Review of Richard Hall (2018). The Alienated Academic. The Struggle for Autonomy Inside the University.

Originally published in Postdigital Science and Education.

~ As he writes, the fourth wall is crumbling. He is sitting in his office towards the end of a winter’s day. Outside the window he hears people making promises on the pavement, cars passing like waves breaking in the distance. He sees his bookshelves reflected in the darkness of the glass. He has more books than he has years left to read.

Recent literature on English higher education has documented a number of incremental policy changes over the last four decades that have led towards the marketisation of the sector. The Browne Review (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2010), HE White Paper (Department for Business, Innovation and Skills 2016) and Higher Education and Research Act (Higher Education and Research Act 2017 have explicitly worked towards creating a system of higher education that has all the key features of marketisation.

The effects of marketisation in English higher education and elsewhere have prompted researchers to examine the changing nature of the profession, critically reflecting on the impact of metrics, performativity, debt and bureaucracy on academic work. Recently, the emphasis has been on ‘academic identity’, responding to a decline in the conditions of academic labour across the world and the instrumentalised role of universities in national economies. Despite a recent increase in union membership and an emphasis on ‘wellbeing’, contractual conditions in HE are worsening, pensions are being undermined and more academics and students are becoming sick and tired. In The Alienated Academic, Richard Hall surveys much of this literature and the general sense of estrangement and hopelessness within the higher education sector.Where Hall’s book differs from much of the literature on the marketisation of higher education and threats to professional identity, is his thoroughgoing, relentless attempt to explain what is happening at a categorical level that cuts through (i.e. intersects) the differences in professional experience in order to find what is common among us.

~ He is an academic. He sits, he reads, he experiments, he designs, he builds, he thinks, he writes, he stands, he teaches, he listens. He is an academic. He creates teaching resources, he runs projects, he writes grant applications, he attends conferences, he publishes articles and books. He attend meetings, he creates modules. He is an academic. He tutors, he mentors, he supports, he liaises, he networks, he leads, he contributes, he develops, he consults, he plans, he organises, he strategises, he collaborates, he co-ordinates, he supervises, he manages, he negotiates, he champions, he influences, he evaluates, he appraises, he examines, he marks, he accredits. He is a teacher, a researcher, a scholar, an entrepreneur. He is an academic. This is his work.

The alienation that Hall identifies at work goes beyond estrangement and hopelessness and is rooted, he argues, in the critical category of labour. In fact, to see the problem as marketisation, metrics or managerialism is to mistake the manifestation for the cause of our problems. Such an approach tends towards an unreflexive resistance to our own objective conditions and an overwhelming sense of helplessness. That helplessness breeds hopelessness, a recurring theme throughout Hall’s book. What is required (and this is key to the whole book) is a categorical critique of academic labour; one which perceives labour in the university through the basic critical categories of wage labour.As Hall shows, the basis for a categorical critique of labour was established by Marx in his exposition of the commodity-form. Marx regarded the historically specific relationship between the form of labour and the form of commodities as his key intellectual contribution and ‘the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns’ (Marx 1867/1996: 51). It is this pivotal theoretical insight that underpins the basis of Hall’s understanding of ‘labour’ and distinguishes his approach from a traditionally naturalised view of ‘labour’ that understands labour as the basis for an emancipatory critique of capitalism, rather than the historically specific object of critique. The specificity of capitalist labour is the form it takes as wage labour, a historically unique organisation of human activity mediated by value. Its emancipated opposite is, according to Marx and others since, a form of productive activity that is ‘directly social’.

~ From each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs from each according to their abilities to each according to their needs.

