Author: Joss Winn

The association of free and equal producers

We acknowledge the cooperative 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to practically show that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers. (Marx, 1866)

Key points from Egan and Jossa papers 1

  1. Both authors write about co-operatively run ‘Labour Managed Firms‘ (LMF) in the context of Marx, Marxism and the historical development from capitalism to socialism. Jossa appears to be unaware of Egan’s earlier work but can be read as a continuation of Egan’s main points, as outlined below.
  2. Co-operatively run Labour Managed Firms (LMF) are distinct from Worker Managed Firms (WMF) – Jossa regards this distinction as “decisive.” (2005:14) However, for the purposes of these notes we can refer to both types of co-operative firm as ‘producer co-ops‘, which are distinct from the more common ‘consumer co-ops’. “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.” (Marx, 1866)
  3. Producer co-ops abolish wage labour. They hire capital rather than labour. This is a fundamental characteristic. “Employment is based on payment of a membership fee or the purchase of a membership share in the enterprise, not the sale of workers’ labor power. Any net surplus is distributed to labor, not capital.” (Egan: 67)
  4. Another fundamental characteristic of producer co-ops is that they are democratically run. In capitalism, democracy operates politically, but not economically. Capitalist firms are not democratic. Producer co-ops uniquely establish democracy within the firm. “Advanced capitalist states are predicated on the exclusion of democracy from all but the political sphere of social life. In particular, the discourse of democracy in these states is not extended to work and the economy.” (Egan:67) A genuine producer co-op is “an organizational expression of democratic control of production.” (Egan:69) “…one main advantage of producer cooperatives (from the perspective of a critic of capitalism) is to realise economic democracy as an essential component of political democracy.” (Jossa, 2005:5)
  5. A principal contradiction of capitalism is that it socialises the production of private property. i.e. labour is purchased and brought together by the owners of capital to produce more privately owned capital. In the capitalist firm, capital controls and co-ordinates labour through the wage.  Marx referred to the ‘double nature’ of management in capitalist firms, where due to the imperative to grow, capital ownership and management become separated and management is socialised (Egan: 70-71). The owner of capital supplies capital while the manager of the firm is the administrator of capital. The capitalist no longer directly supervises the production of capital. Joint-stock companies resolve this contradiction for the capitalist, in a way that remains negative for labour.
  6. Producer co-ops resolve this contradiction positively for labour. “The capitalist stock companies, as much as the co-operative factories, should be considered as transitional forms from the capitalist mode of production to the associated one, with the only distinction that the antagonism is resolved negatively in the one and positively in the other.” (Marx, 1894) The management of a producer co-op is established as a function of labour instead of capital. As Marx recognised: “In a co-operative factory the antagonistic nature of the labour of supervision disappears, because the manager is paid by the labourers instead of representing capital counterposed to them.” (Marx, 1894, quoted in Egan: 71) “Instead of management hiring labor, labor now hires management.” (Egan, ibid)
  7. Historically, Marxists have largely dismissed the potential of co-operatively run firms as ‘market socialism’ which inevitably degenerate into capitalist firms. However, there is clear evidence that Marx understood the distinct form of producer co-ops positively and as a historical development of capitalism leading to socialism (both Jossa and Egan point to similar sources in Marx’s writing to evidence this). “Marx sees cooperatives as a “transforming force” to the extent that they reflect the structural possibilities for democratic social production found within capitalism.” (Egan:72)
  8. Marx recognised that emerging producer co-operatives continue to operate within capitalism and reproduce the commodification of use-values through the sale of things in the market. In this way, the sustained success of producer co-operatives approximates that of the capitalist firm. Egan states that “this is where most contemporary Marxist commentary on labor-managed firms in advanced capitalism stops… A form of market determinism permeates this commentary; the power of the market to force cooperatives to degenerate into capitalist firms (if they survive at all) is seen as absolute.” (Egan: 73) However, capitalist markets are a historically specific form of social relations and therefore a dialectical analysis reveals the possibility of an alternative. “Worker cooperatives are politically and theoretically problematic, but so are all struggles which arise out of and challenge (either intentionally or unintentionally) the logic of capitalism… A Marxist analysis of worker cooperatives must critically examine the limitations of such an organizational form within capitalism, but it must do so from a foundation which also recognizes the positive qualitative developments which such organizations reflect.” (Egan: 76) “The potential for degeneration [into a capitalist firm] must be seen to lie not within the cooperative form of organization itself, but in the contradiction between it and its capitalist environment. Degeneration is not, however, determined by this contradiction.” (Egan: 82)
  9. For Marx, the formation of co-operatives as a historical (dialectical) outcome of capitalism must be the outcome of class struggle, rather than instituted by the state or paternalistic capitalists. For Marx, Egan and Jossa, a further fundamental characteristic of producer co-ops is “the development of a cooperative, solidaristic orientation between cooperatives themselves.” (Egan: 74) Co-operatives must assist each other rather than compete with each other in a “unity of action, and identity of interest.” (Egan, quoting Jones: 74)
  10. Drawing from Marx, Egan outlines “three institutional mechanisms designed to prevent co-operative degeneration.” First, hired labour must be prohibited. Second, co-operatives should belong to a national organisation. Third, a proportion of the surplus of co-operatives should be devoted to a fund for the creation of new co-operatives. (Egan: 75)
  11. Worker Managed Firms, “which are widespread in the Western world, self-finance themselves and consequently do not strictly separate labour incomes from capital incomes; their members earn mixed incomes (from capital and work), in place of pure incomes from work.” (Jossa, 2005:14) In such firms, workers are “their own capitalists”, a progressive development of capitalism. Marx wrote: “The co-operative factories of the labourers themselves represent within the old form the first sprouts of the new, although they naturally reproduce, and must reproduce, everywhere in their actual organisation all the shortcomings of the prevailing system. But the antithesis between capital and labour is overcome within them, if at first only by way of making the associated labourers into their own capitalist, i.e., by enabling them to use the means of production for the employment of their own labour. They show how a new mode of production naturally grows out of an old one, when the development of the material forces of production and of the corresponding forms of social production have reached a particular stage.” (Marx, 1894)
  12. Labour Managed Firms “are cooperatives which fund themselves with loan capital and consequently draw a clear-cut distinction between incomes from work and incomes from capital or property.” (Jossa, 2005:14) LMFs “effectively reverse the capital-labour relationship… the moment when cooperatives are prevented from self-financing themselves (i.e., provided they are organised as LMFs rather than WMFs), the description of producer cooperatives as firms run by workers as ‘their own capitalists’ will no longer apply. And as the LMF reverses the capitalistic relationship between capital and labour, it can without doubt be rated a genuine socialist enterprise in which workers cease acting as their own capitalists.” (Jossa, 2005:15) Does this mean that the LMF abolishes the duality of concrete and abstract labour determined by capitalist wage labour and therefore the production of value based on the exchange of labour as a commodity? For Jossa (2005:8), “The commodities manufactured by democratically managed cooperatives cease to be ‘in the first place an external object’ unrelated to our work … and turn into the product of free choices made by workers in association.”
  13. For Jossa, the successful transition to socialism can and must be a gradual, non-violent process (Jossa, 2009). Producer co-operatives operating within a market economy “must be looked upon as a transitional economic system.” (2005:12) “This [co-operative] system can be established piece by piece, by enacting parliamentary legislation designed to further self-management in manners that will encourage the creation of democratic firms until these end up by outnumbering capitalistic firms. (Jossa, 2012a:834-5) Producer co-operatives mark a change in the mode of production and in this sense are revolutionary.  Socialism based upon national and international associations of producer co-operatives is the most credible alternative to the failures of state socialism and its centralised planning. (Jossa 2012a: 823)
  14. According to Jossa, a defining characteristic of capitalism is not that commodities (use values) are produced primarily for sale (exchange value), but that labour power is purchased as a commodity for the production of profit (surplus value).  In a LMF, labour power is not purchased and consequently a number of features of capitalism are called into question (e.g. alienation, the ownership of the means of production, the mode of production, the division of labour, the necessity of work). (Jossa, 2012a: 836)

