseparable”.  “Relative value-form and equivalent form are moments of the same expression of value, which belong to one another and are reciprocally conditioning and inseparable.”

The “two forms are mutually excluding or opposed extremes, i.e. poles, of the same expression of value. They are always distributed amongst different commodities”.

“The value of commodity A can thus only be expressed in another commodity, i.e. only relatively. The relative value-form of commodity A thus presupposes that that some other commodity confronts it in the equivalent form. On the other hand, this other commodity, B, which figures as the equivalent of commodity A is thus in equivalent form, and can not be at the same time in the relative value-form. This commodity does not express its value. It furnishes only the material for the expression of value in another commodity.”

The equation ‘commodity A = commodity B” can be stated conversely: “commodity B is worth commodity A”. The equation is reversed “in order to express the value of commodity B relatively, and once I do this commodity A becomes the equivalent instead of commodity B.”

“The same commodity therefore cannot make its appearance in the same expression of value at the same time in both forms. Rather, these exclude one another in a polar manner.”

Person A says: X amounts of my commodity is worth Y amounts of your commodity.

B agrees: Yes, Y amounts of my commodity is worth X amounts of your commodity.

“Here, as commodities, both academic labour power and student labour power are at the same time in relative value-form and in equivalent form…for two different persons and in two different expressions of value, which simply occur at the same time. For the academic, her commodity is in relative value-form – because for her the initiative proceeds from her commodity – and the labour power commodity of the other person, the student, is in equivalent form. Conversely from the standpoint of the student. Thus one and the same commodity never possess, even in this case, the two forms at the same time in the same expression of value.”

“Relative value and equivalent are both only forms of commodity-value. Now whether a commodity is in one form or in the polar opposite depends exclusively on its position in the expression of value. As regards the content, the two expressions:

1. X amount of commodity A = Y amount of commodity B or X amount of academic labour power is worth Y amount of student labour power.

2. Y amount of commodity B = X amount of commodity A or Y amount of student labour power is worth X amount of academic labour power.

are not at all different. As regards the form, they are not only different but opposed.”

“In expression 1 the value of academic labour power is expressed relatively. Hence it is in the relative value-form whilst at the same time the value of student labour power is expressed as equivalent. Hence it is in the equivalent form. Now if I turn the expression 1 round I obtain expression 2. The commodities change positions and right away student labour power is in the relative value-form, academic labour power in equivalent form. Because they have changed their respective positions in the same expression of value, they have changed value-form.”

3.1.1 The relative value form

The relative value form is a “relation of equality”, of “equalisation” between commodity A which expresses its value in relation to commodity B. Therefore, we can in fact say: academic labour power = student labour power; that is, in the act of exchange, both use values ‘owned’ by the academic and student are reduced to the same thing: value.

“We overlook that for the most part, because attention is absorbed by the quantitative relation, i.e. by the definite proportion, in which the one type of commodity is equated to the other. We forget that the magnitudes of different things are only quantitatively comparable after their reduction to the same unit. Only as expressions of the same unit are magnitudes with the same denominator and hence commensurable. Academic labour power thus relates to student labour power as something of its own kind, or student labour power is related to academic labour power as a thing of the same substance, as the same in essence. The one is therefore quantitatively equated to the other.”

“The relation of equality is thus a value-relation… As use-value, or body of the commodity, academic labour power is distinguished from student labour power. But its existence as value comes to light, is expressed in a relation, in which another commodity-type, student labour power, is equated to it or counts as the same in essence.”

“Student labour power is value only to the extent that it is the expression, in the form of a thing, of the human labour-power expended in its production and thus insofar as it is a jelly of abstract human labour – abstract labour, because abstraction is made from the definite useful concrete character of the labour contained in it, human labour, because the labour counts here only as expenditure of human labour-power as such. Thus academic labour power cannot relate to student labour power as a thing having value, or cannot be related to student labour power as value, without relating to it as a body whose sole substance consists in human labour. But as value academic labour power is a jelly of this same human labour. Within this relation student labour power as a thing thus represents the substances of value which it has in common with academic labour power, i.e. human labour. Within this relation student labour power thus counts only as shape of value, hence also as the form of the value of academic labour power, as the sensible form of appearance of the value of academic labour power. Thus by means of the value-relation the value of the commodity is expressed in the use-value of another commodity, i.e. in the body of another commodity different from itself.”