The Alienated Academic is structured in three parts over nine densely written and heavily referenced chapters. It covers a lot of ground in 270 pages, drawing widely from contemporary Marxist theory as well as an extensive engagement with Marx’s original work. It provides a useful survey of the concept of alienation and argues for the continuing and contemporary relevance of Marxist theory and its basic categories of labour, value, the commodity, subsumption and so on. What is likely to make this sometimes difficult book both intriguing and more broadly appealing is that Hall extends his contemporary Marxism with the literature of feminism, (de)colonialism, identity politics and intersectionality. It is a productive synthesis that is set in the context of contemporary changes in English higher education, while recognising that the alienating features of English university life can be found across the world.For these reasons, this is a unique and ground-breaking monograph in the field of critical university studies.

~ When he writes, he forgets to stand. He forgets to drink. At night, his body aches.

Review: Negotiating Neoliberalism. Developing Alternative Educational Visions

Below is an extended pre-print of a book review for Power and Education journal. The first half talks directly about the book; the remainder tries to offer a critical response.

Rudd, Tim and Goodson, Ivor F. (Eds.) (2017) Negotiating Neoliberalism. Developing Alternative Educational Visions. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.

This book, comprised of 13 peer-reviewed chapters, presents a coherent understanding of neoliberalism as an ideological project, the ways in which it is made manifest in all areas of formal education, and the need to develop conceptual and practical alternatives that serve humanity rather than the economy. The focus of the book is equally weighted between discussions of compulsory and higher education and similarly balanced between theoretical and empirical scholarship and research. In addition to the thematic coherence of the chapters, most of the authors engage with Goodson’s framework of ‘The five R’s of educational research’ (2015): Remembering, regression, reconceptualization, refraction, and renewal. In their introduction to the book, editors, Rudd and Goodson, extend this to ‘six R’s’ with the addition of resistance.

This framework serves the book’s authors well. For example, Mike Hayler argues that formative assessment can be combined with the principles of critical pedagogy to resist data-driven target-setting and similarly, Peter Humphreys proposes a more personalised education that is “invitational” and wholly democratic. Ingunn Elisabeth Stray and Helen Eikeland Voreland employ refraction to study UNESCO’s Education For All project through the cases of Norway and Nepal and conclude that the project is in danger of becoming “an exercise of political violence” that needs to become more sensitive to national and cultural contexts.

Two chapters in the book combine remembering with renewal through the theme of co-operative education. Following a brief history of co-operative education in the context of neoliberalism, Tom Woodin’s chapter discusses an in-school co-operative of more than 80 students who provide peer-support to other students in a variety of subjects. The experience of setting up and running the co-operative has introduced a sense of solidarity and collective purpose among its members. This small example of constituting social relationships differently within a neoliberal context is in itself an education in the possibility of alternatives that can be expanded both within and outside the education system. Co-operatives, argues Woodin, offer a form of “structural innovation” that is capable of proliferating and maintaining a sense of social struggle. John Schostak’s chapter extends this argument by acknowledging the recent movement of co-operative schools in the UK but recognising that without radical changes at the level of the curriculum, there is the “ever present danger of simply reproducing” the status quo. Schostak persuasively argues that the practice of co-operation is itself a form of collective education out of which a curriculum of learning emerges, based on the practice of democracy. The institutional forms that arise from the practice of democracy, solidarity and equality are themselves the subject of study as much as they are the object of collective management.

Richard Hall focuses on academic labour within UK higher education, discussing the influence of ‘human capital theory’ on the way in which the labour of academics is being valorised. What makes the chapter interesting is the way in which he provides a close reading of Marx through which he exposes human capital theory as a theory of productivity that is made manifest in the intensification of labour time. This now operates in policy and in practice inside higher education and elsewhere. Hall’s response is to work against this reconceptualization of academic labour by advocating solidarity inside and outside universities so that academic labour, including that of students, is recognised as having the same fundamental characteristics as other forms of labour and is therefore subject to the same crises of capitalism that are the focus of other social movements. Hall is not arguing for the militant defence of academic labour, but to see it for what it is: wage labour subject to the alienation of the capitalist valorisation process, and as such should be abolished. Resistance to the processes of work intensification are all the while necessary, but the discovery of new forms of social solidarity and large scale transformation (rather than reformation) of political economy are the end goals.