The university is itself a means of production

If we examine the whole [labour] process from the point of view of its result, the product, it is plain that both the instruments and the subject of labour, are means of production, and that the labour itself is productive labour. (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 7)

Following on from my earlier notes, I wanted to be clearer about what I understand by the ‘means of production’.

Marx clearly defines the ‘means of production’ as “the instruments and the subjects of labour”, which, when combined with human labour i.e. work, becomes a productive force.

The elementary factors of the labour-process are 1, the personal activity of man, i.e., work itself, 2, the subject of that work [i.e. raw materials or the product of a previous labour process – in our case ‘prior knowledge’], and 3, its instruments [i.e. technology, buildings, roads, etc.]. (Marx, Capital Vol. 1, Ch. 7)

Therefore, when we speak of the university itself as a ‘means of production’, we refer to the configuration of its ‘instruments’ (e.g. technology, buildings, etc.), and the ‘subject of labour’ (e.g. prior knowledge). In other words, the ‘means of production’ refers to the university’s structural, technological and bureaucratic configuration as a form of capital for the production of knowledge. The university incorporates prior knowledge into its production process and the knowledge it produces is offered as the ‘subject of labour’ elsewhere, resulting in capital accumulation (i.e. growth).

The academic and student are brought together by this configuration in order to produce new knowledge through their labour. However, in a content-driven form of higher education, the student’s role shifts towards that of a consumer of knowledge which is produced by academics and, increasingly, through a global, social process that is distributed via mass forms of communication e.g. the Internet. In this consumer role, the student is profoundly dis-empowered, having become integral to the exchange process (the moment at which surplus value/profit is realised), rather than the production process (the moment at which value is created).

If the purpose of higher education is the production of knowledge, its product is knowledge and so we must examine the whole labour process from this standpoint, beginning not from the exchange process, nor from the point of view of its instruments (i.e. technology) but from the labour process.