A “definite quantity of human labour is objectified” in a commodity. This is clear when comparing academic and student labour power.

“In the value relation of academic labour power to student labour power the commodity-type ‘student labour power’ is hence not only quantitatively equated to academic labour power as bodily form of value as such, i.e. as embodiment of human labour, but a definite quantity of this bodily form of value, 1 x student labour power, not 1 dozen, etc, insofar as in 10 x student labour power, there is hidden precisely as much value-substance of human labour as in 1 x academic labour power.”

Academic and student labour power are equivalent as value. They are also equated as values which embody quantities of human labour  and thus are equated as definite magnitudes e.g. the labour power of one academic is equivalent to the labour power of 10 students.

“Thus through the relative value-expression the value of the commodity acquires, first, a form different from its own use-value. The use-form of this commodity is academic labour power. But it possesses its value-form in its relation of equality with student labour power. Through this relation of equality the body of another commodity, sensibly different from it, becomes the mirror of its own existence as value, of its own character as value. In this way it gains an independent and separate value-form, different from its natural form. But second, as a value of definite magnitude, it is quantitatively measured by the quantitatively definite relation or the proportion in which it is equated to the body of the other commodity.”

3.1.2 The equivalent form

“As values all commodities are expressions of the same unit, of human labour, which count equally and are replaceable or substitutable for one another.”

Value is the form through which different use values of different commodities are regarded as equivalent and can be exchanged. Academic labour power “does not need to take on a form different from its immediate natural form in order to appear as value for another commodity, to count as value and to act on it as value”.

Equivalence between commodities is not concerned with “quantitative definiteness”. Equivalence does not at first come about through a judgement of e.g. 1 x commodity A is worth 10 x commodity B. Prior to this quantitative definiteness, a more basic equivalence occurs between commodities. They are both equated as value:

“Equivalent means here only something equal in magnitude, both things having been silently reduced in our heads to the abstraction value.”

The equivalent form of value is “peculiar” in that “use value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, of value.” That is, the use value of academic labour power takes on the value of that which it can be exchanged with: student labour power.

“In itself, considered in isolation, student labour power is only a useful thing, a use-value, just like academic labour power, and hence its student-labour-power-form is only the form of use-value or natural form of a definite type of commodity. But since no commodity can relate to itself as equivalent and therefore also cannot make its own natural hide an expression of its own value, it must relate itself to another commodity as equivalent or make the natural hide of the body of another commodity its own value-form.”

The equivalent value form is also peculiar because “concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, abstract human labour.”

The concrete labour of the academic and student is useful. It is the labour of teaching, of learning, of researching, of writing, of marking, etc.

“The definite concrete useful labour, which produces the body of the commodity which is the equivalent must therefore, in the expression of value, always necessarily count as a definite form of realisation or form of appearance, i.e. of abstract human labour. Student labour power, for example, can only count as the body of value, hence as embodiment of human labour as such, in so far as the labour of learning counts as a definite form, in which human labour-power is expended or in which abstract human labour is realised.”

“Within the value-relation and the value expression included in it, the abstractly general counts not as a property of the concrete, sensibly real; but on the contrary the sensibly-concrete counts as the mere form of appearance or definite form of realisation of the abstractly general. The labour of learning, which, for example, hides in the equivalent ‘student labour power’, does not possess, within the value-expression of academic labour, the general property of also being human labour. On the contrary. Being human labour counts as its essence, being the labour of learning counts only as the form of appearance or definite form of realisation of this its essence. This quid pro quo is unavoidable because the labour represented in the product of labour only goes to create value insofar as it is undifferentiated human labour, so that the labour objectified in the value of the product is in no way distinguished from the labour objectified in the value of a different product.