A chapter which shares a key critical category with Richard Hall’s is that of Yvonne Downs, who focuses on the difficult concept of ‘value’. She argues that “little is known about the value of higher education at all” (59) and offers critiques of two prevalent discourses: financialization and ‘privileged intrinsicality’. Financialization reduces everything to a single logic of financial value either in terms of individual income or public savings. Privileged intrinsicality is a nostalgic response to financialization that views education as being valuable in and of itself. Like financialization, it reduces the value of higher education to a single logic of value, only this time, non-financial and ultimately grounded in a particular (liberal) morality. To counter each of these discourses, Downs proposes a form of ‘refraction’ that understands how individual forms of value are always embedded in dominant cultures of valuation. This conception of value as an ongoing process of (e)valuation is referred to as ‘lay normativity’, defined as “that which already and actually matters to people.” (67) This is a reflexive and pragmatic conception of value that is irreducible to a single hegemonic logic and asserts this process of individual and class-based (e)valuation as an expression of agency.

Returning to Rudd and Goodson’s six-point framework for research, they illustrate in their concluding chapter that it takes into account supra, macro, meso and micro levels of analysis, positioning the most abstract level of analysis at the top of the ‘axes of refraction’ (i.e. supra). However, in my view, this methodological separation of the abstract (ideology) from the concrete (individuals) has real, practical consequences in terms of the sixth ‘R’ of resistance. What, exactly, are we resisting? Is it, for example, the supra structures of neoliberalism or the micro agency of Chief Executives? Stephen O’Brien’s chapter on Resisting Neoliberal Education further illustrates this dilemma, where he writes about resisting “these neoliberal times”, resisting a loss of freedom to “an all-consuming capitalism”, and resisting the neoliberal “paradigm”. All of the chapters in the book show a concern with the concrete, qualitative specificity of neoliberalism as well as recognising its abstract nature, which suggests we need a methodology that reveals their inherent unity. One complementary approach is to employ Marx’s dialectical epistemology, which is the basis for his method of “rising from the abstract to the concrete”. For Marx, “the concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many [abstract] determinations, hence unity of the diverse.” (Marx, 1993, 101)

This approach is compatible with Rudd and Goodson’s framework but suggests that the technologies of neoliberalism are the ‘concentration’ of the fundamental (i.e. determinate) categories of capitalism. As a historically specific expression of capitalism (Clarke, 2004), a critique of neoliberalism requires us to understand and work with the analytical categories of critical political economy and in doing so recognise that capitalist society is structured by a quasi-autonomous developmental logic (Postone, 1993) whereby socially constructed abstractions have real, determining, concrete existence and power over people. This logic is laid out in the first chapter of Capital (1976) in Marx’s exposition of the value-form of commodities. It is a form of social domination that extends across all levels of analysis, from supra to micro, and, critically, is given substance and mediated by “the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value” (Marx, 1987, 402). It is his unique discovery of the dual character of labour in capitalism (and therefore the possibility of its abolition) that fully establishes Marx’s mature work as a theory of emancipation.

Discussions of ‘neoliberal education’ tend to focus on concrete expressions of capitalism (e.g. policy, performativity or professionalism) while rarely engaging with its fundamental categories (e.g. labour, value, capital), let alone being grounded in them (Hall and Downs’ chapters are notable exceptions). As Moishe Postone has argued (1993), one of the problems with this approach is that anti-capitalist efforts to resist the concrete features of neoliberalism tend to be both dualistic and one-sided; they identify capital with its manifest expressions (its concrete appearance rather than essence) and in the act of resistance (e.g. violence, refusal) further hypostasize the concrete while overlooking the fundamentally dialectical nature of capitalism’s social forms and therefore allowing its abstract power to persist unchallenged (Postone, 1980). Thus, efforts to assert an identity and ethic of professionalism, the dignity of useful labour, or indeed, create oppositional alternatives, can themselves be seen as a form of reification which tends to lead to “an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.” (Postone, 2006).