That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolteacher is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the heads of their scholars, they work like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out their capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.(Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Chapter 16)

Finally, a word of caution on the use of the term ‘immaterial labour‘ to refer to the labour of academics and students.

Marx never used the term ‘immaterial labour’. Obviously this should not deter us from using the term if it is a useful development of Marx’s critique of political economy, but in this case, it is not. Marx was aware of the term ‘immaterial labour’, but critical of it as a reified, liberal concept that contributes to class division. Those who use the term ‘immaterial labour’ to refer to the work of academia usually do so in a polemical, political way. In this sense it is a positive, fetish category, rather than the basis of a negative, critical standpoint. It offers nothing to the clarity of meaning that Marx provides with his own critique of labour and can be easily confused with the essential category of ‘abstract labour’. If labour can indeed be distinguished as ‘immaterial’, then following Marx, we might assume there are ‘immaterial commodities’, too, and the historical-materialist method is abandoned. Marx’s critique of the commodity form, value and labour are comprehensive and inclusive of what we might think of as material and immaterial and to start with ‘immaterial labour’ is to start from a position which is against Marx.

Of course, the ideas around ‘immaterial labour’ raised by Lazzaranto, Negri and others are interesting, but ultimately add nothing to a critical theory of commodity production as the basis of capitalist social relations.  For a concise and critical examination of the expression ‘immaterial labour’, see Haug (2009). For an expansive study of intellectual (not ‘immaterial’) and manual labour, see Sohn-Rethel (1978).

For our purposes in understanding the university itself as a means of production, the labour of students and academics is encapsulated by Marx when he states:

On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour-power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour-power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use-values. (Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 1)

To conceive all labour in its general (cf. ‘abstract‘ not immaterial) form is to begin to understand the role of labour in capitalist society.

Notes on the university and the means of production

1. Consumption and production: The dominant discourse around higher education in the UK is its marketisation, i.e. knowledge as a commodity and universities as competing capitals.  Students are increasingly indentured consumers. Lectures are reduced to ‘content’ and academics are the original knowledge workers. At Lincoln, we have a strategy to resist this: Student as Producer. It is an intervention led by my colleague Mike Neary, based on a number of intellectual projects, including the critical social theory of Walter Benjamin [PDF].  Student as Producer has become the organising principle for teaching and learning across the entire institution. Student as Producer is against the marketisation of higher education. It is an attempt to shift the discourse away from the exchange of knowledge towards the production of knowledge. In essence, we ask what is higher education for? It is for the production of knowledge.

2. Technology for the production of knowledge: My work in the Centre for Educational Research and Development focuses on the role of technology in higher education. The role of technology in higher education is the same as the role of technology in other industries, which I do not need to elaborate here. The use of technology in higher education is not static nor linear. Scientific research undertaken in universities leads to the development of new technologies (e.g. computers) which confront students and academics when commodified. My particular interest in the role of technology in higher education is not, as is often the case, the pedagogical use of technology (e.g. the use of computers to support teaching and learning), but rather the institutional, infrastructural use of technology (e.g. the use of computers for scholarly communication). If we view ‘the university’ as an institution that exists for the production of knowledge, then we arrive at the question: what are the means of production in higher education? They are the same as any other industry: labour, science and technology, and capital. Each of these words have common meanings that we use in every day speech, but those ‘common sense’ and naturalised uses derive from historical, social and epistemological developments over hundreds of years.

3. Science as the instrument of capital accumulation: I had hoped, before now, to have written up my notes on Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s magnificent and out-of-print book, Intellectual and Manual Labour. A Critique of Epistemology [PDF]. What is significant here about Sohn-Rethel’s critique is his focus on the history, purpose and use of science. He boldly demonstrates that the history of science (i.e. since Galileo’s law of inertial motion), is pre-dated by and derived from the ‘real abstraction’ of the exchange of commodities. By ‘real abstraction’, he refers to abstract concepts having real, concrete effects. Often, we may not even be aware of or understand the abstraction (e.g. ‘value’), only its material outcome. Put another way, our lived historical experience is dominated (i.e. controlled) by abstraction, which is rooted in the history of commodity exchange. Sohn-Rethel attempts a remarkable study of the development of abstract thought, which I cannot do justice to here,  but to put it crudely, he argues that the origins of abstract thought are to be found in the invention of money as a ‘universal equivalent’ for the exchange of commodities, and that modern scientific theory is “knowledge of nature in commodity form” (132). This has deep and wide-ranging implications, not least in a higher education institution which produces scientific knowledge. If, as Sohn-Rethel argues, all science today is bourgeois science geared towards the purpose of capital accumulation,  higher education is at the heart of this configuration. We are reminded of this when we are told that higher education is an important engine for economic growth. In that claim, higher education is defined as a means of commodity production: it is the producer of scientific knowledge and all its labour power and infrastructure must in some way contribute to this production. But it doesn’t, yet, and there lies the struggle. Not in the circulation of knowledge, but in the production of knowledge.