This inversion by which the sensibly-concrete counts only as the form of appearance of the abstractly general and not, on the contrary, the abstractly general as property of the concrete, characterises the expression of value.”

The equivalent value form is also peculiar because “private labour becomes the form of its opposite, labour in immediately social form.”

“[The] material social interconnection of private labours carried on independently of one another is however only mediated and hence is realised only through the exchange of their products. The product of private labour hence only has social form insofar as it has value-form and hence the form of exchangeability with other products of labour. It has immediately social form insofar as its own bodily or natural form is at the same time the form of its exchangeability with other commodities or counts as value-form for another commodity. However, as we have seen, this only takes place for a product of labour when, through the value relation of other commodities to it, it is in equivalent-form or, with respect to other commodities, plays the role of equivalent.

The equivalent has immediately social form insofar as it has the form of immediate exchangeability with another commodity, and it has this form of immediate exchangeability insofar as it counts for another commodity as the body of value, hence as equal. Therefore the definite useful labour contained in it also counts as labour in immediately social form, i.e. as labour which possesses the form of equality with the labour contained in another commodity. A definite, concrete labour like the labour of learning can only possess the form of equality with the labour of a different type contained in a commodity of a different kind, for example academic labour power, insofar as its definite form counts as the expression of something which really constitutes the equality of labours of different sorts or what is equal in those labours. But they are only equal insofar as they are human labour as such, abstract human labour, i.e. expenditure of human labour-power. Thus, as has already been shown, because the definite concrete labour contained in the equivalent counts as the definite form of realisation or form of appearance of abstract human labour, it possesses the form of equality with other labour, and hence, although it is private labour, like all other labour which produces commodities, it is nevertheless labour in immediately social form. Precisely because of this it is represented in a product that is immediately exchangeable with the other commodities.”

The equivalent value form is also peculiar because “the fetishism of the commodity-form is more striking in the equivalent form than in the relative value-form.”

In day-to-day life, the products of labour (software, journal articles, books, linen, iron, wheat) relate to one another as commodities. They are values, they are measurable as magnitudes of value, and their common character of being values puts them into a value-relation to one another. Now the fact that, for example, ‘1 x academic labour power = 10 x student labour power’ or ‘1 lot of commodity A is worth 10 of commodity B’ only expresses the fact that:

  1. the different types of labour necessary for the production of these things count equally as human labour;

  2. the fact that the quantity of labour expended in their production is measured according to definite social laws;

  3. that academics and students enter into a definite social relation of production.

“It is a definite social relation of the producers in which they equate their different types of labour as human labour. It is not less a definite social relation of producers, in which they measure the magnitude of their labours by the duration of expenditure of human labour-power. But within our practical interrelations these social characters of their own labours appear to them as social properties pertaining to them by nature, as objective determinations of the products of labour themselves, the equality of human labours as a value-property of the products of labour, the measure of the labour by the socially necessary labour-time as the magnitude of value of the products of labour, and finally the social relations of the producers through their labours appear as a value-relation or social relation of these things, the products of labour. Precisely because of this the products of labour appear to them as commodities, sensible-supersensible or social things.”

The main product of labour in the university is knowledge which is ‘reinvested’ into the labour power of academics and students, as well as exchanged for grants, patents, consultancy, etc. The socially necessary labour time required to acquire a level of knowledge which meets the requirements of the academic employment contract exceeds that of the socially necessary labour time required to acquire a level of knowledge which meets the requirements of entry into a university as a student. The magnitude of value of academic labour power, measured by socially necessary labour time, is therefore greater than the magnitude of value of student labour power. Although both are ‘labour power’ commodities, they are qualitatively different, yet in practice they are brought together for exchange by being relative and equivalent to each other as values. As a value relation, it is therefore a social relation.