This suggests that the real power of capitalism/neoliberalism is not in the structures of its institutions or the agency of certain individuals to discipline others or undertake acts of resistance, but rather in the impersonal, intangible, quasi-objective form of domination that is expressed in the form of value, the substance of which is labour. What distinguishes this approach from debates that dissolve into metaphysics and morality is that Marx’s category of value refers to a historically specific (i.e. contingent) form of social wealth. As today’s dominant form of social wealth, the form of value as elucidated by Marx (1978) offers the ability to render any aspect of the social and natural world as commensurate with another to devastating effect. The urgent project for education is therefore to support the creation of a new form of social wealth, one that is not based on the commensurability of everything, nor the values of a dominant class, but on the basis of mutuality and love: ‘From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.’

References

Clarke, Simon (2004) The Neoliberal Theory of Society. In Saad-Filho, Alfredo and Johnston, Deborah (Eds.) Neoliberalism. A Critical Reader. Pluto Press.

Goodson, Ivor F. (2015) The five Rs of educational research, Power and Education 7 (1) 34 – 38

Marx, Karl (1993) Grundrisse, Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl (1978) The Value-Form, Capital and Class, 4: 130-150.

Marx, Karl (1976) Capital, Penguin Classics.

Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1987) 1864-68, Letters, Marx and Engels Collected Works Volume 42. Lawrence and Wishart Ltd.

Postone, Moishe (2006) History and Helplessness: Mass Mobilization and Contemporary Forms of Anticapitalism, Public Culture, 18 (1) 93-110.

Postone, Moishe (1993) Time, Labour and Social Domination, Cambridge.

Postone, Moishe (1980) Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to “Holocaust”, New German Critique, 19 (1) 97-115.

 

 

Review: Co-operation, learning and co-operative values

I have written a short review for the Journal of Education Policy of Co-operation, learning and co-operative values, edited by Tom Woodin. Here are the opening couple of paragraphs:

As Tom Woodin points out in his Introduction to the book, Cooperation, Learning and Cooperative Values, the Rochdale Pioneers of the nineteenth century Co-operative movement aspired to ‘re-arrange the powers of production, distribution, education and government’. The original seven ‘Rochdale Principles’, internationally endorsed in 1937, included the ‘Promotion of Education’ alongside other principles such as ‘Democratic Control’, ‘Political and Religious Neutrality’ and ‘Open Membership’. Those original Principles were revised in 1966, and included the ‘Education of members and public in co-operative principles’. In 1995, following international consultation within the co-operative movement, the current Principles were revised, and Principle Five was restated as ‘Education, training and information’. I have begun this brief review by emphasising the historical centrality of education to the co-operative movement, which today has over one billion members, because it is important to recognise how the principle of education has been formally retained over the course of one and a half centuries to both support and promote the whole body of values and principles of co-operatives and their members.

Today, in most countries, a ‘co-operative’ is likely to be recognised as a legal entity and have to demonstrate that it is constituted according to the values and principles of the 1995 ‘Co-operative Identity’ statement (ICA 2016. That is to say, a ‘co-operative’, being ‘co-operative’ and extending ‘co-operation’ to others has a carefully defined meaning that should not simply be mistaken for a type of ‘collaboration’ or even ‘co-operation’ in the sense that Marx understood it as constituting ‘the fundamental form of the capitalist mode of production’. (Marx 1976). In effect, the co-operative movement has developed and retains a highly sophisticated understanding of co-operation as a set of practical and ethical values that are put into practice through seven principles that still aim to ‘re-arrange the powers of production, distribution, education and government’.

Tom Woodin, an expert on the history of co-operative education, has produced an excellent edited collection of contributed chapters that span the theory, history, practice and policy implications of co-operative education. Over 13 chapters, the authors cover a great deal of ground and for readers who are looking for a broad, informed and critical introduction to co-operative education, there is currently no better place to start.

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