4. The death of the guilds: In his study of the Death of the Guilds, Krause identifies the relatively recent re-configuration of academia by the capitalist mode of production. His work can be related to Sohn-Rethel, in that they both discuss the transition from artisanal to scientific modes of production; from a mode of production where the intellectual and manual labour were united, to a mode of production where the head (abstract thought) and the hand (craft) are separated. Artisans “owned the means of production” (S-R, 117) and guilds are groups of workers that exercise political power “primarily for their own ends.” (Krause, x). Guilds own the means of production. Both Krause and Sohn-Rethel recognise that the death of the guilds and the artisan mode of production that they were formed to protect, began to crumble with the early growth of capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. For Sohn-Rethel, the writing was on the wall with the development of mathematics. “It is no exaggeration to say that one can measure the extent of division of head and hand by the inroad of mathematics in any particular task.” (113). For Krause, writing in 1996, the guild model of political power in academia only remained to some extent in the Oxbridge colleges. Krause and Sohn-Rethel are both useful for understanding the transformation of scientific research and teaching towards the capitalist mode of production (i.e. economic growth), which in recent years is put forward by the higher education sector as a justification of its continued public funding.

5. The birth of the commons: We can be certain that today, ‘the university’ is an institution organised bureaucratically, technologically, and epistemologically for the production of knowledge which is exchanged as a commodity. No institution can exist at such scale and compete nationally and globally in any other configuration. However, in the last decade or so, the Open Access (OA) movement has developed from within academia in a way that resembles the power of the guilds. The objective of Open Access is to provide scholarly literature online to the public, free of cost and most copyright restrictions. Open Access is a scholarly movement that is wielding political power and has deep implications for the mode and means of the production of knowledge in higher education. If openness within higher education is understood as a ‘recursive public’ (Kelty, 2008), we can observe and predict that further recursions will be deemed necessary to support the logic of Open Access: Open Data, so that research can be verified and built upon; Open Science, where the research process is conducted publicly; Open Source, where the research tools and software algorithms are transparent and accessible; and Open Peer Review, where the verification of research findings are themselves open to scrutiny for bias and inconsistency. Each of these recursions requires changes to the technological, social and bureaucratic configuration of universities (this gradual reconfiguration occupies much of my day-to-day work). Although the concept of recursion suggests a series of steps or iterations, each recursive element can occur concurrently, deferring its limits to the next process while continuing to unfold. As Kelty has noted, “the ‘depth’ of the recursion is determined by the openness necessary for the project itself.” (2008:30). The depth of recursion required by the logic of OA is still being worked out and remains a contested public through which the nature and purpose of science is being questioned. Kelty’s ‘recursive public’ is nothing more than a generalisation of political struggle expressed in terms immanent to its subject. Open Access has recursive implications that amount to the socialisation of the means of production of science. The production of a scientific commons. Communism.

I am grateful to Richard Hall for making clear to me something I had not fully grasped until now. The university itself is a means of production.

Open data and the academy: an evaluation of CKAN for research data management

This paper offers a full and critical evaluation of the open source CKAN software for use as a Research Data Management (RDM) tool within a university environment. It presents a case study of CKAN’s implementation and use at the University of Lincoln, UK, and highlights its strengths and current weaknesses as an institutional Research Data Management tool. The author draws on his prior experience of implementing a mixed media Digital Asset Management system (DAM), Institutional Repository (IR) and institutional Web Content Management System (CMS), to offer an outline proposal for how CKAN can be used effectively for data analysis, storage and publishing in academia. This will be of interest to researchers, data librarians, and developers, who are responsible for the implementation of institutional RDM infrastructure. This paper is presented as part of the dissemination activities of the Jisc-funded Orbital project.

Download the paper.

Writing, craft and method: Postone’s Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust’

Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust” (PDF)

I have read Moishe Postone’s article a number of times. Today, I sent it to a friend with the following message:

A bit off the wall, but I’ve attached one of my favourite articles. There’s probably a time and a place to read it and it may not be now. When it was first pointed out to me, I just didn’t get the significance of the argument, and very importantly, the *method* of argument. Having read it a few times now, I think it’s the work of genius.

In a profound and sophisticated way, it takes a general response to the film, ‘Holocaust’, and uses that moment in German popular culture to elaborate a critique of capitalism which offers an explanation for anti-semitism. The way Postone, the author, unravels his argument not only provides a superb discussion about the essence of capitalism vs its manifest form in anti-semitism, but also provides a structure for the critique of other manifest forms of capitalism. e.g. higher education, or whatever.

The article I am currently writing has been through four different drafts, each no less unsatisfactory as the last. As it currently stands, the article is much too long and in my historical discussion, I have so far been unable to move away from simply offering information (events, people, places), rather than an adequate explanation. This is a point that Postone makes about the media’s response to the film, Holocaust (1978).