“the commodity-form and the value-relation of products of labour have absolutely nothing to do with their physical nature and the relations between things which springs from this. It is only the definite social relation of people itself which here takes on for them the phantasmagoric form of a relation of things. Hence in order to find an analogy for this we must take flight into the cloudy region of the religious world. Here the products of the human head appear as independent figures endowed with a life of their own and standing in a relation to one another and to people. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of the human hand. This I call the fetishism which clings to the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities and which is therefore inseparable from commodity- production.”

The product of the exchange of academic-student labour power appears as knowledge, embodied in their respective labour power commodity, objectified in the classroom, essays, exams, journal articles, books, etc. It is the university campus, the lecture hall, the seminar room, the exam, the book, the article, etc. which seemingly bring academics and students together and construct relations between them, when in fact behind this is the commodity form and the value relation of labour power itself and the products of labour power. The university is a fetish.

3.1.3 Exchange value

“The expression of value has two poles, relative value-form and equivalent-form. To start with, what concerns the commodity functioning as equivalent is that it counts for another commodity as the shape of value, a body in immediately exchangeable form – exchange-value. But the commodity whose value is expressed relatively, possesses the form of exchange-value in that:

  1. its existence as value is revealed by the exchangeability of the body of another commodity with it;
  2. its magnitude of value is expressed through the proportion in which the other commodity is exchangeable with it.

The exchange-value is hence the independent form of appearance of commodity- value.”

Academic labour power and student labour power both exist simultaneously and immediately as opposite poles of relative value form and equivalent form. As equivalent form, student labour power is the shape of value of academic labour power. As relative value form, the shape of value of student labour power is academic labour power. There is unity in their opposite. This is not concerned with the magnitude of value, which is determined by the socially necessary labour time expended to re-produce their respective labour power up to the moment of exchange. It simply refers to the existence of exchange value, which is not to be confused with the ‘price’ of a commodity and certainly not the surplus value or ‘profit’ which may be produced through the exchange. Exchange value is the value expressed by one equivalent commodity relative to another commodity.

The magnitude of value of academic and student labour power is expressed through the degree of knowledge and subsequent physical and mental skills, which the academic and student respectively embody in the moment of exchange. This is tested socially through the exchange of labour power with other commodities. Can the student learn the same thing from another student as effectively in the same amount of time as they can from an academic? Can they learn it from the Internet as effectively in the same amount of time? Can the academic produce the same amount of knowledge as effectively and in the same amount of time if they don’t teach at all? Can the academic produce the same amount of knowledge as effectively and in the same amount of time simply through ‘independent’ research (to the extent that research is ever independent of existing social relations).

“In the relation of value of academic labour power to student labour power the natural form of academic labour power counts only as the shape of use-value, the natural form of  student labour power only as value-form or shape of exchange-value. The inner opposition between use-value and value contained in a commodity is thus represented by an external opposition, i.e. the relation of two commodities, of which the one counts immediately only as use-value, the other immediately only as exchange-value, or in which the two opposing determinations, use-value and exchange-value, are distributed in a polar manner among the commodities.

If I say: As a commodity academic labour power is use-value and exchange-value, this is my judgement about the nature of the commodity gained by analysis. As opposed to this, in the expression ‘the labour power of one academic = the labour power of 10 students’ or ‘one academic is worth 10 students’ the academic labour power itself says that it

  1. is a use-value (academic labour power e.g. to teach, to research);

  2. is an exchange-value distinct from that (something equal to student labour power); and

  3. is the unity of these two differences, and thus is a commodity.”

“The product of labour in its natural form brings with it into the world the form of a use-value. Therefore it requires further only the value-form in order for it to possess the commodity-form, i.e. for it to appear as a unity of the opposites use-value and exchange-value. The development of the value-form is hence identical with the development of the commodity-form.”

Labour power in all its expressions (teaching, research, learning, bricklaying, etc.) is the product of the social re-production of labour power which reproduces itself as intelligent, strong, skilful,  useful human labour. For whatever reason, when it enters into an exchange relation it acquires the value form and hence the commodity form: “a unity of the opposites use value and exchange value.”

Commodities exist in “a relation of qualitative equality and quantitative proportionality” to each other. For example, let’s say that the labour power of 1 academic is equal to the labour power of 10 students. 4

or

1 academic is worth 10 students

or

1 academic = £20,000 (in student ‘contact time’ alone)

or

1 academic is worth £20,000

From this, we can see that the money form (e.g. £20,000) “is nothing but the further development of the simple value form of the commodity, and therefore of the simple commodity form of the labour product.” The simple commodity form undergoes a “series of metamorphoses” to start from ‘the labour power of 1 academic is equal to the labour power of 10 students’ to “take on the shape”, ‘1 academic is worth £20,000’.

“The expression of value in student labour power gives academic labour power a value-form by virtue of which it is distinguished simply as value from itself as use-value. This form also puts it only in relation to student labour power, i.e. to some single type of commodity different from itself. But as value it is the same as all other commodities. Its value-form must hence also be a form which puts it into a relation of qualitative equality and quantitative proportionality to all other commodities – to the simple relative value-form of a commodity corresponds the singular equivalent-form of another commodity. Or the commodity, in which value is expressed, functions here only as singular equivalent. Thus student labour power in the relative expression of value of academic labour power possesses only the equivalent-form or the form of immediate exchangeability with relation to this single type of commodity, academic labour power.”

4. Total or Expanded Value form

“The simple value-form requires the value of one commodity to be expressed in only one commodity of another sort, though it does not matter which.”

In this way, academic labour can be understood relative to student labour power, or to another commodity such as a computer, a bag of wheat, a drum of oil, etc. It follows then that if a single commodity can be relative in value to another single commodity, then it can also be relative to any other commodity, rather than in isolation with just a single other commodity.

“There exists the possibility that it has just as many different simple expressions of value as there are different sorts of commodities. In fact, therefore, its complete relative expression of value consists not in an isolated simple relative expression of value but in the sum of its simple relative expressions of value.”

Thus we obtain:

1 x academic labour power = 10 x student labour power or = 40 computers or = 1000 bags of wheat or = 40 drums of oil or = etc. 5

“This series of simple relative expressions of value is in its nature constantly extendible or never concludes. For there constantly occur new types of commodities and each new type of commodity forms the material of a new expression of value.”

“The value of a commodity, for example academic labour power, is now represented in all other elements of the world of commodities. The body of each other commodity becomes the mirror of the value of academic labour power. Thus only now does this value itself appear truly as a jelly of undifferentiated human labour. For the labour which constitutes the value of academic labour power is now expressly represented as labour which counts equally with any other human labour whatever natural form at all it possesses and hence whether it is objectified in student labour power or wheat or iron or gold, etc. Hence by virtue of its value-form academic labour power now stands also in a social relation no longer to only a single other type of commodity, but to the world of commodities. As a commodity it is a citizen of this world. At the same time there is inherent in the endless series of its expressions the fact that the value of commodities is irrelevant with regard to each particular form of use-value in which it appears.”

Marx identified the “deficiencies” of the expanded value form as:

  1. It never concludes in a final commodity and expression of value.
  2. The value of a commodity is only ever expressed in a limited number of equivalent commodities while excluding others.
  3. Human labour is only ever expressed in a particular form of commodity, rather than a unified form.

The commodity “is a citizen of the world”, meaning that the magnitude of value of a commodity can be expressed relative or equivalent to any other commodity. Because of this, Marx argues, just as we moved from an analysis of the simple form to the expanded form, we must also move from the expanded form to the ‘general value form’. In this overall transition from the simple to the expanded to the general and eventually the money form, we move to an overall more social form of commodity exchange, which can only operate through increasing levels of ‘real abstraction’ in daily life.

5. General value form

“The relative value-form now possesses a completely changed shape. All commodities express their value:

  1. simply, namely in the body of one other single commodity,
  2. in a unified manner, i.e. in the same other body of a commodity.