The weaknesses of the understanding of anti-Semitism outlined above emerged with particular clarity in the discussions on the “Holocaust” film held after each showing on West German television. The panel members were at their best when presenting information: conditions in the concentration camps; the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and their composition (police as well as SS units); the mass murder of Gypsies; and the material difficulties and extent of Jewish resistance. They were at a loss, however, when they attempted to explain the extermination of European Jewry. (p. 98)

Working on the fifth draft of my paper, I have returned to Postone’s article once again to remind myself of his method here, which is one of the rare times (the only time?) that he has systematically applied his reading of Marx’s critique of capitalism to a historical event. Here, I want to examine the structure of his article in sufficient detail so as to borrow this methodological approach in my own article on the history of hacker culture and higher education.

The article is formally structured in five parts, which can be summarised as follows:

  1. A general introduction, providing context to the film and the popular reaction in West Germany, pointing out the weaknesses of that response. (97)
  2. A critical summary of the German New Left’s response to Nazism, National Socialism and the Holocaust. Argues that the past has been repressed. (100)
  3. The main body of his argument. Argues against a functionalist explanation of the Holocaust e.g. anti-Semitism as a form of prejudice, xenophobia and racism. Argues the need for “qualitative specificity” rather than generalised explanations (105). Distinguishes between anti-Semitism, anti-Jewish prejudice and Nazism. Begins to introduce the concept of abstraction. Argues that modern anti-Semitism attributes an “intangible, abstract and universal” power to the Jews (106). Aims to unite a socio-historical analysis of Nazism with an examination of anti-Semitism i.e. the concrete and abstract; a “historical-epistemological frame of reference.” Sets up objective in his own method: an explanation of anti-Semitism “in terms of socio-historical epistemology.” (107) Offers summary of where he is taking the argument: “a careful examination of the modern anti-Semitic worldview reveals that it is a form of thought in which the rapid development of industrial capitalism with all of its social ramifications is personified and identified as the Jew… In other words, the abstract domination of capital, which – particularly with rapid industrialisation – caught people up in a web of dynamic forces they could not understand, became perceived as the domination of International Jewry.” (107) Returns his argument to the distinction between substance and form, essence and abstraction: “the distinction between what modern capitalism is and the way it appears.” (108) Compares abstract attributes of anti-Semitism to characteristics of the value form as analysed by Marx: value and use-value. Moves into a “brief analysis of the way in which capitalist social relations present themselves” (109). Proceeds with a discussion of the commodity form, the dialectic of its double character: money/value and commodity/use-value. Elaborates theory of commodity fetishism and extends it to epistemology (cf. Sohn-Rethel?). Substantiates this theoretical discussion with brief indication of historical examples. Leads to argument that the Jews became the personifications of capital rather than merely representations of it; the “biologisation of capitalism”. The ‘anti-capitalism’ of National Socialism was expressed as anti-Semitism. “The overcoming of capitalism and its negative social effects became associated with the overcoming of the Jews.” (112)
  4. A very brief section discussing “why the biological interpretation of the abstract dimension of capitalism found its focus in the Jews.” (112) Offers historical explanation but focuses on the dialectic between the state and civil society –  the individual as citizen and person, as an abstraction and as a concrete human being. “The only group in Europe which fulfilled the determination of citizenship as a pure political abstraction, were the Jews following their political emancipation. They were Germans or French citizens but not really Germans or Frenchmen. They were of the nation abstractly, but rarely concretely… In a period when the concrete became glorified against the abstract, against ‘capitalism’ and the bourgeois state, this became a fatal association.” (113)
  5. The final section concludes the article by summarising how “modern anti-Semitism… is a particularly pernicious fetish form.” (113)  There is a very striking paragraph which argues that just as the capitalist factory is where value is produced, the extermination camp is its grotesque negation. “Auschwitz was a factory to ‘destroy value,’ i.e. to destroy the personifications of the abstract. “Its organization was that of a fiendish industrial process, the aim of which was to “liberate” the concrete from the abstract. The first step was to dehumanize, that is, to rip the “mask” of humanity away and reveal the Jews for what “they really are” – “Musselmanner,” shadows, ciphers, abstractions. The second step was then to eradicate that abstractness, to transform it into smoke, trying in the process to wrest away the last remnants of the concrete material “use-value”: clothes, gold, hair, soap.” (114) Finally, Postone ends by looking forward and cautioning the Left against pursuing

Any “anti-capitalism” which seeks the immediate negation of the abstract and glorifies the concrete – instead of practically and theoretically considering what the historical overcoming of both could mean – can, at best, be socially and politically impotent in the face of capital. At worst it can be dangerous, even if the needs it expresses could be interpreted as emancipatory.

The article warrants a very close reading – much closer than I have offered here, where I am more interested in understanding how Postone makes his argument, than what his specific object of investigation is.

In summary, the articles proceeds as follows: introduction > critical review > development of theoretical argument grounded by historical example > broad justification for preceding argument > conclusion and way forward. Section three is clearly the most substantive section and in essence it employs Marx’s examination of commodity fetishism and his labour theory of value in Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 1, to provide the analytical tools for a socio-historical and epistemological explanation of the Holocaust.