Their value-form is simple and common, i.e. general. Academic labour now counts for the bodies of all the different sorts of commodities as their common and general shape of value. The value-form of a commodity, i.e. the expression of its value in academic labour, now distinguishes the commodity not only as value from its own existence as a useful object, i.e. from its own natural form, but at the same time relates it as value to all other commodities, to all commodities as equal to it. Hence in this value-form it possesses general social form.

Only through this general character does the value-form correspond to the concept of value. The value-form had to be a form in which commodities appear for one another as a mere jelly of undifferentiated, homogenous human labour, i.e. as expressions in the form of things of the same labour- substance. This is now attained. For they are all material expressions of the same labour, of the labour contained in academic labour power or as the same material expression of labour, namely as academic labour power. Thus they are qualitatively equated.

At the same time they are quantitatively compared or represented as definite magnitudes of value for one another i.e.:

10 student labour power = 1 academic labour power

and

40 drums of oil = 1 academic labour power

Therefore

10 student labour power = 40 drums of oil

Or in 1 drum of oil there hides only a quarter as much of the substance of value, labour, as in 1 student labour power.”

At this point, the equivalent form becomes further developed to the “general equivalent form; or the commodity in equivalent form is now general equivalent.” As a general equivalent, the natural form of the commodity “is therefore at the same time its general social form.”

“For all other commodities, although they are products of the most different sorts of labour, academic labour power counts as the form of appearance of the labours contained in them, hence as the embodiment of homogenous undifferentiated human labour. Teaching – this particular concrete type of labour – counts now by virtue of the value-relation of the world of commodities to academic labour power as the general and immediately exhaustive form of realisation of abstract human labour, i.e. of the expenditure of human labour-power as such.

For precisely this reason the private labour contained in academic labour power also counts as labour which is immediately in general social form or in the form of equality with all other labours. If a commodity thus possesses the general equivalent-form or functions as general equivalent, its natural or bodily form counts as the visible incarnation, the general social chrysalis of all human labour.”

It is at this point that we can begin to read Marx’s work on the value form without interpretation since we have shown how the labour power of academics and students take on general value form which is relative and equivalent to all other commodities.

“The simple relative value-form expresses the value of a commodity only in a single other type of commodity, no matter in which. The commodity thus only acquires value-form in distinction from its own use-value form or natural form. Its equivalent also acquires only the singular equivalent-form. The expanded relative value-form expresses the value of a commodity in all other commodities. Hence the latter acquire the form of many particular equivalents or particular equivalent-form. Finally, the world of commodities gives itself a unified, general, relative value-form, by excluding from itself one single type of commodity in which all other commodities express their value in common. Thereby the excluded commodity becomes general equivalent or the equivalent-form becomes the general equivalent-form.”

“The polar opposition or the inseparable interconnection  and at the same time constant exclusion of relative value-form and equivalent-form implies:

  1. that a commodity cannot be in one form without another commodity being in the opposite form; and
  2. that as soon as a commodity is in the one form it cannot at the same time, within the same expression of value, be in the other form.

Now this polar opposition of the two moments of the expression of value develops and hardens in the same measure as the value-form as such is developed or built up.”

Note how, in the following summary, Marx demonstrates his method of “rising from the abstract to the concrete”. Although it begins with the ‘simple form’, which might be mistaken as the ‘concrete’ operation of commodity exchange, in fact he shows that the simple form is actually an abstraction intended to reveal the nature of the money form, which does have a concrete existence in our social lives.

“In form I [simple form] the two forms already exclude one another, but only formally. According to whether the same equation is read forwards or backwards, each of the two commodities in the extreme positions like academic labour power and student labour power, are similarly now in the relative value-form, now in the equivalent. At this point it still takes some effort to hold fast to the polar opposition.

In form II [expanded form] only one type of commodity at a time can totally expand its relative value, i.e. it itself possesses expanded relative value-form only because and insofar as all other commodities are in the equivalent-form with regard to it.

Finally, in form III [general form] the world of commodities possesses general social relative value-form only because and insofar as all the commodities belonging to it are excluded from the equivalent-form or the form of immediate exchangeability. Conversely, the commodity which is in the general equivalent form or figures as general equivalent is excluded from the unified and hence general relative value-form of the world of commodities. If the academic labour – i.e. any commodity in general equivalent-form – were also to participate at the same time in the general relative value-form, then it would have had to have been related to itself as equivalent. We then obtain:

5 x academic labour power = 5 x academic labour power

a tautology in which neither value nor magnitude of value is expressed. In order to express the relative value of the general equivalent, we must reverse form III. It does not possess any relative value-form in common with other commodities; rather, its value expresses itself relatively in the endless series of the bodies of all other commodities. Thus the expanded relative value-form or form II now appears as the specific relative value-form of the commodity which plays the role of the general equivalent.”

It is this analysis of the “transition” of the forms of value that prompts us to ask: “Is ‘the student as producer’ a tautology?” The answer is “No!”. A student who is a producer remains a student. Their labour power remains contractually defined by their institution and their past accreditation (socially recognised evidence of its magnitude of value) as ‘student labour power’. To call the labour power of a student, ‘academic labour power’, would, under the logic of commodity fetishism, be a tautology that expresses no value.

Might this then be the key to undermining the capitalist production of value in knowledge production along the lines of Neary’s anti-productivist critique of the ‘student as consumer’? To actually reconceive the labour of academics and student as qualitatively the same labour power, only of recognisably different individual magnitudes, where they are not exchanged on the basis of their relative and equivalent value, but rather “from each according to their ability to each according to their need.” Such a move would entail a different type of reciprocity among people. One which Marx discusses in his Critique of the Gotha Programme. There, he argued that:

“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.”

In that late text, Marx explains why the idea of equality is a bourgeois concept: Individuals are different but under the capitalist mode of production we are regarded fundamentally as equivalent workers. A communist society would recognise and compensate inherent ‘inequalities’.

“But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only — for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal… In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly — only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”

In the existing relationship between academics and students, the magnitude of their respective labour power is ‘equalled’ by the general equivalence of the money commodity. It ‘balances’ the reciprocal value form relationship.

“The general value-form is the developed value-form and hence the developed commodity-form. The materially quite different products of labour cannot possess the finished commodity-form, and hence also cannot function in the process of exchange as a commodity, without being represented as expressions in the form of things of the same equal human labour. That means that in order to acquire the finished commodity-form they must acquire the unified general relative value-form. But they can only acquire this unified relative value-form by excluding from its own series a definite type of commodity as general equivalent. And it is only from the moment when this exclusion is definitely limited to a specific type of commodity that the unified relative value-form has won objective stability and general social validity.

Now the specific type of commodity with whose natural form the equivalent form coalesces socially becomes the money-commodity or functions as money. It specific social function and hence its social monopoly becomes the playing of the role of general equivalent within the world of commodities.”

1 x academic labour = 10 x student labour = 40 x drums of oil = £20,000

6. The money form

“The progress consists only in the fact that the form of immediate general exchangeability or the general equivalent-form has now, by virtue of social custom, definitely coalesced with the specific natural form of the body of the commodity gold. Gold confronts the other commodities as money only because it already confronted them before as a commodity. Like all other commodities it also functions as equivalent, either as singular equivalent in isolated acts of exchange, or as particular equivalent beside other commodity-equivalents. Little by little it functioned in narrower or wider circles as general equivalent. Once it has conquered the monopoly of this position in the expression of value of the world of commodities it becomes the money-commodity, and from the moment when it has already become the money- commodity, form IV distinguishes itself from form III, or the general form of value is transformed into the money-form.”

[It is of no concern here that the gold standard of monetary exchange was abandoned in the 1970s and replaced by fiat money.]

Marx concludes his elucidation of the value form with the final sub-section: ‘The simple commodity form is the secret of the money form’. Here he repeats how he has moved from an abstract analysis to the concrete conditions of capitalist social relations. All the ‘complexity’ of the money form are resolved in the move to simple abstraction.