Student as Producer is hacking the university

With Dean Lockwood

This chapter discusses the Student as Producer project at the University of Lincoln and provides two case studies of how Student as Producer is infiltrating quite different areas of university life. The first discusses Student as Producer in the context of Deleuze and rhizomatic curriculum design, while the second looks at how the project is being applied to the development of an open institutional infrastructure, in which Computer Science students are redesigning and developing the tools used for research, teaching and learning.

Published in Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age

Download a pre-print of this chapter. It is partly based on a case study I wrote for JISC.

Making sense of things: A PhD by Published Work

At this time of year we have our annual appraisals, which involves looking back on what personal and professional objectives I set myself for last year. One of those ambitions was to work towards submitting a ‘PhD by Published Work’ in 2014. In that respect, I think I’ve failed to really complete anything substantial. In the last 12 months, I have spent most of my time running JISC-funded projects 2 and, related to that, trying to develop the LNCD group here at Lincoln. It is good work, and I enjoy it, but unlike most academics who receive funding for research and/or development, I am not that interested in writing papers about the work I do day-to-day. Technology related projects, such as those funded by JISC, produce lots of academic, peer-reviewed papers, but it has never occurred to me to write about this side of my work in a systematic way. Perhaps this was because I joined the university having been an Archivist and Project Manager elsewhere, and outside academia, the accomplishment of the project is itself the objective and writing up papers doesn’t really factor into the work. Also, the projects I run day-to-day, while I enjoy them and think they are of value, don’t provide me with any sense of meaning or purpose in the world, which is the reason why I entered higher education as an undergraduate and post-graduate student. It has never occurred to me that my vocation and my efforts in higher learning, should or would ever coincide until a year or so ago when I was offered a permanent academic contract at Lincoln, rather than the fixed-term, non-academic contracts I had been on. Being ‘an academic’ is quite unique in that it does combine a lifetime of higher learning with a vocation, something I have been slow to put into practice over the last year.

I need to get out of this habitual way of thinking and start to make direct connections with my day-to-day work and my intellectual aspirations, eventually completing a PhD. It is not easy and I would appreciate any advice you might have. Looking over my blog this morning, of the 209 posts I’ve written since April 2008, I have categorised 58 of them being related to what I want to pursue for my PhD. Doing this has allowed me to try to find some sense of coherence to my work, which I will outline here for my own benefit and perhaps even for your interest.

The first period of those posts covers the time I spent thinking and writing about ‘resilient education‘ with Richard Hall. It began with a failed bid to JISC around business continuity within HEIs in the face of an energy crisis. One question that framed our work at this time was, “What will Higher Education look like in a 2050 -80% +2c 450ppm world?” Over a number of blogs posts, face-to-face conversations, workshops, a conference paper and, eventually a journal paper, we both felt that the imperative of economic growth and therefore the social relations of capitalism are the root cause of the crises we face in society and therefore in higher education, too. It was through conversations with my colleague Prof. Mike Neary, that I began to shift from viewing this problem as technological, economic and cultural, to one that is fundamentally historical and political. At first, I was drawn to ideas that have circulated for some time among environmentalists and ‘ecological economists’, such as that of a non-growth-based ‘Steady State’ economy and the work of the Transition movement. However, I remained unsatisfied with these liberal solutions to liberal capitalism. 3 Of course, such approaches have some practical merit, but I soon found them intellectually impoverished compared to the approach of critical political economy.

The most challenging, stimulating and useful scholarship I have read over the last couple of years has been by writers in the Marxist tradition of critical political economy: Writers such as Simon Clarke, Moishe Postone, Mark Neocleus, Harry Cleaver, and Mike Neary have provided me with a radically different way of understanding the world and the challenges society and therefore higher education faces. So far, I have attempted to use the methodological tools provided by this critical, scholarly tradition in one book chapter, which I remain dissatisfied with but nevertheless see it has a building block to something more mature. That piece of writing was, if you like, my research output from the ChemistryFM OER project that I ran. As well as my article with Richard Hall, I also co-authored an article with Mike Neary, both of which could be seen as a critique of my work on that OER project.

In terms of scholarly progress, I see now that the article I wrote with Richard Hall was the culmination of a period trying to address the first ‘research question’ of ‘What will Higher Education look like in a 2050 -80% +2c 450ppm world?‘ By the time the article was written (and certainly by the time it was published), we had both moved on and in my book chapter and article with Mike Neary, I was trying to critique the approach that Richard and I had taken in the earlier article, which makes a case for open education as an approach to developing a ‘resilient education’. Today, I do not think that openness as it is commonly understood and practised, will re-produce a more resilient, sustainable higher education as we commonly understand and practise it. There is much more to be said about this and in doing so, I shifted my emphasis to thinking about what openness means and how it is practised inside and outside higher education. One of the earliest and most influential expressions of openness can be found in hacker culture.