“We see that the money-form proper offers in itself no difficulty at all. Once we have seen through the general equivalent-form it does not require the least brain-fag to understand that this equivalent-form fastens on to  a specific type of commodity like gold, and still less insofar as the general equivalent-form in its very nature requires the social exclusion of a definite commodity by all other commodities. It is now only a matter of this exclusion winning an objectively social consistency and general validity, and hence does not concern different commodities in turn nor possesses a merely local reach  in only particular areas of the world of commodities. The difficulty in the concept of the money-form is limited to comprehending the general equivalent-form as such, form III. However, form III in turn  resolves itself into form II, and the constitutive element of form II is form I:

1 x academic labour power = 10 x student labour power
or
x commodity A = y commodity B.

Now if we know what use-value and exchange-value are, then we find out that this form I is the simplest, most undeveloped manner of representing any product of labour, like academic labour power for example, as a commodity, i.e. as a unity of the opposites use-value and exchange-value. At the same time we easily find the series of metamorphoses which the simplest commodity-form

1 x academic labour power = 10 x student labour power
must run through in order to win its finished shape
1 x academic labour power = £20,000

i.e. the money-form.”

This analysis suggests that a post-capitalist university is one where the labour power of individuals is not measured relative or equivalent to each other according to the magnitude of its socially determined value, represented by the universal commodity: money.

Their respective labour power is understood qualitatively in terms of their individual experience, skills and knowledge of the social and physical world: their ability or capacity as social human beings, and it is not deemed deficient during acts of ‘unequal’ reciprocity. In a post-capitalist university, social relations would accept absolute difference between individuals, rather than acknowledge difference while at the same time organising our social lives around an objective form of equivalence: money.

In a capitalist university, students’ and academics’ labour power are qualitatively different use values brought into an exchange relation, yet it is a distinctive relationship because it is at the same time co-operative and productive. It produces knowledge, which might be sold directly through consultancy, patents, etc. or through its role in the reproduction of labour power, it will be sold elsewhere by the student for a wage.

Neary posited the student as producer without analysing the student’s role as consumer. Moten and Harney argue students are producers through social, cooperative production. As I have tried to show, this social co-operation is expressed as the relative and equivalent poles of the value form, in which the producer and consumer are immediate to one-another at all time in a unity of opposites, dominated by the money-form.

In memory of a tree

“As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, hears himself say, ‘This is where I come from’, and falls back, exhausted.” 1

I live a minute walk from the east side of Lincoln South Common but had never visited, nor even heard of, Cross O’Cliff Orchard until recently. The orchard is across the road (‘Cross O’Cliff Hill’) from the west side of the Common, so I took a half hour walk this afternoon to the orchard for the first time.

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Click on the image to read the text and learn about Lincoln South Common.

On my way there, I was reminded of the recent disappearance of a favourite landmark. It was a large tree that sat on the highest south ridge of the Common and was bent into a distinctive shape, so much so that it was distinguishable from across the city. I have remarked on this tree to people for many years and noticed recently while walking home that it was suddenly absent from the landscape. Previously, to observe it was a sign that I was orientated towards home and now my ‘compass’ feels broken.

[Click the photos to see the full size image. The original images can be seen on Flickr. Thanks to the various people who have taken them.]

It seems that my landmark was cut down to make way for another anticipated landmark: Lincolnshire Bomber Command Memorial.

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The Bomber Command planning notice.

IMG_20140427_162355 IMG_20140427_145212 I am, in principle, in support of large public pieces of art, and it would be wonderful to have one located so close to where I live, but I cannot find any enthusiasm for another war memorial, not least one called ‘Bomber Command’.

Angry and depressed by the loss of this tree, my tree, our tree on common land, my spirits were lifted as I entered the orchard.

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“One of England’s few surviving traditional old orchards… at least 125 years old.”

The sun was warm and the trees were in full blossom. I felt like I had entered a secret world.

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Under the canopy of some old trees.
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Lots of young trees have been planted.
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There were ‘Forget-me-not’ flowers everywhere.

I can’t wait to return with family and friends to enjoy food and drink together. We shall pass the old tree stump and remember its absence from our horizon towards home.