During this period (the last year or so), I have been interested in hackers, hacking and how student hackers can re-produce the university. One of the reasons I made this shift was because in my work day-to-day, I was managing JISC-funded technology projects and, influenced by Mike Neary’s work on Student as Producer, I was employing students and recent graduates to work with me on these R&D projects. During the course of this work, I was also appealing to university management to support a more formal collaboration among different departments at the university, which focused on the role of students in re-producing the university through their work on technology projects. The result of those committee papers and discussions was LNCD.  Working closely with student hackers and more closely with the university developer community in general, I began to think about the history and practise of hacking. This work is on-going as I sketch out ideas on this blog. I began with a simple proposal that we should understand hacking as an academic practice, or rather as a development of the academic tradition. I developed this a little further in a short article for the Guardian, which reflected on hacking, Student as Producer and a student hacker conference that we organised at Lincoln with the DevCSI project, called DevXS.

The JISC projects, LNCD, the reflections on hacking and the DevXS conference were then written up in a case study commissioned by JISC on ‘institutional approaches to openness‘. The case study was called ‘Hacking the University’ and a similar version of it, along with an additional section by my colleague Dean Lockwood, will be published in a book next month.

As I continued in this vein, I began to think about hacking as both learning and as labour and tried to articulate this in a couple of blog posts about learning a craft and the university as a hackerspace. At that time, I thought that one intervention that I might make at Lincoln in trying to get students to challenge and re-produce ‘the university’ as an idea as well as a living institution, was to develop a course based on the model of hackerspaces and examine the work of hackers pedagogically in terms of a craft. I was also thinking about how funders like JISC could support this approach, too. This led me to look at popular models of funding, such as the ‘angel investment’ of Y-Combinator, which I am beginning to tie back into the history of hacking and the origins of venture capital in US universities. My two most recent posts in this area (here and here) have been sketches for an article I intend to write on the role of universities in the development of hacker culture. It’s only once I have examined and critiqued this aspect of hacker culture history that I feel I can move on to more substantive and specific questions relating to hacking, openness and freedom, and the relationship between students, universities and venture capital in producing a new form of vocationalism within higher education.

This is likely to form the major part of my PhD by publication but despite writing long reflections on this blog, it does not amount to anything that I can readily submit for the PhD. I have also neglected to apply any methodological critique to my recent writing about hackers and hacking and need to return to the central categories of Marx: e.g. value, fetishism, class struggle, alienation, each of which I see as central to the re-production of the work of hackers and hacking and therefore the role of the university.

I also feel that I am currently a long way from reconciling the projects that I do day-to-day and the critique of political economy that I have started. Last week, for example, I had a conference paper proposal accepted on an evaluation of CKAN for research data management. On the face of it, this paper would normally be a fairly straightforward critical appraisal of a piece of software and for the conference that is what I intend to write. But I know that I should take the opportunity to develop the paper into something more intellectually substantive and incorporate it into a negative critique of openness, open data and university research culture. Whatever I end up writing, I am going to ensure that from hereon, my time is spent bringing my writing together into a coherent PhD submission in two or three years time.

Finally, if you are interested, here is the section of university guidance that deals with ‘PhD by Published Work’ (PDF). There are a number of things I have to do between now and my submission, not least keep writing, but also seek clarification around the meaning of ‘a substantial contribution to the academic endeavour of the University’. Co-authored outputs are permissible, but I need to be much clearer on what the Faculty Research Degrees Board expect to be included. At the moment, I am assuming that only my book chapter on OER is submissible as part of the PhD. Not only that, but it is the only piece of writing that approaches the standard of intellectual work that I think I would want to submit. Of course, I could be persuaded otherwise… Nevertheless, I think I need to have four more pieces published in order to submit the PhD, as well as writing a a 5-10,000 word commentary. Expect updates on this blog as I work towards this and thanks for any advice you can offer.

Open education. Common(s), commonism and the new common wealth

With Mike Neary

Open Education, and specifically the Open Education Resources movement, seeks to provide universal access to knowledge, undermining the historical enclosure and increasing privatisation of the public education system. An important aspect of this movement is a reinvigoration of the concept of ‘the commons’. The paper examines this aspiration by submitting the implicit theoretical assumptions of Open Education and the underlying notion of ‘the commons’ to the test of critical political economy. The paper acknowledges the radical possibility of the idea of ‘the commons’, but argues that its radical potentiality can be undermined by a preoccupation with ‘the freedom of things rather than with the freedom of labour’. The paper presents an interpretation of ‘the commons’ based on the concept of ‘living knowledge’ and ‘autonomous institutionality’ (Roggero, 2011), and offers the Social Science Centre in the UK, as an example of an ‘institution of the common’. The paper concludes by arguing the most radical revision of the concept of ‘the common’ involves a fundamental reappraisal of what constitutes social or common wealth.

Download the full article from Ephemera journal

Open education. From the freedom of things to the freedom of people

In this book chapter I offer a critical analysis of Open Education, a growing international movement of educators and educational institutions who, through the use of the Internet, seek to provide universal access to knowledge. The purpose of this analysis is to examine the production of value through technological virtuality, in the concrete labour process of teaching and learning.

Published in Towards Teaching in Public: Reshaping the Modern University

Download the full chapter

Hacking the Academy

By Joss Winn and Mike Neary

Did you notice anything strange about the ongoing ‘phone hacking’ scandal involving the News of the World? There are no hackers involved. This is the latest example of hacking’s troubled history with the mainstream media, which confuses the “playful cleverness” of expert computer programmers with the malicious meddling of computer crackers and criminal journalists. With the repeated confusion of Hackers with Crackers and old Hacks, the rich and fruitful history of the true Hackers is diminished and a thriving intellectual culture focused on problem solving, self-directed learning and the free exchange of knowledge is undermined.

Much has been written about hackers and hacking, but rarely is it contextualised as part of the scholarly tradition. Yet careful reading of the history of hacking reveals that it is very much a part of the work and values of universities and that the ‘hacker ethic’ is shared, in part at least, by most academics working today.

We can trace the history of hacking back to MIT University in the early 1960s and greater access to shared computers. At the core of hacking is the academic practice of ‘peer review’: the opportunity for academics to closely examine, modify and use other people’s work. Hackers extended this through the creation of legal licenses that allow the copyright holder of software to grant anyone the ability to use, modify and re-distribute their work providing the modified version is licensed under the same terms. The great MIT hacker, Richard Stallman called this hack ‘Copyleft’ and his General Public License (GPL) has become the most popular open source software license in use today. In 2001, Stanford Law Professor, Lawrence Lessig founded Creative Commons, an organisation that borrowed much from these ‘free software’ licenses to create a set of similar licenses for other types of creative works. The activity of hackers have provided academics and their institutions with the legal basis upon which to overcome the traditional restrictions of copyright and permit the public use, modification and redistribution of research articles, research data and teaching materials.

Out of this novel reconfiguration of property rights, hackers have collaboratively developed the basic infrastructure of the Internet; not only a technological achievement but, for some, a progressive political project based on the common values of autonomy in choosing one’s work, an enthusiasm for problem-solving that borders on play, a reverence of peer-review, expertise as the basis of meritocracy, and the defence of access to information.

This ‘hacker ethic’ can similarly be seen among academics today who fight for Open Access to peer-reviewed articles and those teachers who form the growing Open Educational Resources movement, dedicated to providing teaching and learning materials for free, worldwide public use. Not surprisingly, both the Open Access and Open Education movements owe much to Stallman and other pioneering hackers who developed the GPL and similar ‘open source’ licenses. Unquestionably, the history of Open Access and Open Education is deeply indebted to the culture of hacking, yet we should not forget that the history of hacking is deeply rooted in the culture of the university.

At the University of Lincoln, the values of hacking are embedded within Student as Producer, an institution-wide project for curriculum development where students are regarded as part of the academic project of the university. We are keen to reclaim and reconnect the values of openness and collaboration that hackers are well regarded for with the values of the academy and are doing so by bringing students into the research project of the university itself. At Lincoln, undergraduate student hackers have been working on real research and development projects with university staff and contributing to the development of a culture of openness and innovation.

To further recognise this and encourage collaboration with student developers in the design of university life, we have been working with the DevCSI project at the University of Bath to organise DevXS, a free national student developer conference to be held at the University of Lincoln in November 2011.

We are expecting 150 undergraduates from across the country will attend DevXS to develop prototype open source web applications using open data provided by the University of Lincoln and other universities working on an anticipated data.ac.uk initiative. DevXS is intended to be a disruptive learning experience, a pedagogical intervention for students who want to hack and build useful things that enrich academic life. Students from across the UK and beyond are invited to compete against each other and the clock to create new web applications in a unique student developer ‘hackathon’. Working in teams, they will be provided with high-speed Internet, refreshments and tools to play with. They will break only to eat, sleep and take in encouragement from more experienced hackers. Prizes will be awarded for the most imaginative and useful new applications. Promising prototypes could ultimately be refined into fully-fledged services.

It is the latest example of how the University of Lincoln has embraced the different themes of openness, such as open source, open data, open education and open access, and we are mindful that this contributes towards a greater strategic priority of re-configuring the nature of teaching and learning in higher education and encouraging students to become part of the academic project of the University and collaborators with academics in the production of knowledge and meaning.

Further reading:

  • Graham, Paul. 2004. Hackers and Painters. O’Reilly.
  • Himanen, Pekka. 2001. The Hacker Ethic. Vintage.
  • Jordan, Tim. 2008. Hacking. Polity Press.
  • Levy, Steven. 1984. Hackers. Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Penguin Books.
  • Raymond, Eric. 1996. The New Hacker’s Dictionary. MIT Press.
  • Soderberg, Johan. 2008. Hacking Capitalism. The Free and Open Source Software Movement. Routledge.
  • Thomas, Douglas. 2002. Hacker Culture. University of Minnesota Press.
  • Wark, McKenzie. 2004. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press.

A version of this post with minor edits was first published in the Guardian